toronto Page 13 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
What Does Kawhi Leonard Want?
The first domino in a pivotal and unpredictable summer has fallen, with the Lakers trading for Anthony Davis for, basically, what they were offering six months ago. It’s a big deal and it reshapes the West and in light of Golden State’s disastrous Finals, makes the Lakers the favorites. For now. Tha...
Here Are Some Cool Guys Who Are Now NBA Champions
Kawhi Leonard won his second career Finals MVP Thursday night, becoming the first player in NBA history to win one in each conference. The magnitude of what he personally accomplished likely will take some time to settle in: After missing a full season due to injury and forcing his way out of San An...
![Alameda County Sheriff's Office Wants To Charge Raptors Exec Masai Ujiri With Battery [Update]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/itphupop5snhu4vufp83.jpg)
Alameda County Sheriff's Office Wants To Charge Raptors Exec Masai Ujiri With Battery [Update]
Raptors president of basketball operations Masai Ujiri was walking onto the floor Thursday night to celebrate his team’s championship when he appeared to get in some sort of altercation with a cop. The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office claimed that Ujiri shoved one of its deputies and nudged him in th...
Pascal Siakam And Fred VanVleet Were Pure Joy
The very end of Game 6 was like holding in a sneeze. At the end of the NBA Finals you might expect a satisfying, full release of tension, but that moment never really came. Instead the refs puttered and dithered over what to do with that ersatz timeout and then a foul on Kawhi Leonard and then how m...
There's A Difference Between Luck That's Received And Luck That's Found
Other franchises will want to make a replicable plan out of the Toronto Raptors’ journey to one of the truly amazing championships in NBA history. That’s how it goes. There has to be some parable in what everybody just watched, even if it’s the dullest kind, the kind about the friggin’ salary cap. ...
Fuck Your Asterisk
I heard someone on sports talk radio the other day say that if the Raptors pulled out a win in these NBA Finals, fans would forget about what exactly happened to Golden State during the series—he made this supposition after Kevin Durant’s calf rolled up but before Klay Thompson’s knee buckled like a...
Kyle Lowry Kept The Raptors Alive
It was an up-and-down postseason in what’s been an up-and-down career for Raptors point guard Kyle Lowry, but on Thursday night, when all of his teammates struggled to score out of the gate in Game 6, it was Lowry who helped give them the jumpstart they needed to eventually cross the finish line. As...
Drake Had Three Weeks To Workshop His Next Promo, And This Is What He Came Up With
The last time we did this, Drake had descended from his stage in the heart of Toronto—why does Drake get a stage? Why doesn’t he watch the game among the rest of the fans?—to tell us that Raptors fans are very good at following the rules. The performance left some clear opportunities for improvement...
Kawhi Leonard, Whenever You Get A Minute, This Extremely Drunk Raptors Fan Has A Plant For You
Kawhi Leonard had one of the great NBA postseasons, dismantling the Process, outplaying the MVP, and being the single best player in a Finals that brought down a dynasty. He was near-unanimous Finals MVP, and is now the first player in the history of the league to earn that honor in both conferences...
Oakland's Past Is Brighter Than The Warriors' Future
OAKLAND — The nostalgia in the building was thick enough to cut with DeMarcus Cousins, so much so that many of the last 19,596 humans shoved into what has always been known by the locals as “The Coliseum” almost forgot that there was a championship to defend, a season to prolong and a summer to defe...
It Appears That Raptors President Masai Ujiri Got Into It With A Cop
Toronto Raptors president of basketball operations Masai Ujiri has always been known as a fiery dude—recall when he yelled, “Fuck Brooklyn!” before a game against the Nets—but after the buzzer sounded last night and the Raptors became NBA champions, he reportedly reached a new level of not giving a ...
The Toronto Freaking Raptors Are Now NBA Champions
The Toronto Raptors, of all teams, are your new NBA champions, after pulling out a 114–110 win in Oakland in Thursday night’s Game 6. It wasn’t necessarily a series that will be remembered for its aesthetic beauty, but in the end the Raptors earned their first title with six games of incredibly suff...
Klay Thompson Helped Off With Bad Knee Injury, Heroically Returns, Sinks Free Throws, Runs Back Off, Is Out
Toward the end of the third quarter of Thursday night’s Game 6 in Oakland, Klay Thompson landed awkwardly after he was fouled on a breakaway layup by Danny Green, and appeared to badly mess up his left knee. Klay has already missed a game of this series with an injured left hamstring; the Warriors a...
Go Ahead And Get Upset About Kevin Durant's Injury
After a rapid and opaque rehabilitation from a strained calf, Kevin Durant’s return to Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Monday was cut short by a devastating injury. Everyone on the Warriors seems both stricken and kind of confused about who to blame; journalists like The Athletic’s Tim Kawakami who wrot...
Kyle Lowry Deserves No Slander This Time
Just to get this out of the way: Draymond Green got his fingers on the ball. The one body who guards two bodies like perhaps no other player in NBA history did it all over again. Green denied Marc Gasol the ball by fronting, then scooted out to poke Lowry’s potential game-winner behind the backboard...
![Tim Kawakami Self-Flagellated For Hours Over His Kevin Durant Column [Updates]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/dgwbbfaff3uxrl1zmkxv.jpg)
Tim Kawakami Self-Flagellated For Hours Over His Kevin Durant Column [Updates]
Last night, after Kevin Durant’s Achilles seemingly rolled up like a window shade during the Warriors must-win Game 5 against the Toronto Raptors, fans and reporters alike began a wild-eyed search for someone to blame. The question of blame here is complicated and multi-faceted and ultimately imposs...
There's Nothing Quite Like Draymond Green At Full Speed
Draymond Green’s curse (well, other than the invisible backpack) is that no matter how good he gets at basketball, the most immediately and undeniably impressive basketball feats, the truly unmistakable displays of superhuman ability, will never be available to him. He will never pour on the hailsto...
Who The Hell Knows How This Ends, But At Least It's Not Without A Fight
Nope, I have nothing for you. I cannot explain how the Golden State Warriors won Game 5 of the NBA Finals, and neither can any of you. A team in tatters refused to shred, and it remains obstinate in the face of a hockey team’s list of injuries. This is almost not at all about the Toronto Raptors any...
Who's To Blame?
The reactions to a catastrophic NBA injury usually unfold in very simple terms. Stomachs drop, deep sympathies are expressed for the player involved, and everyone moves on while shaking their heads and grumbling about how sometimes life just isn’t fair. Rarely do such injuries lead to the general ma...
The Raptors Blew It
Coming close hurts all the more when you can quantify just how close you came. One shot, or one missed shot, or one call the other way, or ... one timeout? The Raptors came oh so close to winning a championship Monday night, and it’s not the one-point final margin that’ll stick in craws and steal sl...