Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

The pool of NBA free agents available as of July 3 is shockingly small. The vast majority of marquee names settled within a few hours of the official kickoff of free agency Sunday afternoon; a huge number of rotation guys and role players have already grabbed up much of what remained of the open salary cap space…Read more...

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Perhaps lost in the shuffle of the USWNT rolling England up into a little ball and kicking them all the way into the third-place match was a late-game tactical shift that was as confounding as it was ill-advised. For the second straight game, the best team in the world protected a slim lead with Mourinho-esque levels…Read more...

While I know that Stranger Things premiering on the Fourth of July was a strategic decision planned and approved by at least 15 levels of marketing managers at Netflix to tie the release to the show’s summer of 1985-set third season, it still feels like a fun, fizzy coincidence! Because there’s something about the…Read more...

Following a hearing today in Atlantic City Municipal Court, domestic violence charges against Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Odubel Herrera have been dropped, because his girlfriend and alleged victim decided she did not want to proceed with the case. Herrera, who was facing charges of simple assault and knowingly…Read more...

VAR has been a disaster at the Copa América this summer, and last night’s Brazil-Argentina semifinal was no different. And as evidenced by his scathing postgame comments slamming VAR and the refereeing in general after his team fell to Brazil, Lionel Messi is fed the fuck up with it.Read more...

A Levi’s sale, Harmony Hub, lobster claw oven mitt, and a Sunglass Warehouse sale lead off Wednesday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

If a walk-off win is exciting, and a walk-off walk is peculiar and charming, what is a walk-off walk, walk, walk, walk, walk? Perhaps something too grotesque to even imagine, let alone witness with your own eyes? Let’s find out.

The Salt Lake Tribune has obtained records from the University of Utah that show one of the police officers accused of mishandling the Lauren McCluskey case was disciplined about four months following her murder for his mistakes in another domestic violence case.Read more...

After three days of embarrassing attendance at the Stomping Grounds pay-per-view and the subsequent editions of Raw and SmackDown, and after months of chatter that the product had sagged and stagnated, WWE finally decided to make a big move last week. That the move in question wound up being the shock announcement of…Read more...

Just in time for July 4th, Michelin-starred chef and angry British person Gordon Ramsay made the below YouTube video to show you how to grill a hamburger. Why you would trust this man to make you a proper burger over Ron Swanson, I do not know. Why Ramsay needs a full 10 minutes to show you how he does this, I again…Read more...

Ken Stabler, the late Hall of Fame quarterback, suffered from CTE and Alzheimer’s before his death; not even the NFL or its lawyers dispute that. Yet Stabler’s family will not collect any money from the NFL’s class-action concussion settlement, which has proven to be a disaster for hundreds of former players and their…Read more...

The USWNT’s 2-1 World Cup semifinal win over England was a nailbiter, and that was just watching it on TV. From the bench, it was a pressure-cooker. “It’s terrible,” said Megan Rapinoe, who didn’t play due to injury. “It’s so stressful. It’s hard. You put everything into this game ... You have everything invested in…Read more...

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In the bottom of the fifth inning of Tuesday night’s game between the Twins and the Athletics, golden-armed A’s outfielder Ramon Laureano scalded a one-out liner up the line in left. Mark Canha, who’d walked one batter earlier, hoofed it around the bases in an attempt to score from first on the double. Against any…Read more...

I have no idea if Yasiel Puig is as dumb as Pedro Strop says he is, but on this we can all agree: Puig routinely does very cool stuff on a baseball field. Tuesday night he made a very bold and cool play in extra innings to give his Reds a walk-off win over the division leading Milwaukee Brewers.Read more...

White Sox outfielder Daniel Palka finished his rookie season last year with a healthy 27 home runs and 67 runs batted in, in 417 at-bats. It was a promising year, even if Palka also struck out a whopping 153 times. His sophomore year has not been so promising—Palka opened the season 1-for-35 from the plate with 16…Read more...

