Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

Paul Pierce played his last NBA minute over two years ago. His absence made no hearts grow fonder. Last night, while the Bucks drained the last drops of blood out of the Celtics’ season, Milwaukee’s arena lit up with a “Paul Pierce sucks” chant.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a WWE wrestler comes out to the ring to cut a promo, gets interrupted by someone, who in turn gets interrupted by someone else. This goes on until a tag match is thrown together featuring everyone in that derailed promo train. This is such a common occurrence that internet fans…Read more...

To preview the upcoming Carolina Hurricanes–Boston Bruins playoff series, Boston sports radio show Toucher & Rich had Chip Alexander, Canes beat writer for the Raleigh News and Observer, call in Wednesday to talk hockey. It wasn’t long before one of the hosts hung up on him, for a very petty reason.Read more...

This review almost certainly contains spoilers.

On this week’s edition of WWE’s flagship television program, Monday Night Raw, viewers were treated to a segment in which the tag team The Usos, theoretically the good guys, revealed that they had invented “Ucy Hot,” their own sweat-activated version of Icy Hot, and secretly deployed it to the trunks of their rivals,…Read more...

Skillet Throw Out Old Canisters of PAM Immediately | Jalopnik Missouri HOA Threatens to Foreclose on Truck Owner’s House Because They Don’t Understand Patina | io9 Updates From Game of Thrones, Child’s Play, and More | Kotaku Fallout 76 Players Can Now Set Up Their Own Stores, But Bethesda Taxes Their Goods | The…Read more...

A plant Gold Box, RoboVac exclusive, KitchenAid Mini, and a Columbia sale lead off Thursday’s best deals.

We’re all aware of what a thrilling, last-second, game-winning touchdown can do American football fans, but I submit that nothing can make a sports fan lose his or her mind quite like a stoppage-time winner in soccer. It’s such a rare thing, such an unexpected thing—you dare not even hope for it!—that you can’t blame…Read more...

As the second round came to a close I looked upon the remnants of the NHL and beheld the Four Horsemen who delivered judgment upon the match-ups. Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death each sent a team into the next life, which appears mostly to be either Worlds, or a golf course in British Columbia.

It’s the how that really stings. That Barcelona, a very good team that nonetheless suffers from several glaring deficiencies, lost in the Champions League semifinals to Liverpool, one of only two truly great teams in Europe this season and probably the one best equipped to solve the particular problems this devilishly…Read more...

Pretend you don’t know anything about hockey. Take a look at this frozen moment of action. Where is the puck? Where is the play happening, and where is it not? Who is involved in the action, and who still has the potential to affect it? Who is violating the rules? More importantly, who is violating the rules and…Read more...

The Nintendo Switch has been around long enough that we’re starting to see certified refurbs hit the market en masse. This one’s available for $275, which is only a $25 discount, but it’s sold direct from Nintendo’s own eBay storefront, and includes the standard one-year warranty.Read more...

The Warriors found themselves in a real hairy spot Wednesday night, in the second half of Game 5 of their conference semifinal series against the Houston Rockets. The Rockets were surging even before Kevin Durant went down with a lower leg injury, erasing Golden State’s early lead and drawing to within a point at the…Read more...

Wednesday’s Red Sox-Orioles game was much more eventful than you might expect from a game featuring a Red Sox team climbing back from a rotten start and, well, the Orioles, who are trash. Chris Sale took a no-hitter into the sixth inning; later, after losing the no-no, Sale took out his frustration by dusting the…Read more...

Late in the third quarter of Wednesday night’s Game 5 of Rockets-Warriors, Kevin Durant pulled up with a sudden non-contact lower leg injury, and had to leave the game. Reggie Miller, working the TNT broadcast, observed that the sequence of Durant’s injury looked strikingly similar to the Achilles tendon injury…Read more...

It would have been very on-brand for the perennial choke-artist San Jose Sharks to blow it against the 8th seed in the second-round of what might be the most wide-open NHL playoffs of all-time. But to their credit, San Jose recovered from Gabriel Landeskog’s Game 6 overtime winner and got the win they needed in Game 7…Read more...

In the third quarter of Wednesday night’s Celtics-Bucks game, the Celtics half-heartedly swarmed a Giannis Antetokounmpo-Eric Bledsoe pick and roll at the top of the key, and Giannis smartly dumped a little bounce pass to Bledsoe on the short roll, where he could attack a scrambled Celtics defense. What followed was…Read more...

