Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

The Rockets ran away from the Celtics Thursday night, in a game that was marred in both halves by some especially spotty and sensitive refereeing by the officiating crew. The officials handed out six technical fouls—three against each team—and at least a couple of them appeared to be the result of referee Brent…Read more...

In the span of a week, Clemson defensive tackle Dexter Lawrence had a drug test come back positive for an anabolic steroid not approved for human use or consumption in the U.S., or in any other country, vehemently denied in front of reporters that he knowingly put anything illegal into his body, and had the NCAA …Read more...

I am told this spectacular light show over New York City tonight was caused by a transformer explosion at a power station in Queens, and not by a massive meteor burning up in the atmosphere, nor by slimy space aliens parking their city-sized mothership over the city and preparing the invasion. One thing we can all…Read more...

The Suns and Magic played an overtime game Wednesday night. Of course you didn’t notice, because you—whoever you are, even if you are literally the head coach of one of these two teams—had something to do that was much better than watching two teams with a combined 22–44 record this season, and a whopping zero…Read more...

UFC president Dana White was a bit of a shithead towards a reporter on Thursday during the press conference for the recently-relocated UFC 232. To make things easier for Jon Jones to participate in the headlining fight after an “atypical” drug test, the pay-per-view event was move from Las Vegas to Los Angeles on six…Read more...

Italian soccer found itself beset by the twin scourges of violence and racism yesterday, which is maybe fortunate for Ascoli goalkeeper Filippo Perucchini, since his humiliating own goal in a Serie B match against Palermo today would’ve definitely been front-page news in less violent and racist times. Because boy, was…Read more...

Duke quarterback Daniel Jones lit up the Temple Owls in the Independence Bowl today, throwing for 423 yards and five touchdowns while leading the Blue Devils to a 56-27 victory. Jones, who is exactly the kind of quarterback—a very tall white one—who tends to get football analysts and commentators in a lather, spent…Read more...

The Hornets and Nets showed us all the “beautiful game” last night with a truly weird end to regulation, before following it up with a rather bizarre game-ending sequence.

The Temple Owls were once beating the Duke Blue Devils by 13 points in their bowl game. It looked like the Owls might get a win for their perpetually fired-up interim coach, Ed Foley.Read more...

University of Utah track and field athlete Lauren McCluskey was fatally shot earlier this year by a man she had recently dumped after she found out he had lied to her about his name, age, and criminal record. The man, Melvin Rowland, 37, died by suicide hours later. But for weeks before her Oct. 22 murder, McCluskey,…Read more...

If failure is the quintessence of humility, then as I sat slumped over a fold-out chair in a bar beside a CRT television, GameCube controller in hand, I was the ultimate product of video game shame.

On September 9, 2018, American mixed martial arts fighter Jeff Monson became a government official in the Russian Federation. The former UFC title challenger, who was granted Russian citizenship by President Vladimir Putin less than four months earlier, was elected to a council of deputies in the city of Krasnogorsk,…Read more...

Oklahoma QB and all-around athletic marvel Kyler Murray is a throwback, good enough at football to win the Heisman Trophy and lead his team to the CFB playoff, and good enough at baseball to get selected by the Oakland A’s with the ninth overall pick in the most recent MLB Draft. With that high selection, Murray…Read more...

“Anthony Davis trade talk is the biggest story in the NBA,” screeches the headline on this Zach Lowe article on ESPN.com. In a blog making broadly the same argument over on the Ringer, Kevin O’Connor writes that a Davis trade could cause “a seismic shift in the league,” like trades involving Wilt Chamberlain and…Read more...

Will Leitch, contributing editor at New York magazine, national correspondent for MLB.com, film critic for Grierson & Leitch, host of Sports Illustrated’s “ The Will Leitch Show” and founder of Deadspin, is doing his yearly fill-in for Drew Magary on today’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo. (Here is 2011’s…Read more...

This year, Italy’s Serie A adopted the English tradition of holding matches on the day after Christmas, known as Boxing Day, in hopes of showing off its domestic product to the widest possible set of eyeballs. Of course, as the hopefully embarrassed country came to realize, showing off the glories of Italian soccer…Read more...

My beloved idiot sons, the California Golden Bears football team, somehow lost the worst college football game of the season last night to TCU, a 10-7 stinker that featured the worst interception you’ll see throughout bowl season, and also the second-worst. If those two weren’t enough for you, don’t worry, there were…Read more...

