afl Page 6 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

You’ll Never Believe This, but the NHL Whiffed on Its Protests
It’s obviously awkward for the NHL and its players to find a way to join in on the Black Lives Matter movement and protests before and during their games. It’s an almost entirely white league, with a majority of players not even from this country — and even the ones who are come from a generally aff...

The Packers' Goal-To-Go Offense Was Too Cute To Work
Packers fans will be specifically frustrated by two themes from Thursday night’s narrow home loss to the Eagles: confusion over the pass interference review process, and Green Bay’s failure to convert on two late drives deep in the red zone, in a seven-point game. No one seems to know what the hell’...

Australian Rules Footballer Receives Nasty Comments, Then Support, Over Photo Of Her Kicking
Australian rules football is dealing with quite the kerfuffle this week after a network gave in to the creeps who left nasty comments on a photo of Carlton footballer Tayla Harris as she kicked a goal in Sunday’s match against the Western Bulldogs....

Carter Hart Could Be The Start Of Something Big In Philadelphia
You would have been forgiven for counting out the Flyers. Hell, you would be forgiven for counting them out now. But ... it’s not so easy anymore. Thanks to an eight-game winning streak, a Philadelphia team that had the league’s worst record less than a month ago is now just five points out of a pla...

Canucks' Alexander Edler Taken Off On Stretcher After Gory Faceplant
Canucks defenseman Alexander Edler got tangled up while retreating in front of his team’s goal early in the third period of Monday night’s game against the Flyers, and faceplanted with extreme violence. A player spiking his face into the ice isn’t generally one of the many things a viewer expects to...

The Odds Are Getting Better That <i>You</i> Are Going To Start In Goal For The Flyers This Season
Stability in goal doesn’t necessarily correlate with success, but the converse is almost always true. The Flyers are one point out of the NHL’s basement, and on Tuesday, in just their 43rd game of the season, they used their seventh different goalie—no team in the history of the league has ever used...

Andrei Vasilevskiy Was Bug-Eyed With Disbelief At His Own Save
It was maybe not a game you’d have expected much excitement from. The Lightning lead the entire rest of the NHL, by a healthy margin, and haven’t lost in regulation since November. The Flyers, on the other hand, are scraping the bottom of the East and have already canned their coach and GM. But a mi...

The Flyers Are Throwing A Hail Mary
The last-place Philadelphia Flyers—a playoff team last year that has already fired its GM this season—have nothing to lose. And when a team is backed into the bottom of the standings without anywhere further to drop, they start to make riskier and more desperate moves. Today, the Flyers made two—fir...

Monday Night’s Best Football Game Was Between Mascots
Philadelphia has a lot of new mascots. This year alone we’ve met Gritty, Phang, Wingston. Franklin is only three years old. Last night at halftime, the Eagles had a pro vs. college mascots football game and it was great. You can watch the whole thing here, or follow down below as I break down some o...

Today Is A Great Day For A Ron, But Maybe Not For Long
This is Ron Hextall. Until this morning, he was the GM of the Philadelphia Flyers. In five years, he completely rebuilt the roster and restocked the farm system, and while that is an accomplishment given what he inherited, five years is a long time for a team to go without winning a single playoff s...

How Gritty Conquered America
While Flyers front office types were throwing around names for the new mascot, team president Paul Holmgren tossed out a suggestion: “Gritty.” Players the Flyers liked were always described that way, and Holmgren thought it’d be a good name for a mascot....

Gritty Upstaged The Unveiling Of Yet Another New Philadelphia Mascot
How do you unveil a mascot just a little more than a month after the biggest mascot launch in world history? How do you do it when you’re a smaller team in the same city? Well, you invite all of the city’s mascots and throw a mascot party, of course....

The Flyers Suffered Through An Absolutely Miserable Powerplay
In the second period of a 2-2 tie game against the Flyers, Arizona Coyotes forward Vinnie Hinostroza got a two-minute minor for tripping and took a trip to the penalty box. It became the best thing that’s happened to his team all night....

The Flyers' Home Opener Went So Badly, They're Swearing
Now, you pieces of shit know that I can’t abide cursing. There’s no fucking reason for an educated, grown man to resort to swear words. How goddamned bad could the Flyers’ home opener against the Sharks have been to spur not one, but two players to work blue?...Oh! Oh. Jesus fishfisting Christ. Yeah...

The Last Two Minutes Of The AFL Grand Final Were Thrilling Even If You Don't Know What You're Looking At<em></em>
Here’s two minutes of suspense that can be enjoyed with no context or understanding of Australian rules football. Big boys scrabble for ball. They boot the ball. They boot the ball in between posts. It’s hard not to get riled up by an Australian hollering, “He’s got the most impossible goal,” or by ...

Gritty Earns The Phillie Phanatic's Respect Through Dance
The greatest mascot in American professional sports took another step towards earning total admiration from the Philadelphia faithful on Saturday when he decided to have a dance party with the true O.G. of the charming-but-still-creepy mascot game: the Phillie Phanatic. The opening hug alone should ...

Flyers' Jori Lehterä Named As Suspect In Cocaine Ring<em></em>
Flyers center Jori Lehterä was not at practice Wednesday, as news broke that he has been interviewed by police and named as a suspect in a cocaine ring in his native Finland. According to Finnish news service MTV, which first reported the story, Lehterä has denied involvement....

This Enormous Texan Stumbled Into Basketball, And Now He's Stumbled Into Australian Rules Football Stardom
Mason Cox has a history of getting lured into sports he did not actually play. Organized basketball found him first. At Marcus High School in Texas, he stuck to solely to soccer, a decision that looked slightly stranger after he grew six inches between his junior and senior years and found himself a...

It's Gritty's World Now
You will have to understand, if you’re to keep reading and we’re to keep writing, that Deadspin is a pro-Gritty shop. There are allegedly some people out there who don’t like the new Flyers mascot. Frankly, those aren’t the sorts of people we want around here....