Baseball got it absolutely right when it made sure Toronto’s rookie slugger Vladimir Guerrero Jr. would be swinging his bat in next week’s Home Run Derby, even if his debut season hasn’t quite produced the eye-popping numbers everyone expected. Baby Vlad’s eight homers in 231 plate appearances may not be able to hang…Read more...

If USWNT manager Jill Ellis is in need of an instructional video to teach her players the finer points of shielding the ball from the opposition when trying to waste time down by the corner flag, she need look no further than this video of an Indian soccer cow’s impressive display of defensive possession:

For the second summer in a row, it will not come home. Alyssa Naeher made sure of that.Read more...

Two days into free agency, and it’s been a severe drought of Kawhi Leonard news, excluding sources who may be Jeanie Buss’s Reddit-loving nephew or Shams Charania-cosplayers. Bone-dry. In an era where a lone emoji can kick off a 12-hour news cycle, there’ve been no inklings as to whether Leonard’s preference is…Read more...

Congratulations, Spurs fans: the club’s long transfer market nightmare is finally over. On Tuesday, Tottenham Hotspur announced not just one, but two transfers, the first by the club since signing right winger (both on the field and off of it) Lucas Moura back in January of 2018. And judging by the quality of player…Read more...

Anyone concerned by Megan Rapinoe’s absence from the starting lineup of today’s USWNT Women’s World Cup semifinal against England was given swift reassurance that everything would be okay when Christen Press, Rapinoe’s replacement, scored this arrowing header just 10 minutes in:

To understand how and why the Guys that have lodged in my mind are where they are, you must remember that this was the 1980s and 1990s, and that I lived in the suburbs, and that I am an idiot. There were things to do there, and various places within a moderate bike’s ride at which to do them; I had a little crew of…Read more...

Today, we’re talking about pizza, garbage, morning radio, college email addresses, and more.

After scoring two goals in back-to-back games, Megan Rapinoe will start Tuesday’s Women’s World Cup semifinal match-up against England...on the bench. Per the USWNT’s announcement of the lineup, Rapinoe has been benched in favor of Christen Press, one of two changes to the starting XI that faced France (the other is,…Read more...

Every summer, the best wrestling on the planet happens half a world away from the sterile confines of WWE. Starting on Saturday, New Japan Pro Wrestling puts on its mammoth undertaking of a tournament, the G1 Climax. (Yes, Climax is part of the name, let’s all just try to be adults about this.) Over the course of a…Read more...

When Scott Udall first played Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance shortly after it came out in 2005, he was in a vulnerable spot. Udall, who grew up Mormon in Salt Lake City, Utah, was very religious, and his family were all politically active Republicans. His parents had gone through a messy divorce, and he’d lost contact…Read more...

This March, septuagenarian distance runner Frank Meza finished the Los Angeles Marathon in 2:53:10. That would be a record time for his age group, only it’s been stripped from him after L.A. Marathon officials disqualified the result and ruled that one particularly suspicious stretch of his alleged record-setting run…Read more...

On the surface, the rivalry between skiers and snowboarders once had all the classic Snobs vs. Slobs tropes. The stuffy, elitists skiers, with their skin-tight ski-suits, champagne, and love for rules and propriety. The punk-kid snowboarders, loud and brash, with cheap beers stuffed into the pockets of baggy pants.…Read more...

An Eddie Bauer sale, AirPods, Clipa, and a TCL TV lead off Tuesday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

Enes Kanter signed a two-year, $10 million deal with the Boston Celtics yesterday, bringing an end to his short but feel-good tenure as a member of the Portland Trail Blazers. Kanter’s time in Portland may have gone on a little longer if the team hadn’t, according to Kanter, given him just a few minutes to consider…Read more...

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Sometimes trades are far simpler than GMs make them out to be. It’s understandable why many are hesitant: the fear of losing a trade is real, and GMs tend toward maintaining the status quo, since the status quo involves them having a job. But: a trade doesn’t have to have a loser. The Colorado Avalanche and Toronto…Read more...

