Deadspin > Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise

Tasty stuff on the hot stove today, folks: The Cardinals have signed right-handed pitcher Miles Mikolas to a two-year deal. You may know his name from very brief stints with the Padres and Rangers from 2012 through 2014 (unlikely), or from his quite good performance in Japan over the past several years. But you should…Read more...

Stephen Curry ended the night on crutches after rolling his right ankle in the final minute of Golden State’s game against New Orleans yesterday. Today, the team has announced that Curry is out indefinitely, with at least two weeks until doctors re-evaluate his injury.Read more...

CBS Sports has blamed a “technical issue” for scraping blogs from various SB Nation team sites and posting them in full on its website with no attribution, according to a statement from CBS Sports Digital to Deadspin.Read more...

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Welcome to Bad Quarterback Performance Of The Week, a recurring feature in which we celebrate the worst quarterback play the NFL has to offer.Read more...

Desus Nice and The Kid Mero just tackled esports on their comedy talk show, thanks to Riot’s latest masturbatory advertisement showcasing League of Legends pro players. Riot’s video, which juxtaposes clips of notable esports haters like Colin Cowherd with emotional esports moments like Faker crying, argues that people…Read more...

Over seven years after the body of Lorenzen Wright was found near Memphis, Tenn., a man has been indicted today for the first-degree murder of the former NBA player by a Shelby County grand jury.Read more...

We are currently at that point in the baseball calendar when we are not strictly speaking really on the baseball calendar. Baseball-adjacent things are happening, or threatening to happen. Shohei Ohtani is giving the fans of seven teams a chance to think happy baseball thoughts, there are various depressing trade…Read more...

Thanks to Brendan Karet and Dave Weigel, the Deadspin staff has spent the last half hour or so watching this video of a husky man in business casual wailing away on some meat, and then following the Youtube rabbit hole down to, uh, more videos of What If Game Of Thrones But Middle Management?Read more...

You probably remember the rules of chess, but what’s actually happening there on the board? How many moves are Grandmasters really thinking ahead? Why do they never actually checkmate the opponent? Is my life just like a game of chess?

Around the time of Trump’s inauguration, when America’s maximum dissolute liberal rage was seeking an outlet, there was discussion of a general strike. Then, it was an implausible fantasy. Now? Let’s have a serious talk.Read more...

The International Olympic Committee announced today that it has banned Russia—but not all Russian athletes—from the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, as an unprecedented punishment for systemic doping, including at the 2014 Games in Sochi.Read more...

Thomas the Tank Engine, as a children’s book and TV series, may be vaguely authoritarian, but as a toy, it’s weirdly entertaining. Watch in awe (or at least with surprisingly strong interest) as the locomotive does totally sick tricks like a 50-50 grind, or a barrel roll onto a parallel track.Read more...

Time for your weekly edition of the Deadspin Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we’re talking paracord bracelets, farting, Alabama, and more.

Fresh off his 41-point statement game on Friday, Jazz rookie Donovan Mitchell has remained hot as hell. His contribution to Utah’s all-devouring 116-69 destruction of the Wizards was 21 points on 8-for-13 shooting; he sat the entire fourth quarter. Mitchell’s 16.7 points per game put him third among all rookies and…Read more...

In a piece published at CBS Sports on Tuesday, reporter Matt Norlander chatted up several of college basketball’s top coaches, hoping to find a path inside the minds of these titans, these innovators. The main question being posed is the one that’s been vexing the sport since the FBI fucked everyone’s shit up in the…Read more...

The Philadelphia Fusion, the Comcast-owned Overwatch League team, just pulled out of their pre-season matches, citing “player logistics issues.” The Fusion had been scheduled to play the debut match of the OWL pre-season against the Florida Mayhem tomorrow.

Now that the Giants have fired Ben McAdoo, someone else has to be the spiritual successor to Jim Tomsula, a former doormat salesman whose figurative and literal hunger earned him exactly one season leading the 49ers, but oh, what a season it was. Jaguars coach Doug Marrone already seems like a viable candidate to fill…Read more...

Youtheory Racing’s No. 55 truck sent a wheel flying across a desert when their truck landed nose-first into the dirt while trying to qualify for the Pahrump Nugget 250 Best in the Desert race. No one was hurt, but it just looks like a ridiculous trucksplosion.

Social media was abuzz this weekend with a video depicting a baby-faced Sunderland fan sitting alongside his fellow supporters at the Stadium of Light, taking in the day’s match while also appearing to take a pleasant shit right there on his seat. The kid, later revealed to be 17-year-old Callum Mawson, has since come…Read more...

According to ESPN, a protective order has been filed against Oklahoma running back Rodney Anderson. The woman who filed the order says that Anderson sexually assaulted her on November 16.

Through the first 810 games of his career, Kevin Durant was ejected just twice. Through the first 18 games of this season, he’s been booted off the floor three times. Last night brought us the latest incident, in which Durant got into it with Boogie Cousins during the final minutes of the game, earning himself a…Read more...

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A grimy football game can be fun, sometimes. Messy, brutal, even a little bit of dirty play can raise the stakes, or at least turn a game into a car wreck that can’t be looked away from. Steelers-Bengals was not fun.

Ah, ugly holiday sweaters. A tradition that never ceases to outdo itself. If you have one (or more) of these parties coming up, Amazon has a Gold Box full of some really great options. Truly, these are the pinnacle of ironic ugliness and they’re on sale, today only.

Pizza stones help you quickly achieve crispier crusts (or crispier anything) in the oven, and the best one you can buy has a rare discount today, just for our readers.

