f Page 1010 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Steph Curry's Finger Mangled And James Harden's Eye Gouged In Opening Minutes Of Game 2
Basketball fans had every reason to expect Game 2 of the Rockets-Warriors Western Conference semifinal series to be ugly, with the Rockets working the officials in embarrassing fashion and franchise enemy Scott Foster assigned to the refereeing crew. But this was not the start that anyone imagined!...

Khris Middleton Feasts, Then Giannis Feasts, And Suddenly The Celtics Were Just A Tasty Meal
Giannis Antetokounmpo and Khris Middleton went nuts Tuesday night, and the Bucks cruised to an impressive Game 2 blowout win over the Boston Celtics, 123–102, in Milwaukee. Giannis devouring puny mortals is expected, but Middleton playing like a bloodthirsty maniac in a crucial playoff game is very...

Calm Down About Spoilers
Spoiler culture—the capital-D Discourse surrounding how much of the plot you should know before heading into a piece of media—reached its apotheosis with the releases of Avengers: Endgame and the Game of Thrones episode “The Long Night.” The furor around spoilers is such that it is entirely believab...

Football Writers Dust Off Their Old Dumb Takes About Domestic Violence, Somehow Make Them Dumber
Since the Kansas City Chiefs indefinitely suspended Tyreek Hill last week for his alleged role in breaking his 3-year-old son’s arm and for threatening his fiancée in a leaked audio recording, the NFL Knowers have dutifully donned their thinking caps and pondered solutions. What the actual problem b...

Nikola Jokic Is Squashing The Doubts In His Big Soft Hands
From a skeptic’s perch, Nikola Jokic was a prime candidate for fraudulence come springtime. His youth, his floamy physique, the unprecedented weirdness of his game, his occasional habit of going passive when he should’ve gotten more shots up, his leadership of a No. 2 seeded Nuggets squad that never...

Commissioner For A Day: It's Time For A Four-Point Shot In The NBA
It is not a good practice, just as a general rule, to steal Big Ideas from widely maligned and mostly forgotten MTV stunt-programming. But people that play by the general rules or adhere to best practices or “have actual ideas of their own” seldom make history, and I was not going to spend my one hy...

Bolton Wanderers' Ownership Disaster Is Now Affecting Actual Games
When last we checked in on Bolton Wanderers, the storied English soccer club was on the verge of ruin after years of mismanagement and ownership incompetence. Not much has changed since: while the nearly bankrupt club has found a potential new owner willing to buy the team, the deal still has yet to...

Three Mushers, One Impenetrable Blizzard, And The World's Hardest Dog Sled Race
Everything was going to be decided within the next five minutes. Three mushers and their dog teams were on top of Eagle Summit, a 3,685-foot tall gap that runs through the White Mountains in central Alaska. They were stuck in a blizzard, huddled together with their dogs as winds up to 40 miles an ho...

Esa Lindell Kept Diving And Diving And Then Suffered Cosmic Justice
Let us stipulate that diving, or flopping, is not so common in hockey as it is in some other sports we could name, nor is it generally treated with anything but outright contempt. It does exist, and it does, unfortunately often, work, but it’s not regarded with the grudging respect for its value it ...

What The Absolute Hell Was Kyle Lowry Doing?
It was possible to miss this in realtime. I did. For one thing, it happened quickly, and devolved quickly into distracting chaos. For another, even if your eyes gathered the information and transmitted it whole to your brain, your brain may have processed it as an error and erased it, because it is ...

Nuggets Bozos Turn Fast-Break Into Slapstick Disaster
Late in the first half of Game 1 of the Western Conference semifinal series between Portland and Denver, Jamal Murray swiped a Blazers inbounds pass and tore ass the other way, in a two-on-two break with teammate Malik Beasley streaking ahead of him. With two skilled and athletic guards pushing ahea...

In Game With Gut-Sick Joel Embiid, Raptors Are The Ones To Shit Their Pants
Joel Embiid was listed as probable headed into Game 2 of the Eastern Conference semifinal series between the 76ers and Raptors, with a case of gastroenteritis. It’s a stomach virus, and is experienced as a lot of stomach pain and diarrhea, which is definitely not the condition you want to be in whil...

Bucks, After Having Butts Kicked All The Way Off In Game 1: Why Would We Change Anything?
The major question coming out of Game 1 of the ballyhooed Celtics-Bucks series is how the Bucks plan to recover after having home-court advantage yanked away in a discouraging loss. The long and short of it is, the Bucks, from head coach Mike Budenholzer on down, do not feel that strategic adjustmen...

The Rockets Are Only Embarrassing Themselves
It’s not enough that the Houston Rockets have to whine that they lost Game 1 because the refs didn’t take their signature gaming of the “landing zone” rule as seriously as usual. They elected to follow that snit with what is perhaps the most pathetically lame sports media leak of all time, as ESPN m...

It's Time To Remember Al Horford Again
Al Horford is good. This is a sentence that’s never punctuated with an exclamation point between the months of October and March. Then, once again, you see him stopping the least stoppable players in the Eastern Conference, and making all the right decisions on the other side of the floor, and it’s ...

Mike Francesa Blames Giants Draft Pick For Getting Shot And Bringing Shame To The Team
Two Washburn University football players were shot outside of a party in Topeka, Kansas early Sunday morning, according to the Topeka PD. Junior defensive back Dwane Simmons was pronounced dead at the scene, while his teammate Corey Ballentine suffered non-life threatening injuries. Hours before the...

Cersei Lannister Is Smarter Than All These Morons
Cersei was right! That’s the main takeaway from “The Long Night,” the deliriously silly and nonsensical third episode of the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, which aired last night. Not only is Cersei Lannister smarter than everybody else in Westeros, she has definitively proven that you ...

Pay-To-Play Is The Stadium Grift That Keeps On Giving
Sometime in the next few days, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb—aka the guy who took Mike Pence’s job when Pence ascended to the Old Executive Office Building—is expected to sign a bill extending the Indiana Pacers’ lease in Indianapolis through 2044. In exchange for agreeing to have his team play where it...

If This Is Rockets-Warriors, Let's Just Get It Over With As Soon As Possible
In case you ever decide to hate sports without the crutch of a rooting interest, financial, familial, or simply laundry-based, here’s your ticket. The pre–NBA Finals NBA Finals are already a drunken bar argument, and they’re only going to get worse. The Houston Rockets ... the Golden State Warriors ...

The Islanders' Best Hope Against The Hurricanes Is A War Of Attrition
A team playing its ninth game in 18 days on Sunday afternoon, the Hurricanes, were struck by disaster in the very first minute of Game 2 against the Islanders. Carolina defenseman Trevor van Riemsdyk got checked hard against the boards by New York’s Cal Clutterbuck, knocking him out for the whole ga...