By the standards and practices of the Vegas Golden Knights, John Tortorella had it coming. His first three-game losing streak as the team's head coach was enough for Knights general manager Kelly McCrimmon to decide he'd seen enough, and the fact that the three losses in question came in the Stanley Cup Final mattered not. Team policy is team policy.

Gerard Gallant, the team's first coach, got…

The National Hockey League is no more prone to imitation than any other species of parrot, particularly when something that seems counterintuitive works out well. It is for that reason and that reason only that the news out of Edmonton this day is not as gobsmacking at it seems.

Wait, Edmonton? What the hell does Edmonton have to do with anything, and why should it pull one's attention from what…

Amid all the joyful preening and proclamations of destiny deferred but no longer denied, the most obstreperous of New York Knickerbockers fans arose today to the knowledge that they were dead-ass wrong about coach/reformed pariah Mike Brown.

At least for now, anyway. There is still another series to be played, and the team the Knicks will face in their first NBA Finals since 1999 will have just…

It should not have taken a month and change for the Golden State Warriors to figure out what they wanted to do with head coach Steve Kerr, nor should it have taken that long for Kerr to figure out what to do with them. If management wanted to punish their Hall of Fame-bound head coach for allegedly mismanaging Jonathan Kuminga (we'll wait for you in the back to settle down), they should have…

Nothing is potentially as pathetic as an old-guy tantrum, and yet nothing is so potentially entertaining as an old-guy tantrum when the old guy isn't worried about his gig. Enter Rick Bowness, the head coach of the Columbus Blue Jackets and someone whose face would be on the $1,000 bill if there was a country called Dontgiveafuckistan.

Bowness is 71 years old and has coached 899 games since his…

The Milwaukee Bucks fired Doc Rivers on Monday. What a terrible time they have all had. The Bucks failed to advance out of the first round of the playoffs in**** two previous tries under Rivers; this season, beset by injuries to Giannis Antetokounmpo and showing that characteristic idealessness of a Rivers-coached team, they played to a miserable 32-win record, missed the play-in, wound up in a…

In December of 1995, Patrick Roy let in nine goals in half a game at home against the Detroit Red Wings. With the crowd getting on his case, and the team already in a spiral, Roy exited the ice and promptly told Canadiens brass that he would not be suiting up for Montreal again. A few days later, Roy got his wish with a trade to the Colorado Avalanche, who would go on to win the Stanley Cup that…

In a move that perhaps stems from restlessness or jealousy over the federal government getting all the attention, the state of Florida has called for the NFL to get more racist. James Uthmeier, the state's attorney general, announced on March 25 that he would be sending a letter to the league to demand it get rid of "the so-called Rooney Rule," throwing into question his understanding of what…

Desperate times call for desperate measures, which of course means that Tottenham Hotspur and John Tortorella are in the news simultaneously.

Sadly, their paths do not converge, or anyway do not _yet_ converge, beyond the fact that Spurs have fired another coach in their Salute To Catastrophe season, and Torts got another coaching job in a different sport on a different continent. But we must…

Asked what advice she’d give Tennessee head coach Kim Caldwell after the Lady Vols’ 93-50 loss to South Carolina on Sunday, a diplomatic Dawn Staley demurred: “I probably wouldn’t say it publicly.” That makes one! Caldwell, at her postgame press conference, had a lot to say publicly in the wake of the worst loss in program history.

“We just had a lot of quit in us tonight, and that’s been…