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This, of course, was the mother of comebacks. It tightened a city where people live atop each other, where they battle for taxis and parking places and apartments that are more like compartments, where daily antagonists can be pulled into a hard embrace by a tragedy or a Sinatra lyric or a basketball team.

The 2026 New York Knicks will be like the 1980 Olympic hockey team, at least in Gotham’s value system, after they soberly and systematically wiped out a 29-point shortfall and beat San Antonio, 107-106, in Game 4 of the NBA Finals. They’ll be kings of the subways and sidewalks for as long as they walk, and as long as they push their 3-1 Finals lead into their first championship since 1973.

But the mother of comebacks had plenty of ancestors. Recent ones, too. Many of the showbiz kids at Madman Square Garden Wednesday night were at Yankee Stadium two years ago, when a New York team coughed up a 5-0 lead in a clinching World Series game. In the Stanley Cup Final that is going on simultaneously, a two-goal lead has evaporated in each of the first four games, and Vegas blew a 4-0 lead after two periods on Saturday before it recovered to win.

In March, Duke led Connecticut by 19 points in an NCAA regional final, and in the end Braylon Mullins, a UConn freshman, hit a 3-pointer from near-midcourt to win it for the Huskies. In October, Texas A&M trailed South Carolina 30-3 at halftime and won, 31-30. The Knicks might not have authored the best comeback on Wednesday, really, since the Giants trailed Washington 9-1 after seven innings and won 11-10 on a grand slam by rookie Bryce Eldridge. And you don’t even have to be human to know there’s always time enough to win. Golden Tempo was in the back of the line at the Kentucky Derby and again at the Belmont Stakes, and won both races.

How does this happen? Obviously it has become easier in basketball because of the all-powerful 3-point shot. And the Knicks have made it almost habitual. They trailed Cleveland by 22 in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Final with 7:52 left and wound up winning. Last year they trailed Boston by 20 in three different playoff games and won them all.

Is it “momentum,” the all-purpose term for events that will keep happening by some sort of divine fiat? No, it’s more like confidence. Jalen Brunson called it “belief.” There are hundreds of teams who have belief, fall behind by 20 and lose by 30. But at some point the team that leads has to destroy the opponent’s belief. People call it “stepping on the neck.” There never has been a more determined neck-stepper than Tiger Woods who, for 11 years, never lost a 54-hole lead in a major championship. In romping through the Eastern Conference playoffs, the Knicks customarily took 15-point leads and widened them to 30 or more. Maybe today’s athletes are more distractible, more prone to actually enjoying a big lead before certifying it. And maybe they become paralyzed when the possibility arises that they will lose that lead and the game with it. This is what befell San Antono after it scored 76 points in the first half,, led by 27, and might as well have played against air.

The Spurs hit 14 of 26 three-pointers in that first half. Dylan Harper and Devin Vassell were 7-for-7. Knicks’ center Karl-Anthony Towns was in immediate foul trouble, and coach Mike Brown was throwing in names and faces that definitely needed ID to get in. Victor Wembanyama was feeling frisky, scoring over Mitchell Robinson, telling Robinson he was in his head, and then seeming to prove it by taking a charge, and taking a hard shot to the head from Robinson, who drew a flagrant foul.

Brown and the Knicks went into the locker room, and Brown did not fire up the video, and left the players alone for a few contemplative minutes. Then he reminded them that 24 long minutes remained, and even though the Knicks would need some luck, they could also manufacture some.

“We felt like if we got it down to 20, we could get it down to 15 and then maybe 12,” said Josh Hart, knowing that the MSG crowd also had belief in its own capacity to alter events merely with lungpower. Besides, Taylor Swift was sitting right there. It was time to shake it off.

But not immediately. The Knicks had two turnovers in the first two minutes, and De’Aaron Fox hit a jumper to put the Spurs up 81-52. From that moment, San Antonio would score 25 points in 21:40.

First, Wembanyama flagrantly fouled Towns. Then the Spurs had three shots on one possession and did not score. That was a lot of work for nothing. Better to fling 3-pointers at the pinata. At one point San Antonio missed 10 consecutive threes. The Knicks shrugged and kept running their offense, and Brown put in Jose Alvarado, one of the most disruptive substitute guards in the league, to give Brunson some ballhandling relief. At the end of the third quarter Anunoby drilled a 3-pointer, the lead was only 15, and the Garden began proving that concrete can dance.

“We were playing on our heels, not our toes,” said Spurs coach Mitch Johnson.

Still, San Antonio swelled the lead to 20 with 9:33 to go. But it doesn’t take much to lose a lead when you forget how to score. Fox ran a pick and roll with Wembanyama and then threw him the ball, but the French Correction had already turned toward the basket and the Knicks took over. Wembanyama missed two free throws. Stephon Castle stepped on the end line. Brunson, who has become one of the great fourth–quarter assassins, hit a three to cut it to one, then floated a layup to give the Knicks their first lead.

From that point on, did the Spurs’ youth betray them? Not really. Harper is 20 and never lost his cool. Castle is 21 and hit two massive free thorws late. Fox is the wise old head at 28, and yet when he got a steal as the Spurs were leading by one, he tried to attack the basket instead of withdrawing and getting fouled. Anunoby raced down to block that shot.

The Knicks had their chance, and Wembanyama joined Fox in trying to harass Brunson. But Anunoby, who had in-bounded the ball, saw something that New Yorkers almost never see. He saw a clear lane down the middle, and when Brunson drove and missed, Anunoby got between Harper and Vassell and tapped in the rebound with 1.2 seconds left. MSG dissolved into OMG. Brown called it “maybe the most iconic shot in the history of New York basketball.” It would take some heavy memory-jostling to dispute him.

The numbers in the second half and fourth quarter added to the general fantasia. San Antonio had eight buckets in the half, shot 3 for 17 from deep, and made nine of its 10 turnovers for the game. Wembanyama was 3 for 14 with no assists. In fact, the Spurs had two assists in the whole half, indicative of their shaky sense of trust. We knew Wembanyama would be a historic player but he’ll have to erase this red-letter night. He could use a power forward, but he has to rule the paint first, and he needs to get the posing and posturing out of his game, as well as the cheap-shotting.

In the fourth quarter the Knicks were 12 for 20, and Alvarado and Anunoby were a combined 6 for 6. Brunson scored 36 and Anunoby, who has gotten the biggest indidivudal boost from this series, scored 33. He was injured when Toronto won the 2019 championship, then was part of a 6-player deal with the Knicks. At the time, Knicks-to-Raptors guard R.J. Barrett was considered the treasure in the trade. Anunoby quietly guarded and rebounded and kept working on his shot. He is hitting 47.4 percent of his 3-pointers in the postseason.

Ogugwa Anunoby is from England and played high school basketball in Jefferson City, Mo. where his father was teaching at Lincoln University. Indiana coach Tom Crean spotted him in an AAU tournament in Atlanta, but Anunoby had hurt his wrist and his name wasn’t in the program. Crean tracked him down and saw every other tournament he played in, and Anunoby spent two years at Indiana, but only one was healthy. Largely on spec, the Knicks signed him to a five-year, $212 million extension. At the time, Anunoby’s agent was Sam Rose, son of Knicks’ general manager Leon. Like all the other Knicks’ wheelings and dealings, it has clicked spectacularly.

“It was from the hand of God,” Towns said of OG’s tap. But it was also a gift from the timer that hangs above the MSG floor. Recent events show that it never expires as quickly as you might think, especially when hope is alive.

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Nobody needs to hear another critique of Brendan Sorsby, or the courtroom that will allow Lubbock Slim to play quarterback for Texas Tech in 2026.

Betting on games is pretty much the Original Sin for athletes, whether they’re in college or the pros. Pete Rose, the alltime hit leader and the personification of baseball Fame, will never see the halls of Cooperstown. Same with Shoeless Joe Jackson, even though the record never shows that he actively participated in the Black Sox scheme. He did know it was happening.

LPGA golfers, soccer players, All-Star pitchers and Pro Bowl receivers have all been disciplined for betting in recent years, or since the Supreme Court, in 2018, made it easier to call up the Original Sin on your phone.

But the heaviest consequence of this ruling has nothing to do with Sorsby himself, who was facing a one-year suspension.

Judge Ken Curry’s temporary injunction, which will reduce Sorsby’s suspension to two games, will be appealed by the NCAA. If that appeal fails, that takes the whistle and the handcuffs away from the NCAA’s enforcement unit.

Betting and every other type of rule-breaking will be tacitly approved. It would undermine any salary cap that the NCAA imposes. Scholarship limits would be meaningless, too. Most everybody agrees that college sports has become the Wild, Wild West in this transition period. Monday’s injunction has pointed it toward Haitian-caliber lawlessness. At least the Hunger Games had a controlling authority.

Even the schools who have an eye on secession from the NCAA were horrified to hear this. Anyone in the Great Plains could see the steam coming off the forehead of Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor. He said Big 12 teams have already discussed backing out of all games with the Red Raiders. “It’s fucking bullshit,” Taylor said. “It’s absolutely devastating for him to play when every other sport, no matter the level, deems an athlete ineligible, or they are punished severely for betting on their team.”

Another coach, who asked for anonymity, said he might have to amend the usual practice of inviting law enforcement officials to warn his players against betting. Instead, he might invite some sharpies to give handicapping tips. Why not? There’s no longer a guardrail against betting or, for that matter, attempting to injure a receiver who strays over the middle.

In the much bigger picture, this ruling, if upheld, could finally chisel away at the deep hold that college sports has on its alumni and fans. The reason that 100,000-seat stadiums get filled on Saturday afternoon is the implied confidence that the games are a real competition. When there is always doubt about who’s on the take, and when everyone realizes how subtly and quickly a quarterback can change the outcome, there becomes less of a reason for a Big 12 fan to fly to Orlando and Provo and Morgantown over the course of an autumn.

It wounds the crediibility of the 12-team College Football Playoff, which the Big Ten wants to double. Just hypothetically, what happens if Notre Dame beats Michigan in a CFP final and then the FBI (or at least a functioning FBI) calls a press conference to announce the Michigan quarterbask’s final interception was thrown perfectly, and intentionally? Even if there’s no evidence at all, a large hunk of the defeated fan base will insist that the fix is in. The grapes have soured in most competitions these days, athletic or not.

Beyond all that, Curry’s ruling seems to remove the NCAA’s enforcement mechanism altogether.

The NCAA’s Rule of Restitution allows it to vacate wins, remove scholarships, remove TV money, impose the “death penalty,” and make it unwise to challenge any finding. Although other courts have stopped the NCAA from enforcing the rule in other cases, Curry is pre-emptively stopping Texas Tech’s opponents from retaliating. Georgia’s athletic director announced that no Georgia team will schedule a competition with Texas Tech, although they don’t play each other that often, and Tech’s Big 12 rivals are already discussing a de facto boycott. That, according to Curry, would bring in breach-of-contract issues.

Some lawyers say that Curry’s conditions for Sorsby’s reinstatement are also a warning shot at the NCAA. The judge said Sorsby must complete counseling sessions, a Gamblers Anonymous program and monthly compliance reporting, and must take medication to combat anxiety, to continue to play. It’s usually the NCAA that makes those rules.

It also will be more popular to pursue cases in state courts, the way Mississippi’s Trinidad Chambliss did. The quarterback was seeking a sixth year of eligibility because, as he maintained, he did not play during his 2022 season at Ferris State. He had respiratory issues at the time, but declined to have surgery. After the NCAA turned down Chambliss twice, he filed in a state court, which came up with the same type of injunction Curry did. Ole Miss assistant coach Joe Judge, who formerly coached the New York Giants, testified that Chambliss wouldn’t be as prepared for the NFL draft without another year of experience. Therefore, he would suffer “irreparable harm” if he was denied. That assumes a lot. It is like saying an alcoholic shouldn’t lose his driver’s license because he or she might find it harder to get to a hypothetical job interview in time.

To review: Sorsby was a 3-star recruit at his Denton, Tx. high school and signed with Indiana, in the bad old pre-Cignetti days. He was a redshirt as a freshman and started seven games the next year, six of which Indiana lost.

Sorsby then transferred to Cincinnati, where he blossomed. Over two years he threw 45 touchdown passes with 12 interceptions, and ran for 18 more scores. He was the Big 12 Offensive Player of the Year in 2025. Texas Tech pulled up to the ATM and fetched the money, estimated by some as $6 million, to bring Sorsby to Lubbock.

But, in the spring, Sorsby entered a rehab center in Goodyear, Az., for what he called a gambling addiction. Whether this was a deathbed realization is not clear, but Sorsby did not fess up to anything while he was placing 40 bets on his own Hoosiers. His legal team says it’s not a big deal because he was redshirting at the time, which is a hoot, because Sorsby obviously was in the meetings, knew about the injuries, knew about the vibes, and bet anyway. He bet 9,000 times on games overall, and risked at least $90,000.

He was familiar with the world of parlays and prop bets, but aren’t we all? Don’t Kevin Hart and Shaquille O’Neal and Kevin Garnett and Jamie Foxx tell us all about it, during every commercial? Don’t Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith analyze the betting side of the game during commercial cut-ins? It’s impossible to say Sorsby didn’t know about the Original Sin, but it’s easy to understand why he might have thought everyone in sports was getting a dispensation.

He also said he didn’t bet against his own team, which was also Rose’s attempt at justification. That only means the bookies noticed when Sorsby stopped betting on his own team.

Sorsby’s lawyers won because they somehow convinced Curry that their client was suffering from an addiction and, therefore, a mental health disorder. That assumes Sorsby was issuing a cry for help instead of a plea. Sorsby said he was betting on Turkish basketball games while he was in high school. At Indiana he bet on basketball opponents to score more points than usual. He sent $65,000 to friends to cover his bets. He told authorities that he was addicted after his freshman year. Somehow he wasn’t moved to share this news with anybody until the walls closed in.

Sorsby’s successful appeal is the most publicized victory in gambling’s campaign against legitimacy. But not everyone is getting away with it. Several NFL players have been suspended, including Calvin Ridley, who bet on Falcons’ games when he was a Falcon and lost a year of his career. The NBA suspended Jontay Porter for life, and Terry Rozier has been arrested.

Emanuel Clase of the Cleveland Guardians, once the best closer in the game, has been suspended indefinitely, and umpire Pat Hoberg was disciplined. Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon was fired. Shane Pinto of the Ottawa Senators missed half the NHL season. Notre Dame’s entire men’s swim program was suspended for a year. The NCAA banned four Alabama State basketball players last week. Two Korn Ferry Tour golfers were suspended for three and six months.

But, until now, there hasn’t been retaliatory action by a prominent defendant. And even though Curry is a retired judge from Fort Worth and was only called to Lubbock to sub for a judge with ties to Texas Tech, this will always be attributed to homecourt advantage.

Curry ruled that Sorsby would suffer “probable, imminent, and irreparable injury” if banned for more than two games. Apparently the obvious reply — “Shouldn’t he?” — escaped him.

The sun did not set on Monday before the NCAA filed an appeal, but it probably won’t be heard until Sorsby and Texas Tech have finished their season. And what a season it will be. Taunts will be original and wicked. Losses will be scrutinized for any hint of quarterback malpractice. When it’s over, Sorsby will have to navigate a thicket of red flags to convince anyone in the NFL that he’s worth the gamble, so to speak.

If there’s any consolation, the ruling should spur Congress to hop on the Cruz-Cantwell bill that will bring more actual government to this OK Corral. That, of course, presupposes Congress will actually meet regularly in the fall or will get their selfies and videos done in time to vote on something.

Until then, we can separate the eras of college sports. Welcome to the Saturdays of Big Irreparable Harm.

