ick Page 251 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Which NBA players saw their stock fall during these playoffs
A player’s worth is most accurately weighed in the playoffs. Just refer to last season’s Julius Randle debacle. Randle averaged 24 ppg, 10 rpg, and 6 apg on scorching shooting splits of 46%/41%/81%. Every metric but his FG% was a career-best. Then came the playoffs. In that first-round series vs. th...

Cut the semantics crap, Kevin, you know what Draymond meant about Steph Curry, and he’s right
As much as I’m looking forward to seeing the Golden State Warriors back in the NBA Finals, what I’m not looking forward to is paying them many compliments. They’re extremely fun to watch, no less fun than the League Pass alert days of 2013 and 2014. However, Charles Barkley is correct when he says t...

Say it ain’t so, D.J.
Dustin Johnson has defected. Only a few months after his statement of allegiance to the PGA Tour among all that Phil Mickelson-LIV Golf drama, the promise of what is rumored to be in the $100 million-plus range proved too tempting to turn down, moral compass be damned....

Gregg Popovich’s coaching tree is monopolizing the NBA Finals
Gregg Popovich is the winningest head coach in NBA history with 1,344 victories. Along with having the most wins for any coach in league history, we’re beginning to see another part of Popovich’s legacy take shape. The four head coaches involved in the last two NBA Finals have a tie to coach Pop, ha...

We got a fun Game 7, and here are the players who made their mark the past two weeks
The playoffs just haven’t felt the same since that thrilling Game 6 between the Memphis Grizzlies and Golden State Warriors. Blowouts, unfortunately, littered the conference finals, especially in the east. The Dallas Mavericks only got thoroughly walloped in Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals, ...

Congrats Boston, but you have no shot against the Warriors
The Boston Celtics have torn through the playoffs, eliminating each team that’s ousted them in the last three postseasons. After a seven-game slugfest with the Miami Heat, the C’s are in Eastern Conference finals for the first time since 2010, led by Jayson Tatum, who is making a strong case for ent...

Fight fire with fire, burning with fear
You have to hand it to Avalanche coach Jared Bednar. He does have one of the best checking centers in the NHL at his disposal in Nazem Kadri. It would be easy, explicable, and defensible to just toss Kadri over the boards every time the Oilers put Connor McDavid out there, and be done with it. After...

Get ready for hot pickleball action!
It’s not often that we get the chance to live through the invention and ascension of a sport into popular culture. American football dates back to the Civil War era. James Naismith invented basketball in 1891. FIFA was founded in 1904. But thanks to a man named Joel Pritchard trying to entertain his...

Don’t support Gabe Kapler’s protest during the national anthem if you took issue with Colin Kaepernick’s
Six years ago, a Black football player decided he wasn’t going to stand during the national anthem because America wasn’t holding up its end of the bargain when it came to protecting the people he cared about. The country lost it, and he lost his job. Six years later, a white baseball manager has de...

Jimmy Butler’s superstar card got declined when Miami needed it most
Earlier this month, FS1’s Nick Wright debuted a bit called the Superstar Club. I don’t usually endorse debate show takes, but this was a solid metaphor. Jimmy Butler was depicted standing in line, waiting for entry. In this year’s Eastern Conference Finals against the Boston Celtics, he nearly cemen...

Charges dropped against Broncos’ WR Jerry Jeudy
Ahead of a scheduled hearing in Arapahoe County, Colo., today, the prosecution dropped all charges against Denver Broncos’ wide receiver Jerry Jeudy, stemming from arrest earlier this month per an ESPN report. ...

I feel great about not trusting the Hurricanes again
The problem with upping the degree of difficulty on your playoff run is that no matter how good you are, eventually you’ll push yourself off the cliff. The NHL playoffs are hard enough as is without trying to navigate them like they were a bar bet. The Hurricanes didn’t bother to win a road game in ...

American Athletes who gave their lives in service
It may be rare these days, but there was a time when some of the best athletes in America went off to fight in wars. Some did so willingly, others were drafted....

Investing in NFT ticket stubs is likely one of the NBA’s next big crypto ventures
NBA Top Shot, a collection of NBA NFTs featuring highlights, GIFs, and other classic NBA moments, recently surpassed $1 billion in sales. There have been ups and downs during the company’s lifespan, and it surely hasn’t reached the same heights it teased in early 2021, but Top Shot has remained a vi...

Your AEW Double Or Nothing preview
It’s now a Memorial Day weekend tradition, as AEW has its other tentpole PPV (and they still call them “PPVs”) from Las Vegas. If you’re a weirdo like me, it’s no longer the holiday that kicks off summer but this event. It’ll actually be the start of a pretty frenzied summer of activity, given that ...

Auston Matthews is nearing an elite, rare echelon for American hockey players
The NHL’s most prestigious individual award was first handed out in 1924. Calvin Coolidge just became President of the United States. It took until Barack Obama’s final year in The White House for someone born and raised in America to win the Hart Memorial Trophy, the league’s most valuable player a...

Colin Kaepernick may return to the NFL while America asks itself what is it that the police do, exactly
Every revolution begins with a single act of defiance - Mahatma Gandhi...

Not to worry Luka, it happens to the best of them
Sure he had to hear his eulogy while he was still living after Andrew Wiggins read him his last rites in Game 3, but Luka Dončić has nothing to be ashamed of. The Dallas Mavericks star led the NBA postseason in scoring, but his singular output was futile against a Golden State Warriors team that pla...

A 75-year streak is in danger of being broken tonight
2021 saw the end of one of the most famous Finals streaks of all-time. Thirty-seven consecutive NBA Finals between 1984 and 2020 saw at least one teammate of Shaquille O’Neal’s on one of the competing rosters. No one on last year’s Suns or Bucks rosters had ever played with O’Neal during his career....

What are the Miami Heat?
Three teams have been pillars of culture in the modern NBA: The San Antonio Spurs, the Oklahoma City Thunder, and the Miami Heat. No matter the players, these three franchises have established systems where players come in to fill a role, commit to the vision, and buy in completely. Of the trio, onl...