Zappos is basically a one-stop shoe destination already, but right now, they’re having an actual sale, marking down nearly 75,000 shoes, boots, and apparel for the winter season. Heels, boots, sneakers, sweaters, layering pieces, all kinds of styles from brands like UGG, Adidas, Nike, SOREL, Converse, Dr. Martens, and…Read more...

Earlier this year, I decided to garner a boatload of daughter points all at once to make up for the fact that I moved 1,300 miles away from home. My dad came to visit me for Father’s Day, so I got us tickets to see the Baltimore Orioles play at Camden Yards. We both love baseball, and this would be fun. My dad is a…Read more...

I’m a sucker for any show about a bunch of flawed misfits working together for some common goal—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Community, Veep, you name it. And no show in 2018 stuck together a more lovable, broken, inspiring group than NBC’s The Good Place, a half-hour comedy/sci-fi/philosophy lesson that’s only getting…Read more...

With Sunday night’s win against the Chiefs, the Seahawks improved to 9-6 and locked up a playoff spot for the seventh time in Pete Carroll’s nine seasons as head coach. This was not exactly an easy-to-predict development. Injuries and age had taken their toll, so the defensive core of the roster—Cliff Avril, Michael…Read more...

Yet another Kindle ebook sale, a popular pilates machine for the new year, and a unique clock lead off Thursday’s best deals from around the web.

We arrived at the studio hungry. A promise had been made: the last Deadcast of calendar year 2018 would be a review of The Year in Sports Media Beef, and our chef de cuisine and tour guide would be Laura Wagner, the site’s our in-house beefmaster. Lord knows this stupid and diminishing year provided plenty of protein.…Read more...

Penny Marshall and I were the bridesmaids in Carrie Fisher’s wedding to Paul Simon. This was 1983 and there was a select group of friends invited to go along on their honeymoon up the Nile. We were watched over by a silent Egyptian crew who cooked for us, steered the boat, cleaned the cabins, and catered to our whims.…Read more...

Perhaps you need something to read on the plane home, or something to distract you while you avoid your in-laws. Here are the most compelling long features and essays we published this year so you can catch up before we do it all again in 2019.

Kotaku PlayStation Classic Gets Huge Price Cut, Which Says A Lot | Gizmodo This Right Here Is an Incredibly Annoying Thing About Android | Jalopnik Here’s a Close Look at a Brand New Tesla Model 3's Quality Issues | Lifehacker How to Schedule Text Messages on Android | The Takeout Nothing is more Midwestern than…Read more...

Following a half-season of angry training videos, notable benchings, and frothing tension, Paul Pogba wants you to remember that he can still do shit like this:

Bill Belichick’s gnarled, stunted coaching tree—a coaching krummholz, really—ultimately reflects well on Belichick. He’s not, apparently, succeeding solely by surrounding himself with hypertalented assistants, as we’re seeing every few years when one of those assistants gets a head coaching gig and promptly flames…Read more...

Wednesday night’s excruciating bowl game between Cal and TCU featured 17 total points and nine combined interceptions, and needed an overtime field goal for the nominal winner to slink out of there with somehow even less dignity than their vanquished foe. Of those nine interceptions, believe it or not, this was not…Read more...

Jon Gruden was mic’d up during Oakland’s Week 16 beatdown of the Denver Broncos, and Wednesday the NFL published a little five-minute cut of his choicest moments, and I am here to tell you it is extremely compelling stuff. I would watch a weekly television show of nothing but clips of Gruden screaming at referees and…Read more...

Hassan Whiteside did some cool things Wednesday night, in Miami’s narrow loss to the Toronto Raptors. He finished with 16 points, 12 rebounds, and three blocks in 31 minutes, and was a game-high plus-22. In the first quarter, with the Heat up nine and feeling frisky, Whiteside brought the ball up the floor off a…Read more...

UFC welterweight Alex Oliveira went home to Tres Rios, south of Rio de Janeiro, to spend Christmas with family. There he was involved in a Christmas Eve altercation at a gas station, involving machetes and guns and an exploding grenade that lodged a handful of shrapnel in his lower leg, requiring surgery.Read more...

The Washington Redskins axed a deal in 2014 with Chinese tech giant Huawei to provide free wifi at games near the nation’s capital after being warned that the company could pose a cybersecurity threat, the Wall Street Journal reported this week, citing a source familiar with the matter.

