boston Page 7 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The NBA's In-Season Tournament takes from soccer but isn’t a cup
I’ll give the NBA this, as a soccer fan. It’s the only league to take notice of soccer’s consistently rising popularity and attempt to capitalize on that by co-opting some element of it. This is where anyone like me has to fight a blinding urge to scream about promotion and relegation, and earlier t...
Billy Donovan needs to end this Chicago tragedy and get back to college hoops
One thing that became apparent during the final night of the NBA’s In-Season Tournament Group Stage was that the Chicago Bulls stink. ...
The contrived vilification of Malika Andrews has reached a tipping point
There’s no such thing as a good echo chamber. Eventually, bad narratives begin bouncing around, spreading and taking root at a cellular level. ...
These are the all-time NBA starting fives
While debating politics over Thanksgiving can cause irreplaceable family fissures, debating the all-time starting fives for each NBA team holds way fewer stakes. There are many different ways to build an all-time starting five, all of which illicit strong reactions. Some people prefer to choose the ...
The best fan-hosted NBA podcasts
With trust in the mainstream media dwindling daily, it’s no wonder corporate sports journalism is also losing ground. Partisanship and traffic-driven agendas have diluted the public’s trust in NBA talking heads. As anyone with a microphone and laptop can start a podcast, a DIY community of fan-drive...
Emphasis on 82-game schedule won’t solve NBA’s biggest problem
In case the NBA has not made itself clear over the last few months, the league office is fed up with load management. There are 82 games on the schedule, and players are expected to play in every single game unless they are actually injured. The NBA is going so far now as to claim it has data that t...
Here's who we have winning the National League awards
Now we move on to the National League, where the MVP debate will have writers at each other’s throats for months. It’s Miggy vs. Trout all over again, where the shiny, identifiable accomplishment is pitted against the better overall season without some benchmark to point to. The Cy Young will come d...
Boston hopes Jrue Holiday is the missing piece for their Silly Putty roster
The Boston Celtics seem to believe that if they keep smashing buttons, a championship will eventually materialize. The Celtics have reconfigured around Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum countless times. The early Tatum-Brown years saw them trying to build a contender through the Joe Lacob two-track plan...
Curt Schilling is having a Hall of Fame week at being human scum
If making headlines for acting as inhumanely as possible could be a goal in life, Curt Schilling is having an impeccable week. ...
What was Chaim Bloom supposed to do?
Just how well is a GM/executive reign supposed to go when the first task given to them is to trade the best player in baseball? That was the road set out for Chaim Bloom, who came to Fenway from Tampa, probably with hopes that he could set up a Rays-with-money set-up like Andrew Friedman in Los Ange...
Maybe Noah Lyles was right about the NBA after all
The NBA announced Wednesday morning that the Dallas Mavericks will take on Euro League champions Real Madrid in a preseason exhibition on Oct. 10 in Spain. It isn’t unusual for the NBA to send teams to other countries for games before the start of the regular season, but this announcement’s timing ...
Mookie Betts, not Ronald Acuña Jr., is the NL MVP
We’d all be better off if every MVP award was simply renamed, “Player Of The Year,” as it would save us a very annoying and tiresome debate about what “valuable” means. It gets doubly so in baseball, where we still haven’t quite escaped what numbers people should pay attention to, and what is overbl...
Boston Celtics’ Jaylen Brown became the first active NBA player to suit up for a BIG3 game, but is he the last?
The Boston Celtics are a franchise that’s used to making history. As one of the most storied organizations in North American professional sports, making national headlines is nothing new in Beantown. Celtics guard Jaylen Brown made history of his own earlier this summer when he signed the richest co...
Alex Cora had himself a night
It’s starting to slip away from the Boston Red Sox. After an excellent July, the Carmines have run to nowhere in August with a 10-10 mark which has left them five games adrift of the last wildcard spot. Which isn’t a huge surprise, given that this team was built to basically win 84 games and give th...
Dodgers, Chelsea FC owner might be the uniting force to save women's hockey
There are two famous rivalries in North American women’s hockey: Canada vs. the USA, and the PWHPA versus the PHF. One rivalry will continue in perpetuity at every World Championship and Olympic Games, while the other is dead....
The Cowboys' Ronald Jones failed a steroid test, so what?
Welcome to Deadspin’s The Sports Nihilist, where all is for naught and we are but accidental jolts of electrified meat stuck to the surface of a rock in an indifferent universe. ...
NBA needs to up the ante with its international game slate
What happens when a seventh seed and a 13th seed meet on a basketball court in a country that doesn’t have an NBA franchise? Who knows, but we’re going to find out....
No one does the absurd quite like the Red Sox
The challenge of baseball, and the beauty of it, is the length and density of it. It’s pretty much every day for six months, and every team and every player has to do whatever is necessary to even remember what day it is at this time of year and beyond. Over 162 games in 180 days or so, anybody can ...
Jaylen Brown and the volatility of a $304 million contract
It’s difficult to contextualize what just happened with Jaylen Brown and the Boston Celtics. The team’s second-best player, who’s got the handles of a wing with two left hands, landed the largest contract in NBA history, signing a five-year, $304 million supermax extension. That’s a lot of money, an...
You have to marvel at the wretchedness of the Chicago White Sox
There are certainly a host of disappointing teams in MLB this year. More so than usual it feels like, with the Mets, Padres, and Cardinals face down in a muck they never considered being in back in the spring. You can throw the Mariners on there if you’re feeling truly dispirited and want to take it...