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With the death of Deadspin and the hollowing out of Sports Illustrated over the last month or so, they are one of the few remaining places that will do this type of in depth sports reporting. However I will point out the target of this piece is not a league, team, player, or anyone that ESPN would have to be afraid of pissing off.

You're right about this, of course, but ESPN has stuff of this quality on a pretty darn slow drip given the talent they have and the even greater talent they could afford if they decided to make quality investigative / long form stuff a real priority.

I suspect the fact that they do it at all is that it's some enlightened manager's little feifdom that they protect and that it'll be gone as soon as that person finds another gig or retires. I doubt that dyed-in-the-wool corporate types are in love with these operations, as sad as it is.

In depth investigations like this are released by ESPN once, sometimes twice a month. Sorta rare, but they do still do some good journalism on occasion.

They had a recent story on nhl team dentists that was a good read posted on HN as well