toronto Page 16 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Fred VanVleet: My Power Is Not Derived From My Son
One fun subplot of these NBA playoffs has been the resurgence of Raptors backup point guard Fred VanVleet. Through the first 15 games of the postseason, VanVleet was just one of the many Raptors role players struggling to find his shot while Kawhi Leonard dragged the team forward. He finally emerged...
![The Warriors Aren't Just Going To Be Able To Wait For This Mess To Go Away [Update]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/yhv3gn6x8wq7o3yhtaxc.png)
The Warriors Aren't Just Going To Be Able To Wait For This Mess To Go Away [Update]
A lot has happened since Raptors guard Kyle Lowry was shoved by a Warriors fan after falling into the seats during Game 3: Lowry was understandably angry; the fan got ejected; after the game Lowry said the fan had made “vulgar” comments to him; this morning, the fan was identified as Mark Stevens, a...
Kevin Durant Is Fucking Up The Finals
In an ordinary Finals, the team in Golden State’s position, down 2-1 after dropping Game 3 at home, would be in real trouble, needing to win three out of four and at least once on the road to avoid elimination. Hell, the Warriors might even be in real trouble! Or maybe they aren’t the Warriors, but ...
Vlad Guerrero Jr.'s Righteous Dong Sent The Yankees To Hell Where They Belong
The vile and hideous New York Yankees were, inexplicably, somehow on the verge of maybe winning a game on Wednesday night, until a legend in the making shut them down. The Yanks have rightfully tasted victory only once in the month of June, and to prevent that disaster from happening again, the Toro...
Solo Steph Curry Is The Best Steph Curry
A thing that I will never stop inserting into conversations for the rest of my life is that I got to watch Steph Curry play (twice) while at Davidson—both of the Wildcats’ games at the Detroit Lions’ stadium when they made the Elite Eight during Curry’s sophomore season. Steph had 33 of his team’s 7...
The Raptors Won But Finals Chaos Still Reigns
It’s cheap to say that the Raptors beat the Gldn Stae Warors (which is to say, 63 percent of the Golden State Warriors) in Game 3 of the NBA Finals; in fact, it isn’t much of a stretch to say that the Raptors might have won the game anyway....
This Is Why Kyle Lowry Was So Pissed
Early in the fourth quarter of Toronto’s Game 3 road victory over the Warriors, play was held up for a minute while Kyle Lowry appeared to scold either a Warriors fan or multiple Warriors fans or the referees or arena security, or all of the above. Upon review, it appeared that Lowry was pissed beca...
Raptors Snatch Back Home-Court Advantage With Game 3 Beatdown Of Gutted Warriors
There may be no satisfying takeaway from Toronto’s Game 3 123–109 victory over the Warriors in Oakland, beyond the completely obvious reminder that however great Steph Curry is, he cannot beat an NBA Finals team completely by himself. Steve Kerr held Klay Thompson out of the action, and so the Warri...
What If The Raptors Had To Choose Between Kawhi And Drake?
There are rules to the Deadcast, although we don’t generally pay that much attention to them. For the most part, as you might have noticed, it goes like this: Bullshit/sports, sports, sports/Funbag, Funbag. It’s not a lot of structure, but it keeps us honest. This week, though, we faced a Funbag que...
The Layup Faces Of Game 2
For Sunday’s Game 2 in Toronto, a pair of remote cameras were set up at one end of the court. One (the angle you see above) appears to have been in the stanchion itself, and was operated by Getty Images’ Gregory Shamus, and captures the action just below the basket. The other (the first photo below)...
The Weirder The Finals Get, The Better
The news from the NBA Finals is all good, kids, and it is this: Nobody has any narratives left to invent. The events of Games 1 and 2 have savaged all the preconceptions, conceptions, and the way it’s looking, the post-conceptions of this series. Nobody has any idea what’s coming next, and nobody wi...
The Warriors Should Have Been Fucked
There’s no such thing as an NBA Finals loss that doesn’t sting, but some of them hurt more than others. The J.R. Smith Disaster was so demoralizing that you knew, even though it happened in Game 1, that the Cavs would never recover. Last night’s Game 2, which the Raptors lost 109-104, was not nearly...
Warriors Come Alive In Third Quarter, Even NBA Finals
For one and a half games of the 2019 NBA Finals, it looked like the Toronto Raptors were the better team. Then the first six minutes of Game 2’s third quarter happened....
Marc Gasol Can Run With The Warriors, And Get Buckets Too
Marc Gasol has been a prime component of the Raptors’ asphyxiating defense—one of the most switchable, responsive, obnoxiously needling teams in recent memory. His post D has been stout enough to knock Joel Embiid a notch down from series-defining to merely good. By Giannis Antetokounmpo’s own admi...
Draymond Green Wants It Known That He Did <i>Not</i> Scuffle With Drake
Raptors super fan and legendary cornball Drake was an unusually subdued presence during Game 1 of the NBA Finals in Toronto, perhaps because he got a stern talking-to from the league. But, with an assist from a salty Draymond Green, Drake still managed to deliver another meme-able moment after the f...
Pascal Siakam Fought A Bear And Won
For as much as the Raptors’ run to the finals was about Kawhi Leonard’s ascension to godhood, it was also about the circumstances that made that ascension necessary. Think of all the playoff possessions in which Leonard was forced to pull a heroic shot out of his ass because his other four teammates...
Fred VanVleet Can Do No Wrong
How big a lead does a team have to have on the Warriors before its fans can feel comfortable? Twenty points with two minutes left? Fifteen points with 30 seconds to go? To me, it didn’t feel like the Raptors had Game 1 locked up until they were actually dribbling out the final ticks, up nine with th...
Raptors Fight Off Every Warriors Push To Grab A Comfortable Game 1 Victory
In retrospect, we had a pretty solid indication that things were turning Toronto’s way in the build up to their Game 1 victory over the Warriors:...
Drake Tries Very Hard To Pretend He Doesn't Have Steph Curry And Kevin Durant's Jersey Numbers Tattooed On His Body
The world was very nearly spared a couple week’s worth of energetic Drake sightings Thursday night, when Andre Iguodala of the Golden State Warriors went careening into the sidelines late in the first half of Game 1 of the NBA Finals. Iguodala missed hurling the bulk of his giant NBA frame into the ...