The sports figures we've lost in 2022
Here’s a look at the athletes and sports figures we’ve lost in 2022....
Josh Donaldson still doesn't get it
Josh Donaldson had all week to come up with something better than this. Whether he couldn’t or wouldn’t, he didn’t, and just like his racist comment to Tim Anderson on Saturday, it’s Donaldson’s lousy actions that mean more than his lousy words....
Is the NHL’s Presidents’ Trophy curse real?
The Florida Panthers breezed through the first round of the playoffs and then got bounced from the second round so fast we barely had time for the annual discourse about the Presidents’ Trophy and whether it’s a curse for a team’s Stanley Cup hopes....
Just say it: Josh Donaldson made a racist comment to Tim Anderson
Our media apparatus remains completely unprepared to deal with the challenges it faces, out of fear that calling things what they are — telling the truth — will be too controversial and cause a backlash....
Oilers enjoy the sounds of silence at expense of Calgary crowd
It’s tempting to try to glean some kind of lesson from big games. We all try to do it, all the time, just as fans. The playoffs are not all that different from the final few episodes of a prestige television series’ season. You know there’s not much left, and you’re looking for any clues you can get...
Tale of the tape: Battle of Alberta vs. Battle of Florida
The second round of the playoffs worked, in part, the way that the NHL dreamed up when it went to this postseason format of divisional brackets. You can question the wisdom of it happening in the second round, but we’re getting the Battle of Alberta and the Battle of Florida now....
Shohei Ohtani is amazing and Michele Tafoya tweeted something dumb
Michele Tafoya is no stranger to controversy, whether made up out of whole cloth and not really even involving her, or overlooked when she was too cozy in her sideline job with some of the NFL’s worst humans, or completely of her own doing by going on cable news and advocating for white supremacist ...
Leafs on precipice of some kind of history
Nobody ever tweeted about a Florida Panthers playoff series victory before last night, when Carter Verhaeghe, off a pass from Claude Giroux – trade deadline acquisition and bringer of tons of vicarious Panthers fans from Philadelphia – lifted Florida to a 4-3 overtime win over the Capitals, and a 4-...
It’s getting late pretty early in Boston
The Red Sox won 92 games last season and went to the ALCS. They had a fair amount of turnover in the offseason, losing Eduardo Rodriguez, Kyle Schwarber, and Hunter Renfroe in free agency, but Boston also added Michael Wacha and Rich Hill to the rotation, got Jackie Bradley Jr. to come back to their...
You don’t have to care about the NFL schedule yet
For anyone who’s ever sat at work, thinking, “this meeting could’ve been an email,” this question is for you: Why are you transfixed by the NFL’s schedule being released in bits and pieces for a whole week?...
Kyle Busch could miss race for daughter’s birth, and good for him
It’s a very cool thing for Trevor Bayne that there’s a chance he’ll get back behind the wheel in NASCAR’s Cup Series. Bayne, the Rich Strike-esque winner of the 2011 Daytona 500 on his 20th birthday, is the standby driver if Kyle Busch’s surrogate goes into labor and Busch misses either Darlington t...
Philly’s Joel Embiid, Dallas’ supporting cast help get their teams back into series
The last two NBA Finals losers, the Heat and Suns, are in very similar positions in the second round of the playoffs. Both took care of business at home, then went on the road Friday night and got smoked....
Whew, there’s been a lot of bad hockey so far
It’s wonderful as a hockey fan that in this new era of ESPN coverage, playoff games have staggered starts – 7, 7:30, 9:30, and 10 Eastern – so that in this first round, the most exciting round of the playoffs where anything can happen, we can watch as much playoff hockey as possible and not be stuck...
Are the Yankees frauds? Will the Angels come down to earth?
Saying “it’s only April” is out, because it’s been May for a few days now. We’re about 15 percent of the way through baseball’s regular season, give or take depending on how many games each team has played, and while that’s not a big sample size, the teams that are in first place now have those wins...
Unlikely heroes lead way to start NBA playoffs
The stars were out for the first day of the NBA playoffs, with Donovan Mitchelll scoring 32 points to lead the Jazz to a 99-93 win in Dallas, Karl-Anthony Towns putting up 29 points and 13 boards to lead the Timberwolves to a Game 1 upset in Memphis, 130-117, and then Tyrese Maxey scored 38 points f...
Joe Maddon out-galaxy brains himself, manages to win anyway
There are a couple of key questions in baseball over the past several years that regularly intersect: “Why can’t the Angels win anything when they have Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, two unique talents among the greatest the game has ever seen?” and “How did Joe Maddon ever win a World Series with th...
The end of the NBA regular season is nigh
Because the NBA regular season doesn’t really matter — seriously, the barometer of advancing to the postseason this year was, “are you better than the clock-struck-midnight on Julius Randle version of the Knicks or the bunch of corpses that LeBron James couldn’t animate to 35 wins in Los Angeles?” —...
Can we please just watch the ballgame?
Major League Baseball made this exclusive deal with Apple for Friday night games, and Mets-Nationals was the very first one, Max Scherzer’s debut for New York (which the Mets won 7-3), against his old team, featuring JUAN SOTO, whom the broadcast gushed over as constantly as he gushed over Apple – b...
Deadspin’s 2022 MLB predictions: The good, the bad, the frustrating
You don’t need sportswriters to tell you that the Dodgers are going to be better than the Diamondbacks this year. You already know that. At the same time, it feels wrong to go into the baseball season without looking ahead at it, without trying to gaze into a crystal ball to make some kind of picks....
Mississippi Boondoggle comes back to Favre’s drug that maybe never was
Brett Favre has never satisfactorily answered why he took a million bucks of state money, intended for needy kids, to do a radio PSA. He just kind of said that he did it, and promised to pay the money back, and then tried not to do so....