8 Page 46 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

The Rockets Are Short-Circuiting
One of the coldest, most ruthlessly efficient scorers in the NBA froze up on a wide-open three that Draymond Green was cool to let him have. P.J. Tucker eventually missed his own three to end the possession, but if you’re wondering how badly the Warriors own James Harden and the Rockets right now, h...

I Ask You Once Again: How Are The Cavs Like This?
What’s going on here? Just what the heck is this?...

I'm In Awe Of This Nicklas Backstrom Pass
“That was pretty much a perfect game,” Devante Smith-Pelly said after the Capitals’ convincing 3-0 win to take the Lightning to a Game 7, and, yup. The offense was relentless, the defense was suffocating, and Braden Holtby was impenetrable when tested. (Smith-Pelly had a hell of a game himself, scor...

LeBron James Can Make Scoring 44 Points Look Ordinary
Probably the highest praise to give LeBron James is that his 44-point game tonight wasn’t even all that exhilarating, particularly when it didn’t come packaged with quite as many boards and assists (five and three) as his previous five 40-point outings this postseason. The Cavaliers’ 111-102 defeat...

The Capitals Were Finally Flawless
It wasn’t Andrei Vasilevsky’s fault, but it’s hard to beat perfection. The Tampa Bay Lightning goaltender stopped 31 of 33 Capitals shots tonight in Washington’s 3-0 win over the Bolts in Game 6. Several of those saves were spectacular—though unsurprising for anyone who had seen Vasilevsky’s previou...

Dead Letters: Golden Knights Edition
Subject: Had to buy depends...

God Help Me, I'm Rooting For The Warriors Now
The bleak doom of all good things in this terrible psycho-capitalist hell-society we have made is to be processed and metabolized into an inert clot of blind, gray, mindless nano-goo by precisely the kind of antiseptic, hyper-rational, ahuman actuarial math on display here:...

You Don't Have To Get Cute With The Rockets
The Rockets are coming after Steph Curry. Through the first three games of their series against they Warriors, they have been committed to one idea that they seem to think will give them the best chance to win: use a pick to switch Curry onto the ballhandler on every offensive possession, and then w...

You Have To Love A Big Steph Curry Game
The start of Steph Curry’s Game 3 went much like his Game 1 and Game 2, and by the end of the first half he was 3-of-11 from the field. At that point, Curry was shooting a combined 3-of-20 from three-point range for the series, and it was starting to look like the takeover everyone had been waiting...

Holy Crap, The Golden Knights
“We’ll be pretty good in three years and we’ll make a run in five or six,” predicted Golden Knights owner Bill Foley back in August. “This team isn’t going to have more than a dozen regulation wins,” predicted some dummy. This was, to put it as plainly as I can—and it’s a sentiment that wouldn’t hav...

The Preakness Was A Foggy, Muddy, Wonderful Mess
The Preakness, held Saturday at Maryland’s Pimlico Race Course, fucking ruled! The race itself was fine: the favorite won; the favorite was also the horse that won the Kentucky Derby; therefore the actual Preakness Stakes did the job of getting the broader non-gambling world through May with reason ...

LeBron In Full Must-Win Mode Is An Unsolvable Problem
The Cavs opened Game 3 with a huge 22-6 run, and that was more or less that. This was not a case of the winning team grabbing an early lead behind a fluky start and nursing it cautiously until the final buzzer—the Cavs were forceful and decisive early, and did some cool and different things to chall...

Alex Ovechkin Has Been Eating This Carb Nightmare Before Every Home Game For 13 Years
Partly it’s superstition, and partly it’s because, as they say, he likes what he likes, Alex Ovechkin eats the exact same thing a few hours before every Capitals home game, and he’s been eating it since his rookie year. Athletes really are different from the rest of us....

The Lightning Power Play Is A Thing To Behold
The numbers are intimidating. The Tampa Bay Lightning had the league’s third best power play during the regular season, at 23.9 percent. They have the best power play of any team left alive, at 30.8 percent. They are 6-of-14 on the power play against the Capitals. They have scored a power-play goal ...

The Lightning Scored Three Beautiful Goals And The Capitals Only Scored Two
It might seem a bit tedious to go through all the goals in the Lightning’s 4-2 Game 4 win over the Capitals on Thursday night, which evened the Eastern Conference Finals at two games apiece. But bear with me—in the tensest game of the series so far, every scoring play (minus the empty netter with tw...

In The Future, We Will All Gamble Constantly
The NBA Playoffs should be at something like their apex right now, and in the least entertaining possible sense they may well be. There are four notionally entertaining teams left, and they have combined through four games for maybe three entertaining quarters. The league’s biggest and most brillian...

Chris Paul's Yo-Yo Dribble Never Gets Old
Last night, the Houston Rockets blew past the Golden State Warriors in Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals by getting a little more lively on offense and moving the ball. That is cool and good for them, but let’s be honest: the best thing about the game was Chris Paul’s dribbling....

Steph Curry Will Have To Take Over At Some Point
It’s been over two weeks since Steph Curry returned from his knee injury to make the Warriors fully operational for the latter stages of the playoffs, and his results have been mixed. He made the Warriors look invincible once again in his first game back against the Pelicans, but he’s been up and do...

All Hail Sir Jonathan Marchessault
According to the numbers, home ice in the NHL isn’t that big a deal, and I’m never been one to argue with hard data. However, playing in the desert does seem to mean something to the Vegas Golden Knights, who beat the Jets 4-2 Wednesday night to take a 2-1 lead in the Western Conference Finals. The ...

The Desperate Rockets Beat The Warriors, And It Was Actually Fun To Watch
The Rockets can pass! That’s the most stunning takeaway from their 127-105 win against the Warriors tonight, which evened the Western Conference Finals at one game apiece and introduced a prettier, more kinetic version of the Rockets than the team that won 65 games in the regular season. Game 2 saw ...