At the start of the bottom of the third inning of last night’s Marlins-Cubs game, the NBC Sports Chicago broadcast cut to analyst Doug Glanville for an update. While Glanville was talking, a fan in a hoodie waved hello to the camera, flashed a peace sign, then made an upside-down OK hand gesture with his fingers.

The Lakers reportedly went through a bizarre and even troubling process to arrive at this moment in the search for their next head coach—the moment when they sit at a table and hammer out a deal with Tyronn Lue, backed by the full support of everyone in the organization. Part of that process, as reported by Marc Stein…Read more...

In the most amazing soccer comeback in the history of the world, or at least since yesterday, Tottenham pulled off a stunning come-from-behind win over Ajax today to advance to the Champions League final.Read more...

Jamal Murray in his zone has become appointment viewing. The appointment is at an ENT’s office, and the doctor’s trying to determine why steam is billowing out of your nose and the nose of Jamal Murray.

Hey! Who here likes Homeowner’s Associations? Ah, gotcha, trick question, absolutely nobody likes HOAs because they’re consistently miserable and disheartening examples of how tiny amounts of power can transform human beings into talking, blistered dicks. In case you don’t quite believe me, please consider the case of …Read more...

Today the Sacramento Kings and De’Aaron Fox invited everyone into their shared mind palace when they asked what the answer to this seemingly simple math equation. The result was chaos, and it nearly broke the Deadspin staff, although to be fair, basically any meaningless argument can break the Deadspin staff.

JayCee Cooper was looking forward to her first sanctioned USA Powerlifting meet in her home state of Minnesota when she received word, just a month before the event, that she wouldn’t be allowed to compete.

Here’s a horrifying story with a relatively happy ending: Georgia sprinter Elija Godwin, one of the fastest freshmen in the country, accidentally impaled himself on a javelin while running a backwards sprint drill on Tuesday afternoon. Incredibly, Godwin survived.Read more...

Ten eggs is a gargantuan breakfast order. Who would order 10 eggs, fried, sunny-side up, with no other items save perhaps a small stack of toast? Well, according to this morning’s episode of Fox & Friends... multiple people would. OR WOULD THEY??

Mortal Kombat 11 is a brutal game. That’s what you come for—sensational, over-the-top violence that’s inventive and gratuitous on a level that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It can be shocking in its detail and funny in its execution, but it’s always arresting. It’s also short. Fatalities, gory, physically improbable…Read more...

Gael Monfils got wrecked in the opening set of his Madrid Open second-round match today, but he worked his way back into it. By the tail end of the second set, Monfils was feeling himself enough to test out this leaping ... forehand passing shot with all his weight hurtling in the opposite direction. Like most of…Read more...

While there’s plenty of blame to go around in Barcelona for Liverpool’s hurricane-force comeback yesterday in the Champions League semifinal, there is no end to the credit and praise the Pool Boys deserve for a game perfectly planned for by Jürgen Klopp, and proficiently executed by his players. Liverpool’s monumental…Read more...

For the second MLB season in a row, an A’s pitcher has thrown the first no-hitter of the season. That’s a rather unusual feat, given that the A’s rotation has been so famously dinged-up that they opted for a bullpen start in last year’s Wild Card game, but there was plenty about Mike Fiers’s no-no last night that was…Read more...

Nationals slugger Anthony Rendon has previously demonstrated his willingness to call out an MLB umpire over a bad call. When Marty Foster ejected Rendon for no good reason back in 2018, he lamented how there’s “no accountability” for umpires whose mistakes can be clearly seen from overhead and replay angles. After…Read more...

The curling team with the pants. That’s all you have to say. The imagery is instant: four grown Scandinavian men and their provocative trousers. It’s quite an accomplishment, especially for a niche Olympic sport.

An exclusive Anker deal, Greenworks tools, a Dell laptop and a Ninja air fryer lead off Wednesday’s best deals.Read more...

The best overtime game of the Stanley Cup Playoffs was the Denver-Portland game Friday night. All glory and honor to Blues-Stars Game 7 Tuesday night, which certainly did its best, combining multiple overtimes with the additional sparkle of not just sudden death but expulsion, but it remains the silver medalist for…Read more...

