🔥 Puck Poverty

Welcome back to our weekly pick 'em game. Once again, we’re putting five $20 gift cards up for grabs for anyone who can correctly pick the winners of five games. 

Click here to lock in your picks for this week. 

Share this link to your fantasy group chat, Tinder date, your boss…. whoever you want. 

💔 The Belichick–UNC era could already be coming to an end. Bill and the Tar Heels are reportedly in negotiations to buy him out of his contract and cut ties after just six games as head coach. 

• We wonder if it had anything to do with his 24-year-old girlfriend constantly being on the sidelines, or Bill banning Patriots scouts, or not letting UNC social media post Patriot players highlights, or the fact that the team is 2-3. It’s anyone’s guess really.  

⚾️ Blue Jays sent the Yankees to Cancun. The Jays broke the MLB record for most runs scored in the first two games of the playoffs, the Yankees bounced back with a comeback win in a do-or-die game three, but Toronto buried them (with a bullpen game) on Wednesday night. 

• A ridiculous 9.5 million Canadians tuned in to watch the first two playoff games. That’s almost a quarter of the entire country.
  

• Jays manager John Schneider had an all-time quote to spark the champagne celebration, and Vladdy — who tore the Yankees a new one all series — summed up the ALDS perfectly: 

🗡️ Mark Sanchez might be a certified psycho. In one of the most bizarre stories of the year, the former NFL QB (and the last player to take a playoff snap for the Jets) was arrested for drunkenly chasing and attacking a 69-year old truck driver in Indianapolis. The driver told police that Sanchez was "trying to kill" him and that he had to stab him in self-defence. Tough look. 

⛳️ Tennis legend Andy Murray had a rough go in his first pro golf tournament. Sitting in a deep bunker, Murray hit his ball about three feet in the wrong direction. He did recover later in the round (kind of), sinking a 70-foot birdie putt that left the broadcasting crew sounding genuinely pissed that a tennis player could make golf look so easy. 

🏀 A Lakers fan is suing LeBron for his stupid Hennessy ad. After LeBron teased a big announcement on social media (which looked a lot like a retirement press conference) Lakers fans paid nearly $1,000 to get into the arena for the first game of the farewell season. As it turns out, that announcement was a Hennessy sponsorship (super lame), and all those ticket prices came back down to earth — causing one particular ticket holder to sue him for fraud.  

• He’s got almost zero chance of winning in court, but we respect the hustle. 

🏈 We have a new contender for messiest play of the NFL season. Somehow the Titans scored a touchdown on a play that saw the football turned over three times. It doesn’t matter if it's pretty — when you’re 0-4, you’ll take what you can get. 

The best hockey player in the world is bagging the same salary as an average MLB reliever or a bench player in the NBA. 

Connor McDavid just signed a very team-friendly deal that will see him make $12.5 million for each of the next two seasons. That might be life changing money for most of us, but compared to the rest of pro sports, it’s borderline disrespectful. 

• Oilers fans should be counting their lucky stars that this guy’s still in Edmonton. McDavid was already a bargain on his current eight-year, $100 million deal he signed in 2017.

• Luckily, he was willing to take an $8 million a year pay cut to let the Oilers duct-tape a roster together that can get over the Stanley Cup hump.

He’s not the first guy to do this: 

• Sidney Crosby has consistently taken team discounts to help the Penguins with their salary cap situation. 

• Tom Brady famously signed a cheap three-year $33 million deal in 2013 to save the Patriots $8 million in cap space.
  

• Jose Ramirez signed one of the most team-friendly deals in MLB history with the Cleveland Guardians. He was told that extra money would be reinvested in the team (shocker: it wasn’t). 

Big picture: In a world where the best baseball players are inking $700 million contracts — and mediocre QBs are bringing in $265 mil — it feels criminal that hockey’s biggest stars are making scraps. 

Sure, they don’t bring in the same kind of TV, ticket or sponsorship dollars, but they grind out 82 games, lose teeth, and beat the lights out of each other for 60 minutes a night. It seems insane that some of these guys get paid like mid-level accountants.

Shoutout to @immattyice for hitting this playoff baseball centipede by only betting on pitcher strikeouts. Taking the under on K’s for a guy that struck out 12 in his last start is as gutty as it gets. This guy knows ball. 

Check out the full parlay here.

🎞️ On this day in 2022, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen won his second Formula One World Championship with a win at the Japanese Grand Prix. Verstappen went on to win the next two drivers championships, but that four-year reign looks to be coming to an end this season. 

Alright, that’s enough yelling for one Friday.

Got a hotter take? Think we missed something? Want to argue that the Leafs are actually cursed by a 1932 ghost?

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Forward it to a friend who lives for the group chat debate.