Top 50 sports stories of the 2010s

Braden pitched in only five seasons and had a career 4.16 ERA. He was largely an unremarkable pitcher, save for one memorable afternoon. On Mother’s Day, May 9, 2010, the A’s starter pitched the 19th perfect game in MLB history. To make the moment more special, Braden’s grandmother, who raised him after his mom died of cancer as a teenager, was present for the occasion.

LeBron James has had a great career, but it will forever be defined, in part, by one huge misstep. James, the best player in the NBA, was a free agent for the first time. He decided to have a TV special to announce where he would be signing. Many assumed the special meant he was returning to Cleveland. Instead, he took his talents to South Beach, joining the Miami Heat. Cavaliers fans didn’t take it well, but eventually LeBron would make amends.

The Blackhawks had the longest Stanley Cup drought in the NHL. Eventually, they started to get some new pieces in place, including young guns Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane. For the first time in 20 years, Chicago returned to the Stanley Cup Finals and this time won it all, taking down the Philadelphia Flyers to make history.

The Spanish team of the turn of the decade is one of the all-time great squads. Names like Xavi, Andres Iniesta, and David Villa are forever ingrained in the annals of the country’s sports heroes. After winning the Euros in 2008, a fine accomplishment in and of itself, Spain won its first-ever World Cup in 2010. The country would then proceed to win another Euro title in 2012, putting together a truly dominant stretch of international soccer glory.

The 2010s were defined in men’s tennis by three men: Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. And yet this is the tennis match that made this list. The match at Wimbledon between Isner and Mahut was completely insane. It’s the longest match in tennis history; it took them THREE DAYS to finish. Overall, it lasted 11 hours and five minutes, dwarfing the previous record for the longest tennis match. For the record, Isner won.

Galarraga finished his career with a 4.78 ERA and a losing record. One day in 2010, he came oh-so-close to achieving fame but instead he ended up in the land of sports infamy. The Tigers starter had retired 26 straight Cleveland Indians, and he should have had the 27th out. Instead, first base umpire, in a time before replay, incorrectly ruled Jason Donald safe, costing Galarraga the perfect game. Unfortunately for Joyce, this happened in the world of social media. To his credit Joyce was apologetic after the fact, and to his credit Galarraga bore no grudge. What could have been an ugly incident instead turned out to be an unfortunate situation that still saw some of the best out of two sports lifers.

In the ‘90s, there were three NBA lockouts, though only one cost us any games. After years of relative labor peace, an increasingly empowered NBA player base refused to step down against the NBA owners and also their hatchet man commissioner David Stern. The eight-month lockout in 2011 was the longest in NBA history, and the season would end up being cut to 66 games.

Speaking of Stern, he wielded his power in a different way in 2011. The New Orleans Hornets were then owned by the league, and it had a big piece in point guard Chris Paul. The team tried to trade Paul to the Lakers in a three-team deal, but Stern canceled it for what he called “basketball reasons.” It was a real baffler, and the teams tried to appeal the decision. Their pleas fell on deaf ears, and in the end the Hornets ended up trading Paul to the Clippers a couple of days later.

Jeremy Lin was an undrafted point guard out of Harvard when the Knicks claimed him off waivers. He was supposed to be a depth guy. Then suddenly, he was thrust into a starting role, and magic occurred. Lin had a double-double against the Wizards! He scored 38 on the Lakers! He made a buzzer-beating three against the Raptors! Thus, Linsanity took over Madison Square Garden. Injuries ended up marring Lin’s career, but we’ll always have that amazing, inexplicable stretch in the 2011-12 season.

Summitt is a basketball legend. The Hall of Famer won eight titles at Tennessee and when she retired in 2012, her 1,098 wins were the most ever in college basketball. Summitt could have added more but due to the complications of her Alzheimer’s disease, she had to retire at 59. The college basketball world was worse without her.

In the ‘90s, Lance Armstrong was one of the biggest names in sports. He made people care about cycling. His Tour de France wins, overcoming cancer in the process, made him a hero. Livestrong bracelets were ubiquitous. Then it all fell apart. In 2012, the US Anti-Doping Agency found that Armstrong had been using performance-enhancing drugs through his cycling career. He lost all his Tour de France titles, and a sports hero was turned into a villain in the blink of an eye.

The triple crown, if you don’t know, is when a hitter leads the league in batting average, home runs and RBI. No hitter had done it in baseball since 1967, when Carl Yastrzemski did it for the Boston Red Sox. Then, finally, after decades of winning, it happened again. Miguel Cabrera hit for the triple crown for the Detroit Tigers in 2012. Naturally, he was named the MVP.