If you’re familiar with catastrophically incompetent Republican politics and PR doofus Liz Mair at all, first of all I’m so sorry about your brain worms problem. But also, it’s likely you recall her viral Twitter meltdown in January, when she posted an insane, racist gripe about Spanish-speaking people who rudely…Read more...

Nikola Jokic is a man of simple desires. He wants to make cool passes, “eat good,” “watch TV show,” and be stronger than the Coke. He also wants a damn microphone that he can hold in his hand without any issues.

It’s difficult to talk about women in sports without talking about the work of Nancy Hogshead-Makar. She won three gold medals as a swimmer in the 1984 Olympics, and that’s possibly the lesser part of her résumé given what she’s done since. She’s spent decades advocating for equality for women in sports, through her…Read more...

Until Patrick Maroon finally, finally beat Ben Bishop 5:50 into the second overtime and put the Blues through to the Western Conference final, no player in the history of the NHL had ever scored a Game 7 overtime winner in his hometown. It’d been close, once, when in 1979 Yvon Lambert, out of Drummondville, Quebec,…Read more...

Moms who say they don’t want anything for Mother’s Day are lying. But buying a present for the woman who gave you life doesn’t have to mean emptying out your bank account. We’ll be updating this post with the best gift-able deals, so you can get Mom something nice and still save money. Your mother didn’t raise you to…Read more...

Anker makes a lot of gadgets, but noise canceling headphones were a notable gap in the company’s lineup until very recently. So if you want to block out the world with the new Soundcore Space wireless over-ears, you can save $20 right now, no promo code required.Read more...

Some of what has made Nuggets-Trail Blazers such a fun playoff series is how evenly matched the teams appear to be. Headed into Game 5 with the series tied, neither team had won a game by more than eight points, and the last two games, a split, were decided by a grand total of seven points. One of them went to four…Read more...

Atlanta’s Max Fried is a very cool young pitcher. He got off to a great start this season, compiling a 4–1 record and a 2.11 earned run average through his first six starts, with a scrumptious 0.991 WHIP. He has also evidently run afoul of Fate, which came to collect its due in the second inning of Fried’s Tuesday…Read more...

The St. Louis Blues should have won Game 7 about four times over before regulation even ended, but finally, in double overtime, they got some reward for an absolutely dominant performance. While an instantly legendary showing from Stars goalie Ben Bishop almost allowed Dallas to survive, the Blues broke through after…Read more...

The 76ers were blown out in Game 5 Tuesday night, 125–89, by Kawhi Leonard and the Toronto Raptors. Nothing much worked for Philadelphia—the closest they came to a functional offense was Jimmy Butler willing his way to the line for 11 free throws. By the midpoint of the fourth quarter, the game had become a laugher,…Read more...

Kawhi Leonard is doing it again. He put up a 13-and-10 double-double before halftime of Game 5 of the 76ers-Raptors conference semifinal series, with three assists and a pair of steals. It’s not clear tonight that the Raptors even require all these damn heroics—they’re up 21 at the half and the Sixers look extremely…Read more...

In a motion filed Tuesday, Palm Beach County prosecutors asked the judge in Robert Kraft’s prostitution solicitation case to hold two of Kraft’s lawyers in contempt of court. The motion claims that two of the New England Patriots owner’s attorneys, Alex Spiro and William Burck, intentionally made a false statement…Read more...

The Lakers are reportedly in the process of hiring former Cleveland Cavaliers head coach Tyronn Lue to replace the fired Luke Walton. Contractual parameters are being sorted out, according to Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports. Lue’s hiring would come with the blessing of LeBron James, who of course won a championship…Read more...

In the spring of 2019, writer Giri Nathan asked an editor if he could write a blog about Joel Embiid in the style of writer Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.” The Sixers player was irritable and dealing with various ailments as his team fought a tight playoff series against the Raptors. “Why the hell would…Read more...

Liverpool have shocked the world. Heading back to Anfield after losing a dispiriting 3-0 first leg in Barcelona, Liverpool needed something resembling a miracle to reach their second straight Champions League final. And they found one, somehow, winning 4-0 at home and booting Barcelona out of the competition in the…Read more...

When Donald Trump’s administration decided in April of 2017 to overturn a rule that had allowed athletes from the service academies to defer their military commitment until after their professional sports careers were over, it wasn’t for any of the starchy reasons laid out in a memo from the–Secretary of Defense James…Read more...