jessespector Page 18 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

What happened to all the NBA’s best playoff heel teams?
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....

Is Brooklyn's rout of Milwaukee meaningful?
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....

Jon Rahm out of Memorial Tournament with COVID midway through record-setting performance
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....

With Harden knocked out early, Nets remind Bucks they’re still stacked
James Harden left Game 1 of the Nets-Bucks series in the first minute, after aggravating the hamstring injury that cost him 21 games during the regular season. Steve Nash doesn’t know whether Harden will be available for Game 2 — either way, the former MVP’s health coming into question reshapes ever...

How many Tampa Bay Lightning players do you think Tom Brady can name?
It’s no big deal if Tom Brady isn’t familiar with anyone on the team, and he was just glad to agree to serve as the Bolts’ “fan captain” for Saturday’s Game 4 against the Carolina Hurricanes. It’s also hilarious to see the big-time Cameo video energy that Brady brought to the table to fire up the Ta...

16-year-old Taya Currie is first girl drafted in OHL history
Eventually, there’s an important question that needs to be answered, but for now, this is simply really cool....

Habs go up 2-0 on Jets as Scheifele whines about his suspension for dirty hit
The Canadiens sure did learn their lesson from Game 1 against the Jets: don’t try to score an empty-net goal, because that apparently is justification for trying to remove someone’s head from his body....

Road warrior Kawhi Leonard joins NBA elite with season-saver in Dallas
If you were watching Game 6 of Clippers-Mavericks on Friday night, you heard about a hundred times how there’s never been a series in the NBA where the road team won the first six games — until now, since Los Angeles notched a 104-97 victory behind 45 points from Kawhi Leonard....

Eat it, Javy Baez! Here’s a Cinderella-saving squeeze-play, a ‘caught stealing/unassisted/by catcher,’ a dinger hitting a moving freight train & a buzzer beater
No unseeded team had ever won its first two games at the Women’s College World Series, so James Madison’s second straight triumph in Oklahoma City was historic in its own right on Friday night....

MLB doesn’t need a 'face of baseball,' and the proof is in the playoffs
Mike Trout has as many MVP awards as career playoff games played, with three, and for as much talk as there might be in baseball — even from the commissioner — about MLB’s need for the best player of his generation to take on the mantle of the face of the game, no amount of marketing can make up for...

Hear me out, Knicks need to start Elfrid Payton over Derrick Rose to beat Hawks
Knicks fans have been fed up all season with Tom Thibodeau’s insistence on keeping Elfrid Payton in the starting lineup. After two absolutely dismal starts in the playoffs against the Hawks, in which Payton went a combined 0-for-5 shooting with one point, one assist, and one steal in 13 minutes, dur...

Hey, Knicks fans: At least you’re not the Maple Leafs
How bad was the Toronto Maple Leafs’ collapse? It’s better to be a Knicks fan right now....

If it’s not the Leafs this season, which teams have the best (worst?) shot at passing the Rangers 54-year Cup futility?
The New York Rangers are the historic gold standard for futility in the NHL, having gone 54 years without winning the Stanley Cup until finally getting the job done in 1994 (see Mark Messier with the Cup above) — after decades of being taunted with “1940” chants in enemy arenas....

Seems like old times, eh Leafs?
By now you know the key points. The Toronto Maple Leafs haven’t won the Stanley Cup since 1967, haven’t been to the Final since then either, haven’t beaten the Canadiens in a series since their ’67 title clash, won their first division title since 2000 this season (thanks to being in the all-Canadia...

Does MLB even have a marketing department?
Last weekend, when writing about José Godoy becoming the 20,000th player in Major League Baseball history, I brought up the story of Bob Watson being the man who scored MLB’s one-millionth run, and all the hoopla around that in 1975....

Christian Pulisic just made American men’s soccer history — in Europe’s Champions League final
American men’s soccer remains, even with all the growth of Major League Soccer and the rise in popularity of the sport, very much a sleeping giant on the world stage....

Baseball brains are broken — can’t anyone here play this game?!
Maybe there’s something in the water in Pittsburgh. It could be anywhere. The Ohio… the Allegheny… the Monongahela… But it’s something, somewhere, because baseball players’ brain cells are dying at an alarming rate....

Deadspin’s Jesse Spector goes full Abe Simpson
Having turned 40, I’m aware that I have lots of OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUD potential, but the NBA really needs to cool it with the constant uniform switching. Most of the time, whatever, we’ve all accepted that an NBA player’s job expectations in 2021 include modeling various styles of Nike activewear. ...

It's 1, 2, 3 balls, you're on!
It’s not quite Javier Báez stealing a run for the Cubs by going backward, but Yankees third baseman Gio Urshela also did something you probably haven’t seen before on Friday night in Detroit....

The ol’ ‘It’s tough to win when all but one of your stars sucks’ nights for Knicks
Julius Randle was 2-for-15 shooting, R.J. Barrett went 2-for-9, and Reggie Bullock shot 3-for-8. Even the Knicks’ instant-offense bench guys, Alec Burks and Immanuel Quickley, each struggled to 2-for-8 nights. ...