The Mourning After Page 53 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Playoff spots land on some MLB teams, Celtics only land on their face
Major League Baseball got its final-day “bonanza,” which it will use as a selling point whenever they get around to expanding the playoffs for good. While the American League slots had been sorted for a while, the National League had a smorgasbord of teams that got lost on their way to somewhere els...

Celtics stay alive and the hockey gods make an appearance
There are a maximum of 12 NBA games left this season thanks to the Celtics keeping their season alive....
![Here's what Charles Barkley got wrong and should have talked about last night [UPDATED]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/iskrt2uw8gabejus9bkt.jpg)
Here's what Charles Barkley got wrong and should have talked about last night [UPDATED]
While the Lakers took a commanding lead in the Western Conference final last night, thanks to the fact that they bothered to pay attention to rebounding again, that probably won’t be what everyone will be talking about in the days to come. Which is fine, even good, because the NBA has used these bub...

Steven Stamkos gets his Willis Reed moment
The “Willis Reed Game” has grown in proportion as an epic through the decades, as these things tend to do as the years tick off. By this point, it wouldn’t be a surprise if a lot of younger fans assume that Willis Reed hobbled out of the Knicks locker room missing a leg, hopped around for 65 points,...

This is the future baseball wants for you; and eat, drink and be Murray
MLB will have you believe that this was a dramatic night in the last week of its season. And on the surface, it does look like that. Teams got more bunched, there were walk-offs and extra innings and standings swings and such. However, flip up the hood and you’ll see the engine is just a hamster tak...

Lightning Do Mighty Fine Impression of Dallas Stars to Tie Series With Dallas Stars
Every Stanley Cup Final, and really any championship series, ends up being some sort of referendum on where that league and sport is. Because original ideas generally are treated like an infestation of Asian Longhorned Beetles by 75 percent of every front office, no matter the sport, and whomever wi...

Not-LeBron, Six-Putts, and the Padres - Everything you Missed While Watching the NFL on Sunday
It’s likely that before you enter a playoff series against LeBron James, you understand there might be a game or two that’s going to be taken from you (unless you’re the Warriors, in which case it’ll be three games in a row you’ll never live down no matter what you do). He’ll go supernova, shoot som...

The Celtics Just Needed a Good Scream
Sometimes, it’s good to just scream your problems away?...

This is What Happens When You Piss Off LeBron
Earlier this summer, “The Last Dance” gave the world a look at how Michael Jordan used every slight, real or perceived, as motivation....

Let's Enjoy the Celtics' Implosion. Plus, the Yankees Continue Hitting Homers Like Crazy
The Celtics’ season is going down the toilet....

Thanks to Big Ten's Reversal, Another Year of Disappointment Awaits Wolverines Fans
Big Ten football is coming back in October, much to the delight of Donald Trump and the universities that will get to resume cashing in on unpaid labor....

Magic Johnson Owns Clippers, too, With Lethal Twitter Takedown
There will be no greater takedown of the Los Angeles Clippers, who blew a 3-1 series lead in which they held leads of 16 and 19 points in Games 5 and 6, than the one delivered by Magic Johnson, the only completely sincere and benign person on Twitter....

Serena Turned Back Again From Record She Doesn’t Need Because She's Already the G.O.A.T.
While the NFL was once again showcasing the worst America has to offer, Serena Williams took the court to show the best it has to offer. It was her 11th straight U.S. Open semifinal, itself a ridiculous record that gets lost in Serena’s 23 Grand Slam titles. ...

Islanders Learning There Just Might Not Be Anything They Can Do
Buzzer-beaters are supposed to be the territory of the NBA’s Orlando bubble, but the Tampa Bay Lightning moved the phenomenon 2800 miles to the Northwest on Wednesday night. Nikita Kucherov capped off the Bolts’ best offensive foray of the night by scoring off Ryan McDonagh’s cross-ice pass with jus...

Your Contractually Obligated 'Bucks Stop Here' Joke
Without Giannis, the Milwaukee Bucks always faced a mountain to keep their series going against the Miami Heat last night. So it proved, as they simply ran out of gas, weapons, and ideas and exited stage left out of the bubble in five games. It’s the second year in a row having the league’s best rec...

It’s Always Important to Stop and Laugh at the Yankees
Some will disregard this baseball season as an experimental farce (and it basically is), and they will do it even more so and with more passion as their teams slip further down the standings. So you can expect a lot of cries of “Charlatan!” from New York in the coming days, and it’s not like Yankees...

Joe West Is A Plague
You ever ask yourself what would happen if you took Tony Soprano, fed him nothing but baked beans out of a can for four months while only allowing him to listen to Hank Williams Jr. songs? The answer, my friends, is Joe West, who worked his shit-kicked-into-his-own-brains voodoo again yesterday....

Here’s One Way to Get Revenge Without Throwing a Baseball at Someone’s Skull
Miguel Sanó destroyed a baseball on Saturday, launching a Joe Jiménez pitch off the facing of the second deck in Minneapolis to pull the Twins within a run of the Tigers in the eighth inning. Sanó then had the game-tying hit in the ninth before Byron Buxton beat out a walkoff infield single....

Jimmy Buckets is About to Burst Bucks’ Bubble
Hope you enjoy this Labor Day weekend, because once it’s over, there’s a whole slew of takes on the way....

The Raptors and Celtics Would Have It Be Such an End ...
It probably won’t be the basketball that will be remembered about this Orlando bubble to finish the 2019-2020 season, and rightly so. That doesn’t mean some of the teams and players aren’t going to try. The Celtics and Raptors engaged in an absolute bonkers ending to Game 3, and when it was all said...