im Page 219 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The Trail Blazers' offseason is a high-wire balancing act
This is the most important summer of Damian Lillard’s reign in Portland. For the past decade, the Portland Trail Blazers have been the Warriors’ little brother. Think Seth Curry and Steph Curry, but in franchise terms....
6 Decades Before Jackie Robinson, This Man Broke Baseball's Color Barrier
Sixty-three years before Jackie Robinson became the first African American in the modern era to play in a Major League Baseball game, Moses Fleetwood Walker debuted in the league on May 1, 1884 with the Toledo Blue Stockings in a 5-1 loss against the Louisville Eclipse. Walker, a 26-year-old African...
The odd construction around Shohei Ohtani certainly didn’t help Joe Maddon
With every passing year, the pressure on the Angels ratchets up just a little more as Mike Trout ages. It’s now common thought that the Angels have basically wasted the career of perhaps the best player of all time, and there’s a breaking point somewhere in the future but getting bigger on the horiz...
Richard Jefferson’s rant on shortening the season is off-base
Professional sports is not the easiest way to earn a living. That was part of what Richard Jefferson was trying to get at during his viral rant after Adam Silver dained to consider the idea of shortening the NBA season. Jefferson was drafted in 2001 and to his credit, the first 10 seasons of his 17 ...
In this edition of ‘Should That Be a Statue?'
Imagine if your lowest moment was so abysmal that people would want to build a statue to it? No, I’m not talking about the Southern part of the United States, I’m referring to Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt of Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup Final that earned him a red card before France fell to I...
9 Black Athletes Who Integrated Professional Sports
After Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, ending a six-decade ban on Black players in Major League Baseball, opportunities slowly began to expand for athletes of color. Robinson’s historic achievement—a formative moment of the postwar civil rights moveme...
It looks like the NFL is getting a new owner — Rob Walton, another white guy
When Maya Angelou said, “When people show you who they are, believe them,” she was foreshadowing the actions of the NFL. ...
Pat Riley challenges Heat stars Tyler Herro and Kyle Lowry to be better
The Miami Heat had a great season that ended one missed Jimmy Butler three-point attempt short of their second trip to the NBA Finals in three years. Heat President Pat Riley addressed the media this week to close out the year, and addressed many concerns for the team moving forward. Two of the more...
Looks like that’s it for the Boston Bruins, the dynasty that almost was
In every sport now, it seems one of the most fascinating things to watch is when an organization decides a particular roster has run its course. Thanks to salary caps everywhere (or just the totally not but really is a cap in baseball) there always comes a time when you have to pull that trigger as ...
The Ohio GOP would like to ‘inspect’ your daughters’ genitals
Ohio’s ban on trans youth in sports is the epitome of the conservative culture war on the LGBTQ community. Their obsession has reached pathological levels. Last week, Ohio’s Republican-dominated House approved a bill requiring genital inspections to prevent transgender female athletes from competing...
Anyone who’s still outraged over Draymond Green’s shenanigans this deep into his career just doesn’t get basketball
Let’s get this out of the way first. Any team that strolls into the NBA Finals against the Golden State Warriors and doesn’t expect Draymond Green to pull Draymond Green antics isn’t prepared for the task at hand....
The biggest thing to happen to the USMNT this weekend was not becoming the villain
The USMNT played two friiendlies this week, and in a normal year these would be the “World Cup Sendoff” games where the roster would basically be finalized. They would have been a lot more intensely watched by both Gregg Berhalter and fans alike, with the final cuts following soon after. The matches...
2022 NBA Draft Profile: Chet Holmgren
It almost feels too perfect. The scrawny, 7-foot, 195-pound sopping wet Chet Holmgren from Gonzaga playing for the Oklahoma City Thunder. It’s easy to imagine him sharing the court with Josh Giddey and Aleksej Pokusevski. Three caucasian dudes, all above 6-foot-8, and all with diverse skill sets and...
LeBron James said he was going to be a billionaire and, well, damn, he pulled it off
“In the next 15 or 20 years, I hope I’ll be the richest man in the world,” LeBron James said to Tim Withers of the Associated Press in 2005. “That’s one of my goals. I want to be a billionaire. I want to get to a position where generation on generation don’t have to worry about nothing. I don’t want...
Rafael Nadal winning the French Open is still the most inevitable outcome in sports
Rafael Nadal’s dominance on clay courts is to be expected. When he enters Roland Garros, his path to the title is Jordanesque, Gretzky-like, Ruthian, or whichever GOAT athletes of the last century come to mind....
Miguel Andújar's fall from grace
In 2018, young Yankees were taking over AL Rookie of the Year ballots. New York’s third baseman Miguel Andújar and shortstop Gleyber Torres finished second and third respectively in rookie of the year voting, losing out to Angels’ two-way phenom Shohei Ohtani....
SHOCKER! Twins announcer Jim Kaat makes another stupid comment
Baseball can’t go a week without someone saying something incredibly stupid....
Boston can sure take a punch
We’d seen this script before. Fans with any kind of decent memory recognized it. In the NBA Finals, as Golden State locked in and took a double-digit knockout lead. Turn off your TVs, the game is over. Or as the late-great Chick Hearn would say “The game’s in the refrigerator, the door’s closed, the...
The best sports scenes from <i>The Wire</i>
On yesterday’s date in 2002, the Michael Jordan of television series made its debut on premium cable. It didn’t have near the hype of Bobby Knight calling it the best basketball player of all time. In fact most people didn’t even watch it until years after the final episode aired. But The Wire would...
Patrick Mahomes, golfer of the people
Patrick Mahomes may have lost The Match (not in small part due to Josh Allen’s self-described “garbage can” play) but he won over American hearts yesterday for being a true Golfer Of The People. As he was trash-talking not only his opponents but also his teammate, chugging back Coors Light after Coo...