mad Page 11 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Will Nikola Jokić lead Denver to its first title or will Jimmy Butler fulfill his playoff prophecy?
One of the least anticipated matchups in recent memory is upon us. The Denver Nuggets and Miami Heat. Let’s be real here. No LeBron, no Jayson Tatum, and no Boston Celtics legends in the stands. Media members have been openly grousing all week about having to cover the Nuggets. That’s a cornball pos...

Newsmax's Greg Kelly claims there's 'nothing gay' about baseball, which he clearly doesn’t watch
I can’t even claim to really know what Newsmax is, other than it has a name that sounds like something a satire show would come up with to spoof an enclosure of right-wing baboons throwing various feces at each other and the camera and the real thing being actually far more ridiculous than any spoof...

Believe in fun, believe in the Diamondbacks
There was always hope that a young, funky team would finally not just get the best of the Dodgers, but signal the end of the now decade long run of the Dodgers running roughshod over the NL West. Yes, the Giants got them once, in a season where the Dodgers still won 106 games. And we know what happe...

Sure, the Boston Celtics won but they still have a Jaylen Brown problem
The Boston Celtics rose to their feet, spit out the blood, wiped their mouths, and got back to fighting in their Eastern Conference Finals series against the Miami Heat. Down 3-0 after getting the snot knocked out of them on Sunday night, they got their first win of the series with Jayson Tatum and ...

Joe Mazzulla and the Celtics have Boston on the edge of misery
Joe Mazzulla versus Erik Spoelstra has been a lopsided showdown between two coaches with a devotion to film study. Spoelstra famously began his brilliant coaching career as a video coordinator with the Miami Heat in 1995. Joe Mazzulla is more of a pure cinephile. One of the more interesting peeks in...

The Miami Heat kicked the Celtics in the head, teeth, calf, and everyone else in Game 3
I have seen some ass-whuppings administered in my lifetime. I remember in the fifth-grade baseball playoffs beating the top overall seed by about 20 runs. To put a championship cap on Alabama’s 2012 football season the Tide ran through Notre Dame so viciously, that their opponents lost the desire to...

Boston and Miami battle to see who's the Beast in the East
In a rematch of last year’s Eastern Conference Finals, the Boston Celtics and Miami Heat are set to square off for the third time in four years to crown the Beast in the East. While the Celtics remain the No. 2 seed, the Heat have been forced to defy the odds of returning to the ECF as the No. 8 see...

Trevor Bauer sent to the Japanese minors
After posting a sparkling ERA of 8.40 and 1.867 WHIP, the Yokohama DeNA BayStars of the Japanese league have sent former Dodger pitcher Trevor Bauer down to the minor leagues. You hate to see it....

Stop praising Sports Illustrated’s N-word-using, criminal swimsuit cover model
There’s only one real reason to be mad about Martha Stewart gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition, and it’s not that they opted to showcase an 81-year-old woman — it’s that they went with a racist felon. I don’t find her personality redeeming, or her crime all that innocent. ...

The NBA's young stars balled out in the second round of the playoffs
The boisterous people of Sacramento were not a part of the second round, but the basketball as a whole was no less exciting. As predicted, the Miami Heat and New York Knicks matchup was late 1990s NBA without the fights, but the 2020s NBA was at its best in the other series....

We're all for the Miami Heat dunking on Stephen A. Smith
Longtime ESPN on-air personality Stephen A. Smith has made no secrets about where his NBA loyalties lie, and it’s in The Big Apple with the Knicks. And New York’s season ended Friday night with a Game 6 loss to the Heat. Of course, Smith took the loss personally, but that didn’t stop Miami from reco...

Chicago Cubs skipper David Ross is clueless
Modern baseball thinking has it that the manager in the dugout is just an extension of the front office. He pressed the buttons he was told to, and if he can help manage personalities and keep a bunch of millionaires from knifing each other over seven hot months, so much the better. So maybe David R...

JJ Redick and the Raptors would be more <i>90 Day Fiancé</i> than ‘happily ever after’
I want to believe that these two parties are smart enough to know that they are better off without each other. They have achieved great success separately, and a union at this time can only cause harm to both. A business relationship should exist between JJ Redick and the Toronto Raptors. That busin...

Real Madrid and Manchester City trapped each other, or so they’d have you believe
When you’ve been as dominant in the Champions League as Real Madrid have for the past decade, or as dominant in the Premier League as Manchester City have, you can convince everyone that whatever you do is part of the plan, part of a higher genius we can’t quite understand. It must be, otherwise, ho...

Blood, sweat, and bodyslams: 10 moments that defined the Heat-Knicks playoff rivalry
The Miami Heat and New York Knicks have plenty of bad blood, dating back to the mid-90s. Even 30 years after Pat Riley left New York for Miami, storylines remain between the two teams. Riley is now the Heat’s president, while Tom Thibodeau, an assistant for Jeff Van Gundy, Riley’s successor in New Y...

The WNBA finally gets the sports documentary it deserves
In the early days of the WNBA, it wasn’t a given that the league was going to make it. A new film set for theatrical release this weekend, Unfinished Business, goes back to the first year through the lens of the New York Liberty, to lay out the stakes those young players experienced....

Mat Ishbia can still flop like the college scrub that he is
How do you know that Phoenix Suns owner Mat Ishbia made being a go-hard his entire lifestyle?...

AI is all fun and games, until it’s not, which is part of why Hollywood has shut down
For those people who turned on The Tonight Show on Tuesday and the wacky game that Jimmy Fallon was playing with a guest looked familiar, that’s because it was a rerun. There will be no late-night television while the television and film scribes of the Writers Guild of America are on strike....

Real Madrid enter the next Galactico Era with the capture of Jude Bellingham
“The best players in the world must play for Real Madrid.”...

Completely blowing it in the first round is good for business, history says
The loyalists in the overpriced seats at Boston’s TD Garden for Game 7 of the Eastern Conference first-round should’ve-been shellacking between the hometown Bruins and barely made it into the postseason Florida Panthers went from agitated, to full-on bittah in booing the 135-point getters in the reg...