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Marc Gasol has been a prime component of the Raptors’ asphyxiating defense—one of the most switchable, responsive, obnoxiously needling teams in recent memory. His post D has been stout enough to knock Joel Embiid a notch down from series-defining to merely good. By Giannis Antetokounmpo’s own admission, Gasol had a…Read more...

We see a lot of deals around the web over on Kinja Deals, but these were our ten favorites today.Read more...

We’ve already geeked out over Minor League Baseball’s Copa de la Diversión alternate hats, but a bunch of minor league teams have other alternative logos, names, and uniforms that they use throughout the year as well.Read more...

The NBA’s ongoing freakout over tampering violations has already led the league to assess large fines to executives for making completely anodyne comments about players on other teams, and even got Anthony Davis dinged for what can broadly be described as self-tampering. Today it claimed a new victim in Clippers head…Read more...

Arizona Diamondbacks broadcaster Steve Berthiaume doesn’t use Twitter, but someone on the site is pretending to be him. The account @BertDbacks is clearly fake—and also rude—but it convinced a family of D-Backs fans that they could come visit the Fox Sports Arizona booth during Thursday’s game against the Rockies.

This year’s Cricket World Cup opened in London on Thursday, with hosts England facing off against South Africa. That’s where England all-rounder Ben Stokes made this spectacular backwards catch while running toward the boundary to dismiss batsman Andile Phehlukwayo, which the commentator described as “one of the…Read more...

Giannis Antetokounmpo is a treasure. A kind soul before the basketball game, a rude leviathan during it, and, it turns out, a reflective conversationalist right after. The Athletic’s Eric Nehm checked in with the possible MVP throughout his postseason, spanning from the Bucks’ sweep of the Pistons to their 4-2 loss to…Read more...

The main challenge for the ambitious clubs of Italy is as evident as it is daunting: to try to bring an end to Juventus’s nearly decade-long Serie A reign. Things like qualifying for and making a run in the Champions League are important, as is success in the domestic cup. But all of it must be subservient to or in…Read more...

Scattershot Nationals reliever Trevor Rosenthal was sent to the injured list back on April 26, two days after his last outing, another alarming disasterpiece in what is shaping up to be a nightmare of a season. The official line at the time was that Rosenthal had a stomach virus that caused weight loss and “muscle…Read more...

New on-sale summer styles await at Original Penguin. Right now, take an extra 50% off a selection of apparel, including cool button-downs, polos, and tees, with promo code SAVE50. Just snag your clothes ASAP, since this sale won’t last past tomorrow.

Did you know that eight different children won the National Spelling Bee last night? Yeah, eight! A tween octet spelled 47 words correctly in a row, and because the Spelling Bee got rid of tiebreakers this year after having them in written form for the last two years, they all have to share in an unprecedentedly…Read more...

What have you done with peanut butter lately? Nothing to write home about I bet. Why not change that—here and now?Read more...

Raptors super fan and legendary cornball Drake was an unusually subdued presence during Game 1 of the NBA Finals in Toronto, perhaps because he got a stern talking-to from the league. But, with an assist from a salty Draymond Green, Drake still managed to deliver another meme-able moment after the final buzzer.

An Apple iPad Pro, a Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks gifts set, and a few refurb Nintendo 2DS models lead off Friday’s best deals.

For as much as the Raptors’ run to the finals was about Kawhi Leonard’s ascension to godhood, it was also about the circumstances that made that ascension necessary. Think of all the playoff possessions in which Leonard was forced to pull a heroic shot out of his ass because his other four teammates didn’t show much…Read more...

How big a lead does a team have to have on the Warriors before its fans can feel comfortable? Twenty points with two minutes left? Fifteen points with 30 seconds to go? To me, it didn’t feel like the Raptors had Game 1 locked up until they were actually dribbling out the final ticks, up nine with the shot clock turned…Read more...

In retrospect, we had a pretty solid indication that things were turning Toronto’s way in the build up to their Game 1 victory over the Warriors:Read more...