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Long ago, Charles Barkley figured out why nobody sleeps in Las Vegas. The beta-blockers, he said. The casinos put them in the air conditioning vents and somehow spread them throughout the smoke, and past the card counters and the couriers of free alcohol, and thus kept people off the elevators and awake all night. Barkley has never been asked to show his work on this, but he does speak from experience.

So how to explain Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final Saturday night? Perhaps a saboteur loaded up the systems at T-Mobile Arena with amphetamines and followed them up with quaaludes.

This wasn’t a game. It was a Netflix 6-parter. Vegas scored two goals that were disallowed. It scored two others that went off Carolina stickblades and sticks. It held the Hurricanes to one goal in all but 39 seconds of a game that lasted 85:38 on the clock. It watched the Hurricanes score three goals in those 39 seconds in the third period, and cut a 4-0 lead to 4-3, and then score again to create overtime. No one had lost a lead that big in Stanley Cup Finals history, and one more Carolina goal would have branded this game as The Cane Mutiny.

Instead, the Golden Knights and Hurricanes hunkered down for a scoreless overtime, and, in the second OT, Shea Theodore gunned a point shot to the left of goaltender Brandon Bussi. It rocketed off the back wall as Carolina’s Jordan Martinook tried to swat it away. Instead it seemed to nick Martinook’s blade, and it bounced off the back of Bussi’s left skate and into the net, an inside straight if Vegas has ever seen one. The Knights’ 5-4 win was the third one-goal game out of three, and it gave them a 2-1 lead in a Final that now pauses for two days to reassemble shoulders and hips, and unscramble brains.

The fans certainly need it. They were irate over the two reversed goals, although both were simple calls. Then they realized they might have littered the ice with at least 100 caps and hats during a possible loss. They had followed tradition when Mitch Marner scored his third consecutive goal, the fastest hat trick in Final history. The first of those was tapped past Frederik Andersen by Carolina teammate Sean Walker, but Marner also scored on a breakaway and a rush and had 10 shots on goal overall. Marner, of course, was a Toronto Maple Leaf until he became a free agent and fled his hometown, which had sometimes identified him as a playoff problem. Now Marner has 28 points in 19 playoff games. As he rampaged, a spectator wearing a Leaf sweater held up a sign: “My Therapist Recommended This Trip.”

Andersen was spared further shame after two periods, as Carolina coach Rod Brind’Amour replaced him with Bussi. As backup plans go, this wasn’t bad. Bussi had spent four years in the Bruins’ minor league system, came to Carolina this season, and went a neat 31-6-2 in net. He might have been a Rookie of the Year candidate but you have to be 25 or younger to win the Calder Trophy, and Bussi is 27. But Bussi hadn’t played since April 14, since Brind’Amour decided Andersen’s experience was preferable. Shortly after Bussi came in, Sebastian Aho slashed Marner on another trophy dash, and Marner got a penalty shot. Bussi never gave ground and stopped it. He went on to stop the next 17 shots. A Vegas stick still hasn’t beaten him.

This is why you bring in the second goalie. It gives his teammates something, or someone, to play for. Suddenly Martinook was sneaking into the crease for a goal, and Aho was beating Brayden McNabb to a puck and firing a stunning pass to Taylor Hall for another goal, and Eric Robinson was hopping on a loose puck from a faceoff and shoving it to Jaccob Slavin, whose drive was tipped in by Jordan Staal. All in far less time than it takes Rory McIlroy to deliver a tee shot.

In normal series, you might expect it to end there. Give the Hurricanes an attaboy for making it close. Not here. With 1:42 left, Staal attacked the net, and Andrei Svechnikov waded into a pool of gold jerseys and poked the puck until it got past Carter Hart.

Scroll down to Theodore. He had to play both sides on defense in Game 2 after McNabb took a puck to the face. McNabb returned Saturday, to loud huzzahs, wearing an undetermined number of stitches all around his nose and also wearing a cage for a helmet. He played 36 minutes and was plus-3 with two assists, Theodore played 39:09.

McNabb and Theodore are two of the four remaining “misfits” who led the expansionist Knights to the Stanley Cup final in 2018. The other two are center William Karlsson and winger Reilly Smith. How Theodore got to Vegas is a window into how this relentless organization thinks.

Theodore was a first-round draft choice in Anaheim. With expansion coming, the Ducks had a quandary on defense. They had traded for veteran Kevin Bieksa, but he had a no-move clause. They didn’t want to part with either Josh Manson or Sami Vatanen. And, unaccountably, they had signed Clayton Stoner to a four-year, $13 million contract, even though Stoner’s most famous accomplishment would be getting cited for hunting grizzlies without a license.

The Knights might have wanted Stoner but they pretended they had to be persuaded. So the Ducks, trying to squeeze underneath the salary cap, traded Theodore to Vegas….for Vegas’ agreement to take Stoner. Injuries limited Stoner to 14 games that season. Theodore was on the 2026 Canadian Olympic team, is the alltime leader in most categories for Vegas defensemen, and is in the first year of a seven-year deal that will pay him $7.4 million per. It was one of the few two-for-none deals in NHL history, and, no, it wasn’t one of those that helped both teams.

Along with the vertigo it triggered, Game 3 will be remembered for its destruction and sophistication. On the Carolina side, Hall, K’Andre Miller, Jalen Chatfield and William Carrier all left with injuries, and Carrier never came back. Noah Hanifin took a brutal hit from Martinook and played only 21 minutes. Ivan Barbashev also missed time for Vegas. There were mistakes, like Svechnikov’s too-many-men penalty that enabled Vegas’ first goal, but there were only two contact penalties: Aho’s on Marner, which was necessary, and a stick-holding penalty on the Knights’ Cole Smith. Otherwise, no holding or hooking or tripping or high-sticking or cross-checking or boarding or interference or any of that, and it wasn’t because the officials left their whistles at the hotel. Attention to detail was required, and paid.

After three games, there’s no point in trying to project this as the greatest Final in Cup history, as the ESPN hypemasters were doing Saturday night. In 1942 Toronto came back from 0-3 and beat Detroit in seven. In 1987 a dominant Edmonton team was pushed to a 7th game by Philadelphia before it won at home. There were other classsics, too. But there’s no telling what awaits us. All we know is that a towering, three-act drama was performed in Vegas Saturday night, one that won’t be forgotten by its witnesses. Don’t expect it to stay there.

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Myles Garrett was already penciled in. He and everyone else knew he’d be the No. 1 pick in the 2017 NFL draft. And they all knew that the Texas Bowl, where Texas A&M was headed with its 8-4 record, was just an exercise in calisthenics and TV commercials. This was when top college players like Christian McCaffrey began blowing off insignificant bowl games to protect themselves for the draft. But Garrett, with the most to lose, said he was playing, said he wanted to get to the finish line with his guys. And he did. A&M lost to Kansas State anyway, but Garrett survived. On Draft Night he was the first man out of the Green Room on draft night. That stands for something.

Myles Garrett also has written children’s stories and poems. His girlfriend is Chloe Kim, the Olympic gold-medal snowboarder. Beyond all that, Garrett has lived in the grime and slime of Cleveland’s stadium for the intervening nine years, dealing with one blocker at his shoulders and another at his knees, not only chasing quarterbacks but catching them at a disproportionate rate. The Browns won 58 games in those seasons, including none in Garrett’s rookie year, and went to the playoffs only twice.

On his first professional play Garrett sacked Josh McCown of the Jets. In the 17th game of last season, he sacked Joe Burrow of the Bengals. That was his 23rd, breaking a single-season record held by the Giants’ Michael Strahan and the Steelers’ T.J. Watt. Garrett is the only player with 12 sacks in six consecutive seasons, and he’s the NFL sack leader in those nine years, with 10 ½ more than Watt. Although few of those sacks did much to nudge the AFC North standings, Garrett has won two NFL Defensive Player of the Year awards, including the 2025 edition, and has been first-team All-Pro in five of the past six years.

So, in the coldly logical mind of Les Snead, you do whatever you can to get Myles Garrett, who is only 30 years old and who informed the Browns that he’d like to see how the playoff people live, much like Matthew Stafford told the Lions in 2022. Stafford won a Super Bowl in first year with the Rams, was the MVP last season, and is under contract for two more years even though he’s 38. In exchange, the Browns wanted Jared Verse, the pass rusher who was the 2024 Rookie of the Year, and they wanted the Rams’ first-round draft choice in 2027, and a second-round pick in 2028 and a third-rounder in 2029. Snead, the general manager of the Rams, agreed without one single yeah-but. He cares about his lineup card, not anyone else’s. The Rams now will be judged a crushing disappointment if they don’t get to the Super Bowl, which again is in their stadium, and win it. In their minds, thirty-one other teams should feel the same way. They’ll worry about 2028 when it comes. Who knows what pandemic, parasite or blocked strait will greet us before then?

Snead and owner Stan Kroenke are not in this to go 10-7 five consecutive years, or make the first weekend of the playoffs and call it good. Snead has described the NFL as a blown-up version of the WWE’s Survivor Series. Only one team can and should be happy. Last year the Rams got to the final minute of the NFC Championship Series and didn’t win. They did not issue a we-had–a-great-season address.

Garrett should make everyone else on a good defensive line better. He will be playing with the lead more often than he ever has, which means the quarterbacks he hunts will be passing more, and with more desperation. That would help him, as would Aaron Donald, who retired from his All-Pro days but did not retire from the weight room. After the trade, Donald was making social-media noises like he wanted to come back. The three-time Defensive Player of the Year is only 35 and hasn’t played since 2024. Snead would gladly arrange for the rookies to carry Donald and his freshened legs into the facility, like some all-powerful potentate. But there’s no rush. Safety Eric Weddle came back for the tail end of the 2021 championship season, and Donald could parachute in for Thanksgiving.

The Rams already dealt one of their 2026 first-rooud picks for Trent McDuffie, the brilliant young cornerback from Kansas City. The other No. 1 was spent on Alabama rookie quarterback Ty Simpson and now we know why; Snead doesn’t have to rummage for the Future Quarterback next year, so he could pursue Garrett with that 2027 pick, and in fact was already doing that.

Simpson and Verse have another distinction. They’re the only first-round picks Snead has spent on his own draft since 2016, the year the Rams returned to Los Angeles. That’s when Snead jumped up to pick Jared Goff first-overall, giving Tennessee their first-rounder in 2017. The 2018 Rams were in a Super Bowl. Then Goff and coach Sean McVay ran aground and the Rams traded him for Stafford, along with the 2022 and 2023 first rounders. Goff has been very good in Detroit. The Rams would do it again in a heartbeat.

The 2019 first-rounder went to the Falcons, so they could get into the first round and pick tackle Caleb McGary. The 2020 and 2021 first-rounders went to Jacksonville for cornerback Jalen Ramsey, a key figure in the Super Bowl that the Rams won. The 2022 and 2023 picks went to Detroit for Stafford. The 2025 pick again went to the Falcons for draft position. The Rams’ next first-round pick will be in 2028. You can bet it’s already burning a hole in Snead’s pocket.

Along the way Snead made the following comment that adorns more than one T-shirt in SoFi Stadium: “F—- them picks.” That created the impression that he was the modern-day George Allen, desperately holding onto rusted ships. So did the recruitment of Von Miller, Odell Beckham Jr. and Ndamukong Suh. But the truth is that Snead is a former scout who loves the draft, loves the bones of it, loves rummaging around in Day 2 and Day 3, when the hordes have stumbled out of the one-stage Coachella that the draft has become, and the studio analysts are frantically Googling for something to say about a guy from New Mexico Normal. The reason the Rams can punt the first-round picks and survive is that Snead has found winning players in those late rounds. They fill two important requirements. They’re highly motivated and they’re cheap.

The classic example is Cooper Kupp, the Super Bowl MVP who floated to the Rams in the third round in 2017. The Rams let Kupp go after they plucked Puka Nacua out of the fifth round — the 177th player picked — in 2023, and Nacua led the NFL with 129 catches and 80 first downs last season. The Rams didn’t anticipate that Kupp would be a prime mover in their NFC title loss in Seattle. They also have questions about Nacua’s unsolicited off-field opinions that might come up the next time he wants an extension. But if we’re talking about championships and zero-sum games, Nacua is a major reason why.

The 2022 and 2023 drafts were like a day at the fair for Snead. The Rams had 22 choices and eight of them are useful for today’s Rams, including running back Kyren Wililams (fifth round, ‘22), safety Quentin Lake (sixth round, ‘22), pass rusher Byron Young (third round, ‘23), defensive tackle Kobie Turner (third round, ‘23), guard Steve Avila (second round, ‘23) and tight end Davis Allen (fifth round, ‘23).

The two third-round picks in ‘24, the year that Snead led off the Rams draft with Verse and defensive tackle Braden Fiske, were running back Blake Corum and safety Kamren Kinchens. All four picks have been hits.

Now comes Garrett. Beyond his portfolio, his arrival makes everyone get to the facility five minutes earlier, has them staying on the practice field 30 minutes later. It sets the terms of engagement. Nothing discourages a pro athlete more than the feeling that the front office isn’t as committed to winning as he is.

So not everybody wants to leave California, as it turns out. And Myles Garrett really didn’t want to leave Cleveland. But he’d already played one Texas Bowl, with nothing on the line but memories. He no longer wanted to play 17.

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They weren’t true to their nickname, not at all. Everybody sees hurricanes coming. You can board up the windows and pack up the belongings. But the Carolina Hurricanes were barely a trickle on the pavement during the middle of Thursday’s Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final.

Vegas was cruising, up 2-0 on the scoreboard, up 1-0 in the Final because of its comeback from an 0-2 hole in Game 1. All Carolina had was the unfettered noise of their fans and the faith of coach Rod Brind’Armour, not that he had a choice.

Things weren’t going well. Brett Howden, channeling Claude Lemieux and Max Talbot and John Druce and other grunts who sprouted wings in the playoffs, picked up his 12th and 13th goals of the postseason for the Golden Knights. Howden had 12 in the regular season, but here he took a lob pass from Mitch Marner and shook off defenseman Sean Walker and scored, and then he was sprung loose by Ivan Barbashev’s pass and bulled past Jaccob Slavin to score again on Frederik Andersen. (Seven times, a player has exceeded his regular-season goal output in the playoffs. Lemieux did it three times.)

The Golden Knights had other chances, too, finding jujitsu ways to penalize Carolina’s head-first offensive pressure, moving the puck ahead and finding space all over the ice. The fact that Andersen kept Vegas stalled at 2-0 was of little comfort. Brind’Amour was shuffling lines the way he never had to do when the ‘Canes were rolling past Ottawa and Philadelphia and Montreal. A loss would have sent Carolina limping to Vegas, and the King Arthur-meets-Elvis pageant at T-Mobile Arena, with little guarantee of returning for more hockey.

But the weather can be funny in Hurricane country. Carolina’s Logan Stankoven went behind the goal and insisted on stealing a puck from Rasmus Andersson, and he came out and finally beat Carter Hart. A couple of minutes later, William Carrier fought off Jeremy Lauzon, who once led the NHL in hits, and captured a puck, and got it onside to Mark Jankowski, who zipped the tying goal past Hart’s shoulder. That’s “Stanks” and “Janky” in hockey parlance, and throats were straining and ears were bleeding in Lenovo Arena.

Then came the play that will dominate the Canadian blogosphere at least until Saturday night when the series resumes.

Slavin, a Team Canada staple and owner of perhaps the most reliable stick among all NHL defensemen, had another rough moment. He tried to clear the puck down the middle and Barbashev intercepted. Blissfully alone, Barbashev missed his first try, retrieved the puck, skated around the net and tried a wraparound on Andersen, as Slavin literally crawled to re-enter the play.

As Anderson fell to control the puck, Barbashev kept poking. Hurricanes captain Jordan Staal fell on top of Andersen. Pavel Dorofeyev also tried to pry it loose. The puck finally did dribble through Andersen and into the net. But referee Jean Hebert was already signaling “incomplete,” which is also the international symbol for no goal.

