washington Page 36 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Pedro Florimon Ruins The Nationals With Slick Glove Fake-Out
Phillies starter Vince Velasquez and four relievers held a banged-up and disappointing Nationals lineup to just two hits in Saturday’s 3-1 Phillies victory. The Nats engineered eight walks in the game, but left eight runners on base and were 0-3 with runners in scoring position. They did, however, p...

Bryce Harper Makes For One Badass Leadoff Hitter
New Nationals manager Dave Martinez moved Bryce Harper to the leadoff spot on May 1, with the Nationals sitting at a disappointing 13-16 on the season and mired in an offensive slump that saw the team produce more than four runs in a game just once over its previous nine games....

Sidney Crosby Makes Everyone Better
Here’s a stat—a quirk?—that has very little to do with anything else in this blog but is too amazing not to lead with: In this series, Sidney Crosby has been on the ice for all 10 of Pittsburgh’s goals....

The RGIII™ Brand Is Dead, And Here's The Death Certificate
Want to see something really sad? Look at what’s become of Robert Griffin III’s stable of trademarks:...

Former Washington DT A.J. Francis Rips Team On Instagram After Signing With Giants: "Your Logo Is Racist"
Defensive tackle A.J. Francis signed with the New York Giants today after being released by his former team, Washington, on Monday. He celebrated the move with an Instagram post that’s way more good riddance than goodbye. ...

NHL Suspends Tom Wilson Three Games For Jaw-Breaking Hit
Less than 24 hours before Game 4 of the Capitals and Penguins’ second-round series—which Washington leads 2-1—the NHL announced that it has suspended Capitals enforcer Tom Wilson three games for his hit on Penguins forward Zach Aston-Reese in Game 3, which broke the Pittsburgh player’s jaw and gave ...

Report: Washington Cheerleaders Were Told To Serve As Escorts For Rich Sponsors On Unsavory Costa Rica Trip
Of the many queasy revelations in Juliet Macur’s story in the New York Times today about the Washington Redskins’ sketchy-unto-sleazy treatment of its cheerleaders, the most mind-boggling concerns a trip to Costa Rica in 2013. Five cheerleaders told Macur that the team had them serve as escorts for ...

The Capitals-Penguins Blood Feud Now Maybe Has Some Spit In It
Familiarity breeds contempt, yes, but also, contempt breeds contempt. The Capitals and Penguins would dislike each other even if they didn’t meet four times a season and then again seemingly every spring, but the prolificity of the rivalry gives the bad blood the time and exposure it needs to ripen ...

Alex Ovechkin Pulls A Crosby And Beats The Penguins
With 1:07 to play in tonight’s Caps-Penguins Game 3, which was tied at three, Alexander Ovechkin delivered a stellar game winner on a two-on-one to put Washington up 2-1 in the series. And he did it by batting a puck from mid-air and into the net in the signature style of his rival Sidney Crosby. (S...

Tom Wilson Strikes Again
Washington Capitals bruiser Tom Wilson, after escaping discipline for knocking Pittsburgh’s Brian Dumoulin out of Game 2, made his presence felt again in Game 3 of their series tonight. As Penguins forward Zach Aston-Reese tried to take the puck out of his own zone near the benches in the second per...

Isn't This A Goal? It Sure Looks Like A Goal
Soon after the Capitals killed a Penguins power play, at about the 11-minute mark of the third period of today’s Game 2, with the Capitals holding a 3-1 lead, the Penguins scored what sure looked an awful lot like a goal:...

The Raptors Finally, Mercifully Spared Us Any More Of The Washington Wizards
The Wizards, who won 43 games during the regular season—that’s three fewer than the Denver Nuggets, who failed to make the playoffs in the much tougher Western Conference—and were the Eastern Conference’s 8th seed, were eliminated on their home floor by the Toronto Raptors Friday night. ...

Penguins Remind Us That The Capitals Can Never Relax
Behind a lead-off goal 17 seconds in from Evgeny Kuznetsov, and a sniper shot at the start of the third from Alex Ovechkin, the Capitals were cruising tonight with a two-goal lead in Game 1 of their second-round series against the Penguins. But in the span of five minutes, it all fell apart, as thre...

Here We Go Again
With their 4-2 series win over Columbus, the Capitals are going to play in their seventh second-round playoff series in the last 11 years. That’s incredible! Don’t ask how they did in those second-round series....

All The Wizards Did Was Heat Up
So the Washington Wizards will not be swept by the Toronto Raptors. Friday night the Wizards got hot from the floor, survived several instances of their players being crabby, runaway buttheads, and grabbed Game 3 on their home court. Marcin Gortat shaved his mohawk; John Wall cooled it with the turn...

Bradley Beal Says Scott Brooks Apologized To Him For His Role In Beal's Dreadful Playoffs
Bradley Beal, like his team in general, is not having a good playoff series against the Toronto Raptors. Beal shot just 3-for-11 in Game 2, scoring just nine points and picking up four fouls en route to an atrocious plus-minus of -34 in 25 minutes. Overall, Beal is scoring 14 points per game and has...

The Wizards Of Aughts: The Post-Millennium Washington Wizards And The Bloggers Who Immortalized Them
The late-model Washington Wizards are broadly competent, secretly mediocre, spotty, and more boring than they are not. They could be nutshelled as an equal and opposite reaction to their counterparts of a decade ago. Those Wiz teams, which weren’t better but sure were stranger, boasted a bigger coll...

Katharine Graham Was Not To Be Fucked With<em></em>
This was first published as “Pillar of the Post” in the May 20, 1976 issue of The National Observer. It appears here with the author’s permission....

The Raptors Put The Wizards In The Trash, Where They Belong
The competitive part of last night’s Game 2 between the Toronto Raptors and Washington Wizards was over, long over, by the time some combination of shame and embarrassment sparked a smidgen of detectable pride or competitive intensity in any Washington player. The result was a laughably misleading ...

Capitals Somehow Manage Not To Lose An Overtime Playoff Game
It had been two games of the same script so far in the Capitals-Blue Jackets series—Washington loses on a gut punch in overtime—but tonight, the Caps themselves actually caught a bit of luck, as they survived double overtime to beat Columbus on the road in Game 3, 3-2....