Lifehacker How to Watch the July 2nd Solar Eclipse From Anywhere in the World | Gizmodo Florida City Fires IT Employee After Paying $460,000 Bitcoin Ransom to Hackers | Jalopnik Koenigsegg Is Extremely Mad Online About a Cheap One:1 | Kotaku Mordhau’s Developers Are On Some Bullshit [Update] | The Takeout Ask The…Read more...

A crappy side effect of the NBA’s salary cap is it’s usually better business for your favorite team to have a cheap good player than an expensive one, so you are conditioned to think of cheap contracts for good players as “good” and pricier contracts for comparable players as “bad.” Sticking with that unfair binary,…Read more...

Six of eight names have been announced for the 2019 Home Run Derby, to be held next Monday night. The field does not yet include Shohei Ohtani, which is frankly an outrage. The good news is, the field does include Pirates masher Josh Bell, who is rounding into peak form exactly in time.Read more...

Having lost Kevin Durant in free agency to Kyrie Irving and the Brooklyn Nets, the Golden State Warriors announced Monday that Durant’s number-35 jersey will be effectively retired, for as long as Joe Lacob is in control of the team:Read more...

One endearing thing about Naomi Osaka is that she seems to actually digest and carefully respond to the questions asked of her in press. Where many athletes are ready to spit out some prepackaged platitude—which, in fairness, is about the level of thought that most post-game queries deserve, in any sport—Osaka always…Read more...

The Los Angeles Angels announced today that starting pitcher Tyler Skaggs died in Texas this morning. So far no cause of death has been reported. He was 27 years old.

An unexpected delight on the opening of NHL free agency: The Montreal Canadiens have signed Carolina Hurricanes restricted free agent forward Sebastian Aho to an offer sheet. It will be very interesting to see how this one goes down—while it feels unlikely that the Hurricanes won’t match, at the very least there…Read more...

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

The reinvention of the Florida Panthers continued today with a massive new contract for free agent goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky, worth a reported $70 million over the next seven years. By signing the two-time Vezina winner and former Blue Jacket, the Panthers hope that they’ve captured a key ingredient they were…Read more...

Cori “Coco” Gauff is still a teenager, but her legend precedes her. The first story I ever heard involving the American prodigy was about her serving incomprehensible heat while she was barely a teenager. Soon enough there were official figures to back that up. Last year at the Wimbledon junior tournament, Gauff, 14,…Read more...

The United States women’s national team—three World Cups and four Olympic gold medals to their name—will meet England—zero of either—tomorrow afternoon in Lyon to decide who plays in Sunday’s final, and the English seem rather perturbed with the brimming confidence shown by the Americans.Read more...

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Around 9:30 a.m. on June 24 in Manhattan, cyclist Robyn Hightman rounded the corner from 23rd Street onto Sixth Avenue, where they were struck by a large white delivery truck and thrown off their bike into the middle of the street. A photo from shortly after the crash shows a mangled, black, single-speed bicycle …Read more...

I don’t remember where I was going or why I was going there, but given the neighborhood I was in and when in my life I was there, I was almost certainly going to a bar. It was raining, and as I hustled down a street that was briefly in that golden New York state of being both smelly and shiny, I saw it blaring out…Read more...

The Pittsburgh Penguins accomplished the inevitable. After Phil Kessel rejected a trade to the Minnesota Wild, the Pens found an agreeable new team for him, all the way out in Arizona. On Saturday, Pittsburgh traded Kessel, a 2021 fourth-round pick, and prospect Dane Birks to the Coyotes for Alex Galchenyuk and…Read more...

If you lost track of the Washington Wizards amid all Sunday’s wild NBA free-agency news, that’s fine, and reasonable. It speaks well of you, all things considered. A solid double-fistful of the league’s big stars switched teams over the weekend, and none of them came to or left the Wizards—but the Wizards, nothing if…Read more...