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This week in the NBA, November 18, 2023
If you went to bed last night thinking that it’s a shame that the 76ers Kelly Oubre Jr. was injured in a hit-and-run accident on Saturday while walking alone in Philly, you may have been confused this morning to see much of X (formerly Twitter) losing its collective mind and suggesting the Oubre Jr....

Draymond Green is straight out of the WWE — and the NBA is better for it
There is a reason that professional wrestling has remained popular for decades even though the action is scripted. The business understands that in order to sell a story there has to be a hero and a heel. Cheering is fun, but jeering is cathartic. In team sports, the heel is automatically included l...

AEW <i>and </i>WWE fans were winners this time around
For all the noise about “WWE vs. AEW” and whatever that means to everybody, they don’t really go head to head on our screens very much. WWE pulled NXT off of Wednesdays when it mostly got its brains beaten in by the burgeoning AEW Dynamite. AEW has struggled on the Saturday nights that WWE runs a Pr...

Did Joel Embiid commit to Team USA just for the tampering?
Apparently, all it takes to convince American hoops players to represent their country is an insult or a loss at the FIBAs. Whether it was Noah Lyles, the B team’s fourth-place finish, or the human instinct to ape the cool kids, Team USA looks to be loaded for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. ...

On-campus pregame shows are the latest casualty of college football’s ‘evolution’
As someone who was programmed to watch college football every fall Saturday from birth, the on-campus pregame show (now plural) was the background noise to my morning routine. It’s always fun to see how drunk college kids get just to stand outside and scream on cue for three hours. All of the analys...

IDIOT OF THE MONTH: Who’s worse — the alleged sex pest or the Nazi enthusiast?
Welcome to Deadspin’s IDIOT OF THE MONTH, beautiful reader! We’ve got a good one for you this time. ...

WWE gets richer while 100 employees get the boot
Time moves fast for a company trying to send its stock price up a percentage of a point. Yes, this is how big corporate America works. Cut employee expenditure to as lean as possible while maximizing revenue. WWE cashing in on a new $1.4 billion deal to move Smackdown back to USA Network is a perfec...

XFL, USFL wisely begin talks to merge leagues
Nearly everything Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has touched over the past 20 years in sports & entertainment has turned into gold. His Midas touch began in pro wrestling behind Vince McMahon and the WWF/WWE, then carried over to the big screen in Hollywood. Johnson revamped McMahon’s twice-failed XFL pr...

LeBron James, wife and 2 associates named in federal PED investigation
There hasn’t been a performance-enhancing drugs scandal in basketball. At least, not to the level of, say, the likes of BALCO and Major League Baseball. As close as we came was when the NBA started testing players for HGH before the beginning of the 2015-16 season. The trendy thing to do online at t...

CM Punk fired from AEW after altercation with Jack Perry
CM Punk has been fired by All Elite Wrestling. The 44-year-old wrestler allegedly got into a backstage altercation with Jack Perry before AEW’s All In pay-per-view in London on Sunday, and was subsequently suspended before his dismissal....

On its biggest stage ever at Wembley, AEW was its AEW-est
AEW took its big shot Sunday, putting on their first-ever stadium show and their first show in the UK at Wembley Stadium. It’s impossible to define what success would be for the show, other than selling a ton of tickets, which they did. Overall, the show was great, while also being everything else A...

Predicting the AEW All In London card
All Elite Wrestling’s first show in the United Kingdom was supposed to be in July 2020. Due to obvious reasons, that didn’t happen. It took three years for AEW to finally run a show in England, but what a way for them to make a debut, with one of the largest crowds in professional wrestling history ...

The biggest show in wrestling history should be on free TV
Let’s be clear about what the main story is about AEW’s All In show at Wembley Stadium on Sunday, which has currently sold 80,000+ tickets and will be the highest-paid attendance for a wrestling show ever (despite whatever figures WWE makes up about past WrestleManias). The story isn’t whether or no...

A tribute to Terry Funk, an unsung wrestling god
Legendary wrestler Terry Funk died yesterday. He was 79. I am certainly nowhere near a talented enough writer to eulogize him properly. Nor have I been a fan long enough or deeply enough for long enough to try and encompass his whole career. The thing is, no one is, so it’s not a personal failing. F...

Don’t let the door hit you on the ass, Ronda Rousey
It all started so well, which is generally how things go for Ronda Rousey. ...

Maybe I’ll just give up on the AEW Women’s Division
On Friday night, Athena and Willow Nightingale had one of the best matches, not just women’s matches, of 2023 on Ring of Honor’s Death Before Dishonor PPV. Not only was it the culmination of a three-match trilogy through both ROH and AEW, or the budding of a rivalry that will probably last years, bu...

Bryan Danielson vs. Kazuchika Okada might be AEW’s biggest dream yet
At its heart, AEW’s working ethos has always been to give fans what they want. What that means, most of the time, is to put on matches that seemed impossible before, or that their fans have been hoping to see one day. Whatever the hiccups at times, whatever the drama, whatever the long way around th...

Zlatan Ibrahimović retired from soccer, and the world is a bit duller today
To say we’ll be Zlatan-less is probably wide of the mark. Whatever Zlatan Ibrahimović goes on to do, you can be sure it’ll be loud and full of bravado. But he won’t be on the field, which is a loss for the sport, if only because there simply can’t be anyone like him again. First off, no one’s going...

Don Callis shows everyone what wrestling heat really looks like
Pro wrestling is America’s most enduring art form. Which might tell you a lot about us as a country, but whatever it tells you you probably already knew. It predates movies, rock music, jazz, baseball, and even the cheeseburger. Wrestling is the only thing we do well that keeps going. And occasional...