He ruled that Barbashev was interfering with Andersen’s right to freeze the puck. The Golden Knights doubted, loudly, that Andersen had it under control. At that point, coach John Tortorella had to make a call. Keep playing, and take a 2-2 tie into the final five minutes.. Or challenge it and get it overturned and take what would have looked like a towering 3-2 lead. The problem, of course, is that few calls do get overturned in the postseason, and a bad challenge leaves you shorthanded for two minutes.

That is what happened. The call stood. Carolina went on the power play. But maybe that was part of the calculation, since the Hurricanes were treating their power play like a trip to the DMV. They were 6-for-59 with the man advantage. This reminded some people of the day Flyers coach Fred Shero said Bobby “The Chief” Taylor would start in goal. Bernie Parent had started every game for months. Why would Taylor start this particular time? “Well,” Shero said, “it’s his turn.”

And suddenly it was Carolina’s turn. Here, Shayne Gostisbehere got a chance to shoot it through Vegas’ forest of defenders while Staal and Sebastian Aho were in front of Hart. Staal, 37 and in search of his first Cup since he was with Pittsburgh 17 seasons ago, tipped it past Hart, and it was 3-2, and there was unlimited merriment…..

Until Mark Stone parked in front of Andersen in the final minute of regulation. On the far boards, Tomas Hertl won a puck battle with Slavin and Jordan Martinook, neither of whom lose many. He fed it back to Mitch Marner, Vegas’ Harry Potter throughout these playoffs. Marner shifted and side-stepped and finally saw a lane and shot, and Stone got in the way, and the puck pinballed around and caromed off Slavin’s skate and past Andersen. Overtime, the way it had to be.

It didn’t even take four minutes. Hertl got whistled for tripping Staal, and the Hurricanes, having hit 21 on the last power play, couldn’t wait to double down. Aho won the faceoff, the Hurricanes moved the puck crisply, and Seth Jarvis set up on the left side with his stick in the air, locked and loaded. Gostisbehere sent him the prize and Jarvis blasted it between Hart’s arm and his body. Carolina, the team that couldn’t get past the conference finals, was a 4-3 winner, and is 6-0 in playoff overtime, and now the Cup is up for grabs.

Tortorella was eloquently terse afterward, saying that he would make that challenge “10 times out of 10.” He had been hamstrung since the first period because stalwart defenseman Brayden McNabb was drilled in the visor by Nikolaj Ehlers’ 97-mph shot. The Hurricanes were signaling to the Vegas bench as soon as McNabb went down, and he was immediately taken to the locker room and then to a hospital. That meant Vegas really had only four playoff-ready defensemen, and then overtime complicated things.

Last week, former Blues and Capitals star T.J. Oshie was asked about the Hurricanes and what makes them tick. He said he really didn’t like their “terrible” locker rooms and the inconvenient location of their X-ray machine, but he did respect their endless commitment to the system. But then he asked, “Who are their Hall of Fame players?” Slavin might make it one day because of his defensive mastery, but Aho, their best offensive player historically, has not reached that standard. And that can be a problem when the playoffs get deep. It was a problem for Carolina when it kept running into Steve Stamkos and Victor Hedman and Sasha Barkov and Artemi Panarin in the conference finals. This year Montreal’s best players were too young to outlast the moment, and Carolina won the West finals in five. But now the Hurricanes are dealing with Marner and Stone and Jack Eichel, along with two veteran defense pairs that can finish each other’s sentences. Will the stardom deficit surface again?

That question has to wait until the parking lot empties and the trash is removed and the “tarps off” guys put their shirts back on in Raleigh. Seven games of this, and the whole city might wander off to sea.

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A funny thing happened on the way to the pantheon Wednesday night. Victor Wembanyama’s path to immortality was obscured by a bearded 7-footer who knows what it’s like to be anointed. Karl-Anthony Towns also was a first-overall pick, also was a big fellow who liked to shoot the three, also got to the NBA and was confronted with a red carpet of expectations. And Towns was playing in his first NBA Finals game, too.

Towns played defense the way the book says, making himself taller than he already was, trying to create unfavorable angles for the 7-foot-4 French Correction. He added some 10-year veteran tricks as well. And, on the other end, he shied away from challenging the Defensive Player of the Year straight-on, but instead got him out on the floor and used his footwork to barge to the hoop. Towns got through the first half with only one foul, a good omen for a Knicks team that needed one. But New York trailed San Antonio by seven at the break, and by 14 halfway through the third quarter, when Dylan Harper, the 20-year-old new kid in town, sank yet another floater for the Spurs.

Then KAT reached deep into the bag. He drove for a finger-roll. He blocked a shot and fueled a break that Jalen Brunson finished. Miles McBride missed a three and Towns rebounded it and scored. Josh Hart missed a three and Towns rebounded that and scored. The Knicks and Spurs were tied, 76-76, when the quarter ended.

Had San Antonio been following the way Knicks had plowed up the East, the way they kept making long runs that were immune to time outs and foul shots and all other interruptions? Everybody knows now. The Knicks turned over the fourth quarter to Brunson, who had bounced back from knee and ankle problems already, and a tie game with 2:16 left became a 105-95 Game 1 victory for New York. The Spurs’ final field goal came with 3:24 left, on Wembanyama’s drive. No one questions San Antonio’s heart after its 7-game dethronement of Oklahoma City. Whether they can reinsert that heart, after Brunson and Towns removed it, might be another issue.

“We let that one go,” Wembanyama said. The Spurs shot 31.8 in the second half, 2 for 19 from three. The numbers in the fourth quarter were 28.6 percent and 2 for 10. The Knicks were 9 for 22 in the fourth and Brunson 5 for 9, capping a 30-point night on 12 for 31 shooting. Towns scored 18 with 12 rebounds, four on the offensive glass, where the Knicks found 23 second-chance points.

As for Wembanyama, he had 26 points and 12 boards but also six turnovers, and 15 misses in 21 field goal tries. His thunderclap plays, the ones that drive the noise in the home arena, were absent, primarily because the Knicks put him on the foul line 13 times. The Knicks also were betting that Julian Champagnie, the Brooklyn native who bombed away for 15 points in the first half, would revert to the norm, and he added just one more point in the second.As mentioned before, the 25-year-old McBride is the youngest player in the Knicks’ rotation, and De’Aaron Fox (28), Luke Kornet (33) and Keldon Johnson (26) are the only plus-25s who play significantly for San Antonio. Whether that had anything to do with Game 1 is a difficult question, but the Knicks, especially Brunson, have a lot of old-men-in-the-park energy about them. At 6-foot-2, Brunson is like an owner’s manual, with shots to fit all situations, as he showed when he faked the shot, faked the step-back, ducked in and hit the jumper in the final minute, despite Devin Vassell’s defensive efforts.

Brunson is the son of ex-NBA player and current Knicks’ assistant Rick Brunson and played high school basketball in Chicago. Towns grew up in New Jersey, Mikal Bridges in Philly, Hart in D.C., and bench guard Jose Alvarado in New York. In those areas, basketball in the park can be more about gamesmanship than game. When Brunson first went to the locker room with the knee injury late in the first quarter, the Knicks were down 10. Alvarado came in, stuck his finger in every pie as always, and when Brunson returned the Knicks were down three. Early blowout averted.

If there is one compelling reason why the Knicks have not lost a game since April 23, and why they finished the regular season 12-4, it was probably coach Mike Brown’s decision to bring Towns outside and let him make decisions, letting Brunson become more of a catch-and-drive force instead of an organizer. That saves Brunson’s calories for takeover time, as in Game 1, but it also highlights Towns’ extraordinary scope. This is a guy who won a 3-point contest at the All-Star Game and, while at Minnesota, scored 44 points in a first half. Towns wasn’t considered enough of a defender to thrive in New York, especially with Tom Thibodeau coaching, but he did things to Wembanyama on Wednesday that Oklahoma City’s Chet Holmgren couldn’t.

Towns is one of four active NBA players who averages 20 points and 10 rebounds for his career. The others are Nikola Jokic, Joel Embiid and Anthony Davis. This season Towns averaged 20.1 points and 11.9 rebounds, and took almost three fewer shots a game than in the 2025 season. His mother Jacqueline, who died in 2020, was from the Dominican Republic and Towns has played for the Dominican nationals, and Hart has named him “The Big Bodega,” although others have extended that to “Bodega KAT,” since the mom-and-pop shops in New York often have a pet feline to roam the premises and chase away other critters.

The demands of New Yorkers, most of whom have never seen the Knicks actually win an NBA championship, have not flustered Towns or, at least, don’t anymore. He contends that he’s the best-shooting big man, from range, in league history. “Men lie, women lie, numbers don’t,” he likes to say.

“I never doubted my ability,” he said, earlier in the playoffs. “But you gotta adjust, especially with a lot of new things thrown at you. I just continue to feel out the game. It will tell me what to do.”

It always does. Victor Wembanyama will climb every mountain in this game, well before he’s done. Game 1 doesn’t change that. Right now, he could use a listening tour.

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The Stanley Cup Final begins Tuesday night in Raleigh. It is a trip the Vegas Golden Knights would assuredly not have made if Carter Hart, a defendant 10 1/2 months ago, hadn’t anchored their defense. Now Hart has a golden chance for the Conn Smythe Trophy, which goes to the MVP of the postseason. If Vegas wins, Ontario Superior Court Judge Maria Carrocchia could well demand a playoff share.

Vegas sleep-walked through most of the regular season despite a roster brimming with Olympians and eventual Hall of Fame candidates. Most of the problem was in goal. Hockey analyst Rob Vollman defines a “quality start” as one in which the goalie matches or exceeds the league-wide save percentage. The four Knights goalies had only 32. Vollman’s “really bad starts” are ones in which the save percentage is under 85 percent, and the Vegas contingent did that 23 times. Their overall percentage of .879 ranked 27th in the league. (Carolina, which plays Vegas in the Cup final, ranked 26th).

Finally, after a 4-10-2 stretch, management replaced 2023 championship coach Bruce Cassidy with John Tortorella, who had coached Hart in Philadelphia. The Knights finished 7-0-1, and Hart was 6-0. They still finished the season with only 39 wins, but they beat Utah in six games and Anaheim in six games, then jolted the NHL by sweeping Colorado, by far the best team from the first puck drop. Hart is 12-4 in the playoffs and Vegas has yielded 10 goals in its past six games. Hart’s .922 save percentage is second-best in the playoffs behind Carolina’s Frederik Andersen, who has faced 140 fewer shots on goal.

An uncertain goalie begets an uncertain team. As the Knights sensed that Hart had a handle on things, their undeniable talent and experience blossomed. Mitch Marner leads all playoff skaters with 21 points and Jack Eichel has 18. Pavel Dorofeyev, the only Knights’ playoff participant whom they drafted, has 10 goals, tops in the playoffs along with teammate Brett Howden, who has scored on an insane 35.7 percent of his shots on goal. A rangy, veteran defense got even better when Vegas traded for Calgary’s Rasmus Andersson. Nic Dowd, 35, is the consummate bottom-6 forward. It only required the belief that the goalmouth had not become a funnel, and that’s what Hart provided.

But Hart is blessed to be in this position today. He and four teammates on the Canadian World Juniors team were acquitted of sexual assault last July 24 in London, Ontario. The trial began in April, became a mistrial, another jury was installed, and Carrocchia dismissed that jury for “prejudice against the defense.” After that, it all came down to her,, and she ruled that the woman known as E.M. during the trial, did not present enough “credible or reliable” evidence for a conviction.

Carrocchia quoted another jurist who, in another case, observed that “although the term ‘believe the victim’ has become popularized of late, it has no place in a criminal trial. To approach a trial with the assumption that the complainant is telling the truth is the equivalent of imposing a presumption of guilt on the person accused of sexual assault and then placing a burden on him to prove his innocence.”

But innocence was in short supply on the night of June 18, 2018, more than five months after Canada had won the World Juniors. There was a gala and a golf tournament in London, and team member Michael McLeod met E.M. at Jack’s Bar that evening. The two went to his room, where sexual activities ensued, and McLeod called the other future defendants and invited them to the room, saying E.M. wanted to engage in a “three-way,” among other things. Hart, the only one of the five who testified, said he was excited by her arrival, and engaged in oral sex with the woman.

Howden was on that team and was in the room briefly, although he was not charged. He had sent a text message to a teammate saying he was “so glad he left” the room and that one of the defendants “smacked this girl’s ass so hard.” Howden testified that he did not remember sending the text or seeing such an event. His text was ruled inadmissible.

As always it came down to a she-said, they-said confrontation. E.M. claimed she was inebriated. One prosecution lawyer brandished a high heel she was wearing, trying to imply she couldn’t have been walking effectively if she had been drunk. Another surmised that the eight drinks she claimed she had at the bar were watered down. McLeod had taken a video in which she said it was “all consensual,” and in fact she never asked anyone to stop. She explained that she was in fear of being injured if she did resist or try to escape, and that she had resigned herself to pretending she was in an X-rated movie, just to survive.

“I made the choice to dance with them and drink at the bar,” she testified, during one of her seven days of cross-examination. “I did not make the choice to have them do what they did back at the hotel…..Any one of those men could have stood up and said, this isn’t right. They didn’t want to think about if I was actually OK or if I was actually consenting.”

Even before the trial, there was outrage. London police investigated and filed no charges in 2019. E.M. sued Hockey Canada, the national governing body, for $3.5 million in April of 2022. The next month, Hockey Canada unexpectedly settled the lawsuit. Two months after that, the Globe And Mail revealed that Hockey Canada had set aside a fund to pay off suits in sexual assault cases, and some of the money came from registration fees paid by parents of youth hockey players. Overall, Hockey Canada paid $8.9 million to settle 21 cases of sexual assault and abuse, and much of that money was in this Participants Legacy Trust Fund.

This was a tornadic event that basically triggered the resignations of all pertinent officials of Hockey Canada. Most of the principal sponsors of Hockey Canada’s activities withdrew their support of all programs.

Meanwhile, the London Fivesome was still playing in shadows. Police re-started the investigation, and the players surrendered to authorities in 2024.

The acquittal did not make Hart’s reinstatement mandatory. Once upon a time, the NHL suspended Sean Avery for talking trash about his former girlfriend, along with other jerk-like hijinks. Some Canadian columnists assumed that Hart and the others would be banned forever. After all, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman had already called the incident “abhorrent and disgusting.”

Last Sept. 11, the league huffed and puffed about the “deeply troubling and unacceptable” behavior of Hart & Co., and intoned that their conduct “falls woefully short of the standards and values” the NHL holds dear.

A couple of paragraphs later, it permitted the London Fivesome to sign contracts on Oct. 15 and begin NHL play on Dec. 1. The Flyers had already cut loose Hart, and the Golden Knights signed him up.

Mention of Hart’s case has been rare on the networks covering the playoffs. On Monday, the Knights and Hurricanes were all available for Media Day interviews, but Vegas media officials refused to let Hart, a 27-year-old adult, answer trial-related questions.

In truth, there’s little more we need to know about a league that asks so much of its players on the ice, like next year’s 84-game schedule, and apparently so little when they leave. Fortunately, there’s not enough room on the Cup to list the lawyers.

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Baseball teams can spend as much as they want on payroll. Baseball teams can also spend as little as they want. Every MLB team is worth over $1 billion, according to the Forbes annual valuations, and the game itself is expected to bring in $13 billion in revenue this year. More games are on more channels than ever before. And the losers can throw up their hands at the end of the season and lament all the damage that those merciless Yankees and Dodgers do to the game, while they pocket the revenue-sharing booty, a reward for decrepitude.

So what’s the problem?