It had taken the NHL years to earn back trust and attention after the 2004 lockout canceled the entire 2004-05 NHL season. That was a huge bummer for hockey fans. As such, there was a lot of hand-wringing when the NHL owners once again locked out players in 2012. Fortunately this time the entire season wasn’t lost. Instead the league played 48 games, and fortunately the players didn’t lose too much in the process.

The NFL is an oft-violent league, but there is a line that can't be crossed. That goes double as we learn more and more about concussions. As such, putting “bounties” on players is obviously frowned upon. So when it turned out that the New Orleans Saints defense had a bounty program from 2009 through 2011, it was a black eye for the NFL. Money was offered for injuring players, especially if you could get them removed from the game. Defensive coordinator Gregg Williams was found to be the ringleader and was suspended indefinitely. Of course, he found his way back into the NFL anyway. The league still has a way to go.

Who thought that Peyton Manning would ever be anything other than an Indianapolis Colt? He was the face of the team from the moment it drafted him first overall in 1998. Then Manning lost the entire 2011 season to a neck injury. The Colts weren't even sure if he would play again, and they released him, moving on with new first-overall pick Andrew Luck. Manning would end up signing with the Denver Broncos. In his first year, he would throw for 37 touchdowns against 11 interceptions. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, he won Comeback Player of the Year.

LeBron James was already considered an all-time great; however, there was one cloud hanging over his head. He hadn’t won a title yet. When he left Cleveland unceremoniously with "The Decision to go to Miami" to team with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, the spotlight got even hotter. Then the Heat lost their first trip to the NBA Finals, to the Dallas Mavericks. Finally, it happened for LeBron. In the strike-shortened 2011-12 season, the Heat won the NBA title, and LeBron finally got his ring.

Phelps was already a legendary Olympian when the 2012 London Olympics began. After all, he had won eight gold medals in one Olympics, a new record. In London, he added four more golds and two more silvers. That gave him 18 golds and 22 overall medals, which made him the most decorated Olympian ever.

We’ve heard of players being locked out, but referees? It happened in 2012 to start the NFL season. The replacement refs are forever going to be remembered for the “Fail Mary.” The image came from a "Monday Night Football" game between the Seahawks and the Packers. The Seahawks won on the final play, but it was a controversial call. The lasting memory is of one ref signaling a touchdown while another ref simultaneously called it a touchback for the defense.

Great Britain was dying for a native son to win England’s iconic tennis tournament, Wimbledon. Murray is Scottish, but it was certainly close enough for British tennis fans in 2013. When Murray won Wimbledon by defeating Novak Djokovic, he became the first British player to win the tournament since Fred Perry back in 1936.

Punching an opponent or kicking an opponent is frowned upon, but biting an opponent? That’s just plain weird. Suarez first bit an opponent in 2010 while with Ajax, but that was on a small stage in the Dutch league. In 2013, though, Suarez had moved to Liverpool, one of the biggest teams in the world. There, he bit a Chelsea player, and this time the punishment was swift and severe. Suarez ended with a 10-game ban.

There has been many an iconic Iron Bowl, but no game between Alabama and Auburn can ever live up to this one. The Tide were undefeated and ranked No. 1 in the nation. The one-loss Tigers were 10-1. The game was all tied up, and overtime seemed likely. Then, Bama went for a field goal. It fell short…and into the hands of Auburn’s Chris Davis. Davis decided to return the ball, and he took it 109 yards into the end zone. Auburn got the win, and “Kick Six” entered the college football pantheon.

Collins averaged 3.6 points per game in his career. The center set a good screen, but that was about it. However, he’s also one of the most important people in sports in the 2010s. In May of 2013, Collins came out as gay. When he signed with the Nets in 2014, he became the first openly gay man to play in one of the four major American sports leagues. Also, shout out to MLS player Robbie Rogers, who also came out as gay around the same time.

Alex Rodriguez should be in the Hall of Fame. He’s an all-time great. He’s also damaged goods. A-Rod had already admitted to using steroids in the past, but then he got involved in the Biogenesis scandal that you may remember. Rodriguez was originally suspended for 211 games but eventually that was reduced to 162. Still, that meant A-Rod missed the entire 2014 season.

Like Collins before him, Sam’s biggest contribution in the world of sports was being openly gay. He was a different case, though. Sam was a star at Missouri in college, but he came out before even making it to the pros. When Sam was drafted by the then-St. Louis Rams, he became the first openly gay player taken in the NFL Draft. He never played an actual down of a real NFL game, which certainly got its share of controversy, but he eventually did play in the CFL.

Donald Sterling was, and is, evidently a racist. This became clear after his mistress released some taped conversations she had of the two talking. The NBA was thrown into turmoil. The Los Angeles Clippers, the team Sterling owned, was in a precarious place. There was talk the players may boycott playing. Adam Silver and the NBA had to take the step of removing Sterling as owner of the Clippers and banning him for life. There was light at the end of the tunnel, as the uber-rich, and uber-enthusiastic, Steve Ballmer ended up buying the team.

