summer Page 5 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

World sporting events are becoming a different kind of guilty pleasure
While this World Cup is unlike any other due to the start time and Middle East location, there is a recent world competition that comes to mind. Think about it. Climate unfit to host the event, haphazard accommodations, stories of government overreach, and sportswashing. That sounds like the Beijing...

It appears Kevin Durant has made peace with treading water in a sea of Nets chaos
Kevin Durant most definitely wanted to be traded this past summer....

Coming off the bench has brought back some semblance of vintage Russell Westbrook
Russell Westbrook’s first season in L.A. was an unmitigated failure. He was plugged into a lineup of non-shooters including LeBron James, Anthony Davis, and a confusing mix of ill-fitting pieces. Of Rob Pelinka’s misfit toys, though, nobody took last season’s debacle harder on the chin than Westbroo...

Victor Wembanyama is the NBA’s basketball comeuppance
Victor Wembanyama is the evolution of basketball personified. But evolution requires a catalyst. Sure Wembanyama’s genes play a significant part, but decades earlier he could have been Frédéric Weis. Weis was the first French center whose name was seared into the memories of American basketball fans...

Victor Wembanyama is in America, and taking part in a matchup that, on a college court, would be one of the most anticipated of all time
While it was great to see Ja Morant taking off for a 360 dunk on Monday night, and Paolo Banchero throwing it down on two people, that was just preseason Memphis Grizzlies vs. Orlando Magic basketball. The NBA regular season doesn’t begin until Oct. 19. Until that day, any minutes fans see of their ...

Kim Mulkey is incapable of basic human empathy
Kim Mulkey’s modus operandi is to be loud and wrong, so it was pretty telling when on Monday she declined to show the minimum level of support for Brittney Griner. The old axiom, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” applies to college basketball’s Lord Palpatine, whos...

Things Done Changed: Zion going into this season with brand new body, but a B.I.G. spirit
NBA, what you gonna do when Big Poppa comes for you?...

Do Americans really care about soccer? We’ll find out
The unbearable heat of Qatar pushed the FIFA World Cup out of the summer months for the first time in the tournament’s history. In 2022, the quadrennial footballing soccer showcase won’t crown a new champion before jackets come out of closets across America. The upcoming global event will run from N...

The WNBA Finals are A’ja Wilson’s to lose
Candace Parker’s repeat bid being squashed by the Connecticut Sun in Friday evening’s winner-take-all Game 5 against the Connecticut Sun was the sort of hoops history-altering that will reverberate more than Queen Elizabeth. Sue Bird is the all-time point god, but her career also arrived at its firm...

Et tu, WTA?
The WTA, the most successful professional league in the history of women’s sports, announced at the start of Week 2 of the U.S. Open that this year’s WTA Finals tournament will be held in Fort Worth, Texas. ...

Margaret Court’s resentment is proof that envy and racism were Serena Williams’ only true rivals
Most of the time, feminists are feminism’s biggest problem. It’s why Margaret Court has chosen this moment to hate on Serena Williams. Because like tennis, feminism is/was supposed to be something just for white women....

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...

It’s just a game
The first time I wrote “professionally” about Serena Williams, back when Bleacher Report was still an onslaught of slideshows, I called her overrated. I was just out of college, and my terrible, awful, horrendous take was she didn’t win as much as she could. This was more than a decade ago, and it w...

White Chocolate is trippin’
In basketball, a couple of never-ending debates will likely go unresolved....

LeBron is manipulating the media for his sons' sake
LeBron is promoting the hell out of his newest passion project. It’s not a Spring Hill-Warner Bros. production, but it is the most personal aspect of his investment portfolio. For Sports Illustrated’s Daily Cover story on Tuesday, LeBron, flanked by his sons Bronny and Bryce, spoke to Chris Ballard,...

Reminder: WNBA players are still going abroad to earn a living
It seems pertinent on Women’s Equality Day to mention that there are still WNBA players going overseas to earn more money than they would by playing stateside....

The Chet Holmgren Experiment suffers its first setback
Unicorn status has been bestowed throughout the last decade upon NBA players with proportions so fantastical that we thought they only existed in fables. Whenever one of those hoops fantasies steps out of our imaginations and onto the court, it’s akin to witnessing a futuristic autonomous concept of...

RIP player empowerment era: Kevin Durant staying in Brooklyn
The Association’s red-hot summer of jack shit continues, with the crown jewel of the offseason — the true Petty King, Kevin Durant — appearing to be locked atop Brooklyn’s scepter....

Disastrous season for the Phoenix Mercury ended with Las Vegas dropping a piano on their heads
Mercury has been in retrograde all season long. At least that’s been the theme of the 2022 WNBA season. Shortly after getting bombarded by an WNBA record 23 3-pointers in a 37-point loss to the Las Vegas Aces, the Phoenix Mercury had to be breathing a sigh of relief. That record-breaking performance...