champ Page 19 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Chicago Cubs skipper David Ross is clueless
Modern baseball thinking has it that the manager in the dugout is just an extension of the front office. He pressed the buttons he was told to, and if he can help manage personalities and keep a bunch of millionaires from knifing each other over seven hot months, so much the better. So maybe David R...

Will the Warriors-Lakers series be determined by a dog on social media?
The defending champion Golden State Warriors pulled out a much-needed victory in Game 5 of their NBA Western semifinals series. Heart of a champion stuff after being down 3-1 to the Los Angeles Lakers right? There was no way that the winners of four of the last eight NBA Championships were going to ...

The Toronto Maple Leafs disappoint their fans by winning
No one does a post-mortem like the Toronto Maple Leafs. For the past six years, it’s been an April tradition. The Leafs spit up all over themselves in the playoffs, and then the next week the rest of the playoffs are drowned out by the wailing from southern Ontario about who needs to be traded, who ...

Nate Diaz is going to get knocked out by a YouTuber
When talking about Jake Paul’s combat sports career, it’s correct to approach any fight he has with trepidation. His only fight against someone from a boxing lineage was Paul’s last bout and a loss to Tommy Fury in February, ending his undefeated run. Although the likes of Tyron Woodley, Anderson Si...

Real Madrid and Manchester City trapped each other, or so they’d have you believe
When you’ve been as dominant in the Champions League as Real Madrid have for the past decade, or as dominant in the Premier League as Manchester City have, you can convince everyone that whatever you do is part of the plan, part of a higher genius we can’t quite understand. It must be, otherwise, ho...

Blood, sweat, and bodyslams: 10 moments that defined the Heat-Knicks playoff rivalry
The Miami Heat and New York Knicks have plenty of bad blood, dating back to the mid-90s. Even 30 years after Pat Riley left New York for Miami, storylines remain between the two teams. Riley is now the Heat’s president, while Tom Thibodeau, an assistant for Jeff Van Gundy, Riley’s successor in New Y...

Boston was bad but the Celtics are far from finished
Boston Celtics fans, I saw the looks on some of your faces as you filed out of TD Garden early on Tuesday night. With the series tied at 2-2, there was no way you all expected the Philadelphia 76ers to pulverize your team in the second half on the way to a 115-103 victory....

The Gang Enters The Soccer Tournament
This is a fever dream for soccer, or a fever nightmare depending on what team you root for. The Soccer Tournament, or TST for short, was announced this week as a 32-team showcase taking place in early June in North Carolina. Based on The Basketball Tournament, it’s a winner-take-all, 7-on-7, $1 mill...

ONE Championship wants United States expansion to start off with a bang
Chatri Sityodtong wants you to know there’s an alternative in the combat sports world. With the American fighting scene dominated by mixed martial arts, boxing, and professional wrestling, a new show in town needs to disrupt the market in order to plant its flag in the ground. Sityodtong, the founde...

FIFA wants to promote women’s soccer — as long as there’s money in it
“FIFA is a non-profit organization” is one of the biggest oxymorons in the world. You don’t get a good portion of the organization indicted for corruption if the body is mainly focused on merely the health of the sport and building it from the bottom up. Gianni Infantino’s latest episode of throwing...

The NBA playoff ratings have been FANtastic
Well, Phil Jackson, it turns out that the NBA has not woked itself out of the American television landscape. Some news that you won’t find on the disingenuous provocateur in Nashville’s timeline is that the first round of the 2023 NBA Playoffs was a smash hit. ...

Every Black football coach should be rooting for Reggie Barlow in the XFL Championship Game
When Fritz Pollard became the NFL’s first Black coach in 1921 people of that time viewed it as progress. Later this month, Reggie Barlow could be the first coach, of any race, to win the XFL Championship in the league’s inaugural year in its new iteration when Barlow’s D.C Defenders take on the Arli...

Weston McKennie is not having a good time
Soccer moves fast, and it moves faster in the January transfer window. All the things Weston McKennie had to consider when a move to Leeds United from Juventus was probably thrown at him in a matter of days, if not hours. Questions of role, money, future, and the allure of moving to a country where ...

Steph Curry, Playoff Jimmy, and the NBA players who willed their teams to Round 2
The first round of the NBA playoffs is over, and it was quite the show. From coast to coast, great players across the league made their presence felt in the least important round of the playoffs. Normally, the first round results in chalk, but many of the best teams of the 2022-23 NBA season have be...

Credit the Warriors for their resilience as much as their shooting
Stephen Curry signed his rookie contract extension with the Golden State Warriors on Oct. 30, 2012. That day was the start of the 2012-13 NBA Regular Season. At that time Curry had never been named an NBA All-Star or to an All-NBA Team. The Warriors went on to make the playoffs for the first time si...

These 9 NBA veterans are crucial to their team's playoff success
Older generations have always had critiques of where the game is going. Each generation, old heads critique how soft and easy the game has become. You can track this through podcasts, interviews, and any episode of the NBA on TNT with Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal. While revisionist history a...

Pep Guardiola is about to complete his masterpiece
My brother had a college friend who had an overarching theory of Led Zeppelin. This isn’t much of a surprise, as I assume college students for some 40 years all had their own theory of Led Zeppelin. I remember telling a friend that I had to have a serious talk with him, made it sound really grave, t...

The Women’s World Cup is already a battle of attrition
The World Cup is always a measure of health and a team’s ability to deal with it. It comes at the end of a long season — unless you’ve fisted it into a desert, totalitarian country that makes you have it in the middle of the season — and players have logged the most possible miles before they play i...

Anthony Richardson should be the anchor of Pete Carroll’s Legion of Sonic Boom
Anthony Richardson should be off the board in a blur whether he goes number one to the Carolina Panthers, third to whoever trades up with Arizona, or fourth to the Colts. However, the Seahawks drafting Richardson as the anchor of their budding offensive track team is the best fit. ...

US Soccer might have actually made a good decision
There is always a suspicion that US Soccer has fucked up. They’re too insular, too greedy, too cheap, and too weird to ever get out of their own way. Even when it looks like they’re taking a step forward, they’ll find a way to sabotage it. The Berhalter-Reyna mess is perhaps the perfect example of j...