Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

From The Players’ Tribune comes this genuinely affecting video showing us the moment that Isaiah Thomas found out he had been traded from the Boston Celtics to the Cleveland Cavaliers.

ESPN published an interview this afternoon with Vernon Shazier, father of the Steelers’ Ryan Shazier, who was carted off the field with a spinal injury in a game earlier this month. Like other recent updates and news about Shazier’s condition, the interview is frustratingly vague, with Vernon saying before the…Read more...

Last week, news broke that former NFL Network makeup artist Jami Cantor had filed a wrongful termination suit against the network, in which she described experiencing sexual harassment from multiple co-workers. Now another former makeup artist, Erin McParland, has come forward to tell her story to Sports Illustrated.

The NFL and NFLPA announced today in a joint statement that the Seattle Seahawks will be fined $100,000 for failing to properly apply the league’s concussion protocol after a hit on QB Russell Wilson in a Seahawks-Cardinals game on Nov. 9. This fine marks the first time that an NFL team has been disciplined for…Read more...

The Los Angeles Lakers are at a crossroads. They’ve been in a lull for five seasons now, Kobe Bryant’s 60-point salvo notwithstanding, and with the looming free agencies of Paul George and, um, that guy in Cleveland, the time has come for the young players they’ve accrued over the past few years to show that they’re…Read more...

In November, news of longtime MLB executive Bob Bowman stepping down from his position came and went. Bowman, who headed up the league’s digital media arm for 17 years, was credited with making baseball “more accessible and enjoyable to millions of fans” by commissioner Rob Manfred in a statement announcing the move.…Read more...

Even as the Jaguars started winning this season, there remained a comfort in being able to continue to clown on Blake Bortles for being Blake Bortles. But not lately. The Jags are in the playoffs for the first time since the Fred Taylor era, and they mathematically still have a chance to earn home-field advantage in a…Read more...

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday during the NFL season. Email Drew here. Buy his book here.Read more...

This year on Christmas morning, we four adult children will emerge from our various haphazard sleeping situations, my sister and I from the double bed we traditionally share, and my brothers from their makeshift beds in the unfinished basement, or perhaps one of them will have fallen asleep on the couch the night…Read more...

Not even a dozen games into his NCAA career, Oklahoma’s Trae Young is already more valuable to his team than any other player in college basketball. The freshman point guard, born and raised in Norman, entered a program coming off an 11-20 season, and without any other can’t-miss one-and-done incoming players, Young…Read more...

MONTERREY, Mexico — When I left Monterrey in 2004, I didn’t know that I wouldn’t be back for 13 years. I knew we were moving to San Antonio, Texas. I knew that the Harry Potter movie that had just come out, the one directed by a Mexican, was the best one yet. But I could not have known the turn of events that would…Read more...

Over at ESPN, Ian Begley has chronicled the festering relationship between former Knicks boss and unbearable weed pedant Phil Jackson and former Knicks star Carmelo Anthony. It’s a long string of satisfying anecdotes but my favorite one captures the purest essence of both characters:

Xavier Woods and his WWE tag team may have failed to regain the tag titles in the squared circle at last weekend’s Clash of Champions, but Woods fared much better a few days before in some 2-on-2 Windjammers competition. The superstar jumped into the Northeast Championship fighting game tournament and, with his…Read more...

If you have any kids (or large adult Nerf gun lovers) left on your holiday shopping list, Amazon’s pushing out one last big toy sale for the holidays, with discounts on action figures, board games, and more. Just remember that these prices are only available today, or until sold out.

For the long-suffering Pittsburgh Steeler fans watching the 1972 AFC playoff game, the season appeared to be over. Trailing 7-6 to the Oakland Raiders, the Steelers faced fourth and 10 from their own 40, with 22 seconds left in the game and no timeouts remaining.

Hey, here’s something rare: two dudes breaking down a Star Wars movie in needlessly painstaking detail. Yes, we’re still talking about The Last Jedi, and that is the subject of this week’s Deadcast.Read more...