The world was very nearly spared a couple week’s worth of energetic Drake sightings Thursday night, when Andre Iguodala of the Golden State Warriors went careening into the sidelines late in the first half of Game 1 of the NBA Finals. Iguodala missed hurling the bulk of his giant NBA frame into the rowdy Raptors…Read more...

Scottie Pippen has added a 5-year-old child to a tenant lawsuit alleging that Pippen’s Fort Lauderdale, Florida home was wrecked up and defiled by, among other things, chaotic crayon and marker scribblings.Read more...

South Korea’s U18 squad was stripped of an international tournament title on Wednesday because of online backlash over photos of the team celebrating with the competition’s trophy in an “indecent” manner.

The Boston Bruins don’t want to talk about their promotion with Barstool Sports, and neither does the NHL.

This has been a spring of angry weather across the U.S. as heat, flooding, and hail pummel the eastern half of the country. But along with the garden variety suffering, devastating tornadoes have also spread across the U.S. from Texas to Pennsylvania.Read more...

This is Erling Braut Håland. The 6-foot-3 Norwegian is 18 years old, and he looks like a lock to be cast as Thor in the certainly forthcoming Teen Avengers movie. He also scored nine times in today’s game against Honduras in the U-20 World Cup as Norway romped to a record-breaking 12-0 win.Read more...

We see a lot of deals around the web over on Kinja Deals, but these were our ten favorites today.Read more...

One of the nerdier things a basketball fan can do at 9 a.m. Eastern Weirdo Time is to go to the NBA website and glom onto the identities of the officials who will work whatever game interests you True, NBA ref nerddom is an exceedingly small subset of Nerdvania, but let a thousand sets of hipster glasses bloom.Read more...

Disgraced former Louisville Cardinals basketball coach Rick Pitino has spent the past six months or so coaching in Greece, where he’s finding success leading Panathinaikos in the Greek League. It’s a madcap new life filled with unfamiliar new experiences, as detailed in this article from The Ringer back in February.…Read more...

Hello, casual basketball viewer! At long last, the NBA Finals are here, and you know what that means: It’s time once again for you to crib a pitiful smattering of hoops knowledge from this extremely half-assed blog and carry it forth to the sports bar like the torch that lights your path.

The most recent instance of English lads descending on the Iberian peninsula for a soccer match ended up making international news after a Brit shoved an old man into a fountain. So it makes sense that England’s Football Association would want to stop any such debacle in its tracks as the Three Lions travel to…Read more...

A confession: A very long time ago, I went on Fox News.

The NBA Finals would seem great to someone who only recently decided to care about NBA basketball. You’ve got your dynastic bulletproof Golden State Warriors, currently minus injured cornball virtuoso Kevin Durant but otherwise as monstrously dominant as ever. You’ve also got the Toronto Raptors, a long-thwarted…Read more...

This feels like an overreaction.Read more...

A few weeks ago, I was reading this interview with architectural critic Paul Goldberger about baseball stadiums in America when I stumbled upon a reminder from Goldberger that doubles as a breathtaking conversation piece for stoners all across the land:

As he walked off the field in Baku during Arsenal’s embarrassing performance in the Europa League final, the relatively paltry numbers of Arsenal fans in attendance serenaded Mesut Özil with boos. Özil had just put in yet another lackluster performance in a big game for the Gunners, showing once again how poorly Özil…Read more...

This is old, but so what. The more we can talk about how the Tampa Bay Buccaneers cooked their books in a failed attempt to claim settlement money from a far-off oil spill that didn’t actually affect them, the better. Turns out there’s one more twist to pass along: The Bucs sought to keep from public view their…Read more...

Mt. Everest is increasingly starting to resemble the setting of a real-life horror movie. This year’s climbing season is already one of the deadliest on record, with 11 lives claimed, largely due to overcrowding. In addition to new climbers dying at an alarming rate, bodies of climbers who died in past seasons have…Read more...

The Toronto Raptors will host Game 1 of the NBA Finals tonight, and there’s no doubt Drake will be sitting on the sideline. He’s behaved like an unruly dingus courtside in Toronto, blurring the lines between participant and bystander in ways that would make Spike Lee blush. Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer, for one, …Read more...

