fin Page 79 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

What If The Raptors Had To Choose Between Kawhi And Drake?

There are rules to the Deadcast, although we don’t generally pay that much attention to them. For the most part, as you might have noticed, it goes like this: Bullshit/sports, sports, sports/Funbag, Funbag. It’s not a lot of structure, but it keeps us honest. This week, though, we faced a Funbag que...

The Golden State Warriors Will Be Pretty Crabbed For Game 3

A seminal description of Steph Curry’s 2012 ankle surgery inspired “crab meat” as in-house shorthand for serious sports injuries. But right now, with the NBA Finals tied 1-1, Curry might be the only Golden State Warrior who could not be consumed with melted butter and lemon. Nearly everyone else in ...

Blues Honor Rent-A-Car Company With Color Guard Flag, Then Quietly Dishonor It

You might think sports are about sports. No. They’re about the troops. And America. And sometimes Canada too, but rarely in the NHL playoffs. But how can you prove, if you’re a team in, say, the Stanley Cup Final, that you really care about America and its uniformed services? (If you go one day with...

Blues Even Up Stanley Cup Final With Impressive Schooling Of Bruins

Folks! Once again we’ve got ourselves a series! As in their stirring overtime Game 2 win in Boston, the Blues responded to having their doors blown off in a dispiriting loss with a feisty 4–2 win Monday to even things up at two games apiece. ...

Kevon Looney's Cartilage Injury Makes Warriors' Title Hunt That Much More Absurd [CORRECTED]

What was initially described somewhat confusingly as a “sprained collarbone” for Warriors center Kevon Looney has, upon further inspection, been revealed as a fracture. Looney, an underrated non-star contributor for the Golden State Warriors, seems unlikely to return for the rest of the NBA Finals....

The Layup Faces Of Game 2

For Sunday’s Game 2 in Toronto, a pair of remote cameras were set up at one end of the court. One (the angle you see above) appears to have been in the stanchion itself, and was operated by Getty Images’ Gregory Shamus, and captures the action just below the basket. The other (the first photo below)...

The Weirder The Finals Get, The Better

The news from the NBA Finals is all good, kids, and it is this: Nobody has any narratives left to invent. The events of Games 1 and 2 have savaged all the preconceptions, conceptions, and the way it’s looking, the post-conceptions of this series. Nobody has any idea what’s coming next, and nobody wi...

The Warriors Should Have Been Fucked

There’s no such thing as an NBA Finals loss that doesn’t sting, but some of them hurt more than others. The J.R. Smith Disaster was so demoralizing that you knew, even though it happened in Game 1, that the Cavs would never recover. Last night’s Game 2, which the Raptors lost 109-104, was not nearly...

Craig Berube Works The Refs, Because Not Much Else Is Working For The Blues

Jordan Binnington will be back in net and the Blues believe his newfound porosity was a fluke, and Oskar Sundqvist will return after serving his one-game suspension, so not only are they ready to move past their Game 3 shitkicking, but they’re out of excuses for it. Mostly. Down 2-1 in the Stanley C...

Warriors Come Alive In Third Quarter, Even NBA Finals

For one and a half games of the 2019 NBA Finals, it looked like the Toronto Raptors were the better team. Then the first six minutes of Game 2’s third quarter happened....

Liverpool Deservedly Win A Rather Dull Champions League Final

In an otherwise uneventful match that was bookended by two Liverpool goals, Jürgen Klopp’s side defeated Tottenham 2-0 for the club’s sixth European title. Mohamed Salah got the Reds on the board early after a very Spursy gaffe gave Liverpool a penalty less than 30 seconds into the game....

Tottenham Couldn't Go 30 Seconds Without Punching Themselves In The Dick

Not even 30 seconds had passed before Tottenham decided to turn up their Spursiness and put themselves in a goal-sized hole against Liverpool in the Champions League final. ...

It's Champions League Time

Marc Gasol Can Run With The Warriors, And Get Buckets Too

Marc Gasol has been a prime component of the Raptors’ asphyxiating defense—one of the most switchable, responsive, obnoxiously needling teams in recent memory. His post D has been stout enough to knock Joel Embiid a notch down from series-defining to merely good. By Giannis Antetokounmpo’s own admi...

Draymond Green Wants It Known That He Did <i>Not</i> Scuffle With Drake

Raptors super fan and legendary cornball Drake was an unusually subdued presence during Game 1 of the NBA Finals in Toronto, perhaps because he got a stern talking-to from the league. But, with an assist from a salty Draymond Green, Drake still managed to deliver another meme-able moment after the f...

Pascal Siakam Fought A Bear And Won

For as much as the Raptors’ run to the finals was about Kawhi Leonard’s ascension to godhood, it was also about the circumstances that made that ascension necessary. Think of all the playoff possessions in which Leonard was forced to pull a heroic shot out of his ass because his other four teammates...

Fred VanVleet Can Do No Wrong

How big a lead does a team have to have on the Warriors before its fans can feel comfortable? Twenty points with two minutes left? Fifteen points with 30 seconds to go? To me, it didn’t feel like the Raptors had Game 1 locked up until they were actually dribbling out the final ticks, up nine with th...

Raptors Fight Off Every Warriors Push To Grab A Comfortable Game 1 Victory

In retrospect, we had a pretty solid indication that things were turning Toronto’s way in the build up to their Game 1 victory over the Warriors:...

Drake Tries Very Hard To Pretend He Doesn't Have Steph Curry And Kevin Durant's Jersey Numbers Tattooed On His Body

The world was very nearly spared a couple week’s worth of energetic Drake sightings Thursday night, when Andre Iguodala of the Golden State Warriors went careening into the sidelines late in the first half of Game 1 of the NBA Finals. Iguodala missed hurling the bulk of his giant NBA frame into the ...

What Happened To All The Interesting Refs?

One of the nerdier things a basketball fan can do at 9 a.m. Eastern Weirdo Time is to go to the NBA website and glom onto the identities of the officials who will work whatever game interests you True, NBA ref nerddom is an exceedingly small subset of Nerdvania, but let a thousand sets of hipster gl...