Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

I know “Basketball Twitter” detests Rudy Gobert, but the fact of the matter is he deserved to win this Defensive Player of the Year Award.Read more...

TNT’s Inside the NBA is a wild show. But, like, the hilarious kind of wild. Or, the “watch Shaq and Charles argue about this dumb shit” wild. The 15-time Sports Emmy Award winning show is not really known for wild animals. But there’s a first time for everything, I guess.

The Green Bay Packers’ front office continues to squirm. As Aaron Rodgers doesn’t show up for mandatory OTA’s the Packers are getting dangerously close to having to live off the merits of their own decision-making in the form of Jordan Love starting Week 1.

No. What’re you, new? No one rises to the level of Robert Lewandowski. It’s Robert Goddamn Lewandowski. Dude just scored 40 goals in one league season, which is utterly insane. That’s after he scored 34 last year. Seventy-four motherfucking goals in two seasons in just the Bundesliga. That’s four seasons-worth to most…Read more...

Here’s a story that’s as American as apple pie, baseball, and voter suppression. It involves naivety, racism, politics, football, the military, and faux patriotism. It checks all the boxes.

I don’t have a real affinity for the New York Islanders. Great jerseys, ones they should have never abandoned, but other than that, whatever. Barry Trotz is maybe the best at getting his players to buy into his system, which is why it works so well, but that doesn’t mean it’s all that entertaining to watch, and it’s…Read more...

There are pretty much just five things going on across baseball Twitter nowadays:

I’m going to keep talking about it until people start understanding what’s happening, because the clues just keep on coming: The Baltimore Ravens and Lamar Jackson are going to throw the football a lot more this year.Read more...

The NBA playoffs have featured excellent basketball as players who have been on the rise as stars in the league have battled to grab the spotlight.

Ben Simmons only took three shots in the 34 minutes he played last night, but his defensive impact was a catalyst in the Philadelphia 76ers’ 118-102 win over the Atlanta Hawks in Game 2.

The English are the Chicago Bears of international soccer. Even though they basically created the sport, and have one of the biggest fan bases as well, they have sat by and watched others pass them as the game changed and evolved, still clinging to what they believed, all the while bleating about their divine right to…Read more...

When the 2021 MLB All-Star Game polls opened on June 3, I filled out five ballots. I’ve voted at least once every day since. And every time, I voted for pretty much the same team with a few minor adjustments.Read more...

Planned parachuters are a staple at some sporting events over here in the U.S. I saw one a few years ago at a college game. If you’ve been to any outdoor football game, chances are you’ve seen one too. It’s a pregame event that’s actually exciting and requires a fair amount of precision from the skydivers.Read more...

This is probably what Migos meant by, “You don’t get shit straight if you don’t straighten it.”

Were you in the mood for an extremely uncomfortable two minutes of media interaction to kick off your day? I bet you were. Who wouldn’t be? This will probably look like any meeting you’ve had with upper management. Step up, Gerrit Cole, and give the people what they want!

Get ready for dad day, folks. After a year of isolation and living at home your pops is ready to get out and be active. Whether his sport of choice is golf, cycling, swimming, or tailgating (we’ll count it for today) there’s something for every dad in Deadspin’s Father’s Day Gift Guide.

It’s time for us to take a good look at the 2018 NBA draft class.

On Sunday, the president of the Ukrainian Football Administration, Andriy Pavelko, revealed his country’s newest kit, which included a yellow shirt with a few Ukrainian slogans and an outline of the country — wait… is that Crimea?

Spend enough time raging against the dying of the light and all you end up with is a sore throat and in the dark. Some things just can’t be prevented, no matter how hard you try and how right you are. The minute you learn that fact is probably the exact minute your childhood dies.Read more...

Fresh off the apparent re-emergence of Kawhi Leonard following a worrisome Game 5, the Los Angeles Clippers find themselves in Salt Lake City, and not Cancun, tonight.

Dallas Baptist University was down by three in the bottom of the seventh. With two outs and the bases loaded in the NCAA regional, redshirt freshman Andrew Benefield came to the plate. Then, well… just watch.

Chris Paul deserves every single one of his flowers.Read more...

To make it to the very top levels of any sport as an athlete, it must take an unfathomable reservoir of self-belief. With all the obstacles, the sheer amount of work, and all the days where the dream must seem as close as one of Saturn’s moons, one would have to be able to call on a never-ending supply of “I can do…Read more...

Adam Gase had a winning record with Ryan Tannehill as his starting quarterback in Miami. Let that sink in for a second.Read more...

Have you ever seen “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly?” No, seriously. The 1966 western movie starring Clint Eastwood is a classic of Western movies, with horses and gunfights and bravado and all that toxic Hollywood macho “this is what a man is” stuff. The movie reaches a boiling point in a three-way standoff between…Read more...

