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From Hans Tesselaar: For the primary time for the reason that 2017-18 season, the Kings can have an opportunity to compete for the Stanley Cup.
They clinched a playoff spot Tuesday with out even taking part in. When the Vegas Golden Knights misplaced on the street to the Dallas Stars 3-2 in a shootout, it assured a third-place end within the Pacific Division for the Kings (43-27-10). They may play the Edmonton Oilers within the first spherical, the best-of-seven collection starting subsequent week.
The Kings, with 96 factors, will open the collection in Edmonton. The Oilers’ 5-1 victory Tuesday evening in Pittsburgh gave them 100 factors and locked up second place within the Pacific. The Kings went 1-2-1 this season towards Edmonton.
Since successful the Stanley Cup for the second time in three seasons in 2014, the Kings have only one playoff win. They misplaced to the Sharks in 5 video games in 2016 and to the Golden Knights in 4 video games in 2018.
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DODGERS
From Helene Elliott: Jessica Mendoza anticipated to have a protracted and detailed assembly with Joe Davis final Friday earlier than she sat beside the Dodgers’ TV play-by-play announcer and have become the primary feminine analyst on a Dodgers broadcast, however one factor occurred after which one other and there was no time for them to debate who would say what and when.
They knew one another a bit as that they had shared an agent years in the past, and would run throughout each other when their broadcast goals had been nonetheless crystallizing.
“We had been actually simply no one and attempting to determine it out,” she stated. After Davis acquired the Dodgers job, Mendoza would make some extent of claiming hey when she got here to observe the group she’d rooted for whereas rising up in Camarillo.
Two Olympic softball medals and a profession as an ESPN baseball and softball analyst later, Mendoza was employed by SportsNet LA to be certainly one of a number of street broadcast analysts after Orel Hershiser in the reduction of his journey this season. Her flip on the microphone got here up when the Dodgers had been at San Diego.
“I used to be nervous coming into final week as a result of no matter how nicely you may know somebody or how lengthy you’ve identified them, it’s very totally different once you’re calling a recreation,” she stated. “Everybody has their issues — the nuances they wish to get into, when they need you to speak, after they don’t.”
With out a whole lot of time to arrange, they relied on their familiarity and instincts. “It helps a lot that we’re each form of nerdy,” Mendoza stated. “We love the sport.”
Right here’s to having a few baseball nerds within the sales space.
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Dodgers fall to Diamondbacks, 5-3
BRITTNEY GRINER
From Lindsay Kagawa Colas: I woke as much as the telephone ringing simply after 5 a.m. in Portland. My colleague was calling from the East Coast. “Lindz, it’s BG. She’s been taken into custody on the airport. She has her telephone and may textual content.” Brittney Griner, who had spent a number of WNBA offseasons starring for UMMC Ekaterinburg, an elite Russian basketball membership group, had been touring again to Ekaterinburg from the U.S., connecting in Moscow when she was detained. She was now within the custody of Russian officers on the airport and, for the subsequent a number of hours, I tracked her location on my telephone and continued texting her, attempting to stick with her so long as I might.
Staying together with her was what Brittney had requested me to do once I began representing her as her sports activities agent proper out of school in 2013. Although she was projected to be the No. 1 choose total within the WNBA draft, a very powerful dialog we had early on wasn’t about endorsements or fame. From my expertise within the enterprise, I knew that success on the courtroom for girls has by no means been sufficient to ensure girls comparable industrial rewards to males. Solely girls athletes considered conventionally lovely by a Western commonplace, “female” — or just perceived to be straight, who had been each white and infrequently much less necessary, profitable at successful, acquired any trace of endorsement alternatives. The WNBA and its gamers, in all of their intersectional energy and sweetness, are nonetheless ready for society to catch up.