Seahawks teammates Bobby Wagner and Earl Thomas caused a bit of a stir after last week’s loss to the Rams, when Thomas told reporters that he thought Wagner was wrong to try and play through injury and Wagner responded with a jab on Twitter.

Kotaku The Last Jedi’s Porgs Are Just Puffins, Which The Film Crew Couldn’t Get Rid Of | Jalopnik Here’s Why You Should Never Take Your Car To A Carwash | io9 Another Familiar Face Will Return for the Halloween Sequel | The A.V. Club We’re pleased to inform you that Zelda is actually the boy | Skillet How to Make…Read more...

The Oklahoma City Thunder have not been a very fun basketball team to watch this season, which is a weird thing to say about a team featuring many players who are known for doing spectacular things on a basketball court. It’s not even the 16-15 record that’s been a downer, but the gross basketball that’s produced it.

Look, I’m not judging you on the fact that you’re buying gifts less than a week before Christmas, but here we are. Amazon has a great watch sale, with brands like Casio, Nixon, Daniel Wellington, Timex, and more for to help you not have an “Oh shit” moment come the night of the 24th. But time’s a-tickin’ on this deal…Read more...

The mighty terriers of Wofford knocked off No. 5 North Carolina tonight for their first-ever win over a ranked team with a 79-75 victory.Read more...

More than two years before the serial sexual abuse of athletes by USA Gymnastic and Michigan State doctor Larry Nassar became widely known and discovered, the university failed to protect the women in his care. Police reports, originally obtained by the Lansing State Journal, show that Michigan State allowed Nassar to…Read more...

There’s an argument to be made that the ideal bat flip should be one-handed—casual, effortless, I am so good and now you must look at how little I care for you or your family or my beautiful bat.Read more...

The Turkish government is seeking a four-year prison sentence for New York Knicks center Enes Kanter for insulting president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Twitter last year, according to an ESPN report on information from a state-run news agency in Turkey.Read more...

The driver of a semi truck carrying a dumpster filled with dirt had to be taken to an Oregon hospital with “serious” but non-life threatening injuries after he crashed into the swimming pool of Portland Trail Blazers guard Evan Turner this morning. A team of at least eight rescuers worked to save the driver from the…Read more...

Korey Smith sent home a stoppage-time winner for Bristol City to give his club a 2-1 win over Manchester United in the League Cup quarterfinals today. Although United can mostly shrug off this defeat in a relatively unimportant competition, the Bristol fans at Ashton Gate won’t forget their night for a long, long…Read more...

David Eaton, the vice president and executive editor for NFL Media, has resigned his position.Read more...

Former Catholic cardinal Bernard Law died Tuesday in Rome, just over 15 years after resigning from his role as head of the Boston archdiocese after the Boston Globe’s investigative team revealed that dozens of priests in the Boston archdiocese had been serially sexually abusing hundreds of boys under Law’s leadership.

Jiri Dvorak was once FIFA’s chief medical officer. For 22 years he worked for soccer’s governing body, and in that time he led programs that researched injuries, sought ways to prevent them, and investigated the use of performance enhancing drugs by players. Dvorak was fired without warning or explanation earlier this…Read more...

Floyd Mayweather, a boxer who lies about being retired, has taken all of four months to start speculating about his next fight. He recently said that he has an offer from the UFC, and Dana White talked to ESPN’s Brett Okamoto today to continue hyping up a mixed martial arts debut for the famously brittle boxing man…Read more...

Cuonzo Martin’s 10-2 Missouri Tigers escaped an upset from Stephen F. Austin in Columbia Tuesday night, 82-81. By besting SFA coach Kyle Keller, Martin apparently believed he had earned the right to take over his entire team.Read more...

On today’s edition of the Dan Le Batard Show, ESPN radio host Dan Le Batard got to interview MLB commissioner Rob Manfred about the Miami Marlins. Things got heated very quickly.Read more...

