ac Page 313 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Big men are back in style in the NBA
The 1995-96 season was the end of the golden era for big men in the NBA. Patrick Ewing, Hakeem Olajuwon, David Robinson, and Shaquille O’Neal were stuffing opponents into lockers with their unstoppable back-to-the-basket games. They were the superstars in the paint, but Alonzo Mourning, Rik Smits, a...

The NFL’s franchise tag is un-American
What happens every time an NFL quarterback resets the QB market? A relatively crap quarterback gets overpaid. The reason Daniel Jones netted a four-year $160 million deal after one good season, instead of getting franchise tagged like he should’ve been, is Joe Burrow got enough money that, by compar...

The Avalanche have gone full Freddie Four Fingers
The NHL trade deadline has gotten into high gear a couple days before Friday afternoon’s deadline, so let’s roll through the highlights of what’s already gone down....

NCAA athletes are trying to unionize again — but this time it feels different
On Tuesday, Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team became the latest college team to attempt to unionize — voting 13-2 to join Service Employees Union Local 560, which currently represents other Dartmouth employees. As labor unions rise in popularity — more than two-thirds of all Americans and 88 percent...

15 NBA players we wish competed in the Slam Dunk Contest
The NBA Slam Dunk Contest is on life support. The G-League’s Mac McClung has won the contest for a second year in a row. Despite Boston’s Jaylen Brown attempting to bring stars back to the iconic event, his dunks were relatively unimpressive. ...

Charles Barkley went from 'dying to vote' for Nikki Haley to wanting to punch Black Trump supporters. Make it make sense
Nobody asked for this, but, yet, here we are. In the middle of a volatile election year where Charles Barkley has free rein to spew his illogical political takes on TV. True bipartisanship looks like viewers from both parties working together to make this end....

When Emmitt Smith talks about race, people should listen
Emmitt Smith is probably not the first athlete people associate with Black people’s American struggle. He wasn’t at the press conference with the then-Lew Alcindor (now known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Bill Russell, and Jim Brown in support of Muhammad Ali electing to not serve in the United States mi...

The Oakland A’s want to build the Sydney Opera House
Leave it to the A’s and John Fisher to be three months late on the renderings for a ballpark that still feels like it has a better chance of being built in Narnia than it does in Vegas, and then to have it leak out a day after they meant it to:...

Daryl Morey is Oppenheimer for the NBA’s nuclear offensive age
It’s Oscars Week, which feels like as good a time as any to draw up the NBA storylines and characters which could double as Oscar nominees. ...

It was time for Jamal Adams and the Seattle Seahawks to part ways
The Seattle Seahawks are entering a retooling phase. It’s not quite a full-on rebuild but there’s enough movement within the organization on and off the field that the team will look quite different next season. It was announced on Tuesday that the Seahawks would be releasing three-time Pro Bowl saf...

The Devils waited too long to make a change
It was only slightly over a year ago that New Jersey Devils fans were apologizing en masse to Lindy Ruff. They had called for his head early last season, and then when the Devils caught fire they all were ready to admit they had egg on their face. New Jersey would go on to the second round of the pl...

The Rangers have a big, dumb sideshow: Matt Rempe
It was natural to think the New York Rangers “got it” after they traded in the misguided clenched jaw ways of Gerrard Gallant behind the bench for the usually up-tempo ways of Peter Laviolette after the Devils essentially skated them out of the building last spring in the first round. The Devils wer...

Rajah Caruth’s historic NASCAR win is a feel-good story we should all celebrate
It’s simple. Since America loves an underdog, America should be applauding Rajah Caruth....

Do the Thunder have a Josh Giddey problem?
Need any more evidence that Gilbert Arenas’ bellyaching about Europeans and foreigners ruining basketball with their sweet outside strokes is all hot air? I’ll give you one: Josh Giddey. Now that his legal woes appear to be in the rearview mirror, the whispers about his liabilities in the Oklahoma C...

AEW's Sting sendoff was perfect in so many ways
Darby Allin crashed some 20 feet through a plate of glass onto the floor, spent a good five to 10 minutes having ringside medical staff picking shards out of his back, leaving Sting to perform his last-ever comeback and win, and it might have only been the third or fourth best match on the card for ...

Liverpool pulled another rabbit, but its pixie dust might only last a week
While I really shouldn’t let my frustration with how MLB has sullied their regular season into my soccer coverage, it was hard not to think about how Rob Manfred just discarded those moments during the regular season that portended to more down the line as I watched Darwin Nunez dig out a Liverpool ...

It's make or break for the Los Angeles Clippers
Curses run deep. They fester in bloodlines, foundations and scorched Earth and are lamented in prose, lyric and declaration. From Shakespeare to Dostoevsky, curses are a part of the canon of human creativity. After the Boston Red Sox broke theirs in 2004 and LeBron James brought a championship to Cl...

Turns out America loves the Denver Nuggets
Most of the state of Colorado can’t watch the defending NBA champion Denver Nuggets. However, the rest of America is enjoying the show. NBA insider/analyst Ethan Strauss dove into some viewership data for a recent post on his substack....

LeBron James creates the 40K club, which he’ll populate alone for a long time
The next player to eclipse 40,000 points in the regular season will have a chance at the title of the NBA’s GOAT simply because the numbers LeBron James will retire with are going to be near impossible to top. It’ll either be someone with freakish longevity, or the most prolific scorer ever. At 40,0...

NCAA swears fealty to NIL collectives, pauses investigations
The NCAA pretty much had its last real vestige of power stripped after the ruling in the Tennessee case last week, and on Friday, announced that it’s pausing all investigations into booster-backed collectives or other third parties making NIL deals. Despite the chaos and malfeasance that will contin...