Well, there are several, but none that MLB hasn’t visited upon itself. The Collective Bargaining Agreement expires after this season ends, and the two sides, owners and players, decided to announce their terms of engagement last week. It sounded like the United Nations would sound if there were no translators. A lot of cross-talking, on parallel planes.

It’s June 1, so there’s no need for real negotiating to replace posturing. But the fans should realize what’s going on here, because it’s been going on since the mid-70s, when players first gained freedom and power. The owners have never accepted that, and so they don’t claim victory, even though the game is pumping out obscene dollars for everyone involved. Instead they’re going to put everyone, or at least those who care, into an off-season wringer, with the threat of a work stoppage etched against the March horizon. At one time this was considered a national crisis. Now it just means we’ll make more bets on golf. Maybe Fan Duel can be the mediator.

The players have suggested that all players become free agents at 30 if they’ve put in five years, along with a minimum salary of $1.5 million with annual raises of 10 percent, and performance bonuses for pre-arbitration players. And, of course, no salary cap.

The owners have proposed a hard salary cap but also a salary floor. The cap would be $245.3 per team and the floor would be $171.2 million. Local TV revenue will also be pooled and divided equally, and the owners and players would split revenue 50/50, although there will be inevitable disputes over what “revenue” is. The Atlanta Braves make a fortune off The Battery, a group of restaurants, shops and a hotel that ring their ballpark in Cobb Country. Those who say The Battery doesn’t pump out baseball-related income, and that such income should be exempted from the pool, are not acknowledging that if the Braves weren’t there, The Battery wouldn’t be there either.

Hopefully all parties will soon return to terra firma. The salary cap numbers, in particular, will satisfy hardly anybody. Do we really think the Marlins ($75.4 million) and Guardians ($70.5) want to pay $171.2 million a year? Do the Dodgers ($317 million on Opening Day) want to reduce payroll, and thus perform triage, by $72 million? And do the Dodgers want to spread their $332 million-a-year of Spectrum TV money across the MLB trough?

The players have always considered a salary cap non-negotiable. Hockey has a hard cap and its highest-paid player is Kirill Kaprizov of the Minnesota Wild. He makes $17 million per year. That would make him the seventh highest-paid Dodger. The NFL also has a hard cap, but the NFL is the premier sports and entertainment industry in America, at least. Counting salary and benefits, each NFL team is on the hook for $378 million. That’s a different realm, greased by a lot of non-guaranteed money and the promise of a short career.

Commissioner Rob Manfred reads from the same hymnal as Bowie Kuhn did in 1981, when baseball lost the middle third of its season to an ill-advised ownership attack on free agency. He says the current salary structure is “not a fair fight.” A look at the current standings would call it eminently fair. Even last year’s standings were led by Milwaukee in the regular season, with the 24th highest payroll in the game.

The eight most eager spenders have a composite record of 256-216, a winning percentage of .542. The 11 tightwads have a composite record of 364-342, a winning percentage of .515. Eight of those 11 teams have winning records. Three of them are leading their divisions. Now, we’ve only gotten through roughly a third of the schedule, and it’s entirely possible that the oligarchy will take over in late summer. No one is pretending that money doesn’t bring advantages. But well-managed teams which know when to jettison players who are descending, and pick up bargain players or rookies who have a longer runway, will always be the most successful.

The “small market” theme even spilled over into the NCAA regionals. Little Rock and Cal Poly are advancing to the Round of 16. St. Mary’s beat UCLA, the top seed in the entire field, and then eliminated the Bruins two days later. St. John’s won at Florida to advance. Milwaukee and Troy were playing for super-regional slots on Monday.

The NBA has a nominal salary cap that is distorted into oblivion by all its exceptions. But, long ago, it allowed its teams to exceed the cap in the effort to sign their free agent players. It was called the Larry Bird Rule and it gave NBA powerhouses a better chance to stay together. If the players are finally checkmated into accepting a salary cap, they need to ask for a Paul Skenes Rule or whatever name they prefer. And each team can be prohibited for using Larry Bird Rules more than once in every three years. That, along with maintaining the salary cap, would force shrewdness and discipline on baseball’s general managers.

Charles Barkley also has an idea. If you finish below .500, you can’t raise ticket prices. You could extend that to merchandise prices, too. This suggestion is more pertinent to the NBA, where teams deliberately lose in order to get high draft position. It’s been a cancer on the game but there’s at least a palpable reason for it. In baseball, where high school players can be drafted, it’s rare that the No. 1 pick makes an immediate difference. The baseball teams that aren’t trying to win aren’t doing it to draft the Next One. They’re just socking away the cash.

What if the players and owners put all this energy into really figuring out why pitchers spend more time in recovery rooms than bullpens? What if they designed a system that realigned the divisions, so more games are within the same time zone, and natural rivalries can flourish organically?

We’re in an era of conflict for conflict’s sake, for actions that lack strategy or focus. It is hoped that Manfred, in the desolation of December, will refrain from telling us that an agreement is just around the corner. The way these negotiations are starting, it’s likely a cybertruck.

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His team had just hit 17 3-point shots. Six of 10, in fact, in the fourth quarter, in front of hostile fans in blue T-shirts, in the face of the best that the two-time Most Valuable Player had to offer. Despite all that, Victor Wembayama was talking about bricks, the kind that builders use.

“When you lay a brick like this every time, when you get a chance, and you lay it perfectly fine? At the end of the day you get a big castle,” Wembanyama said. “A beautiful house. And this is like the entry hall of our castle right now.”

The San Antonio Spurs are not at the end of their day. They’re not even at high noon. They also have an NBA Finals date with New York, which is older, better-rested, and flying with confidence after it usurped the East. But you don’t need a ouija board or even a ticket to Medieval Times to know where the castle is, and it won’t be like the Alamo. With this 111-103 Game 7 win over the Thunder, the Spurs won the Western Conference and framed the NBA’s future. Enter with caution.

Wembanyama, 7-foot-4 at the very least, put up 22 points and shot 7 for 15, figures that the Thunder would have settled for. But he was willing to move the ball to an array of teammates that won 13 of the 19 games that he missed this season. The starting five took 14, 11, 15, 15 and 12 shots, and Julian Champagnie and De’Aaron Fox and 20-year-old Dylan Harper drilled 3-pointers that put in a needle in every OKC rally. Champagnie, undrafted and then cut by the 76ers, scored 20, and Fox, a gift from Sacramento, scored 15. Harper, who could have been a sophomore at Rutgers this season, stepped back to drill a 27-footer that created a 12-point lead with 3:47 left. But before that, he swooped in for three fourth-quarter offensive rebounds that led to three buckets, including his own tip. Much earlier, he had watched OKC’s Alex Caruso throw teammate Devin Vassell to the floor and, instead of woofing at Caruso, quickly enveloped Vassell and kept him from starting a ruckus or worse. At this age, that’s exceptional. Maybe he’s 20, Celsius.

Stephon Castle, no relation to Wembanyama’s dream house, produced his usual 17-point, six-assist, six-rebound smorgasbord but also joined the double-teams that kept dogging Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. They weren’t terribly successful, as SGA’s 35 points in 43 minutes would testify, but it seemed that almost every Thunder bucket was a chore, and his scores were no exception. Moreover, no one else for the Thunder scored more than 17. Without Gilgeous-Alexander, they shot 25 for 62 and 10 for 30 from the 3-point line, and they scored only seven points on fast breaks. A heroic blocked shot by backup center Luke Kornet, on a fast-breaking Isaiah Hartenstein, sent the Spurs’ bench into a frenzy during money time.

The Thunder won a league-high 64 games and seemed destined to carve out their own era. They still might, and the absence of All-Star Jalen Williams and starter Ajay Mitchell from Game 7 should not be dismissed. But now there will be impatient questions, particularly for Chet Holmgren, the third-team All-NBA 7-footer who took two shots in 33 minutes and had four rebounds. And no matter how Sam Presti touches up the roster, the all-knowing personnel boss is powerless to do anything about San Antonio’s.

Wembanyama is 22, Castle 21, Champagnie 24, Sixth Man of the Year Keldon Johnson 26, Vassell 25, Fox 28 and rookie Carter Bryant 20. Coach Mitch Johnson said the Spurs revolve around “words like competitiveness, resolve, togetherness, execution, habits. They don’t give a damn about the word ‘experience.’’’

Evidently not. They weren’t in the playoffs last year, which allowed them to rise to the No. 2 pick in the lottery so they could pick Harper, but they knew they would have made it if Wembanyama hadn’t missed 32 games with deep vein thrombosis in his left shoulder. By last Christmas Day, they were 23-7 overall and 3-0 against the Thunder, and they already knew that their perimeter size and depth made them a better match against the 2005 champs than anyone else. In Game 1 of this series, they won even though Caruso scored 31 points off the bench for Oklahoma City and Fox (ankle) didn’t play at all. Wembanyama scored 41 with 22 rebounds in that double-overtime win, a reminder that he could defend the castle singlehandedly.

“They’re young, they’re talented, they’re well-coached, they play together, they seem to like each other,” Gilgeous-Alexander said of the Spurs. “They have the makeup for sure. And you don’t beat us without the makeup.”

The Spurs’ first Ping-Pong Era began in 1999, when Tim Duncan and David Robinson were surrounded by point guard Avery Johnson and shooters Mario Elie, Jaren Jackson, Sean Elliott and Steve Kerr. They beat the Knicks in five games, then won titles in 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2014. Duncan was on hand for all, eventually to be joined by Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili and Kawhi Leonard.

As Gregg Popovich always pointed out, the Spurs owe much of their greatness to their exquisite timing on Lottery Night. Wembanyama led off the 2023 draft. Charlotte’s consolation prize, with the No. 2 pick, was Brandon Miller. The Spurs endured four also-ran seasons before Wembanyama, and only won 22 his rookie year, as Popovich sat him for 11 games and had him average only 29.7 minutes, the better to handle the tendon-busting schedule. Wembanyama won Rookie of the Year anyway .

Last season Popovich had to retire after a stroke, and Johnson moved up, but Popovich is never far from Wembanyama’s ear and even castigated the Spurs last week after their lackluster Game 3. All along, the Spurs were sifting through complementary pieces until it all clicked, and the Houston Rockets are sentenced to long years of regretting their pick of Reed Sheppard at No. 3, in the 2024 draft, with the Spurs eagerly taking Castle at No. 4, his springboard to Rookie of the Year.

The generation gap in the Finals will be interesting. Veteran teams have a long history of playoff success. Every important Knick, with the exception of backup guard Miles McBride,, was born before the turn of the century. Josh Hart and Karl-Anthony Towns are 30, Jalen Brunson and Mikal Bridges 29, OG Anunoby and Landry Shamet 28 and Jordan Clarkson 33. That’s not old, that’s prime. The Knicks swept Cleveland in the Eastern finals, although “steam-cleaned” might be a better term, while the Spurs needed a maximum seven to get to the Finals. But Game 1 is Wednesday and it’s in San Antonio and, besides, youth doesn’t need a second wind.

Denver was coming off a sweep in 2023 and Miami was coming off seven games with Boston, and it showed as the Nuggets cruised to a 5-game Finals win. But in 2014, the Spurs won all four games against Memphis in the Western Finals while Miami was slugging its way to a 7-gamer over the Pacers, and Miami won that Finals, in seven.

If the Knicks’ nine-day sabbatical hasn’t removed their powers, this has a chance to be a scrapbook series, the kind that the Madison Square Garden front row will take to the big screen. Here’s a vote for the Spurs in seven, not without headaches along the way, and the prelude to all the other bricks in the wall.

They were together for only one season, 1990-91. Brendan Shanahan was beginning his career in New Jersey, Claude Lemieux was sent there from Montreal, where he and coach Pat Burns were coming off a head-butting contest that, for a change, Lemieux lost. Still, they became close friends. If you wore the same sweater Lemieux did, that’s what you became. If you didn’t, keep your head up.

“Playing with him, you could see why the other teams hated him,” Shanahan said. “He was a ruthless competitor.”

Five years later Shanahan was with Detroit and Lemieux was with Colorado. Those two teams, along with Dallas, formed a troika of hatred in the Western Conference. Detroit and Colorado met in the conference finals, and Lemieux crossed paths with his old friend during warmups. “You’re a loser,” Lemieux informed Shanahan. “You haven’t won anything.” At the end of that series, Lemieux was still right. The Avalanche won in six games and then won the Stanley Cup, Lemieux’s fourth.

“We had to learn to be ruthless ourselves,” Shanahan said, “or we weren’t going to win.”

Before dawn on Thursday, authorities found Lemieux’s body in the back of Andros Home, the furniture store in Lake Park, Fla. that he co-owned with wife Deborah. At 60, he had taken his own life. A few hours earlier the Canadiens had lost Game 4 of the Eastern Conference finals to Carolina. Two nights before that, Lemieux had worn his Canadiens sweater, No. 32, and carried a torch into the Bell Centre rink, to a typically riotous ovation. Canadien luminaries are doing this throughout the postseason, in which the team is attempting to win its first Stanley Cup in 33 years, and also the first by a Canada-based team. The torch comes from John McRae’s poem “In Flanders Fields,” after Canadian troops suffered heavy losses during World War I, in the Belgian village of Ypres: “To you from failing hands we throw the torch. Be yours to hold it high.” In French, that passage has been displayed on the Canadiens’ locker room wall for decades.

Lemieux played 21 NHL seasons and was an All-Star once, when he scored 41 goals in 1992. He got Selke Trophy votes, as the best defensive forward, on two occasions. Yet he twice led the NHL in playoff scoring, and in 1995 he won the Conn Smythe as the MVP of the playoffs, for New Jersey. As a 20-year-old rookie in 1986, he had four game-winners in Montreal’s Cup-winning season, including a Game 7 clincher against Hartford that he considered his top individual thrill. Lemieux scored 10 goals in that postseason.

But a late goal in Game 6 of the ‘95 Eastern Conference finals keyed a 4-2 win for New Jersey over Philadelphia, and set up the Stanley Cup. Overall he had 80 postseason goals, 19 of them game-winners. He was a one-man spring offensive, hockey’s equivalent of Robert Horry, except with elbows and knees and malevolent sticks.

This is a massive loss, of course, one that brought former New Jersey teammate Ken Daneyko to tears when he discussed it on NHL Network Thursday. But something greater is disappearing. There were only 61 Quebec-born players in the NHL this year, none on the Canadian Olympic team. The 1993 Canadiens had 14. The 2021 Canadiens at one point had none. This Montreal team has five French-Canadian players and two others from Quebec who speak the language, as does coach Martin St. Louis, but two of them were acquired by trade during the season.

In 2012 the Habs fired coach Jacques Martin and made Randy Cunneyworth the interim boss. Cunneyworth did not speak the language. La Presse, a French newspaper, ran a headline in French that proclaimed “Randy Cunneyworth ne peut pas lire ceci (Randy Cunneyworth can’t read this).”

There are theories for the Quebecois decline but no reasons. As author Brandon Kelly pointed out, Quebec is relatively poor compared to the rest of Canada but so is Nova Scotia, the home of Sidney Crosby, Nathan MacKinnon and Brad Marchand. Hockey expenses have skyrocketed. , The players who are separated and fast-tracked are getting younger and younger.There aren’t as many outdoor rinks because the weather is warmer, and there aren’t enough indoor facilities. Swedes, Finns, Russians and American college players are filling the void. And the great French-Canadian goaltender has almost totally disappeared. The provincial government’s efforts to rebuild the game are either insufficient or misdirected.

In 2003, there were 38 players drafted from the Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League, the easternmost of the three major junior leagues. In 2025 there were 19, and that was a high since 2021. So there’s no Mario Lemieux skating through that door, not anytime soon, and no Claude Lemieux either.

