yo Page 145 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Does the NHL vet its owners?
I wish I could write stuff like this as fiction. But unless you wrote it as Mel Brooks-ian farce, I don’t know how you’d make it believable. And I have to say that I really want to see the city of Glendale actually chain up the doors to Gila River Arena when Coyotes players attempt to show up for a ...

5 totally realistic trade destinations for Damian Lillard
Any rational Trail Blazers fan would avoid watching the team right now. Damian Lillard, C.J. McCollum, and Anfernee Simons are all injured. ESPN.com’s promotion for its Portland-Golden State matchup Wednesday is a “Top five Lillard trades they’d love to see” article, and a clip of Stephen A. Smith s...

Major League Soccer has a better ‘Rooney Rule’ than the NFL
Eighteen years ago, the most prejudiced sports league in American professional sports (Major League Baseball is a close second) created their version of “affirmative action” when they came up with the Rooney Rule — named after the legendary Steelers owner Dan Rooney — in hopes of helping diverse can...

Watch Lincoln Riley at your own risk
It looks like USC used up their entire athletic budget on Lincoln Riley’s $100 million contract. The video of his introduction as the Trojans’ new head coach is making the Twitter rounds, an introduction that can truly only be described as a combination of an SNL skit, a vivid melatonin-induced drea...

Russell Westbrook is tired of hearing about his alleged phone call to Kawhi Leonard in the summer of 2019
The Lakers’ Russell Westbrook-LeBron James experiment hasn’t exactly worked out how everyone in Los Angeles had hoped coming into the season. But if Westbrook had been able to persuade Kawhi Leonard to bring him along on his way to LA a couple of years ago, Westbrook would have been a Clipper and no...

These Bulls are so much goddamn fun
I won’t lie to you, dear reader. Things are pretty bleak around here in Chicago, sports-wise. And actually beyond sports-wise, but I’m not qualified to discuss those things, really. Our center, the Bears, are an elaborate prank played on all of us by a trickster god, or at least they’d better be. Fi...

The Philadelphia Union got screwed, but there was probably little MLS could do
We don’t think any of the current seasons taking place now as “COVID seasons” like we did of the previous ones played in empty stadiums/arenas or in weird, neutral venues altogether. But it still very much is, which the Philadelphia Union learned the all-too hard way yesterday....

A Hall of Fame announcement we can all get behind
In the past, I’ve tried to remove myself from Hall-of-Fame debates. Because at the end of the day, they’re really no more useful or material than the Oscars or Grammys. You’re basically debating someone’s opinion. And because of the esteem these things have gotten over the years, you’re debating the...

These teams did not go quietly into the night in Week 13, their seasons may be done but they gave their home fans at least one last smile to take into the holidays
Be honest with yourselves because I’m about to be honest with you, I didn’t expect much from this Week 13 slate of the NFL season. With just over 1/4th of the regular season remaining, there were four teams on a bye week and the only one of those four teams has a record under .500 (the Carolina Pant...

Management in Europe remains an unclaimed frontier for Yanks
While more and more American players populate the playing squads of clubs across Europe, that hasn’t spurred more esteem for American managers in the game’s bedrock. After today, only Pelligrino Matarazzo of Stuttgart remains in the Big 5 leagues, or really anywhere significant. That’s because, afte...

CFP is as easy as 1-2-3… or 2-3-4
For weeks, we’ve been dissecting, diagramming, and divining what the College Football Playoff might or should look like at the end of this zany season, and then Saturday’s conference championships came along and made everything pretty darn clear....

Sports have a Gen Z problem, and it could take some experimenting to fix
In 2020, a survey of several Gen Z Americans revealed that only 53 percent considered themselves sports fans, and only 21 percent considered themselves to be “avid” sports fans. Both these figures are the lowest of any age demographic. Gen Z has shown a general disinterest toward professional sports...

NFL Week 13: Baltimore is better, but Pittsburgh has a good history in these types of games
Week 13 is normally when we start seeing the NFL playoff picture unfold. However, in 2021, we’re still unsure if there are even any good teams in the league. The NFL is so tightly knit nowadays that even the 0-10-1 Detroit Lions still have not been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs....

Down-and-backs never hurt anybody
In high school, I skipped my ninth-grade team and started on JV. It’s still – top to bottom – the most talented team I’ve ever played on. We were even better than the varsity team. But, in one game we were just going through the motions. At halftime, our coach made us do cardio in the locker room – ...

MLB teams want a 2021 Platinum Glove winner to change positions?
Stop the free agent talk! The lockout has commenced and with it there will be no more free agent signings until MLB and the MLB Players’ Association agree on a new CBA for the next five years. That being said, there are still several big-name free agents who remained unsigned through the Wednesday C...

Who wants the Arizona Coyotes?
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but rumors have started that the Arizona Coyotes could be sold and moved to Houston. I know, it’s been a whole 12 minutes since the last one:...

Here’s a workaround for enjoying Alabama’s talent without enduring ‘Roll Tide!’ chants
As a life ethos, I don’t watch Alabama unless it’s the title game. Not the SEC title game, THE title game. I take that back, I watch the title game and as much of the Tennessee-Alabama game as my girlfriend can stand. They’re too good even for their loaded conference, so save for a title game or ups...

Wait, I thought the NBA was lowering the age for draft eligibility?
The G League celebrated its 20th season of competition this season but is only on its second of genuine interest to NBA fans. Instead of the occasional player who makes the leap from AAA to a rotation player or a raw draft pick trying to hone their skills, there wasn’t too much to get amped about un...

The votes are in, and Aaron Judge is NYC’s (sports) mayor!
The Board of Elections in New York has released the full results of the mayoral election, confirming that Democrat Eric Adams got 753,801 votes, more than doubling Republican Curtis Sliwa’s tally of 302,680. Of course, we already knew that Adams won in a landslide — we knew that it was going to be t...

MLS is just silly, and it loves it, apparently
The MLS playoffs concluded their second round last night, with some of its trademark goofiness. And in true nothing-means-anything fashion of the whole league, both No. 1 seeds failed to win a game....