Combating to shift how the marketplace views and values girls athletes has been on the middle of my complete profession as a sports activities agent. For Brittney, a very powerful issues I might do to help her profession and guarantee she maximized alternative had been 1) to make her as a lot cash on the courtroom, as shortly as potential and a couple of) to at all times inform her the reality, do my greatest to guard her and be there for her, it doesn't matter what. Earlier than that February morning, that included advising her (together with a number of different purchasers) to reap the benefits of the chance to play in Russia for the best paying group on the planet. Ever since that day, it has meant working furiously to attempt to summon each useful resource I can to assist her, in order that I can hold one other promise I made after she was formally charged and minutes earlier than she was led away. “BG,” I stated, “We love you. We're right here. Be courageous. We are going to get you house.”
So whereas her detention has risen to the highest of stories for its geopolitical relevance, supercharged by movie star, at its underbelly lies a narrative of gender-pay disparity right here in america.
ANGELS
From Steve Henson: Lengthy earlier than first pitch, a cowboy hat is about behind the bat rack and beneath three rows of cubbyholes housing helmets within the Angels dugout.
White with black trim, the hat is inconspicuous, nothing particular till one thing particular makes it particular.
When an Angels participant returns to the dugout after hitting a house run, a teammate slaps the cowboy hat onto his head and he bounces triumphantly from one finish to the opposite, slapping arms and bumping fists.
Mike Trout loved the ritual within the third inning of the Angels’ 4-1 win over the Cleveland Guardians on Tuesday evening at Angel Stadium, blasting a two-run house run to left area. Trout additionally had an RBI double, offering loads of help for left-hander Patrick Sandoval, who prolonged to fifteen innings his streak of not giving up an earned run this season by yielding two hits over seven innings.
Sandoval, a Mission Viejo Excessive product, struck out 9 and walked one, displaying a devastating changeup and command of 4 pitches. He hopped off the mound with glee after prompting Oscar Mercado to flail at his changeup to finish the seventh inning on his ninetieth and last pitch.
USC FOOTBALL
From Ryan Kartje: When he determined earlier this month to skip the 40-yard sprint at his Professional Day, Drake London understood there could be questions. His velocity was the one critical concern for NFL scouts, the one nit to select in an in any other case sterling draft profile and now the previous USC star wideout was opting out of his last probability to supply proof in his favor.
Months into the method, London had heard fairly sufficient of these doubts. Anybody who nonetheless had questions, he recommended, ought to “simply watch movie.”
“Don’t actually need to blow by guys to catch a ball,” he stated. “I can on the finish of the day, however I actually don’t need to.”
T.J. Houshmandzadeh, the previous NFL wideout coaching London for the draft, went one step additional.
“Pace,” Houshmandzadeh declared, “is overrated.”
Overrated or not, velocity could be the one discernible impediment in the way in which of London turning into the fourth USC receiver to be chosen within the top-10 of the NFL draft, which kicks off Thursday with the primary spherical. (The final, Mike Williams, wasn’t precisely a burner, both, when the Lions picked him tenth in 2005.)
RAMS
From Gary Klein: The star-studded Tremendous Bowl champion Rams are basking of their Hollywood picture.
On Tuesday, forward of Thursday’s NFL draft in Las Vegas, the group launched a slickly produced pseudo film trailer entitled “On the Clock.” The three-minute video featured a number of Rams gamers, and actors taking part in proprietor Stan Kroenke, basic supervisor Les Snead, coach Sean McVay and defensive coordinator Raheem Morris.
“Les and I each felt fairly good about it,” McVay stated throughout a videoconference with reporters, “and I do know Raheem Morris actually feels actually good that Tyrese Gibson performed him.
“So, he’s been strolling round together with his chest out all day.”
The Rams received’t have marquee billing within the draft — they're with out a first-round choose for the sixth 12 months in a row — however they are going to proceed their Hollywood theme by conducting enterprise and making their picks from a palatial Hollywood Hills house.
BASKETBALL
From Invoice Dwyre: If the title Dick Barnett tickles your reminiscence a bit, you might be in all probability a Lakers fan, and never a younger one. Or, extra possible, you're a Knicks fan.
If the achievements of the 1957, ’58 and ’59 basketball groups from Tennessee A&I set off any recognition, contemplate your self one in one million, a sports activities geek.