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This Lemieux had huge hands and legendary strength, and he was a gamesman as well. Before embellishment was ever considered a penalty, he was the king of cowboy-movie victimhood. He sprawled helplessly after one near-hit, against Toronto, and Burns told the trainer not to even bother helping him. “He played two positions,” wrote Michael Farber, the brilliant Montreal Gazette columnist. “Right wing and prone.”

Hockey has rarely been as savage as it was in those Detroit-Colorado series, and Lemieux was the cold, unblinking eye of the storm. He sent Detroit’s Kris Draper face-first into the boards, and Draper basically had to leave his face right there, since he suffered a concussion, a broken cheekbone, a broken orbital bone, a broken jaw and a broken nose.

Early in the fall of ‘96, Detroit’s Brandon McCarty put a bullseye on Lemieux. McCarty was Detroit’s most eager pugilist, a Type A personality who formed the Grind Line with Draper and Kirk Maltby. He has since appeared as a pro wrestler and has also gone through alcoholism and thoughts of suicide. When Detroit played Colorado in Joe Louis Arena, McCarty said his intention was to “hit Lemieux so hard that I could reach down and drag out his heart, even though that’s anatomically impossible.” He nearly did, flooring Lemieux with a right hand. Lemieux responded by covering up, an ice-a-dope strategy that is known around hockey, contemptuously, as “the turtle.” Lemieux later said the blow had knocked him unconscious, that he would never back down intentionally in such a moment.

McCarty was so intent on his revenge that he hardly noticed what was going around him. Colorado goalie Patrick Roy and Detroit goalie Mike Vernon staged an undercard bout right behind him, with Shanahan going airborne to apprehend Roy. It was known as Fight Night At The Joe, but it wasn’t over. Later in the season Lemieux and McCarty staged a rematch at the very first puck drop, and this time Lemieux weathered the storm.

But there were stories of kindness. Scott Niedermayer was a New Jersey rookie when Lemieux was there, and when the Devils lost a playoff series to Pittsburgh, they went out with the boys. Niedermeyer didn’t drink but Lemieux had a few, and he told the kid to drive him home. Once there, Lemieux slept on his couch and Niedermayer got the bedroom.

As Terry Frei of the Denver Post recalled on Friday, Lemieux lived near Columbine High, scene of a massacre in 1999. Several Columbine students served in a babysitting pool for Avalanche families. When Lemieux visited a hospitalized shooting victim, he was told that the family hadn’t been at its home for a few days. Lemieux hired a cleaning service and sent it to the house.

The fierce side of Lemieux surfaced at contract time. Such a dispute prompted New Jersey to trade him to Colorado, a 3-way deal that also involved the Islanders. He later became a player agent and represented, among others, Carolina goalie Frederik Andersen, and Lemieux made sure it was OK with Andersen if he walked with the torch. He also resisted the years that were catching up to him. He played in Switzerland and signed a deal with the Shanghai Sharks in 2008 before San Jose made a call. Six seasons after he had left the league, he played 18 games for the Sharks, with no goals and an assist.

Known as “Pepe,” the cartoon skunk, Lemieux became quite the entertainer. He appeared on Canada’s equivalent of “Dancing With The Stars,” partnering with figure skater Shae-Lynn Bourne, and even sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on the show.

Lemieux is survived by his wife and four children, one of which played for five NHL teams over seven years and most recently played in Davos, Switzerland. He is Brendan Lemieux, named after Shanahan, by his most ruthless friend.

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The famous Cuyahoga River fire happened in 1969. You’d think all the mind-altering vapors from that travesty would have dissipated by now. Apparently not. Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson said that his team, analytically, won two of the first three games of the Eastern Conference Final with the Knicks even though the scoreboard indicates Cleveland lost all three by 11, 15 and 13 points.

“We’re two out of the three in the expected score,” Atkinson said. “If you believe in process and all that….I see it for myself and I have this feeling, I can go to our analytics table and be like, man, the expected score was like one point or two – us shooting way below expected, them shooting way over.”

Most of the basketball world looked beyond the decimal points and concluded that the Knicks had given the Cavs a proper spanking in every area, at least after they overcame a 22-point, fourth-quarter deficit in Game 1 in NewYork and then won by 11 in overtime. But the Knicks took Atkinson’s summary very seriously, then took no chances. They won Game 4 by 33 points and finished an Eastern sweep.

The hallucinatory tone of the series continued after it ended. “”They dominated us 4-0,” James Harden said. “But genuinely I do feel like we’re the better team.”

Quick, let’s get James to the clinic for one of those cognitive tests: Hart, Towns, Brunson, Bridges, Anunoby….

The Cavaliers announced that Atkinson would return to the team next season, which is only right, since they did win two playoff rounds. But maybe they should keep the spread sheets away from him. What he’s talking about is “expected field goal percentage.” The NBA keeps this statistic, and it explains it this way, or tries to:

“Using 3D optical player tracking and machine learning, the system analyzes 29 points on the shooter’s body and defensive positioning to determine the exact probability of a make. All of this is captured 60 times per second. The model learns the impact of defensive contest posture, shooter orientation and balance, and court location to determine the odds of a shot going in based on the exact situation of the shot.”

Among the qualities that are measured: Shot distance, shooter’s vertical tilt, head angle, head facing percentage, shooter’s speed, velocity to basket, rotational speed and velocity (dealing with hips), full rotation, hang time and air time distance. The defenders are subject to a similar set of coordinates.

Try to keep all that in mind when you next play “Horse.”

The expected field goal percentage (XFG) is compared to the actual field goal percentage – you know, the one in which you actually calculate the percentage of times a shot is actually made – to determine the leaders in shot difficulty. In the playoffs, the No. 1 guy is Rui Hachimura of the Lakers, at 10.5. The Knicks are represented in the top seven by OG Anunoby, Mikal Bridges and Karl Anthony-Towns. Jalen Brunson is 10th. Since Brunson shot 48.7 percent against Cleveland and averaged 25.5 points, perhaps he’s ranked a tad low. The top five in the regular season were Nikola Jokic, Kevin Durant, Luka Doncic, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Stephen Curry, and, yeah, I would have expected that too.

Analytics have existed forever and, even in their burdensome modern form, they serve a purpose. But that purpose only tells you what has happened. It does not tell you what will happen, particularly in a finite set of games, particularly when a championship is on the line and there’s a lot more involved than physical skill.

The Knicks’ Josh Hart was reminded of a saying Villanova coach Jay Wright quoted frequently. “At a certain point, analytics are like a lamppost to a drunk person. You can lean on them, but they won’t get you home.” That’s a variation on what NHL coach Mike Keenan (the last coach to win an NBA or NHL championship in Madison Square Garden, with the 1994 Rangers) said long ago: “We use statistics like a drunk uses a lamppost. For support, not illumination.”

While the Cavaliers’ embroiderers work on the “Eastern Conference Expected Score Champs, 2025-26” banner to go to the Rocket Arena ceiling in October, the Knicks await the winner of the cage match between Oklahoma City and San Antonio. It’s the Knicks’ first trip to the NBA Finals since 1999, when they finished an inspiring playoff run with a loss to the Spurs, and they now seek their first championship since they beat the Lakers in 1973.

A New York crowd with victory in its sights is a fearsome thing, and Madison Square Garden might have to become a rectangle to contain the tumult. Any victory will do,, no matter the style. However, the Knicks’ overwhelming run through the East has sent most of us to the history books. Is this the best playoff run that we’ve seen in recent years? It’s certainly up there.

The Knicks have lost two playoff games. Those were Games 2 and 3 in the first-round series against Atlanta, both by one point. At the time, coach Mike Brown was barely even money to make it to the NBA draft. Since then, New York has won 11 consecutive playoff games by an average margin of 22.5 points. This is not the first time Manhattan has been called the garbage-time capital of the world,, but it’s a first for the Knicks.

They won the three clinching games by 52, 30 and 33 points. Overall their real shooting percentage is 51.5, and they’re hitting 40 percent from the 3-point line. Their opponents are shooting 43.7 percent. Game 4 against Cleveland was typical for them, unheard-of elsewhere. They had 33 assists on 48 buckets, and every starter had at least three assists. They scored 130 points and no Knick scored more than 19.

In the 11-game streak, New York has won 33 of the 45 quarters, counting the OT vs. Cleveland.

Compare this spree to some of the better spring offensives. The 76ers of 1982 won 12 of 13 games, which is why their championship rings feature Moses Malone’s “Fo-Five-Fo.” But they won only four of those games by double digits, and had three wins of two or three points. Their average margin was six points. And, in a historical note, they attempted 10 three-pointers in those 13 games.

The Lakers of 2001, with Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, won their second of three straight championships, and did not lose until the opener of the championship round against the 76ers. They averaged nearly 13 more points than their opposition, and had only two close wins, Game 2 against Sacramento and Game 3 against Philly. They shot 46.8 from the floor and held everyone else to 40.8. They also shot 27.1 percent from three, in limited action.

The Warriors of 2017 went 16-1 in their postseason and won their first 15 games. They were a little miffed that their 73-win team of 2016 lost a Game 7 to Cleveland, so they signed Kevin Durant and won six playoff games by at least 20 points. They averaged 13.5 more points than their opponents, and shot often and well from downtown (38.6 percent). The only loss was by 21 to Cleveland in Game 4 of the Finals, and that only postponed the party.

The Knicks can be nit-picked. They probably would have had a rougher time with Boston, but Boston lost to Philadelphia. They would have sweated to beat Detroit, but Detroit lost to Cleveland. But when you play like this for a month, it’s more of a role than a roll.

They play inordinately physical defense, and they have scorers at every position and off the bench, with Landry Shamet, Jordan Clarkson and Miles McBride. If they do play Victor Wembanyama, expect Mitchell Robinson to help Towns challenge him hard at the rim. If they do play Oklahoma City, expect Robinson to join in the effort to limit Chet Holmgren and ex-Knick Isaiah Hartenstein underneath, and expect Bridges to present high hands and quickness against Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

And if the Knick fans have forgotten what it’s like to really need a basket, rest assured Brunson hasn’t. His acquisition from Dallas, as a face-in-the-crowd free agent, was the first brick in this wall. In a game where size is a prerequisite at every position, the 6-foot-2 Brunson prospers as a crafty lefthander, squeezing through the cracks and putting up a flurry of finishes. He could have rebelled against what the Knicks did the offseason, firing coach Tom Thibodeau, a family friend, and bringing in Brown, who eventually took Brunson off the ball and made him more of a catch-and-drive player, later in the shot clock. But Brunson’s dad Rick played in the NBA, and both have a wide-angle lens when it comes to winning. Brunson is fresher without all the setup dribbling, and Towns can become the point center, which is not a bad thing when he shoots 50 percent from three.

The Knicks’ starters have 40 NBA seasons in them. They probably won’t be lured into chasing history. They know they’ll have to be chasing the Western champs at some point. It’s just a matter of how they deal with the front-row entertainers and the upper-deck crazies who have conjured up a whole new analytic for their Knicks: Expected championships.

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They call it the Presidents’ Trophy. It goes to the NHL team with the most regular-season points. It was invented 40 years ago, and only eight teams have paired it with a Stanley Cup. The other 32 teams have hung the Presidents’ Trophy banner in their arenas and hoped nobody connected it with eventual defeat. The last winner to also win the NHL championship was the 2013 Chicago Blackhawks. No wonder Trump hasn’t named the Trophy after himself.

The Colorado Avalanche seemed immune to the stuff. They did not suffer a regulation-time loss at home until Jan. 16. At one point they were 31-2-7. They piled up 121 points, eight more than anyone else. They led the league in goals. They gave up the fewest goals. Eight of their players were there for 78 or more games. Reigning MVP Nathan MacKinnon led the league with 53 goals. Martin Necas, who the Avalanche got in the upshot of two trades involving Mikko Rantanen, had a 100-point season. The playoffs began and the Avalanche swept the Kings, then dismissed Minnesota, which had 104 points, in five games.

And then someone in an Elvis suit began playing “Hail To The Chief.”

The Vegas Golden Knights, winners of the Stanley Cup three seasons ago and unimpressed with anyone else’s star power, now lead Colorado 3–0 in the Western Conference final. They won twice in Denver, and on Sunday they weathered an 0-3 first period and scored the remaining five goals of the game. They can eliminate the Avalanche in Game 4 Tuesday.

Hockey is the one sport where there’s precedent for an 0-3 comeback. In 2014 Los Angeles trailed San Jose 0-3 in the first round, and Kings coach Darryl Sutter tightly said, “We will not go quietly,” and the Kings won the next four and, eventually, the Cup. Avalanche coach Jared Bednar did not have such a rallying cry. “This is as low as we can go,” he said. He probably didn’t mean to sound so defeatist, but it sounded like the Avalanche were already loading up to visit Bigfoot.

Each game has been increasingly demoralizing. The first game was just a matter of Colorado starting too late, falling behind 3-0, and losing 4-2. In the second game the Avalanche led 1-0 going into the third period and lost 3-1. On Sunday, all-world defenseman Cale Makar returned to the Colorado lineup and even though he didn’t score, his teammates sprinted to that 3-0 lead.

But with 41 seconds left in the first period, Colorado’s Brock Nelson tripped Tomas Hertl. On fresh ice in the second period, Mitch Marner put yet another exquisite pass on a teammate’s stick, this time Mark Stone’s, and Vegas had the quick goal it needed. It was 3-3 by the next intermission. In the third, defenseman Kaedan Korczak sent a transitional pass into the Colorado zone, and Stone, as he later said, “bumped” it over to Hertl, who has scored 276 NHL regular-season goals but who had endured 29 consecutive games and 16 consecutive playoff games without one. “Way too long,” he said when the drought ended. Here, he had lots of room and only Sam Malinski to contend with, and he turned the young defenseman inside out before he scored on Scott Wedgewood with the backhand.

On the other end the Avalanche was going through a 17-minute stretch without a shot on goal, and MacKinnon was rendered useless when he blocked Shea Theodore’s shot with his knee. He did try to come back, and it’s assumed that he’ll play Game 4, but it won’t matter unless Colorado can summon the desperation it hasn’t needed for eight months.

The Golden Knights are coming off a dormant regular season, with injuries and shaky goaltending and general inertia. With eight games left, coach Bruce Cassidy was fired. The Knights reached out to Tortorella, who won the Cup 22 years ago with Tampa Bay and has blazed a trail of truculence through the Rangers, Vancouver, Columbus and Philadelphia. He also was an assistant coach for the victorious U.S. Olympic team in February, and several players called him an inspiration. When he came to Vegas he elevated goaltender Carter Hart, whom he’d coached in Philly, and asked his veterans to play faster and more confidently. Is that all it took? Well, Vegas finished the season 7-0-1 and won the Pacific Division race, which Edmonton’s Connor McDavid had called a “pillow fight.” Now the Knights are 18-4-1 and Tortorella is Yoda, with the occasional f-bomb.

Occasionally the old Torts, the one who once invaded the Calgary locker room during the first intermission and went after coach Bob Hartley, will reappear. The Knights clinched their second-round series in Anaheim, but Tortorella made himself unavailable to the media and the Knights closed their locker room, and Tortorella did not participate in the post-series handshake. The official reason was that Vegas was trying to fly home and needed to beat a local airport curfew. The real problem was that the NHL had suspended Brayden McNabb one game for a hit on Anaheim’s Beckett Sennecke, and since the Knights are always in an organizational 3-point stance, this was their protest. The league came down hard and quickly, fining Tortorella $100K and, more to the point, removing the Golden Knights’ second-round draft pick.

This is a real deterrent. Second-round picks are not pocket trash. Chris Chelios and Nikita Kucherov lead an impressive list. Pavel Dorofeyev, the 25-year-old who had 20 power play goals in the regular season and 37 overall, was a third-round pick. He and Brett Howden, who had 12 goals coming into the playoffs, each have 10 in the postseason. But the real leaders are Marner, who came over from Toronto as a free agent, and Jack Eichel, whom Vegas got from Buffalo in a trade. Marner has 21 points and Eichel 18, and it’s an illustration of how your best players need to be your best players, especially when MacKinnon spent the first two games missing the 4 foot-by–6 foot net, and Makar was sidelined.