Tastefulness. It has no place when celebrating the holiday season, but some people just can’t fucking help themselves. Look at this Spotify playlist:

Actor and Dorchester lunk Mark Wahlberg was at Super Bowl LI between the Patriots and Falcons, but he left before the game was over, with New England facing a deficit. Wahlberg caught shit for being a frontrunner, then said that the reason he’d departed was because his son wasn’t feeling well. That was accurate, but…Read more...

The night before I was set to turn myself in—either for robbing a pharmacy or committing serial tax fraud, I hadn’t decided yet—I sent Officer Mark Gudmundsen an email with a couple of last-minute questions. “You may bring a book,” he replied, “but I will look at it and decide if you can have it in your cell to read.”Read more...

Olympic champion McKayla Maroney recently said that she’d been sexually abused by disgraced USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar for years, and on Wednesday she filed a lawsuit against USA Gymnastics for supposedly paying her to sign an unlawful confidentiality agreement about that abuse. Maroney later spoke out anyway,…Read more...

Former pitcher and part-time gamer Curt Schilling sprung into action after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in August. He asked for donations to his charity Operation Bullpen, filled up trailers, and drove to Texas with volunteers. Schilling was briefly hindered in Tennessee, however, when one of the trailers broke down.…Read more...

From the Daily News today comes a profile of Kristaps Porzingis’s flavorful “personal physician and trainer” Dr. Carlon Colker, who has no affiliation with the Knicks.

Listen. I am old. And one of the things that happened along my way to becoming old was that I recognized, and even came to derive some comfort from recognizing, that the things I value—privacy, the company of my loved ones, good health, not having what look like limo-tinted jeweler’s glasses from the Blade Runner universeRead more...

This year, a lot of things sucked. But a lot of things were also unexpectedly good! Let’s celebrate those latter things with a big list.

Various baseball insiders are reporting that the stove is hot this morning. Rays third baseman Evan Longoria has been shipped to the Giants in exchange for Denard Span and some other stuff:

LiAngelo and LaMelo Ball will head across the Atlantic into the Lithuanian countryside in a few weeks, and Andrew Keh of the New York Times visited Prienai to get a sense of what they’re getting themselves into. He found a small town with Ball family fever, where the pizza joints are blaring about their forthcoming…Read more...

The storied history of the Boca Raton Bowl had never seen a blowout like this. It wasn’t quite the 1902 Rose Bowl, but it was a romp: Florida Atlantic beat Akron, 50-3 in the fourth edition of the Boca Bowl.Read more...

For a while there, the Republican tax bill contained a provision that would be difficult to describe as a “silver lining,” given how comprehensively destructive the rest of the bill is, but could reasonably have been described as “not bad.” The provision was set to prevent cities from using tax-exempt bonds to finance…Read more...

Pick up last-minute gifts and great deals on Eneloop batteries, Calvin Klein underwear, a puffer jacket Gold Box, and much more.

Referee Wes McCauley is universally respected across the NHL, which is why he’s allowed to display a bit of showmanship from time to time. (Just a quick Youtube search pulls up literally seconds of entertainment.) So when McCauley got to announce the results of a Michael Grabner goal review in last night’s 4-1 Rangers…Read more...

Jalopnik The Last Jedi’s Coolest Moment Shares The Same Problem With A Lot Of Other Movies | Lifehacker Help! My Wife Is a Porn Star | The A.V. Club The 20 best films of 2017 | Kotaku Riley’s Top 10 Games Of 2017 | io9 Kevin Feige Teases Thanos’ First Big Moment in Avengers: Infinity War |Read more...

Almost no one played as Blanka in Street Fighter IV. This is because the low-tier green Brazilian is weird, doesn’t play like any other character in the game, and is widely considered not to be very powerful. Nonetheless, Street Fighter V is adding Blanka into the game this January after two years without him. I can’t…Read more...