The Mourning After Page 26 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Josh Donaldson is a bigger baby than you thought
No one should be surprised that Josh Donaldson can’t stop whining about actually facing the consequences, as minuscule as they were. The whole country has dive bombed into the toilet and beyond, based solely on the inability of white men to actually do any introspection or receive any criticism what...

Fight fire with fire, burning with fear
You have to hand it to Avalanche coach Jared Bednar. He does have one of the best checking centers in the NHL at his disposal in Nazem Kadri. It would be easy, explicable, and defensible to just toss Kadri over the boards every time the Oilers put Connor McDavid out there, and be done with it. After...

I feel great about not trusting the Hurricanes again
The problem with upping the degree of difficulty on your playoff run is that no matter how good you are, eventually you’ll push yourself off the cliff. The NHL playoffs are hard enough as is without trying to navigate them like they were a bar bet. The Hurricanes didn’t bother to win a road game in ...

Is the NHL now rigging games for Connor McDavid?
OK, obviously not. But maybe?...

Whatever sport the Heat and Celtics are playing, it’s trash
A lot of sports fandom and analysis is about feel vs. facts, which can go pretty haywire at times. It definitely “feels” like these NBA playoffs have been uniquely blowout-heavy, but it kind of turns out they haven’t been. There just hasn’t been any game-turning shots in the last minute or buzzer-be...

The Flames cost us a truly transcendent moment
The going story out there has been that the NBA Playoffs have been kinda trash. It’s easy to see why people think that, because there’s been a ton of blowouts, and neither of the conference finals has produced a close game in eight tries. What we want out of the playoffs are moments and performances...

Nazem Kadri kept it in check, the Blues reverted to type and got it shoved where it belonged
At the top, this isn’t some kudos party for how Nazem Kadri reacted to the racist threats he received from Blues fans after Game 3. This is just about his response on the ice, and we’ll get to some deadbrained hockey reaction to the more serious stuff in a second. ...

If the Lightning can’t choke you out, Andrei Vasilevskiy will
The narrative, the easiest one to reach for which is generally what most hockey observers want to do before hitting the bar, is the two-time defending champ Tampa Bay Lightning must be playing great defense because the Florida Panthers have scored just three goals in three games. And while that’s no...

Just say it: Josh Donaldson made a racist comment to Tim Anderson
Our media apparatus remains completely unprepared to deal with the challenges it faces, out of fear that calling things what they are — telling the truth — will be too controversial and cause a backlash....

Oilers enjoy the sounds of silence at expense of Calgary crowd
It’s tempting to try to glean some kind of lesson from big games. We all try to do it, all the time, just as fans. The playoffs are not all that different from the final few episodes of a prestige television series’ season. You know there’s not much left, and you’re looking for any clues you can get...

Here’s to feelin’ good all the time
The NHL’s second round hasn’t gotten off to the most rousing start. The Lightning did that efficiency thing where they play just well enough for just long enough to win, even if it did involve Nikita Kucherov turning Aaron Ekblad into a tetherball set. The Avalanche looked unstoppable, and the Range...

No one was as alone as Nathan Eovaldi was last night
It’s often stated that pitchers are weird, which helps explain why they tend to wet themselves every time it’s even suggested they need to change their routine. Just watch what happens when MLB tries to put in a pitch clock next season. The streets will run yellow with hurler urine!...

It’s all just so pointless
There was a baseball game on the Northside of Chicago last night. I didn’t watch it. I haven’t watched any of them. But Twitter tends to tell me if there’s anything that happens of note with the Cubs. I can’t say I’m not informed. I just don’t have to watch Marquee Network’s high school AV Club leve...

We have a new standard for pants-filling
When it comes to truly historic pants-shittings, they generally get to be known simply by the name of the place they took place. Say “Belo Horizonte” to any fan with even a reasonable amount of soccer knowledge, and they’ll know it was Germany 7-1 Brazil. Except that was a deeply flawed Brazil team ...

Shohei Ohtani is amazing and Michele Tafoya tweeted something dumb
Michele Tafoya is no stranger to controversy, whether made up out of whole cloth and not really even involving her, or overlooked when she was too cozy in her sideline job with some of the NFL’s worst humans, or completely of her own doing by going on cable news and advocating for white supremacist ...

Leafs on precipice of some kind of history
Nobody ever tweeted about a Florida Panthers playoff series victory before last night, when Carter Verhaeghe, off a pass from Claude Giroux – trade deadline acquisition and bringer of tons of vicarious Panthers fans from Philadelphia – lifted Florida to a 4-3 overtime win over the Capitals, and a 4-...

If you’re gonna be late, be late
One of the many lessons I learned from my older brother, most of them the wrong ones but they’ve made life more entertaining, was that if you’re running late for something, just go ahead and be late. He taught me this one day as I was hurrying and scrambling to 8th grade or high school, and I had no...

Strange doings on this nervous night in Anaheim
Well it wasn’t that nervous. The Angels won 12-0. But it got tense at the end, as Angels rookie Reid Detmers threw a no-hitter in just his 11th big-league start. And he did it while only striking out two batters, which is strange indeed. Eleven groundouts always helps, though. But in this day and ag...

The Celtics make you so tired
There is something so wonderfully juxtaposed about the Celtics-Bucks series. The only thing we need is for them to wear different colors. Shame they’re both based on green. But it’s a minor complaint....
