var Page 16 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Jason Kidd's hiring in Dallas totally won’t backfire
What has Jason Kidd done to earn a third opportunity as head coach of an NBA franchise? I’m legitimately curious. All he did in his one year with the Nets and three and a half with Milwaukee was win one playoff series while consistently underperforming and failing to win a single division title. The...

Martin Dúbravka was so sick of Spain’s wastefulness he took care of it himself
Ever watch a game and you’re sure that one player out on the field just has their circuits short out for a second? Their brain becomes the rainbow pinwheel of frustration as things fail to load? It can happen to all of us. It just doesn’t happen to us on a stage quite as big as the one Slovakia’s Ma...

Rüdiger HUNGRY!
I bet, my fellow footyphiles, that we thought we were done with international tournaments including players nibbling on each other, what with Luis Suarez not involved in the European Championships and probably too old for the next World Cup. And Copa America has bigger problems, though I suppose we ...

Euro 2021: Can Poland rise to meet Robert Lewandowski?
No. What’re you, new? No one rises to the level of Robert Lewandowski. It’s Robert Goddamn Lewandowski. Dude just scored 40 goals in one league season, which is utterly insane. That’s after he scored 34 last year. Seventy-four motherfucking goals in two seasons in just the Bundesliga. That’s four se...

There’s never been a ‘bettor’ time to put money on Floyd Mayweather, even if he is a degenerate
Over the past 15 years, the tightest betting odds Floyd Mayweather has had for one of his fights has been -190 during his 2007 middleweight title bout with “The Golden Boy” Oscar De La Hoya. ...

Meet MLB’s All-'Never-been an All-Star' Team
Nowadays, it seems like every baseball player under the sun has been an All-Star at some point in their careers. In 2019, there were four AL second basemen selected for the Midsummer Classic. FOUR! In total, there were 75 players awarded All-Star recognition in 2019. In 2018, 73 players were named A...

Now the Leafs have the calamity they’ve always wanted
Because everything is outsized with the Leafs, the idea that they’ve been coughing up genuine chances at the Stanley Cup year-after-year has grown at the rate and scale of The Blob. Being the Leafs, everything around them is audibly multiplied by at least 12, so the sheer volume that is emitted from...

Top 5 NHL playoff saves of all time
We always remember the goals: Bobby Orr flying through the air, Ray Bourque scoring in the Stanley Cup Finals at 40 years old, and Matteau! Matteau! Matteau! Legendary moments. But what about the goals that didn’t happen? What about the goals that were snagged away with a flash of the leather or a f...

Seems like old times, eh Leafs?
By now you know the key points. The Toronto Maple Leafs haven’t won the Stanley Cup since 1967, haven’t been to the Final since then either, haven’t beaten the Canadiens in a series since their ’67 title clash, won their first division title since 2000 this season (thanks to being in the all-Canadia...

Deadspin's AEW 'Double Or Nothing' preview
Sadly, for the second straight year, AEW will not run Double Or Nothing in Las Vegas but in Jacksonville, Fla. I say that because I had tickets in 2020, and a Vegas weekend with the great wrestling unwashed sure would hit the spot right about now. Oh well! They say this one will have a full house at...

VAR isn’t the problem, the people using it are
The return of supporters to various terraces last week in the Premier League brought back some rites of soccer that we didn’t even realize how much we missed and cherished. The mocking of a shot well over or wide of the goal. The vitriol for a ref after a foul. The applause after a relatively simple...

Leicester found a new way to blow it, and their fans probably won’t care
The warping of European soccer and its priorities make judging Leicester City’s last week of the season decidedly foggy. Twenty years ago or so it would be easy. Win the FA Cup, finish fifth, that’s an unqualified success. But that’s not the world we live in anymore, and that’s what makes it so uncl...

Hockey is the dumbest sport
It’s funny (but not), and fitting, that in a week where we’ve spent a great deal of time talking about baseball’s old, drunk, incontinent demons still plaguing the youthful and logical, hockey strolls into the saloon, hitches up its belt, and says, “Oh, you think you’re stupid? I’ll show you stupid....

The biggest problem facing Jets rookie Zach Wilson right now is… his mom
Move over LaVar Ball, there’s a new MPP “most problematic parent” in sports, and her son hasn’t even taken a snap in the NFL yet....

A shoutout to memorable mom moments in sports history
None of the athletes we talk about would be where they are without their mothers, so to commemorate, here’s a list to honor some of the most memorable mom moments in sports history. It’s not necessarily a top 10, but a collection of highlights (and yes, one lowlight) to honor Mother’s Day 2021....

Between Canelo Álvarez and Billy Joe Saunders, we actually have a real fight to talk about
Finally, an actual boxing match. ...

Phew, what a day! May 7 sports gobs of history, including MJ's 'Shot,' 'Practice?!' & Big Sexy goin' boom
Sports people are weird — myself included. We love our stats and our oddities, and our trends and our records. Something that will speak to the hearts of sports fanatics everywhere is a lovely confluence of memorable events that all happened on this very day. ...

Rangers are right about NHL player safety, so it’s time to dump Parros and hire Marc Savard
As it always is, the NHL is in a mess of its own making. Rarely do you get a team decrying a league’s discipline system, at least not in hockey. Gary Bettman rarely tolerates stepping out of line like the Rangers did yesterday when the news broke that the Department of Player Safety doesn’t even wan...

Sorry LaMelo fans, but he shouldn’t be Rookie of the Year
If LaMelo Ball wins the NBA Rookie of the Year, it won’t be because of his body of work....

Desperate for a Jeopardy gig, Turd Ferguson makes an appearance at the Kentucky Derby
Maybe Aaron Rodgers just doesn’t want to be Aaron Rodgers right now. And who could blame him?...