However there's as story there, and it doesn't matter what your age or sports activities pursuits, it's price realizing. It’s about way more than basketball success, and it's being instructed in a documentary movie entitled “The Dream Whisperer.” The primary take a look at that will probably be introduced Saturday at 7 p.m. on the Pan African Movie & Arts Competition, in a theatre complicated on the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza.
Barnett is the “Dream Whisperer.” He's additionally the previous Lakers guard who performed with Jerry West and Elgin Baylor from 1962 to 1965. To stir your reminiscence, consider a thin, left-handed jump-shooter, who kicked his legs backward as he unleashed. Consider a protracted, emaciated face a person who carried the nickname “Cranium” as a result of, nicely, he seemed like one. You can even consider the participant, an ace sixth man more often than not, who acquired traded from the Lakers to the New York Knicks, infuriating West and ending up serving to the Knicks win their solely two NBA titles (1970 and 1973). The Knicks beat the Lakers each occasions.
The center of this story isn't the Lakers, or the Knicks, or West, nor even the numerous movie star voices the movie presents, reminiscent of Phil Jackson, Walt Frazier, David Stern, Julius Erving, Invoice Bradley, Al Sharpton and the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It's Barnett’s story of, as the previous Knicks star and U.S. senator Bradley calls it, “unimaginable tenaciousness.”
Earlier than he was a professional, earlier than he was drafted fourth total by the Syracuse Nationals in 1959, Barnett performed for the Tennessee A&I Tigers, a faculty in Nashville that's now Tennessee State. His group received the championship of the NAIA (Nationwide Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics) 3 times in a row, and that was simply 5 years after all-Black colleges had been even allowed to compete in any nationwide basketball event that meant their presence would combine the competitors. The Texas Western Miners, with 5 Black starters, shocked the faculty basketball world in 1966 by beating Pat Riley’s Kentucky within the NCAA last. The A&I Tigers had received a nationwide title a decade earlier than and executed it 3 times.
However it turned out that that three-peat had little traction within the sports activities world. The NAIA division featured a bunch of smaller colleges and the sports activities world associated extra to Disneyland than Branson, Mo.
NCAA
From J. Brady McCollough: The best indictment of Mark Emmert’s 12-year run as NCAA president is the job description he leaves behind for his substitute:
Preserve the haves amongst NCAA Division I colleges from splitting away from the have-nots and creating their very own governance mannequin that enables for the pursuit of large tv revenues above all else and drops the pretense of school sports activities being an beginner enterprise on the highest degree.
Persuade these presidents and athletic administrators at Energy 5 colleges — lots of which at the moment are providing pay-for-play contracts disguised as title, picture and likeness “collective” agreements — to proceed to share the income pie from March Insanity with all of the little guys as an alternative of beginning their very own males’s basketball postseason event that brings in at the least $1 billion yearly.
Assuming these predictable shifts happen sooner or later and the NCAA’s money cow does graze towards greener pastures, save the Olympic and non-revenue sports activities that symbolize the genuine “student-athlete” expertise on the backside of Division I and all through Division II and Division III, defending hundreds of instructional alternatives for American youth who in any other case might not discover their means to a school campus.
Again up the Title IX lip service with a real dedication to gender fairness, avoiding embarrassments just like the disparity between the bells and whistles on the 2021 males’s and girls’s NCAA basketball tournaments.
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NCAA President Mark Emmert stepping down no later than 2023
ERIC KAY TRIAL
From Nathan Fenno: A federal decide in Texas rejected Eric Kay’s request for a brand new trial Tuesday, greater than two months after a jury discovered the previous Angels communications director responsible of offering counterfeit oxycodone drugs that led to the overdose loss of life of pitcher Tyler Skaggs.
In a one-paragraph order filed in U.S. District Courtroom in Fort Price, Choose Terry R. Means wrote that he was denying Kay’s movement “for the explanations urged by the federal government.”