For years, there have been college football fans dying for a Playoff. For years, teams would play bowl games and then voters would decide on who they thought should be champs. This led to split titles. To try and avoid that, the BCS became a thing. That only paired the first- and second-ranked teams though. Finally, the Playoff became a reality. In 2014, the Ohio State Buckeyes, the fourth seed, beat Alabama and then Oregon to win the title.

Ugh. Do we really have to talk about this again? We can’t really discuss big sports stories of the 2010s without this story that got incredibly tedious, unfortunately. The New England Patriots used underinflated balls against the Indianapolis Colts during the 2014 playoffs. There was controversy. There were physics lessons. There were about 100 attempts to try and suspend Tom Brady to prove a point. Eventually, Brady would be suspended four games to start the 2016 season. The Patriots got the last laugh, though, by winning the Super Bowl that season. You’ll never guess who was Super Bowl MVP.

In 1978, Affirmed won horse racing’s Triple Crown. That is to say, the horse won the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes. No horse won the Triple Crown after that until American Pharoah did it in 2015. He was the 12th horse to do it.

FIFA has never been the paragon of virtue. However, soccer’s ruling body has usually managed to avoid getting caught in the muck. Then in 2015, the U.S. government brought corruption charges against FIFA for a variety of reasons, mostly involving bribery and pay for play. People were straight-up arrested. This also led to the end of Sepp Blatter’s run as the president of FIFA.

In truth, Manning was on his last legs during the 2015 season. He played in only 10 games, and he had nine touchdowns against 17 interceptions. However, he was able to play in three playoff games. The Broncos were led by their defense to Super Bowl 50 where they faced the Carolina Panthers, who had gone 15-1 during the regular season. Denver won, 24-10, to give Manning another ring. He would retire from football soon after.

If you can’t beat them, join them…and change the entire landscape of the NBA in the process. Durant, one of the five best players in the NBA, had been unable to get over the hump with the Oklahoma City Thunder and win a ring. The juggernaut Golden State Warriors stood in his way. Durant decided to sign with the Warriors during the 2016 offseason. The unstoppable Warriors won two rings with Durant, and KD was the Finals MVP both times. The Warriors made it to the NBA Finals again in his third season with the team but got injured during the playoffs. Golden State didn’t win the title — we’ll get to that — and Durant signed with the Brooklyn Nets.

The Premier League is run by a handful of teams. For years, if you weren’t Chelsea, Manchester United or Arsenal, you were out of luck. Then Manchester City got new owners with a ton of money, and they joined the fun. Liverpool was always around too. Leicester City was an afterthought. A couple of bookmakers in England had given Leicester 5,000-to-1 odds of winning the league. They did just that in the 2015-16 season. Led by the likes of N’Golo Kante and Jamie Vardy, Leicester had a true Cinderella run, finishing with 81 points to win the league.

Colin Kaepernick was a really good quarterback, helping to lead the 49ers to the Super Bowl. Then he decided to take a stand, so to speak, against racism and police brutality. He sat during the national anthem during a preseason game but then started to take a knee instead. Other players followed suit. There was a ton of controversy. Kaepernick has basically been blackballed from the NFL, but he helped give athletes a political voice.

The decade began with The Decision, which made LeBron a pariah to the city of Cleveland. Then after winning two titles with Miami, James decided to go home. LeBron returned to the Cavs prior to the 2014-15 season. Then the next year, the Cavaliers overcame a 3-1 deficit to the Warriors in the NBA Finals to give LeBron and the city of Cleveland a rare title. James is now forever a hero to Cleveland.

Speaking of long title droughts, nobody can beat the lovable losers known as the Cubbies. They literally had not won a title since 1908. Think about that. There was effectively nobody alive who remembered the Cubs winning a World Series. Then, finally, that changed. The Cubs took down the Indians in a memorable seven-game series, and the team finally got that World Series win.

Independent baseball leagues don’t get a lot of attention, but they kind of have free rein to make outside-the-box decisions. Take, for example, the Sonoma Stompers. In 2015, they had allowed Sam Miller and Ben Lindbergh, two baseball writers and podcasters, to run their baseball operations. They made a bigger splash in 2016 when they signed Kelsie Whitmore and Stacy Piagno, two female baseball players. They then added another woman, Anna Kimbrell, the next month. It made it the first professional team to have women on the roster since the Negro League of the 1950s.

We all remember the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls. Led by Michael Jordan, they went 72-10 and won the NBA title, setting a record for the most wins in a season. The record seemed destined to last for ages; maybe forever. And then the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors happened. Ironically, the Warriors were coached by Steve Kerr, who played on that Bulls team. They went 73-9, setting a new record. That was great and all, but they failed to finish it off with a title, as the Warriors lost to the Cavaliers in the NBA Finals.