Tonight’s Steelers-Bengals game was brutal—football that can charitably be described as “old-school” and accurately, necessarily described as “sickening.” The hits came and kept coming, with the injury count ticking upward. The night’s worst injury, though, happened only minutes after kick-off, when Ryan Shazier was…Read more...

The Grizzlies snapped their 11-game losing streak tonight with a 95-92 win over the Timberwolves, and Marc Gasol was pretty pumped about it. Enough to clearly drop a “fuck it” in his televised postgame comments.Read more...

Stephen Curry left the court during the final minute of tonight’s Warriors-Pelicans game after rolling his ankle—able to walk off on his own, but not comfortably:

Common as extreme blowouts are in high school basketball, a true shutout is still extremely rare. The state of Montana had its first one in any level of recorded organized basketball last weekend, and man, is it a bummer: Froid-Medicine Lake High 102, Brockton High 0.Read more...

The Pittsburgh Steelers will finish tonight’s Monday night game against the Bengals without their leading tackler after Ryan Shazier suffered what appears to be a head or neck injury while attempting to make a tackle early in the game.Read more...

Warriors guard Shaun Livingston and referee Courtney Kirkland have each been suspended for their little altercation from yesterday—Livingston for one game and Kirkland for one week. Livingston was assessed a technical and ejected at the time; Kirkland was only found partially responsible after a league review of the…Read more...

Exciting hot stove news: Cleveland has signed Michael Martinez to a minor-league contract. Again. This will be his sixth stint with the team. (Fittingly enough, Martinez also has six career home runs.) All those moves in one handy place for those scoring at home, as compiled by MLB.com’s Jordan Bastian:Read more...

Sunil Gulati, the U.S. Soccer Federation’s president for the last 12 years and the man who presided over the worst debacle in American soccer history, has told ESPN that he will not seek to retain his position in February’s election. This is good news!Read more...

Saints rookie running back Alvin Kamara has turned into an absolute force this season as he’s made tacklers miss left and right. Chances are your friend won’t shut up about how he’s rescued their fantasy football team. (Great move, you’re the Howie Roseman of your league. Now fuck off.) The 5-foot-10, 215-pound Kamara…Read more...

For a long time, the backup Saints QB has been a cushy gig. Aside from one emergency Luke McCown start in 2015, New Orleans quarterbacks other than Drew Brees have thrown 10 passes this decade. So, third-stringer Taysom Hill’s best chance to actually play is at a position other than quarterback. This weekend, he did…Read more...

On Monday, the New York Giants relieved head coach Ben McAdoo of his McAduties. It was somehow both a long time coming and abrupt—over a little under two seasons as the team’s coach, McAdoo first positioned himself as something like a rising star and then instantly and dramatically biffed everything. His team…Read more...

LaVar Ball has pulled his middle son, LiAngelo Ball, out of his freshman year at UCLA, according to a report from TMZ, which was then confirmed by ESPN.Read more...

With all due respect to the first minute of this weekend’s Alistair Overeem-Francus Ngannou fight at UFC 218, in which the two heavyweights hung out at the fence and just sort of idly touched bellies until the referee intervened, Overeem was essentially unconscious as soon as the fight began. In the first standup…Read more...

Manchester United beat Arsenal this weekend by a 3-1 scoreline that totally belied the action on the field. United didn’t really deserve to win, in the sense people mean when they say teams that impose their will on their opponent by doing lots of good things while preventing the opposition from doing good things…Read more...

Herm Edwards, who hasn’t coached football since 2008, is now in charge of the Arizona State Sun Devils. The school’s athletic director and Edwards’s former agent Ray Anderson is convinced that this will be a successful idea. Try to parse this press release while keeping in mind that it is about a man being hired to…Read more...

PORTLAND, Ore.—Here is a story from Swoosh: The Unauthorized Story of Nike, J.B. Strasser and Laurie Becklund’s 1993 book about about the company’s early days. In 1975, Nelson Farris, Nike’s first employee—he still works there, “Chief Storyteller” or some such thing—went to a women’s track meet to sell some shoes. He…Read more...

Touchdown celebrations are cool. Touchdown celebrations that pantomime sex are even cooler.Read more...

Kicker Robbie Gould’s 11-year tenure with the Bears came to an unceremonious end when the team released him a week before the 2016 season started. GM Ryan Pace believed that Connor Barth was better and more affordable than Gould, though Barth was cut last month for Cairo Santos. On Sunday, Gould, the Bears’ all-time…Read more...

Today LeBron James spoke briefly about the grim saga of Derrick Rose, whose desiccated body drifted back to Cleveland this morning. LeBron’s comment was unremarkable in Rose-related insight, which it seemed explicitly crafted to avoid. But it was amusing in its insight on the human condition. In the middle of a…Read more...

Lim “Larva” Hong Gyu proved last night that he can win a StarCraft: Remastered match with his foot. During the finals of the Zotac Cup Masters Showmatch, Larva made quick work of his opponent’s base, and in the game’s final moments, he lifted his bare left foot onto the keyboard to tap in a few final button presses.

Well, another week has passed, and with it, another Jacksonville Jaguars victory game. (Higher score.)Read more...

Rob Gronkowski, a palooka with a new mean streak, somehow avoided an ejection after he crushed Bills cornerback Tre’Davious White well after the play was over. (White had to leave the game and be evaluated for a concussion.)Read more...

One year after losing 19 of its players in a plane crash that killed 71 people, Brazilian club Chapecoense clinched qualification to the Copa Libertadores—the South American Champions League—with a last-second stoppage time winner scored by Túlio de Melo.Read more...

Last week, before a basketball game between Eagle Grove and Forest City in Forest City, Iowa, two local radio broadcasters were heard cheerily expressing their disdain for the “Español people” who played for Eagle Grove High School, before wishing they would “go back to where they came from.”