Meanwhile, Tortorella is still just the interim coach, and you can’t assume anything when dealing with Vegas management. Cassidy, the fired coach who won the Cup with Vegas in 2023 and won the Eastern Conference with Boston in 2019 and has a .630 points-percentage besides, would be a leading candidate in Toronto and Edmonton, at least. But the Knights haven’t granted permission for those teams, or any others, to interview him.

Why is the Presidents’ Cup such a poisoned pawn? Maybe there’s something to be said for struggle. Few teams have had a smoother 82-game flight than Colorado had. At every turn it reaffirmed its superiority. This is the first challenge, and there’s no time to reassess and dig deep and do all those things that seem to work in retrospect. The Knights had many frustrations, lots of weeks when their gearbox got stuck. Tortorella was a wakeup call, or more like a siren, and the playoffs reset everyone to 0-0 and gave Vegas a chance to draw on its history. Game 4 gives the Avalanche the same chance. It also tests Bednar’s theory about the location of rock bottom, which is somewhere below the White House bunker.

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The Oklahoma City Thunder played a cruel trick on the NBA’s broadcasters in 2022. It drafted Jalen Willliams in the first round. Then it drafted Jaylin Willliams in the second round. Then it allowed both players to retain their names, instead of renaming one of them J.D. Vance or something.

When commissioner Adam Silver announced Jalen Williams’ name in the first round, the crowd at Jaylin Williams’ high school gym in Fort Smith, Ark., began cheering. “No, that’s the other Jalen Williams,” Jaylin said.

But the Thunder is always resourceful, and pretty soon it was decreed that the first-round Williams would be known as J-Dub and the other would be J-Will. Problem solved. It would have been awkward to have Thunder announcer Matt Pinto use their alma maters: “Santa Clara has it in the left corner, and now he skips it cross-court to Arkansas.”’

By now, differences have emerged. J-Dub scored 40 in Game 5 of the NBA Finals last year. J-Will stole the thunder, so to speak, at the championship parade when he announced, “They said we were too young. They said Oklahoma shouldn’t have a team. But guess what? We’re the fucking champs.”

Now J-Dub has been fighting a hamstring injury for long stretches, and he didn’t play in the previous series against the Lakers, and he went out in Game 2 of this Western Conference final against San Antonio. He did not return Friday night. J-Will,, who is 6-foot-9 but plays all over the place, came in to hit five of six 3-pointers and score 18 points in 22 minutes. He only averaged 1.5 threes in the regular season, but that’s the thing about the Thunder, especially in this 123-108 road win that gave OKC a 2-1 advantage. As two-time league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has said, it’s all about finding answers to the test. The Thunder bench filled in every blank.

Williams wasn’t the most productive extra man. Jared McCain was. He hit 10 of 21 shots and scored 24 points in 28 minutes. Alex Caruso, who had scored 31 off the bench in Game 1, put up 15 and Cason Wallace 11. The subs scored 76, the Spurs’ bench scored 23, and the Oklahoma City starters scored 47.

And to think that the Spurs sprinted to a 15-0 lead, with newly-healed De’Aaron Fox leading the way. It took almost four minutes for the Thunder to score, on a floater by Isaiah Hartenstein. From that moment, the Thunder won the game by 30 points. It was a major downer for a city that was sensing its sixth NBA championship after its double-overtime win in Game 1, and that can certainly still happen..But the Spurs will have to blunt Oklahoma City’s cavalry, and it would also be a good idea to start riding their own horse.

There are multiple fascinations working in this series. OKC’s chance to go back-to-back is one. A bigger one is the specter of Victor Wembanyama, and whether he and the Spurs will hog the NBA’s hardware for the foreseeable future. The first game was portentous for the Thunder, because San Antonio won on a night when Fox didn’t play and Caruso bent the boxscore with 31 points. It happened because Wembanyama raged for 41 points, 24 rebounds and 14 for 25 shooting. Maybe it wasn’t the basketball equivalent of Michael Jackson moonwalking to the tune of Billie Jean in 1983, as Reggie Miller of NBC suggested, but it did seem like a Spielberg disaster movie for the rest of the league.

Wembanyama has a chance to do to the pros what Ralph Sampson was supposed to do to the colleges. He is 7-foot-5 with true 3-point capability. He can block corner jumpers by taking just a couple of steps from the lane. He has developed the habit of missing shots from uncomfortable places just so he can free himself to get his own rebound. And the San Antonio lob pass is a threat that defies radar. Wembanyama can convert it with either hand.

The fact that the Spurs were 13-6 without him was just as disquieting. Stephon Castle, Devin Vassell and rookie Dylan Harper are all difficult matchups on their own. Fox is an established all-star guard who can get to the paint through any barricade. In that Game 1, and on three occasions during the regular season, they seemed too fiery for the Thunder.

But the average age of their starters falls short of 23. The Spurs are considerably younger than LSU will be, for instance. On nights when Castle, Harper and Keldon Johnson are 4-for-20, as they were Friday, Wembanyama needs to be legendary. Instead, he scored the meekest 26 points possible, with four rebounds and two blocks in 39 minutes.

Part of it was the continued aggression of Hartenstein, who played only 11 minutes in Game 1 but has contested Wembanyama vigorously since. But most of it was Wembanyama’s acceptance of that defense, instead of setting up shop in the stratosphere and daring OKC to do something about it.

The Spurs never got closer than nine points in the fourth quarter. Fox reinjured his ankle. Harper, the rookie who had a knee problem near the end of Game 2, was present but ineffective. Emboldened, the Thunder got more ornery with each minute, and Vassell went face-to-face with Ajay Mitchell after Mitchell had brought down Castle on a layup. The fact that Gilgeous-Alexander got to the foul line 12 times, and made 12 shots, infuriated Spurs fans, who began chanting “Flopper” whenever he got the ball. That’s an old trope, of course, and almost every great scorer has heard a variation. But when OKC needed a boost, there was J-Will with a long one, or McCain firing and then grinning involuntarily when the ball went in. Maybe he can be yet another Williams brother, nicknamed “At Will.”

J-Will has a few distinctions of his own. His mother Linda is Vietnamese, and he is the first NBA player of Vietnamese descent to win a championship. He is the final player in the NBA who will wear No. 6, since the league stopped any new No. 6s after Bill Russell died. And he enjoys taking charges and took 50 of them during his second and final season at Arkansas. Yet he was 12th on the Thunder in scoring and 10th in minutes played this year.

This series is somewhat reminiscent of the 1970 Eastern Finals. Milwaukee had rookie Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the next force multiplier. The Knicks had assembled a bunch of smart veterans who formed a perfect jigsaw. If they didn’t stop Milwaukee at this moment, who could? They did, in five games, although Kareem averaged 34 points. The next year Milwaukee picked up Oscar Robertson, who rounded out the Bucks puzzle and helped them to a championship. But Abdul-Jabbar didn’t win another title with Milwaukee, or with anybody else until Magic Johnson joined him in L.A. in 1980.

When Wembanyama is winning games during warmups, and when he is playing in his own orbit on a nightly basis, and when he’s stacking MVP awards, we will look back fondly at his figuring-out process. These are the days when he can go through initiations, or he can perform them. The Thunder seems to grasp the urgency of beating him four times while it’s still possible. It will take all hands, and names.

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In a four-year span, the College Football Playoff may grow from four teams to 24 teams. That’s Ozempic in reverse, with distasteful side effects.

The 24th-ranked team in last year’s final regular-season CFP poll was James Madison, which got into the 12-team playoff because it was the highest-rated champion of the Group of Five, or second-tier conferences. But the 23rd-ranked team was Iowa, which had an 8-4 record. The point of a playoff is to identify a national champion. The point of a regular season is to identify who has little chance to become one, like Iowa, well-respected as it is.

Still, three of the four major conferences are now supporting a 24-team field, probably by the 2028 season. The only holdout is the Southeastern Conference, which sees no problem with the status quo, particularly because it wants to hang onto its conference championship game, which is far more lucrative than the others. The Big Ten is leading the charge here, and the ACC and the Big 12 are following. The golden goose has been grounded, due to excess baggage.

With the conference champ games taken off the board, the whole thing will take four weeks. Eight teams will receive byes. Teams 9 through 24 will pair up for eight first-round games. Those eight winners will meet the bye teams, and on and on. There will be room, again, for only one Group of Five champion. The rest will probably consist of contenders and pretenders from the four big leagues, plus Notre Dame, which is still fuming over its snub from last year and is threatening to schedule the Savannah Bananas out of spite.

That is a lot of football, not all of it particularly good. Taking last year’s standings, BYU-Houston would be one first-round game. Fire up the grill. In past years we would be concerned about so much football causing injuries and playing havoc with academics, since final exams are usually in December. How quaint. That’s like worrying about killer bees and the millenium bug. Money has always been prominent in all college sports, of course. But life looks very different when money goes from a big thing to the only thing.

Tony Petitte is the Big Ten commissioner and the main cheerleader for a 24-team payoff, er, playoff. He was once in charge of CBS Sports, then ran the MLB Network. He remembers when baseball expanded its playoffs, and says that he didn’t recall any resistance, that all the teams and fan bases wanted three wild-cards per league. He said that it didn’t disturb the sanctity of the regular season. It did, of course, because it robbed us all of legitimate pennant races and the daily suspense therein.

But baseball’s regular season is a 162-game march in which rivalries and results become a blur. College football’s regular season Saturdays are a ritual, a social event, a weekend that is planned well in advance. In the days of wire-service polls, BCS championship games and a 4-team CFP, every game was a potential trap door, every weekend a Survivor episode. What happens to the Texas-Texas A&M game when both teams have already pocketed playoff spots? Ask the ACC what happened to its once sold-out basketball tournament when the league expanded and more than a half-dozen schools got tournament bids. It became a pageant, not a milestone.

There were 11 CFP games last year, the second year of the 12-team bracket. Five of those games were decided by 17 or more points, although you can blame Indiana for two of those. There were also 11 CFP games in the 2004 tournament. Four of them featured 17-point margins or more.

Coaches want the 24-team format, except for the ones who really think about it, and realize that a bigger playoff means more firings of those who don’t make it. Fans want the 24-team format, but only those with private jets. Last year, Miami fans were asked to travel to College Station, Arlington and Glendale, Az. before the Hurricanes played the final at home (and lost to Indiana). Oregon and Texas Tech played in Miami, and then Oregon went to Atlanta and would have had to return to Miami had it won.

Next year Georgia warms up its regular season with Western Kentucky and Arkansas State and finishes with Georgia Tech. If it were to play that schedule in 2028, and go 5-4 in its SEC games, which would be a massive underachievement in most seasons, that would create an 8-4 record and a probable spot in the 24-team field.

USC, which is celebrating another top-flight recruiting season as it annually does, leads off with San Jose State, Fresno State and Louisiana. Its Big 10 schedule involves Indiana, Ohio State, Penn State, Washington and Oregon, and there’s always a game the Trojans seem to botch along the way, but you figure that’s an 8-4 season before the first practice.

Yet players must be paid, and more coaching “analysts” must be hired, and more replicas of the White House ballroom must be built on campus to keep the industry thriving. Those of us who loudly demanded that the players get their money can’t complain too much, at least not until we get through 24 for a couple of years, and decide what we really need is 32.

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Alexandre Carrier had the record. It won’t ever be in his scrapbook. He was the alltime scoring leader among defensemen for the Milwaukee Admirals, who play in the American Hockey League, one faraway rung down from the mainstage. The top NHL players skip the AHL altogether. Carrier was in Milwaukee four seasons, beginning in 2017. Don’t ask him to celebrate making history in a place he never wanted to stay. It was like being named Comic of the Year, cruise ship division.

People in Montreal didn’t know. Because of what Carrier did Monday night, they’ll never care. Late in Game 7 overtime, with the beleaguered Canadiens huddling like children in London during the Blitz, Carrier took the puck away from Buffalo’s Tage Thompson in the Montreal zone and flipped a pass to Alex Newhook. Jake Evans sprinted straight for the net and took Rasmus Dahlin, the brilliant Buffalo defenseman, with him. With all those distractions in his windshield, goalie Ukko-Pekka Lukkonen never got a clean look at the puck leaving Newhook’s stick, at least not until it landed beside and behind him, in the net. The Canadiens won, 3-2, and begin the Eastern Conference Final on Thursday at Carolina. It wasn’t a shocker, but the circumstances were. Instead of the young Mozarts leading Montreal to victory, it was Carrier, Newhook, Evans and the other guys, normally piano players in a saloon. The stars were flat, but the grunts were sharp.

A couple of weeks ago Newhook scored the overtime goal in Game 7, also on the road, that won the first round series at Tampa Bay. That was a shot that somehow glanced off the torso of Andrei Vasilevskiy. This was an authoritative shot that cleanly beat the goaltender. But it had its origins on the other end. Before Carrier pried the puck from Thompson, rookie Ivan Demidov closed in on Dahlin and took away the puck when Dahlin wouldn’t shoot it. It took all of that, and another bravura night from goalie Jakub Dobes, to get the Canadiens into the Final Four, two nights after they’d lost Game 6, 8-3, on home ice.

Montreal had led 2-0 on a goal that bounced off Philip Danault’s skate, and a power play goal by Zach Bolduc. Then came the deluge. Overall, Buffalo took 83 shots that either got past Dobes, were saved by Dobes, were blocked by Canadiens or missed the net altogether. Eleven of those belonged to Alex Tuch, a western New York native and essential forward who somehow didn’t score a point in the seven games. Buffalo snarfed up almost every loose puck in the second and third periods, got a goal that deflected off Jordan Greenway’s XXXL jersey and another from the stick of Dahlin, and seemed to have seized a 3-2 lead when Beck Malenstyn poked a puck through Dobes’ five-hole. Instead, the officials waved it off, as they are entitled to do when they lose sight of the puck. However, this was a very quick whistle and an even quicker assumption that Dobes had everything under control. To be fair, Buffalo’s Adam Zucker should have been penalized for steamrolling Dobes earlier.

Granted a reprieve, the Canadiens came out smoking in the overtime, but Lukkonen kept turning them away, and Newhook’s goal didn’t come until 11:22 had elapsed, and the oxygen debt was mounting. It was a classic Game 7 in the sense that both teams ditched the messaging and the posturing and just played tough but businesslike hockey. Bolduc’s goal came on Buffalo’s only minor penalty of the game, a stick-over-glass delay penalty on Zach Benson. Danault was the only Canadien to visit the box, on a high-stick call. It was notable that Montreal won the game in a 5-on-5 situation, because only 10 of its 18 goals in the series came at even strength, and Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield had only one power-play goal apiece. Newhook had six goals, all at even strength.

It was a nauseating way for Buffalo to lose a shot at a Stanley Cup it has never won, and fortunately Scott Norwood was nowhere to be found. But the way the Sabres got to the playoffs for the first time in 15 years, and the characters that emerged from their six-month sprint, have reignited the market and should be enough to earn Lindy Ruff a Jack Adams award, for coach of the year.

The Eastern final promises to pit the exhausted against the bored, at least in the beginning. Because Carolina swept both Ottawa and Philadelphia, it has not played a game since May 9, and has played only four times since April 25. Can Fredrick Andersen be expected to hang onto to his all-world form in goal? Can Taylor Hall and Logan Stankoven remember the high notes they hit in the first two series? More to the point, have the Carolina marketeers run out of “Put Some Stank On It” T-shirts?

