ball Page 43 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Zion Williamson thinks he’s slick, but we know he won’t ever be in the Dunk Contest
Each year following NBA All-Star weekend, we discuss the slam dunk contest for at least two to three weeks afterward. Whether it’s good, bad or somewhere in the middle, the conversation surrounding it blazes on for some time. Now we get Zion Williamson fanning the flames dunk contest banter, with hi...

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...

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...

Nick Saban retired, so why is he acting like he was forced out?
For those of us who hoped Nick Saban retiring would be the end of Nick Saban, this idle/jilted version of him might be even more insufferable. In an ESPN story about how Alabama pivoted from Saban to Kalen Deboer in 49 hours, the seven-time title winner revealed that “player attitudes” and the NIL e...

Spanish police confiscate pickaxes, clubs at Champions League game
Spanish police were able to stop a potentially massive and dangerous brawl from breaking out during a Champions League match between Real Sociedad and Paris Saint-Germain on Tuesday. ...

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. ...

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...

Which NFL players received the franchise tag from their teams?
With free agency around the corner, the NFL is currently engaged in its age-old tradition of taking some of the best names off the market. The franchise tag period allows teams to hold onto premier players just a bit longer, extending the negotiation window for a long-term deal while still maintaini...

Don't count on the LA Clippers — they're sure to let you down
The Los Angeles Clippers have been a delightful surprise in the NBA since bouncing back from a rough start once James Harden joined the team at the end of October. ...

If you can’t trust Anthony Edwards, you can’t trust the Timberwolves
I’m not anti-analytics, because data matters, but there’s no way to factor in things like your best player missing tipoff because he was a late arrival, or a coach pulling his second-best player when he’s on pace for a 70 burger. The Minnesota Timberwolves are a very good basketball team, by record,...

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...

Russell Wilson, the most sound and fury signifying the most nothing
One can’t help but wonder if Russell Wilson had just thrown that last pass in Super Bowl 49 into the third row how the rest of it might have played out. Seattle would likely have had consecutive Super Bowls, he’d be a god in the PNW, and perhaps everyone would have had more patience for the mountain...

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...

Kneeling is a quiet gesture. Bob Melvin’s decision to make the Giants stand for the national anthem is a loud one
After making it known that he wants players to have “a voice” in a volatile Election Year, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell still had six months before preseason games started in which he didn’t have to worry about any potential on-field demonstrations. But thanks to new San Francisco Giants skipper B...

Hopefully the Caitlin Clark effect doesn't end with Caitlin Clark
The buzz around Caitlin Clark eclipsing Pete Maravich’s record on Sunday was enough to get celebs to Iowa City for the occasion. I’m not talking about Travis Scott. Jake from State Farm might be sports’ Forrest Gump, but celebs walking into college arenas to dap up the TV insurance guy while neglect...

Increasing the NFL season to 18 games is a terrible idea
An 18-game NFL regular season has been looming over the league at least since it was clear that the 2011 lockout was an inevitability. What the league wants, the league — more specifically the team owners — usually gets. The revenue split used to be 50/50 with the players, but now a greater share ha...