off Page 135 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Uh-Oh, Joel Embiid's Knee Might Keep Him Out Of Game 1
A visibly frustrated Joel Embiid said he “has no idea” if he’ll play tomorrow in Game 1 of the Sixers’ first-round series versus the Nets, due to pain in his left knee. Seems bad:...

The Flames Are A Different Team If Mike Smith Gets Hot
The Flames led the West with 107 points and yet are not what anyone would call favorites to come out of the conference. That’s perhaps unfair, perhaps unwise, but a team as explosive as the Flames still tends to amount to nothing much if it doesn’t have competent goaltending. One game is just one ga...

Calgary's Andrew Mangiapane Didn't Have To Embarrass Philipp Grubauer Like That
Flames winger Andrew Mangiapane decided that the best time to show Calgary he was worth calling up on the last day of 2018 was in Game 1 of his team’s series against the Colorado Avalanche. With less than six minutes left in the second period, the 23-year-old was able to deke his way past three defe...

Good Lord, The Caps Don't Like Making Things Easy
Just because the championship monkey is off the backs of the Washington Capitals doesn’t mean the team has forgotten where it came from. In Game 1 of the series with the upstart Carolina Hurricanes, the Caps showed flashes of the team’s former self best known for handing momentum right back to posts...

Leafs' Nazem Kadri Sets Up Beautiful Breakaway For William Nylander With Pinpoint Feed
After going down against the Boston Bruins early, the Toronto Maple Leafs spent a majority of Game 1 (so far) effectively defending seemingly every scoring opportunity their opponents got. The Leafs have now gotten to the point where they’ve been able to turn that strong defense into some magical of...

Real Cross Country Delivers Real Redemption
Jakob Larsen, director of Danish Athletics, revealed at the pre-race press conference that the guiding concept behind the design of the 2019 World Cross Country Championships course was a scene from the movie Crocodile Dundee. “That’s not a knife; this is a knife,” says our man of the outback in th...

Jordan Binnington Would Not Be Rattled
The unlikely savior of the St. Louis Blues’ season came through again in Game 1 of their first-round fight with the Winnipeg Jets. Rookie goalie Jordan Binnington, who showed up midseason to go 24-5-1 and pilot the Blues from last place to the playoffs, didn’t get overwhelmed by a sellout crowd in M...

Islanders Fans Reminded Everyone What Home-Ice Advantage Sounds Like
The way-ahead-of-schedule resurgence of the Islanders has coincided with a partial return home, to the Nassau Coliseum, where they’re playing half their home games as they figure out a way to get out of Brooklyn. So it’s only fitting that their playoff opener was back in the old barn, thanks to an a...

Marcus Smart Was The Last Player The Celtics Could Afford To Lose
Boston Celtics guard Marcus Smart could miss up to the first two rounds of the NBA playoffs after suffering a torn oblique on the left side of his body, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski....

Sharks' Joe Pavelski Takes One On The Chin For His Team To Score Opening Goal
Once the Stanley Cup playoffs start, the debate over whether the structural integrity of your face is more important than a goal no longer becomes a debate. There are only two options that players have: give up your face, or let your team down. Less than 15 minutes into Game 1 of the Sharks-Golden K...

The Columbus Blue Jackets Are Not Here To Get Steamrolled
Some fans say that the 3-0 lead when you’re the Presidents’ Trophy winners playing Game 1 at home in the first round against an eight seed from Ohio is the most dangerous lead in hockey, and the Tampa Bay Lightning found that out the hard way in their 4-3 upset loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets on W...

Annoying Refs Bust Up A Party On Long Island, But Jordan Eberle Restarts It
Nassau Coliseum was so frickin’ loud at the start of Game 1 in this first-round series between the Penguins and Islanders, and it somehow got even more deafening 30 seconds into the game. Tom Kuhnhackl came right off the bench for the Isles and set off an explosion in the arena, as he fired a wriste...

A Cranky And Wishful Preview Of The 2019 Stanley Cup Playoffs
The Stanley Cup Playoffs begin Wednesday, and while it is considered an incontrovertible truth that the Cup is a better entertainment than the NBA Playoffs, it is also its own hot mess in uniquely weird ways, starting with this....

The Nets Are In
Coming into the final weekend of the regular season, none of the handful of decidedly un-great teams racing for the Eastern Conference’s last few playoff spots—the Pistons, Magic, Nets, Heat, and Hornets—had a truly easy route to the postseason. They’d all have to beat somebody to get through. The t...

A Fortunate Bounce Helped Virginia Beat Auburn For A Spot In The NCAA Tournament Final
The officials at last night’s Auburn-Virginia Final Four game missed a pretty big call and caused a controversial ending to a game that deserved a lot better, as college refs are wont to do. With less than a second remaining, Auburn’s Samir Doughty committed a worst-case-scenario error and fouled Ky...

Idiot In The Ring Tackles Bret Hart During WWE Hall Of Fame Ceremony
Tonight’s WWE Hall of Fame ceremony in Brooklyn was briefly derailed when a person in a rasta cap jumped into the ring and took down wrestler Bret Hart during his speech. How much did Vince McMahon pay that guy?...

Commissioner For A Day: Let’s Make Kickoffs Worth Something
Dom Cosentino is now the NFL commissioner… in this video we made. Join me and Dom in Commissioner for a Day, the show that gives one Deadspin staffer unlimited power to change one rule in a sport of their choice....

NHL To Continue Using Playoff Format Everyone Hates
We’re about to enter year six of the NHL’s current playoff setup, a format that has garnered mostly complaints since its inception. To be fair to the league, hockey fans can and do complain about everything, but the format’s drawbacks do seem to outweigh its benefits. So, just a few days out from th...

Cardiff City's Neil Warnock Had An Intense Staredown With Match Officials After They Cost His Team Vital Points
Cardiff City manager Neil Warnock was understandably furious after his relegation-threatened squad lost 2-1 to Chelsea on Saturday when Ruben Loftus-Cheek scored a heartbreaking late goal in the 91st minute. Once the referee signaled that the match was over with a whistle, Warnock left the technical...

MLB Advanced Media Made Billions For Baseball, Chewed Up Its Employees, And Spit Them Out
On the second Tuesday of February, at 3:00 in the afternoon, around 40 employees of MLB Advanced Media—one arm of MLB’s media empire, which also includes MLB.com, MLB Network and MLB Productions—nervously filed into a conference room at MLBAM’s office in Manhattan’s Chelsea Market. They had been liv...