free-agency Page 5 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

We Need To Talk About Russell Westbrook
We’re officially in the slowest part of the sports calendar: There is no real basketball on (get out of here, we’re not counting Summer League), soccer just wrapped up its summer tournaments, baseball is in the dead zone between the All-Star Game and September, and so on. But the streets demand the ...

Kawhi Leonard Signs For Only Two Guaranteed Years With Clippers, Can Continue Wandering The Barren Plain, Searching, Always Searching
After the long journey to get back home to California, and the incredible finesse in free agency to secure Paul George, it seemed safe to assume that Kawhi Leonard would set down roots in Los Angeles. He’s 28, in the prime of his Hall of Fame career, signing his third contact. After a sour exit from...

Until There's A Contract, There's No Contract
Here is some weapons-grade stoogery, from The Athletic’s Jared Weiss:...

Kawhi Leonard Is The NBA's Executive Of The Year
Kawhi Leonard dynamited what remained of the premise of the Executive of the Year Award, and in doing so redefined the meaning of such staples as: the Friday night news dump; the value of holding onto non-human playing assets; and even patriotism. Now if that’s not a full day’s work for an adult-siz...

KawhiWatch: Holy Shit, Kawhi Leonard Is Going To The Clippers
Reigning NBA Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard is heading to the Los Angeles Clippers, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski is reporting, and he’ll be joined by MVP finalist Paul George. The news ends weeks of speculation about which team might woo the two-time Finals MVP, coming off an amazing postseason, away from re...

Soccer Idiots Agree: The USWNT Is Cool, VAR Is Not
It’s Independence Day, the day on which every American feels especially proud to be American, which also now means every taking it upon yourself, as an American, to make sure that every other American is behaving in a suitably proud way re: how American they are. In real life, this holiday mostly re...

Stephen A. Smith Says Kevin Durant Says Stephen A. Smith's Kevin Durant Reports Are Bullshit
Stephen A. Smith shared three spicy Kevin Durant reports on Wednesday’s episode of First Take. The least spicy of the three (since it’s three years old, now) had Durant, entering unrestricted free agency in the summer of 2016, telling several Thunder teammates to their faces that he would not be lea...

It Appears That No One Wants DeMarcus Cousins
The pool of NBA free agents available as of July 3 is shockingly small. The vast majority of marquee names settled within a few hours of the official kickoff of free agency Sunday afternoon; a huge number of rotation guys and role players have already grabbed up much of what remained of the open sal...

KawhiWatch: Drake Attempting To Acquire More Chips And Dip
Two days into free agency, and it’s been a severe drought of Kawhi Leonard news, excluding sources who may be Jeanie Buss’s Reddit-loving nephew or Shams Charania-cosplayers. Bone-dry. In an era where a lone emoji can kick off a 12-hour news cycle, there’ve been no inklings as to whether Leonard’s p...

Enes Kanter Says The Blazers Gave Him Six Minutes To Consider Their Contract Offer
Enes Kanter signed a two-year, $10 million deal with the Boston Celtics yesterday, bringing an end to his short but feel-good tenure as a member of the Portland Trail Blazers. Kanter’s time in Portland may have gone on a little longer if the team hadn’t, according to Kanter, given him just a few min...

The Maple Leafs And Avalanche Pulled Off A Wonderful Trade
Sometimes trades are far simpler than GMs make them out to be. It’s understandable why many are hesitant: the fear of losing a trade is real, and GMs tend toward maintaining the status quo, since the status quo involves them having a job. But: a trade doesn’t have to have a loser. The Colorado Avala...

Bobby Portis Is A Lesson In The Cost Of Doing Business With Bad NBA Teams
A crappy side effect of the NBA’s salary cap is it’s usually better business for your favorite team to have a cheap good player than an expensive one, so you are conditioned to think of cheap contracts for good players as “good” and pricier contracts for comparable players as “bad.” Sticking with th...

Montreal Offer-Sheeted Sebastian Aho, But Don Waddell Is Getting Off Those Jokes
An unexpected delight on the opening of NHL free agency: The Montreal Canadiens have signed Carolina Hurricanes restricted free agent forward Sebastian Aho to an offer sheet. It will be very interesting to see how this one goes down—while it feels unlikely that the Hurricanes won’t match, at the ver...

The Florida Panthers Found Their Goalie
The reinvention of the Florida Panthers continued today with a massive new contract for free agent goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky, worth a reported $70 million over the next seven years. By signing the two-time Vezina winner and former Blue Jacket, the Panthers hope that they’ve captured a key ingredie...

Phil Kessel's Going To Arizona After A Messy Breakup With The Penguins
The Pittsburgh Penguins accomplished the inevitable. After Phil Kessel rejected a trade to the Minnesota Wild, the Pens found an agreeable new team for him, all the way out in Arizona. On Saturday, Pittsburgh traded Kessel, a 2021 fourth-round pick, and prospect Dane Birks to the Coyotes for Alex Ga...

And Now, A Washington Wizards Update: Hell
If you lost track of the Washington Wizards amid all Sunday’s wild NBA free-agency news, that’s fine, and reasonable. It speaks well of you, all things considered. A solid double-fistful of the league’s big stars switched teams over the weekend, and none of them came to or left the Wizards—but the W...

Treat The Knicks Like What They Are
Kevin Durant could have chosen better than to make Brooklyn the new center of the universe. For example, he could have joined Kawhi Leonard in Toronto and taken on the entire National Hockey League at its very core by making basketball Canada’s new national pastime. I mean, it’s one thing to kick th...

KawhiWatch: Kawhi Leonard Toying With Entire City Of Los Angeles
The first “day” of NBA free agency 2019 was a depraved feeding frenzy. Within eight hours nearly everything edible had flown off the table, and even some borderline fare, too. Michael Jordan dug into a lukewarm plate of Terry Rozier at a market price of $58 million—sickening. And yet the most prized...
![The Heat Are Scrambling To Actually Complete The Jimmy Butler Trade [Update]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/bsoqmlvsoynhkowtqs6s.jpg)
The Heat Are Scrambling To Actually Complete The Jimmy Butler Trade [Update]
For an organization whose supposed signifier around the league is “competently professional,” the Miami Heat sure seem to have botched their big trade for Jimmy Butler. After The Athletic’s Shams Charania reported that a sign-and-trade deal featuring Butler heading to the 305 and Josh Richardson goi...

The Knicks Didn't Even Get The Chance To Be Turned Down By Kevin Durant
This is NBA free agency as written by Aesop. It was reported, soon after Kevin Durant took his talents to Brooklyn, that the Knicks weren’t going to offer Kevin Durant a max contract because of injury concerns. The Knicks would certainly like you to believe that, anyway. Is it true? Maybe. But those...