The Canadiens are ostensibly off Tuesday and Wednesday, but there’s travel and there’s also the search for terra firma after such an exhilarating series. Hockey players postpone most sleep-related matters this time of year. The fact that five Habs played 25 or more minutes on Monday shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Green Berets don’t chart playing time.

The one Canadien who needs some horizontal time is Dobes. After losses, he is 6-0 with a save percentage of .942. In the two Game 7s Dobes has stopped 65 of 68 shots. He said he “took it personal” when he was hooked for Jacob Fowler in Game 6, and he doesn’t hide his fire under a bushel. He also thrives on the work. But, against a Carolina team that has never seen a shot it didn’t like, Dobes could use a little more puck-clearing and a little less showtime from his defensemen.

This was a spicy rivalry for a while, and will be again, by Memorial Day at the latest. Most of the principals are gone, but neither city will need much prompting to release the hate. In 2019, Montreal GM Marc Bergevin riled the Raleigh crowd by sending an offer sheet to restricted free agent Sebastian Aho. The Hurricanes had to give Aho five years and $42 million to keep him, which they did. That complicated their salary cap, and combative owner Tom Dundon waited until the next season to respond. Carolina offered Jesper Kotkaniemi $6.1 million for one year, including a puckish $20 signing bonus, because Aho’s number is 20.

Ah, but the joke was on the Hurricanes. Montreal did not match the offer. Kotkaniemi might have been the third player picked in the 2019 draft (and the first player born in the 2000s to play a game in any of the four major sports leagues), but he has steadily drifted down the depth chart, playing only 42 games this season and scoring two goals for Carolina. He has not been seen in the postseason. The Hurricanes had to give up first and third round picks for Kotkaniemi, but neither pick amounted to anything. Still, the Habs fans roasted Kotkaniemi when he came back there. They’ll probably have to invade the Bell Centre press box to razz him next week.

If pressure is a factor it falls squarely on Carolina, which is the top seed in the East. The Hurricanes have piled up at least 99 times in six of Rod Brind’Amour’s coaching years there, and have reached the playoffs in all eight. More remarkably, the Hurricanes have established a beachhead in basketball country, with sellouts on most nights and a deafening home crowd. But they haven’t gotten to the Stanley Cup final, and the fact that they won it 20 years ago, with Cam Ward in goal and Peter Laviolette behind the bench, is fading.

If the Canadiens can answer their phone alarms, and if the Hurricanes can remember what the blue lines are for, this should be a passionate series. For Alexandre Carrier, there’s no confusion. He knows he’s firmly in the big leagues, in a time of no small plays.

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The next Ryder Cup doesn’t happen for 16 more months. It isn’t too early for Team USA to ask for a continuance.

The mighty Europeans are picking up worthy new candidates on a weekly basis, like Pied Pipers handing out Costco hot dogs. Last week in Charlotte, it was Kris Reitan of Norway, outlasting the field. The week before it was Great Britain’s Alex Fitzpatrick, joining his brother Matthew to win the team event in New Orleans.

Sunday at the PGA, Aaron Rai, as in wry, of Wolverhampton, England broke free of the huddled masses on the leaderboard and displayed his finishing kick. He shot five-under-par 65 and won his first major championship by three strokes.

Along the way Rai looked like an absolute nightmare in Ryder Cup foursomes matches, because he plays straight and narrow golf, and his unblinking demeanor will serve him well in singles, too. The toughest part about that competition might be the act of making the team. Remember when it was just the U.S. vs. Britain, and then we let them have the rest of Europe to even it up? Maybe they’ll give us Australia and Japan in 2027, if we haven’t invaded them yet.

Rai wasn’t considering the Ryder Cup, or the wide-open window to the rest of his golfing life, his world ranking or even his method of celebration, although he said it was likely he’d be hitting a nearby Chipotle. He wasn’t looking past the one foot he was putting in front of the other. He birdied the 11th to take the lead from Matti Schmid of Germany, then drilled a five-iron to the edge of the 550-yard par-4 15th and made par there. Rai then birdied the par-5 16th and, already up by two, he sent a 68-foot putt scurrying through hill and vale and into the cup on 17. Before he knew it, he was beside the 18th green, kissing his wife, Gaurika Bishnoi, a member of the Ladies European Tour. He has caddied for her and vice versa, and he admits he doesn’t beat her very often.

Rai began the fourth round in a four-man queue, two strokes behind Alex Smalley. The leader opened the door with an early bogey, but the best and the brightest were reluctant to enter, as if a water bucket was perched above. Scottie Scheffler led the field in driving accuracy and was No 5 in greens in regulation, but had another miserable putting day. Rory McIlroy kept hitting his drives to all fields. Ludvig Aberg was Rai’s playing partner and couldn’t figure out the greens, either, a common shortcoming. Only Jon Rahm, among the headliners, took up the challenge, finishing tied for second with Smalley.

Rai, 31, improved his score every day. Of the 82 who made the cut, he was 74th in driving distance. He was also first in approach shots, fourth in percentage of fairways hit, fifth in putting and ninth in greens in regulation. Those who wanted to wade into the numbers could find Rai sitting there, a very live underdog. For the PGA Tour season he is fourth in driving accuracy and eighth in greens in regulation, and, critically, second in approach-shot accuracy from 120 to 150 yards.

All of that made him a snug fit for Aronimink Country Club, and yet no one saw it that way before the bell rang, because the pros had already misjudged their position. McIlroy and others were lamenting the removal of trees. He said that it took away from the strategy off the tee because not everyone could just bomb it anywhere and be fine. What he learned later was that the rough was where golf balls could hide from the authorities, and where birdies went to die. The tournament was decided on the short grass, which is Rai’s home away from home. The most significant stat was Rai’s 6-under-par performance on the eight par-5s for the week. McIlroy, the top rocket launcher in golf’s wide world, was even par.

Rai also didn’t mind the craggy greens, courtesy of legendary architect Donald Ross, who once said he didn’t intend for Aronimink to be his masterpiece but became convinced it actually was. Rai’s only other PGA Tour victory was in Greensboro, at Ross-designed Sedgefield.

But Rai was not an outrageous long shot. He is ranked 44th in the world and has four Euro Tour wins. Twice he has beaten Tommy Fleetwood in playoffs, in the Scottish Open and in Abu Dhabi, and he snipped M. Fitzpatrick to win in Hong Kong. One of his prized wins was the Kenyan Open, on the European challenge tour in 2017. His mother Dalvir was a Kenyan immigrant, and she was on hand that day, which was Mother’s Day.

Amrik, Rai’s father, came from India and was a community worker, but spent most days helping Aaron play golf. The story goes that Aaron got hit with a hockey stick when he was very young, so the parents brought plastic golf balls because they would do less damage. When Aaron practiced in the rain and mud, Amrik meticulously cleaned his irons, applied baby oil and put them in iron covers, and Aaron uses similar covers to this day.

“It’s the message and the meaning,” Rai has said. “I have access to all kinds of equipment now, but I don’t want to lose sight of what’s important.”

You’re wondering why he wears two gloves? Pretty much the same thing. He started doing that as a kid, misplaced one of the gloves one day, was miserable without it, and has never gone back. Ridicule from social media might have convinced Rai to leave all that behind. That’s why he’s not on Facebook, X, or anything else.

The parents wanted Aaron to get the feel of scoring, so they had him tee off in the fairway. He had to wait a few years before he even got to the ladies’ tees. “They thought the distance would come naturally, with growth,” he said. His teachers, Andrew Proudman and Piers Ward, approved. They are still his teachers. Rai was late to what the Europeans call “club golf” because of that approach, so he didn’t interact with a lot of golfing kids his age. Even today he’s the lone wolf on the practice range, the last man there before they turn off the lights.

Every so often there’s a workingman who gets to a major championship and shrugs off the bother. He knows what real pressure is like, the kind that arrives on late Friday afternoon, when a cut has to be made that will allow him a chance at weekend money, which in turn will determine whether he keeps his card. J.J. Spaun beat the odds, and everybody else, at the U.S. Open last year, and Aaron Rai now holds a bulbous silver trophy that will distinguish him for the rest of his life. And the Americans, like Xander Schaffele, who praised Rai’s work habits and his essential niceness will likely see him again, on an international scoreboard that’s becoming a blue wall.

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He’s smart enough and, doggone it, people like him. But is he good enough? Sunday will answer that question for Alex Smalley, no relation to Stuart, a 29-year-old savant who has matched wits with Aronimink Country Club, site of a PGA Championship that Smalley leads by two shots with 18 holes to go. He’s in the final group with Matti Schmid, and neither has ever won a PGA Tour or European Tour event. That’s the second time that’s happened in a major in 30 years (Shaun Micheel won the ‘03 PGA with Chad Campbell). Either would be the first golfer to make the PGA his first tour win since John Daly in 1991. For Smalley, all similarities end there.

Smalley is a singles and doubles hitter, compared to the bash brothers who are trailing him at Aronimink. He gets by with solid iron play and a vivid imagination around the greens. Since these greens, designed by Donald Ross in 1896, might be the most inscrutable in any major championship outside the Masters, these are convenient skills. Among the 82 survivors of the cut, Smalley is 58th in greens in regulation. He’s also 37th in scrambling. But he’s No. 1 in putting, meaning that when he does have a birdie chance, he’s cashing it.

Smalley also possesses an environmental science degree from Duke. He had a 4.71 GPA at Wake Forest (N.C.) High while taking AP courses. “That’s 4.6 better than I did,” said Michael Burns, Smalley’s caddie.

Smalley’s father Terry teaches biochemistry and his mother Maria has a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry, also from Duke. Maria is the one in Alex’s gallery who is punching numbers into her phone, because she has the data on every shot he’s ever hit in competition, amateur or pro. Smalley was asked about it on Saturday and said, “I don’t really look at that very much. I don’t know if she really does, honestly, either.” Sorry, nerds.

That was reminiscent of when the Duke team was introduced to the Decade system, which calculates the risk-reward of every shot based on pin placements and fairway position. When the coaches asked Smalley what he was getting out of it, he said, “Zero, probably.” Meaning he’d already grasped all that stuff.

He’s not much for bromides. Does he get nervous when he’s leading a tournament and the cameras show up? “Once they show up, it means you’re doing something that’s, I guess, worthy of having a camera there,” he said.

Smalley was tied for the 36-hole lead with Maverick McNealy, and on Saturday he didn’t seem quite ready for the closeup. He bogeyed the first, third and fourth holes, and the TV cameras went elsewhere, understandably, since everyone in Philadelphia but Joel Embiid was within two shots of the lead at some point. Most of the fans went with them. A less composed fellow might have slipped out of the picture altogether, but Smalley birdied 7, 8, 10, 13, 15 and 16, and when he birdied 18 he had the 2-shot lead and was the only player in the field who was under par for all three rounds. Twenty-one other players are within three shots of him, including Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm, Ludvig Aberg, Patrick Reed and Xander Schauffele, and Scottie Scheffler, whose putter turned into pasta al dente, is four back.

There are lots of Alex Smalleys out there. They might be winless, but they say they just haven’t won yet. He slogged his way up the ladder, playing on the Canadian Tour, playing on Korn Ferry, and learning a bit more about himself by the week. Few noticed, but Smalley hasn’t missed a cut since February and has finished in the top 21 in each of the last four weeks of individual competition. At the team event in New Orleans, won by the Fitzpatrick brothers, Smalley and Hayden Springer finished second and wiped out a four-shot deficit on the back nine.

He found a friendly track in Aronimink, which only measures 7,300 yards or so, depending on the tee placements. There are only two par-fives on the par-70 layout, and the PGA setup team put the flags on the edge of cliffs that Wile E. Coyote used to fall off. Scheffler called some of the hole locations “absurd,” although they weren’t as absurd as the telecasters’ insistence on calling them “hole locations,” as if they were a natural phenomenon.

This is how you keep the world’s best golfers from laying waste to your historical golf properties. Grow real rough, the kind that swallow golf balls and makes birdies impossible. Play on titled fairways. Hope for real winds. Play on complicated greens, with what they call “conflicting slopes” which take the putts to the right when all the golfers’ surveying tools tell them they have to go left. The 2013 U.S. Open came to Merion, the last time the Philly area played host to a major, amid much apprehension about the damage to the 6,996-yard antique. And Justin Rose won with a score of one-over-par. A place with Aronimink’s subtleties can mess with your head, particularly if you play on courses where mistakes don’t bring consequences.

Smalley’s head is a fortress, surrounded by moats. Drew Powell is an editor at Golf Digest and was on the Duke team with Smalley. This week he wrote that he wasn’t surprised Smalley was contending, and he cited Smalley’s meticulous practice routines, particularly with his wedges. He also practiced game situations with his wedges, finishing each with a putt that he lined up as if he were playing for Sunday money. Off the tee, Smalley developed a low, “fairway finder” bullet that had nearly as much distance as his high drives. Everything was a purpose-driven routine.

Smalley’s amateur career was notable, too. He won consecutive Sunnehanna Amateurs in Johnstown, Pa., the first to do that since Rickie Fowler. At Duke, Smalley’s team got to the match-play segment of the 2018 NCAA tournament, where it found itself alongside Texas in the quarter-finals. Duke coach Jamie Green threw Smalley out there against Scheffler. Their match ended on the 14th hole, with Smalley ahead, 5 and 4. “I didn’t hear it myself,” Green said, “but I heard that at one point Alex holed a putt and Scottie said, ‘Who the f—- is this guy?’’’

With all of Smalley’s calm calculation, there’s also room for serendipity. The surprisingly heavy Wanamaker Trophy goes to the PGA champion, and most folks who wanna make a bet on Sunday’s golf will pick one of the pursuers. But Smalley noted that he had spent three of his Duke years in Wannamaker Dorm. Maybe, just for one Sunday, it’s a Smalley world after all.

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When we last considered the St. Louis Cardinals, we talked about Busch Stadium, and the gradual spread of empty red seats. From 2023 to 2025, Cardinals’ attendance had tumbled from 40,013 per game to 27,728. They had always averaged 40,000 or more from 1998 through 2023. This also coincided with a 78-win season and a three-year absence from the N.L. playoffs.

That trend has not yet changed. On Friday night the Cardinals played Kansas City, from the other end of Missouri, and drew 26,949. That game gets an SRO crowd in the good not-so-old days. St. Louis’ average crowd so far is 27,295. Sure, not all the kids are out of school and the traditionally busy summer weekends haven’t arrived. But now we have pricey gas, yet another discouragement for the lifelong Redbird fans in Arkansas and Illinois.

Help is on the way. In fact, it’s already here. The actual baseball product is far better than it was last year, and it’s beyond anyone’s imagination this year. The Cardinals beat the Royals in 11 innings on Friday. Since April 26 they have won 12 of 18. They are eight games over .500 for the first time since last June 24. Better yet, they look almost nothing like the plodding 2025 crew that lost its last four games and, again, 12 of its last 18.

Usually it takes a while for this year’s fans to catch up with last year’s news. The Blue Jays have been borderline awful, for instance, but their attendance is up nearly 300,000 already because they were American League champs in 2025. Whether the Cardinals will recapture their faithful depends largely upon whether they can hang in a National League Central that has no sub-.500 teams at the moment. We’re only at the quarter-pole. Still, this is an unusually tolerant fan base that only asks for reasons to believe. There are a few.

Rookie second baseman JJ Wetherholt has played every game, has led off every game, and is surviving. He leads N.L. second basemen in runs saved (Fangraphs) and third-year shortstop Masyn Winn ranks third at his position. No everyday player is older than 27, and no member of the starting rotation is yet 30, with 25-year-old Michael McGreevy posting a 2.10 ERA in nine starts. New closer Riley O’Brien, from the College of Idaho, has 13 saves in 16 chances and is the only St. Louis pitcher who has struck out more than a batter per inning. The deadwood, and the wagon of descending players with fat contracts, has scattered. Rebuilding can be brutal. Rebuilding while winning is work that you can whistle to.