Russia was embroiled in a scandal for years of systemic, and evidently state-sponsored, doping of its athletes. This culminated with Russia being banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics. However, eventually athletes who hadn’t been busted from doping were allowed to participate under the banner of “Olympic Athletes from Russia.” It was a concession, but one that didn’t remove the black mark from Russia’s sports machine.

Soccer is on the rise in America, right? The American team had been in every World Cup since 1990, and the talent level was just getting better…right? Well, about that. It was considered a given that the United States would qualify for the 2018 World Cup. All it had to do was get a result against Trinidad and Tobago. It couldn't, and the Americans had to sit out the World Cup. It was a brutal result for the country.

Tired of being a middling team, the Houston front office tore the team down to rebuild. For three seasons the Astros lost over 100 games while building up the roster and getting young talent. The wins started to come. In 2013, they went 51-111. In 2017, they went 101-61 and won the World Series in seven games over the Dodgers. The rebuild had worked.

The 2016 Cleveland Browns went 1-15. It was one of the worst seasons ever. Surely it couldn’t get any worse. After all, only one NFL team had ever gone 0-16 before: the infamous 2008 Detroit Lions. Well, one year after going 1-15, the Browns did indeed go 0-16. Hey, at least the Lions now had company.

We all love an upset, especially during March Madness. We had seen a few 15 seeds beat two seeds, but for all the many years of the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament, we hadn’t seen a 16 seed beat a one seed. It was the white whale. The UMBC Retrievers were a 16 seed out of the America East. They were facing the Virginia Cavaliers. We kept waiting for Virginia to turn it around, but it couldn’t. The Retrievers won, 74-54. Sure, they lost in the second round, but history will always remember the UMBC Retrievers.

Expansion teams are supposed to be bad. Usually they are really, truly awful. That has been especially true in the NHL in the past. Many of the worst seasons ever were put together by expansion teams. Vegas was the first new team in the NHL in quite some time. Surely, it was going to be an ugly season. Then the Golden Knights started winning…and kept winning. Shockingly, they made the playoffs. That was a good enough story. Then, they didn’t stop losing. In fact, they went all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals. As an expansion team.

Philly had a great season with Carson Wentz under center, but then Wentz went down late in the year. That left prodigal son Nick Foles, whose one good season had been with the Eagles under Chip Kelly, to take over. Once again, Foles worked his magic for Philadelphia. The team went to the Super Bowl and pulled off an upset of the Patriots to give the Eagles their first Super Bowl.

Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin have been tied together since they debuted in the same season after the NHL lockout. They’ve both had great careers, but Crosby had three rings. Ovechkin and his Capitals had none, and Washington became synonymous with great regular seasons but playoff flameouts. Then, finally, the Capitals made their second-ever trip to the Stanley Cup. They faced the expansion Golden Knights, and Ovechkin and Co. finally lifted that elusive Cup.

Sports betting has been legal in Las Vegas for many years, but most of us couldn’t make a legal bet outside of Sin City in the United States. Then daily fantasy sports became a thing, and the wheels of sports betting started to get greased. The Supreme Court, hearing a case brought by the state of New Jersey, rendered a verdict that allowed states to decide if they wanted to legalize sports betting. So far 11 states have legalized sports betting.

Whatever LeBron does, it’s new. When he left Cleveland for Miami, it was huge news. When he went back to Cleveland, it was even bigger news. Then King James did it again when he announced that he was going to sign with the Lakers. LeBron was going Hollywood. What happened in James’ first year with Los Angeles was also news: LeBron missed the playoffs!

"Thursday Night Football" has its detractors, but without it we may have not have seen sports history. Amazon Prime started streaming "Thursday Night Football" games in 2018, bringing its own announcers in for the proceedings. Those announcers? Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer. The two combined to become the first female duo to call an NFL game.

The 2000s belonged to Tiger Woods. The narrative wasn’t whether he would set the record for most career majors, but when. Then everything fell apart. There was his personal life fiasco. There was injury after injury. Tiger got older, and the record got further from his grasp. Tiger’s last major win had come in 2008. Many thought he would never do it again. Then in 2019, at Augusta, where he won his first major when he was barely in his 20s, Woods won his fifth Masters.

Kawhi Leonard wanted out of San Antonio. The Toronto Raptors, tired of being perennial also-rans, took the plunge on the trade. They knew he may only be with the team for one season, but the front office thought it was worth a shot. How right they were. The Raptors went on to win their first NBA title, with Leonard leading the way. Then Leonard changed the landscape of the NBA once again when in the offseason he signed with the Clippers and then convinced his new team to trade for Paul George.