samfels27 Page 78 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Euro 2021: Can Poland rise to meet Robert Lewandowski?
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 se...
I just want to keep hearing the raucous din of Islanders games
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 t...
Euro 2021: So how is England going to screw this up?
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 th...
Gerrit Cole gives away the game
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!...
Cubs’ City Connect jerseys advertise a neighborhood they killed
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. ...
Euro 2021: Memphis Depay gets to try again
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 sup...
Do those MVP trophies come with a receipt?
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 ...
Euro 2021: For the last time, is this Belgium’s time?
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....
The Avalanche are granny shifting
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...
How do you solve a problem like Weston McKennie?
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, beca...
Federer vs. Osaka, a tale of two reactions
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 tep...
U.S. beats Mexico in some combination of soccer, whirlyball, and Fury Road
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 basical...
Euro 2021: Can Italy score enough to make some serious noise?
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...
The Hurricanes apparently can’t escape their nature
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....
USMNT knocks off Honduras, but doesn’t look so hot
We USMNT fans have been dreaming for a while about what the team could be with the influx of young stars plying their trade in Europe over the past two years. Problem was, it had been more than 500 days since the national team played a game with anything riding on it, thanks to the pandemic. Can’t k...
LeBron’s gone, and the NBA did him no favors with short offseason
I grew up in Chicago, which means I grew up in a basketball atmosphere that was convinced the league was always rigging things for the Knicks. Even though the Bulls would go on to win six titles — beating the Knicks along the way for most of them — Bulls fans were always insistent that they had to o...
How is Brazil the better choice for Copa America?
You may be getting your large-sporting-events-that-shouldn’t-be-taking-place confused, and it would be understandable. There’s the Olympics, which just lost 10,000 volunteers, is in a state of emergency, and yet welcoming thousands of athletes from 200 countries — doesn’t seem all that sharp. There’...
WWE wields the axe again, but at much bigger targets, meaning what?
News of WWE releases have become regular happenings, and yet some of the most anticipated in some ways. That’s because these days, fans can dream of where their favorite, underused, and now free, performers could go to fulfill their promise and have all the creative freedom they lacked with WWE. It’...
If only playoff hockey could just be playoff hockey and not these garbage hits
When hockey fans tell you, and they will tell you, that playoff hockey is the best thing in sports, what they’re imagining is that every game, every series, looks like Game 2 of the Avalanche and Knights. The thing is, of course, it doesn’t, and a lot of series are just noisy slogs as coaches really...
Blackhawks sued for endorsing alleged sex assaulter by another victim
First a former player sued the Chicago Blackhawks over alleged sexual abuse from a coach, and now they’re being sued by a former high school player in Michigan where said coach, Brad Aldrich, landed after the Hawks gave him a positive recommendation for the job. The plaintiff is suing the Hawks for ...