With the 250th pick in the seventh round of the 2005 NFL draft, the St. Louis Rams (’memba them?) selected a quarterback out of Harvard — not exactly a football powerhouse. His name was Ryan Fitzpatrick, and of the 13 quarterbacks taken before him, only one (Aaron Rodgers) still plays in the league.

At this point, if you still believe that Jay-Z’s partnership with the NFL is a strategic and calculated maneuver that will help Black America, instead of it being the shrewd business move it’s always been, then you’re a dumbass.Read more...

If your entire starting five is at least a +12 or higher, then you’ll look like the Phoenix Suns did in their 122-105 Game 1 victory over the Denver Nuggets last night. And their balance is precisely why they have the edge on a shorthanded Nuggets roster.

The Bucks lost by 39 points in Brooklyn on Monday night, and it felt like something of a denouement for this current Milwaukee team, which has gone 162-65 over the past three seasons but disappointed in the playoffs.Read more...

It’s a Trash Talking Tuesday, and today I’m trashing Mavs star Luka Dončić.

No individual award in American sports generates more debate than the NBA MVP. No one cares about hockey, and half the awards are given to players where the voters don’t really understand why they’re voting for them. Baseball awards are too mired in the debate between how we view the game today and how it used to be…Read more...

For European teams, the lack of opportunities to actually win a trophy can muddy the results they do get. There’s only a trophy on offer every two years (when there isn’t a pandemic), and perhaps Spain at the beginning of the last decade altered our perception of what’s success and what isn’t.

Just over 20 years ago, Caron Butler accepted a scholarship offer to play basketball for legendary coach Jim Calhoun at UConn, a college hoops power. He was a top talent with a future on the hardwood ahead of him. But behind him trailed a sordid past of multiple arrests, and a host of “serious mistakes” he readily…Read more...

Even apparel makers think the Detroit Lions are losers.

It’s hard to think of a series the past few years that has been more anticipated than Avalanche-Golden Knights. Rarely do the two best teams in the NHL meet up before the third round, or more likely at all given the vagaries of hockey. But with the divisional setup this year, it was going to be hard for these two to…Read more...

There are about 400 lessons that fans could have learned about the U.S. Men’s National team last night. And they spread over the entire spectrum of endless hope of things we’ve never imagined to complete and total disaster we’re sadly all too familiar with. Projecting this team into the future, because of all that…Read more...

It’s that time of year again for Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Bucks.

As the great urban philosopher Calvin Broadus — otherwise known as Snoop Dogg — once said, “There are two things in life you can’t play with. This Boxing, and this pimpin’.”

A few weeks ago, former NFL tight end Greg Olsen outlined a nightmarish scenario for any parent. After eight years of life with a heart condition, Olsen’s son, T.J., had a heart that was “reaching its end.” Olsen added that the next step could be a heart transplant.

Welcome to the Ladies Room - A Deadspin Sports Podcast.

Roger Federer withdrew from the French Open yesterday, which put the tournament in an awkward spot. Federer has only played six matches in a year or so, thanks to the pandemic and double knee surgery and rehab. After a near four-hour match in the third round where he really had to slog through a tepid performance, and…Read more...

The worm has turned in L.A.

The CONCACAF Nations League isn’t really supposed to be anything. It’s something of a cheap mockery of Europe’s Nations League, which was really only conjured to get rid of meaningless friendlies in years between major competitions. So, even that’s not really a thing. The CONCACAF version is basically a copy of a copy.

As everyone knows by now, Julio Jones is going to be a Tennessee Titan.Read more...

While the teeth-gnashing on these shores during the last World Cup were enough to drown out the laments of everyone else in the world, you may have forgotten that a true giant of the international game wasn’t in Russia either. That would be Italy, the first time they didn’t partake in the tournament since 1958. In…Read more...

The hottest “rivalry” in sports is between two young golfers who have been trading jabs online. But now, one may want the PGA to step in.

This Game 7 is huge for Luka Dončić.Read more...

Weeks ago, I went against my instincts, and what years of facts had told me, to buy in with the Carolina Hurricanes. What I couldn’t have predicted was that they would be so desperate to return to their nature, like some leaden blanky.

For the past few years, Oklahoma State catcher Raquel Dominguez has stepped out of the dugout to dance behind her coach, Kenny Gajewski, during mid-game interviews. She did so again last night during what would become the deciding game of a series against Florida State. Call me crazy, but this is more entertaining…Read more...

Jon Rahm is a professional golfer, which means that he spends a good amount of his life traveling, a lot of time on airplanes and in hotels and other common areas where a lot of people mass and spread germs.