But the Cardinals also needed a star, a guy who would singlehandedly make the fan swipe the credit card. Albert Pujols hasn’t iived here for a while. There was a first-round draft pick in 2020 who was 6-foot-6, had a supple third baseman’s arm, and sent long home runs over Atlanta high school fences. Gee, whatever happened to him?

Nothing that a couple of flips of the calendar couldn’t fix. Jordan Walker smacked his 13th home run Friday, his third in five games. He is fourth in N.L. slugging and fourth in OPS (.945). He is 24 years old, yet there was much rumbling in the off-season about Walker’s next destination, after two desultory seasons with the varsity. Now the Cardinals might give him a fancy contract that will stretch deep into the 2030s and assure that any future slugging will be performed in a St. Louis uniform.

Sometimes it takes a little faith. The problem is that many first-round players get rushed to the big leagues or get compromised by the depth on the teams they’re joining. Mickey Moniak was the first overall pick by Philadelphia in 2016. In 2020 he came up, played parts of three years, dealt with the Covid-19 bizarreness, and was traded to the Angels after 41 games. He came to Colorado in 2025, damaged goods at 27. Today Moniak is 28 and his .677 slugging percentage leads the N.L.

Like Moniak, Walker came from high school to the pros, in an era when the 100 mph fastball is commonplace. He hit .201 in 2024, .215 last year, when he struck out 126 times. He had 11 homers in those two misbegotten seasons, fewer than he already has in 2026. Instead of peddling him, the Cardinals had him work with batting coach Brant Brown all season, as well as instructors from Driveline. Walker learned that there’s a bountiful open space in right-center field and he began swinging that way. His strikeout rate has dipped from 31. 8 percent to 27.4, and he is walking 10.7 percent of the time as opposed to 7.3.

Results were quick. On April 4, Walker hit a 459-foot grand slam in Detroit, the longest by Cardinal since such things were measured. He also erased a runner with a 100 mph throw from rightfield, where the Cardinals moved him shortly after he signed. “They’re going to have to come up with a sixth tool for him,” Winn said.

There was a mini-slump in April that concerned the Cardinals, because Walker needed to see results to justify the swing changes. Now he’s seen them, as has the opposition.

“He’s very passive on 0–0 counts,” Brown told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “but aggressive on one strike. On two strikes he reels it back in and on 3-2 he’s very aggressive. We’re trying to keep him with the same mindset the entire at-bat and if he sees what he’s looking for in the spot he’s looking for it, whack it. If he doesn’t, let it go.”

The organization is rooting for Walker for obvious reasons, and some that they learned later. Scouts spend entire careers without running into someone as credentialed. The ones who got to know Walker began calling him “The Resume.” Walker’s dad Derek is an MIT grad who works at a software development company. His mom Katrina went to Harvard as an undergrad and then Washington U. in St. Louis and Emory for two masters degrees before she went into teaching. Jordan was a 3.98 student at Decatur High, and Duke had a scholarship waiting for him if he somehow didn’t want to play for the Cardinals just yet. A $2.9 million bonus settled that.

Young players have slipped through the Cardinals’ grasp and thrived elsewhere, like Randy Arozarena, Sandy Alcantara, Zac Gallen and Adolis Garcia. New general manager Chaim Bloom, whose formative years were in Tampa Bay, has already patched those leaks. The Cardinals could still fizzle in summer heat and, as Shawshank Redemption fans know, hope can be a dangerous thing.

But right now they are a secret in the process of unveiling, with promise that only they can sense. There are few more delicious feelings than that. How long will it take for the bandwagon to resume rollling? Hard to tell but, at the moment, you can pick your seat.

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They weren’t a dynasty, even by today’s facile standards, and they never exactly dominated. But the New York Knicks of the late 60s and early 70s still live.

Few teams made people fall in love with basketball as hard as they did. They were an island of unselfishness, an engine that never get out of tune. And they were distinct: Walt Frazier the unhurried maestro, Willis Reed the undersized, all-heart center, Dave DeBusschere the two-sport defender, Bill Bradley the Ivy Leaguer with the reliable shot, Dick Barnett the fall-back-baby scorer, succeeded by the original stylings of Earl Monroe. Running the show was the raspy lifer, Red Holzman.

The end of their careers didn’t stop them. Bradley became a Senator and a Presidential candidate. DeBusschere was the last commissioner of the ABA and helped mid-wife the merger. Reed was a coach and general manager. Frazier remains the Knicks’ TV analyst, and Barnett, armed with a doctorate, campaigned to make sure his Tennessee State teams got recognized by the Hall of Fame.

Coming off the bench was a tornadic collection of elbows named Phil Jackson, who would capture more NBA titles than any other coach.

DeBusschere wrote a diary of the 1970 championship season, entitled The Open Man, which is who Holtzman wanted to have the ball. They played the Lakers in the finals three times in a four-year span and won twice, in 1970 and 1973. In 1970 all the starters averaged at least 14.5 points, and Frazier and Reed averaged more than 20, and DeBusschere averaged a double-double, and the Garden, then as now, throbbed with “Dee-FENSE” whenever the organist cued it up.

Since then, Knicks’ history has been full of ill-equipped saviors. The city exulted when the Knicks got Patrick Ewing in 1985, but he never won a championship and didn’t get to the Finals until 1994, when they lost to Houston and Hakeem Olajuwon. In 1999, they survived a cage match with Miami in the East Final, then became the first team to lose a championship round to San Antonio. They were Michael Jordan’s favorite foil. Pat Riley was going to lead them, then Carmelo Anthony, then Stephon Marbury, then Amare Stoudamire. The Knicks stumbled into a fine player when they drafted Kristaps Porzingis, and eventually he couldn’t wait to get out. They became so dysfunctional that free agents routinely snubbed their money and their city.

All of this makes the spring of 2026 such a giddy time that true Knicks fans are afraid to finish the Cracker Jack box, as if the advertised prize will somehow escape. The Knicks beat Atlanta in six games in the first round, winning Games 4-6 by an average of 33 points. They torched Philadelphia in a 4-game sweep, which ended with New York fans coming south and staging an arena takeover. They are now resting for the Eastern finals, since Cleveland and Detroit will play at least six games, and they will be favored to barge into the NBA Finals like a cybertruck,, unafraid of what Oklahoma City or San Antonio might say. More important, these Knicks are unintentional sons of the 70s. They win pretty.

They’re also ruthless. In this six-game tear, they have surpasssed 50 percent shooting every time. Their average margin in the Philly series was 22.3 points. They had 40-point leads in Games 1 and 4, and they hit 25 three-pointers in the finale For the series they shot 54.5 percent overall and 44.8 percent from long distance, and Karl-Anthony Towns, Mikal Bridges and OG Anunoby all shot over 60 percent. New York had a 6-game string of 50-point nights in the paint alone, and in the last Atlanta game the Knicks were 37 for 49 from 2-point range.

The starting lineup of Towns, Anunoby,, Bridges, Josh Hart and Jalen Brunson has played 318 postseason games. Hart, Bridges and Brunson were national champions at Villanova. And all five came from elsewhere. Brunson was a relatively quiet free-agent acquisition from Dallas whose uniform will hang from the Garden ceiling someday. He’s the type of small guard (6-foot-2) that doesn’t quite fit today’s NBA, but his shoulders are wide enough for four teammates when the clock gets short. Brunson averaged 29 points in the 76ers series.

Anunoby, a refugee from Toronto, is the defensive stopper. Bridges, who came from Brooklyn, is an NBA iron man who defends, runs and shoots. Hart is even more versatile, an insistent rebounder who the Lakers drafted in 2017 and banished to the G-League.

But the face of this surge belongs to Towns. He came to New York in a splashy trade with Minnesota that cost New York Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo. He’s a 7-footer who is a career 40 percent shooter from three, and his defense wasn’t up to the local standard at first. This season, new coach Mike Brown, a controversial replacement for Tom Thibodeau, didn’t try to fit Towns into a painted keyhole. These days Towns plays at the foul line or beyond and he basically runs the offense, so Brunson doesn’t have to. He averaged 15 points, eight rebounds and a team-high 7.5 assists against Philadelphia, in fewer than 24 minutes.

When Towns goes out, as he often does because of uncontrollable fouling, Brown sends in Mitchell Robinson, an old-style shot-blocker and rebounder. Robinson is Mr. Magoo from the foul line and thus is often fouled, but whenever he even makes one of two, the Garden howls. Add the shooting of Jordan Clarkson, Miles McBride and Landry Shamet from the bench, and the Knicks can quickly turn a snowball into a life-threatening emergency. At one point in the last Atlanta game, they led by 61 points (101-40).

There once was a fear that New York teams, with their riches and glamour, would subjugate the rest of the sports world. That fear has dissipated. The Liberty won the WNBA title two years ago and New York FC took the MLS Cup in 2021. But the Giants haven’t won a Super Bowl since the 2011 season, the Jets haven’t since the 1968 season, the Yankees haven’t won a World Series since 2009 and the Mets since 1986. The Rangers haven’t won a Stanley Cup since 1994,, the Islanders since 1983 and the Devils since 2003. The Knicks are ringless since 1973 and the Nets have been unencumbered by jewelry since they won the final ABA championship in 1976.

None of those teams are embraced more tightly than the Knicks, in a city that rightly or wrongly feels it is the cradle of basketball, in a place where Woody Allen and Spike Lee revel in watching two-hour scripts they didn’t write. Ironicaly these Knicks don’t make good movies, because the plot doesn’t thicken, and the good guys win by halftime. Will their superpowers hold up when they hit the big screen? Hard to say, but the previews are loud.

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The tributes were pouring in. Brandt Snedeker became captain of the U.S. Presidents Cup team, coming up this fall at Medinah. He won the Payne Stewart Award, for charity projects such as the Sneds Tour, a year-round golf opportunity for Tennessee kids, and for the Snedeker Foundation, which helped build a practice facility for students at the state School for The Blind. He won the AT&T Legacy Award at Pebble Beach for similar philanthropy, at a tournament he had won twice.

Everything was coming Snedeker’s way except the gold watch. Clearly the golf world had run out of reasons to celebrate his golf. He was 45, his game ravaged by weird injury and insufficient distance off the tee. If this was it, he deserved a big bravo. He had won nine PGA Tour events, shot a 59 in Greensboro in August of 2018, and was once ranked No. 4 in the world. But he hadn’t won since that Greensboro event, and he had gone through an operation that sounded like a Saw movie. It seemed he had more banquets in his future than birdies.

Then Snedeker came to Myrtle Beach for a Tour event. Most of the top players in the world were playing in a 72-man, no-cut, “signature” event at Quail Hollow in Charlotte. Those who tied for 10th place in Charlotte made a half-million. Those who tied for ninth at Myrtle Beach made $113,000. Snedeker still wasn’t a favorite, but he had made cuts in his past two events, and suddenly he was hitting good shots again. On Sunday morning he stood three strokes behind leader Mark Hubbard. His daughter Lily sent him a text: “Play fearless.”

That never has been a problem. Snedeker shot 66 on Sunday, without a “5” on the card through 17 holes. Beginning on the 12th, he birdied four of six. On 18, he blocked his drive and couldn’t save par, which dropped him a shot behind Hubbard. He went to the practice tee and hit some drivers and waited. Hubbard, who is looking for his first tour win at 36, bogeyed 16, then hit his drive on 18 in the same place Snedeker did and couldn’t save par.

Snedeker heard the result, realized he had won, and looked at the ground for a long time before he gave caddie Heath Holt a hug that must have felt like a frontal Heimlich maneuver. Eventually Snedeker would realize he had qualified for this week’s PGA Championship. That, and a two-year period of choosing his own schedule again, were the tangible rewards, but what he really wanted was to prove he still belonged on the PGA Tour, not a farewell tour.

“There’s been points over the last couple of years where I didn’t think I could do this,” Snedeker said. “I was, like, ‘what am I doing?’ My golf game wasn’t very good. My body didn’t feel very good. When you’re 45, there’s lots of scar tissue. It’s a little harder than when I was 25 and 26 and didn’t know what I was doing.

“There’s a lot of good shots to draw from and a lot of bad shots to draw from, too. In the end I did what I’ve always done. I got back to work.”

Of the 76 players who made the cut, Snedeker was 71st in driving distance. But he ranked second in his play around the greens, and fourth in putting, which is the template he’s used to win $38.8 million, 22nd on the career money list. But he hasn’t played in a major championship since the 2021 Open Championship at Royal St. Georges.

His game was already receding by then, and his chest had bothered him since he withdrew from the Open Championship in 2017. Doctors spotted a problem with the joint that separates the upper and lower parts of the sternum. Snedeker could function if he had time between shots, but an hour on the range brought too much pain and too much trouble breathing. Snedeker pursued stem cell treatments in South America and tried whatever he could to avoid surgery. No doctor had seen such an injury to an athlete in a sport without collisions.

But he couldn’t dodge it forever, and in December of 2022, Snedeker had manbrium joint stabiliziation surgery, administered by Dr. Burton Elrod in Nashville. Elrod had done the same operation on Steve McNair, the Titans’ quarterback using a bone he had grafted from McNair’s hip. He was so skeptical of the surgery, and so concerned about an infection so close to vital organs, that he took no notes and vowed never to do it again. According to Snedeker it had only been performed 12 times in 15 years worldwide.

“I don’t have a career without this,” Snedeker told Elrod, who relented. The short version is that Elrod cut across Snedeker’s sternum, put the bone in between the two sections of the sternum, and snapped it back into place. “Like Legos,” Snedeker said.

This would sound bizarre enough if the operation was routine, like a knee replacement has become. Instead, this was strictly experimental. Gulp. Play fearless.

Snedeker rested for 16 weeks before his next shot. “I learned two things: I’m way too young to retire, and I’m unemployable,” Snedeker said. He played at the Memorial in 2023, and the rest has been a linear exercise in frustration, until Sunday.

This uncompromising side of Snedeker isn’t the first one you see. He has a rat-a-tat speaking style and he was nicknamed “Opie” when he first got on tour, with his floppy blonde hair (he’s bald now). He was unguarded and funny. He said he understood that he had a strange surname and just hoped not many people would call him Snotlicker. He had grown up on public courses in Nashville. His dad was a lawyer, and the family bought a pawn shop in a tough part of town, and Snedeker often worked there, alongside his mother Candice. Not a day went by without a story worth retelling, and Steve Earle, the Hardcore Troubador, pawned his guitar there once. Candice and husband Larry both died in close proximity six years ago. She had a heart problem and wore a pacemaker, even when she caddied for Brandt at the Masters par-3 tournament. This win, of course, was on Mother’s Day.

Snedeker had a shot at winning the 2008 Masters but shot 77 in the final round. He was tied with Angel Cabrera after 54 holes in 2013 and said, “I’ve spent 32 years getting ready for this and I’m completely 100 percent sure I can handle it, whatever happens.” Then he shot 75 and finished fifth.

Snedeker won the Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup in 2012, which was an $11.8 million payday, but perhaps his finest hour came at Torrey Pines four years later. He shot 3-under-par 69 in merciless, chilly winds on Sunday. The average score for the field was 78. “I couldn’t do that again,” he said. Play was halted, then resumed on Monday, with no spectators allowed because of fears of falling palm fronds, in the wind. Snedeker could do nothing but watch and, as he suspected, leader Jimmy Walker faltered and gave Snedeker the win.

And there were good breaks, like the 2013 Canadian Open, when Hunter Mahan was leading by two strokes at the halfway point. Then his wife went into labor, and Mahan left the tournament, and Snedeker won by three.

So it’s been a colorful, dramatic career, one that was totally unforeseen by those outside the Snedeker clan.

Wonder what happens in the next one?