rock Page 18 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

A decade after the Thunder traded James Harden, regret should linger
A decade after Oklahoma City traded James Harden on the eve of the 2012-13 regular season, it still stands as an atrocity upon the art of dynasty-building. As the central players involved in that deal wind down their Hall of Fame careers in bleak situations, there is no more denying it, Oklahoma Cit...

Russell Wilson needs to turn heel
He has to be in on the joke at this point. Russell Wilson is playing with our feeble little minds. That’s the only explanation for the Denver Broncos quarterback to keep leaning into this personality that feels straight out of a “How to Act Like a Quarterback for Dummies” book. ...

Ten players that teams in the 'Lose-O-Rama for Wembanyama' should ship
After the matchup between Victor Wembanyama’s Metropolitans and Scoot Henderson’s G League Ignite teams earlier this month, where the projected No. 1 and No. 2 picks faced off in must-see-TV, half the NBA should have shifted into full-on tank mode. Why meddle in mediocrity if you’re the Orlando Magi...

The NBA’s tanking problem is more perception than reality, and a relegation system won’t fix that
During NBA Commish Adam Silver’s apology tour session with beleaguered Phoenix Suns employees this weekend, he was confronted with another concern. In addition to apologizing for suspended team Governor Robert Sarver and his decades of misconduct, Silver was also besieged by a flood of questions abo...

It’s going really well in Vancouver
Nothing goes right for the Vancouver Canucks. This is an immutable law of hockey and the NHL. It’s mostly comedy fodder for everyone outside of British Columbia, and probably for more sadistic jokes within. It becomes less funny when you’ve spent a decade or two listening to Canucks fans bemoan thei...

For NBA MVP, the value bet is Zion, but who will actually win is obvious
It’s easily forgotten that NBA is actually an acronym that stands for National Basketball Association. For a casual observer that follows the league’s personalities and news breakers on social media, the league can be viewed as a multiplatform action/drama that sparks the audience’s adrenaline with ...

Sam Presti, mixed bag
Sam Presti is lucky he’s in Oklahoma City. He would be held accountable for his screwups if he were in charge of a larger market franchise with a longer-tenured and demanding fanbase. But, before we tackle those, Presti has proven to be one of the best judges of talent and character. He has crushed ...

Colorado Avalanche celebrate 'All the Small Things' that led to Stanley Cup title
Champions are made of heart, grit, determination... and perhaps a little dash of pop-punk nostalgia? ...

The NBA and ESPN keep searching, but will never find their Roundball Rock
ESPN does an outstanding job with its NBA coverage. The network has an army of insiders, reporters, analysts, a daily midday show, as well a stellar game broadcast quality that has long satiated this one high schooler who was not happy to see his beloved NBA on NBC gone forever....

FTR is so good Tony Khan can’t book them
FTR — Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler — are the best wrestlers in the world....

College Football Week 5: A veritable smorgasbord of appetizing games
There’s no more hiding for college football teams. The tune-ups are over, and now conference foes are getting thrown together like peanut butter and jelly. Don’t like that? How about Bell pepper, meet onion? Cereal, meet milk. Alabama, meet Arkansas. NC State, meet Clemson. Oklahoma State, meet a po...

These are the top 10 unbeaten college football teams through Week 5
A quarter of the way through the college football season, you start to get a sense of which teams are for real, and which teams are not....

Don’t celebrate just yet, SEC fans, there’s another independent who could claim a CFP bid
For the segment of college football fans who blackout with anger every time Notre Dame makes the College Football Playoff, this season could not have started better. Marcus Freeman’s team came up short against Ohio State and then stumbled trying to get back up against Marshall, and there’s really no...

It’s All Happening – WWE and AEW Now: HHH’s WWE is better but it’s still inflexible
For the first time this past weekend, and intentionally no matter what they may say, WWE and AEW ran PPVs/PLEs on the same weekend, perhaps being in direct competition with each other for the first time since NXT was backed off Wednesday nights. Feels like as good of a time as any to see where the c...

Sometimes predictable is the way to go
It finally happened and is one prime example of why I believe predictability isn’t always a negative in professional wrestling. There hasn’t been a bigger disappointment in WWE over the last year than Dominik Mysterio, the son of squared-circle visionary Rey Mysterio. In my “Clash at the Castle” pre...

For one day, Yann Sommer channeled the spirit of Ron Tugnutt (wait Ron Tugnutt isn’t dead, right?)
Most soccer analysts, especially those who really get in up to the elbow in the analytics, say that the sport is pretty random. Most games are only decided by a single moment (or rarely more than a handful), and those moments can bounce any which way no matter what the trends of a match or a season ...

Tony Khan’s CM Punk-Jon Moxley AEW title booking was atrocious
The most noteworthy part of now-former AEW champion CM Punk’s three-minute loss to Jon Moxley on Wednesday’s Dynamite had nothing to do with the story beats presented on screen, in the ring, or by the show’s commentary team. It had everything to do with an incident last week in which Punk, at the be...

Oh, wow, a sport obsessed with stats finally realizes numbers are marketable
If you’re reading a post about baseball to start your Thursday morning procrastinating there’s a good chance that at some point in your life you’ve been at a bar with one of those punching bag machines. You know what I’m talking about, it looks like a huge speed bag and you put in a dollar or whatev...

The Triple H era starts with hope
The week leading up to Saturday night’s SummerSlam felt particularly guarded. Most of the stories about the workings backstage in the wake of Vince McMahon’s “retirement” and Triple H’s taking over of creative referred to the plans for the company’s second biggest show already being locked in. That ...

Why was Sue Robinson involved in Deshaun Watson’s case, anyway?
“During her tenure on the bench, Judge Robinson presided over an extraordinary number of complex cases, primarily involving patent disputes (including the billion dollar stent litigation), but also including numerous trademark infringement and antitrust disputes.”...