After Kay’s authorized group filed a movement final month for a judgment of acquittal and a brand new trial, prosecutors stated the transfer had “no reasoned foundation” and failed to point out “prejudice, not to mention the form of miscarriage of justice that will warrant a brand new trial.”
THIS DATE IN SPORTS
1956 — Rocky Marciano retires because the undefeated heavyweight boxing champion. He completed with a 49-0 file, together with six title defenses and 43 knockouts.
1960 — The Minneapolis Lakers announce they are going to relocate to Los Angeles.
1968 — Jimmy Ellis wins the heavyweight boxing title with a 15-round choice over Jerry Quarry in Oakland. That is the ultimate bout of an eight-man elimination event to fill Muhammad Ali’s vacated title.
1994 — Scott Erickson, who allowed essentially the most hits within the majors the earlier season, pitches Minnesota’s first no-hitter in 27 years and the Twins beat Milwaukee 6-0.
1994 — Dave Hannan scores 5:43 into the fourth extra time to maintain the Buffalo Sabres going within the NHL playoffs with a 1-0 victory over the New Jersey Devils, the sixth-longest recreation in NHL historical past.
2002 — Derek Lowe pitches a no-hitter towards Tampa Bay. Brent Abernathy is the one baserunner Lowe permits in Boston’s 10-0 victory.
2003 — Kevin Millwood pitches his first profession no-hitter to steer the Philadelphia Phillies over the San Francisco Giants 1-0.
2007 — Kirk Radomski, a former New York Mets clubhouse worker, pleads responsible to distributing steroids to main league gamers for a decade and agrees to assist baseball’s steroids investigators.
2008 — Ashley Pressure turns into the primary girl to win a nationwide Humorous Automobile race. The 25-year-old beats her father, drag racing icon John Pressure, within the last spherical of the twenty eighth annual Summit Racing Tools Southern Nationals to disclaim him his 1,000th successful spherical in his five hundredth NHRA tour occasion.
2009 — The Denver Nuggets match the most important victory in playoff historical past with their 121-63 rout of New Orleans in Recreation 4 of their first-round collection. The Minneapolis Lakers had the opposite 58-point postseason victory, beating the St. Louis Hawks 133-75 in 1956.
2011 — Nathan Horton scores 5:43 into extra time to offer the Boston Bruins a 4-3 victory over the Montreal Canadiens in Recreation 7 of their first-round playoff collection. Boston had by no means received a playoff collection after trailing 0-2 in 26 tries.
2011 — Dwayne Roloson makes 36 saves and Tampa Bay completes a giant collection comeback and eliminates Pittsburgh with a 1-0 win in Recreation 7. Roloson turns into the second goalie to go 6-0 in elimination video games. He allowed solely 4 objectives in successful the ultimate three video games because the Lightning erased a 3-1 collection deficit.
2013 — The Detroit Pink Wings make the playoffs for the twenty second straight season after Henrik Zetterberg had two objectives and an help in a 3-0 victory over Dallas. The Pink Wings personal the longest energetic playoff streak in main professional sports activities, six years longer than the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs’ stretch of postseason play.
2014 — Three-time Olympic champion Kerri Walsh wins her file forty seventh FIVB Seashore Volleyball World Tour title, teaming with April Ross to beat Brazil’s Juliana Felisberta Silva and Maria Antonelli within the Fuzhou Open last.
2014 — Lydia Ko, three days after her seventeenth birthday, birdies the ultimate gap for her third LPGA Tour victory and first as a professional, holding off Stacy Lewis and Jenny Shin within the inaugural Swinging Skirts LPGA Basic.
2017 — Texas A&M defensive finish Myles Garrett is picked first total by the Cleveland Browns within the NFL draft. Chicago sends a third-round choose, a fourth and a 2018 third to San Francisco to change and selects quarterback Mitchell Trubisky, who began solely 13 video games for North Carolina. The 49ers take defensive finish Solomon Thomas from simply down the street at Stanford.
Compiled by the Related Press
And at last
Derek Lowe pitches a no-hitter. Watch and pay attention right here.
Till subsequent time...
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