Bruins defenseman Matt Grzelcyk was taken to the hospital after being boarded by Oskar Sundqvist in the first period of Wednesday’s 3-2 Blues overtime win. Sundqvist got just two minutes, but a bunch more might be coming: Sundqvist has a hearing with the NHL’s Department of Player Safety.Read more...

Imagine, if you can, becoming the GLOBAL EDITOR IN CHIEF of Business Insider (and INSIDER, a venture I still couldn’t define for you) without knowing one of the most basic facts about how American government works.

With their season-capping win on Saturday, soccer club Esportiu Llançà won promotion from Catalonia’s third division (Spain’s seventh tier overall) to its second. To celebrate the team going up, one of the club’s board members arranged for a stripper to enter the locker room after the game and drop it low.Read more...

Kotaku A Theory Why Marvel Movies Don’t Dominate Japan | Gizmodo Laboratory Black Hole Shows Stephen Hawking Was Right, Obviously | Jalopnik Sit Your Ass Down When Your Flight Is About to Depart, You Absolute Reprobates | Lifehacker How to Check if Your Hard Drive Is Failing | The Takeout What’s the best-tasting hard…Read more...

Carl Gunnarsson’s rocket of a winner for St. Louis in Game 2 last night understandably gets all the love and applause this morning —it gave the Blues their first-ever Stanley Cup Final win and sent them back home with hope instead of despair. But back in the first period, long before Gunnarsson’s goal sent the Boston…Read more...

You can look at what happened to the Mets in Los Angeles last night—blowing an 8-3 lead in the final three innings and getting walked off by the Dodgers—as yet another example of the hopeless and bumbling Mets hopelessly bumbling to an embarrassing result. That’s fair enough, because the Mets are the Mets and nobody…Read more...

“Tonight it was hard, so I’m happy about that,” Oskar Sundqvist said, and he was talking about a shot, thank goodness. Specifically, teammate Carl Gunnarsson’s OT goal to give the Blues a 3-2 win and knot up the Stanley Cup Final at a game apiece.

ESPN hockey analyst Greg Wyshynski was on-hand for St. Louis’s stirring 3–2 overtime win over the dreaded Bruins in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final Wednesday night. Afterward, Wyshynski shot the following Blair Witch-style blurry video of two completely full cups of what he described as beer, tucked behind a couple…Read more...

The beef between White Sox shortstop and good bat-flipper Tim Anderson and the Kansas City Royals reared its ugly head again Wednesday night, when Anderson was plunked in the helmet in the second inning by Royals starter Glenn Sparkman. In an effort to get out ahead of any escalating hostility, home plate umpire Mark…Read more...

Folks, we got a series! After getting absolutely trounced in the final 39 minutes of Game 1, the St. Louis Blues showed that this Stanley Cup Final would not be a repeat of 1970. Rather than allow themselves to get steamrolled by the Bruins in Game 2, the Blues held their ground and beat Boston in overtime, 3-2, to…Read more...

In keeping with his longstanding policy of having absolutely nothing interesting to say about anything, ever, Kawhi Leonard has offered very little indication of where he might prefer to sign his next long-term contract, following the conclusion of these playoffs. There’s been talk of Kawhi preferring to play in Los…Read more...

During the fourth inning of tonight’s Cubs-Astros game, Chicago outfielder Albert Almora Jr. hit a foul ball into the seats on the third base side of the Houston ballpark. According to those present at the game, that ball hit a small child, who was quickly brought up the stairs by an adult.Read more...

Sure, this insane highlight stab from Blue Jays outfielder Jonathan Davis came in the first inning of Wednesday night’s game at Tampa, but there were some stakes: the out kept two runs off the board after Toronto’s offense gave starter Trent Thornton a 2–0 lead, and got Thornton out of a tight spot. Besides, screw…Read more...

Addison Choi, a 23-year-old ex-college-soccer player from Fullerton, Calif., was charged today in Massachusetts federal court on one count of transmitting a threat to injure a person, after he sent death threats to at least 45 professional and college athletes between July and December 2017. According to MassLive, he…Read more...