Gizmodo Apple’s Future Looks Rotten | Jalopnik Bro-Truck Owners Are Deliberately Blocking Tesla Supercharger Spots | Kotaku Here’s January 2019's PlayStation Plus Lineup | Lifehacker How to Get Better-Sounding Audio on Spotify | The Takeout 5 foods that I, a sane person, cook in my Instant Pot regularly |Read more...

We all had this day circled on our calendars, because this is the day that Boston College and Boise State were set to meet in the big game—the one we’ve all been waiting for, the one that kept us awake last night: the First Responder Bowl. I regret to inform you that the First Responder Bowl has been canceled.

King Princess has exactly six real songs out and every single one of them is good as hell. “1950” is a perfect pop song that you better like or else you’re the cops, and it’s not even the best song on her debut EP. Friendship ended with Lorde; now King Princess is new best friend. - Patrick RedfordRead more...

Today the Washington Post published a story on Jim McVay, the guy whose only job is to run a lower-tier college bowl game, and the million dollars he makes for doing it. The report, which points out how the $1,045,000 McVay made in 2017 “ranks as extreme” even in the bloated business of college football and how the…Read more...

The 2026 Winter Olympics will be held, somewhere. That’s about the only thing we can say for certain, six months before the International Olympic Committee is due to announce who the host city will be. One potential candidate, Calgary, took itself out of the running last month with a public plebiscite in which…Read more...

Halfway through the Premier League season, a stylish team from North West England has distinguished themselves as the sole front runner for the EPL title, holding a six-point gap over a flawed team from London. Also, Manchester City are in vague contention.

Let’s get this out of the way up top: Yes, I agree, you wouldn’t think a cultural history of Oklahoma City would make for a compelling book. (I’ve had this conversation a lot this year.) But Sam Anderson’s Boom Town is the most engrossing piece of writing I’ve read all year. The book weaves together the story of the…Read more...

On Sunday, during the Los Angeles Rams’ 31-9 win over the Arizona Cardinals, Rams tackle Ndamukong Suh poked Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald in the eyes. Given his reputation as a famously dirty player, most people assumed the worst, with Pro Football Talk calling for him to be fined and at least one riled up…Read more...

A weird thing happened this year: Apple put its brand new iPhone on sale just a few weeks after release. Well, it wasn’t an outright sale. Faced with poor sales, the company boosted trade-in values of old iPhones so that you could get an iPhone XR for up to $300 off. These slumping sales numbers are part of a trend,…Read more...

The Warriors got smashed well and good by the Lakers last night, earning their 12th loss of what has so far been an uninspiring (by their standards) season. The Warriors have never had more than seven losses by Christmas during the Steve Kerr era, and it was genuinely strange to see them, at full strength, get pushed…Read more...

Gizmodo Report: ISS Hole Drilled From the Inside, Cosmonaut Says | Kotaku One Of The Switch’s Top Sellers Is A Bad Game That Costs $0.01 | Jalopnik At $36,000, Might This Hemi-Powered 2008 Jeep Wrangler Wrangle Itself a New Owner? | Lifehacker I’m Ashley Santoro, Sommelier for The Standard Hotel, and This Is How I…Read more...

Christmas feels incomplete without at least four-to-six partial viewings of A Christmas Story, Bob Clark’s 1983 movie based on Jean Shepherd’s semi-autobiographical stories. By now, if you have a heart, you’ve seen each segment and running subplot dozens of times. But which are the best? And which are the less-best…Read more...

An 8TB hard drive, New York Times bestsellers on Kindle, and New Year’s party decorations lead off the best day-after-Christmas deals.Read more...

That love interest of yours might not be so into labels, but we here at The Inventory are very into labels, and label makers, and slapping labels on all the things everywhere. And you don’t even have to have a type-A personality to know the pure, unbridled joy that comes with organizing your life with personalized…Read more...

Christmas morning is a time when a lot of people open presents, sleep off hangovers, or just kind of go about their business as usual since Hanukkah ended more than a week ago (Hi Mom). For President Donald Trump, however, this Christmas was a time to reflect on what truly matters most to him in this world: Wall.

Kyrie Irving caught fire to help the Celtics pull away from the 76ers for a 121-114 overtime win in a statement battle between two of the let’s say three best teams in the East. But it was his counterpoint who celebrated Christmas Day with a career high, even if it was a total accident and still sort of a bummer.

Today, we’re talking about fart ventriloquism, Street Fighter, Bernie the Avalanche mascot, and more.