div Page 14 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Girls’ high school sports: The most impactful legacy of Title IX
One of Title IX’s most significant triumphs in the last 50 years has been the soaring number of women competing in high school sports. The number of women in sports grew more than tenfold, from 294,015 in the 1971-72 school year to 3.4 million in 2019, according to a Women’s Sports Foundation study....
It's 50 years after the passage of Title IX, and I’m done being grateful
Title IX turns 50 this month and, although the law is responsible for so much progress, the work is unfinished. The celebrations and acknowledgements are on the way, but for years women who play sports have been required to be thankful for scraps, and those days are over....
The Florida Panthers are apparently done being good or interesting
We’re still very much in a time where teams in any sport are going to overreact to playoff results. They have 82 or 162 games of sample size where they play everyone and aren’t confined to one matchup with one team at one time with one status of health, but whatever happens in four to seven games st...
That’s the difference between the goalies
Hockey — as weird, random, and boorish as it can get — is a pretty simple game at times. The storylines coming out of Game 3 were that the Tampa Bay Lightning authored some market correction to get back into the Stanley Cup Final after a 6-2 win to get the series to 2-1. And with no team having won ...
Your 2022 NBA All-Postseason Team
In the NBA, the playoffs are truly a second season. There are no more back-to-backs, but there are also no more rest games for players. Also, there are no more sub-.400 teams on the schedule. To recover from a bad loss in the postseason, requires returning to the court 48 hours later and playing aga...
We should all salute the baller named Sue
Sue Bird announced today that this WNBA season will be her last after 21 years in the league. She was drafted first overall in 2002 to the Seattle Storm, where she has remained throughout her two-decade career, during which she was a 12-time All-Star and won four WNBA championships, the most recent ...
The NHL finally gets its era-shifting Final with Lightning vs. Avs
Hockey being what it is, mostly weird and random, rarely throws up the two best teams in the NHL’s showpiece, the Stanley Cup Final. Sometimes we get close, and most seasons it’s actually hard to decipher who are clearly the best teams. With shootouts and overtime goofiness affecting the standings, ...
Tony La Russa got the Matt Nagy treatment on Saturday, but at least he’ll only hear it at his home ballpark
Fortunately, for Tony La Russa, the chants for his firing won’t follow him everywhere around Chicago. Even if the Chicago Bulls were playing in the NBA Finals right now, there likely wouldn’t be enough White Sox fans at the game for the chant to ring out enough for a viral moment. Also, La Russa’s k...
The third period has become to the Rangers what the third quarter is to the Celtics
The New York Rangers lost their first game at Madison Square Garden during these Eastern Conference finals to the Tampa Bay Lightning, 3-1 last night. They’ve scored one goal in the last seven-and-half periods, and they haven’t really deserved much more than that....
The waiting is the hardest part
The Colorado Avalanche are waiting. And waiting for a Stanley Cup Finals opponent hasn’t treated those favorably in returning from mini-vacations in the past. We’re finishing up the 35th NHL postseason in which first-round games are contested as a best of seven, starting in 1987 and featured every y...
The Tampa Bay Lightning have channeled Admiral Ackbar to get back into the series
Perhaps the biggest sign that a team has entered its own class in the NHL is that it can play any way it has to, or wants to, to win. Whatever you ask of them, they have an answer. Some pretenders like the Hurricanes, once you take away their preferred style — in the case of the Canes it’s dump it i...
Looks like that’s it for the Boston Bruins, the dynasty that almost was
In every sport now, it seems one of the most fascinating things to watch is when an organization decides a particular roster has run its course. Thanks to salary caps everywhere (or just the totally not but really is a cap in baseball) there always comes a time when you have to pull that trigger as ...
This is probably as close as Connor McDavid will get
There’s not much more that Connor McDavid can do. For that matter, Leon Draisaitl should be attached to that lament permanently now, after he also averaged two points per game in the playoffs with maybe two functioning limbs. They’re the only players to average two points per game in the playoffs ov...
The best sports scenes from <i>The Wire</i>
On yesterday’s date in 2002, the Michael Jordan of television series made its debut on premium cable. It didn’t have near the hype of Bobby Knight calling it the best basketball player of all time. In fact most people didn’t even watch it until years after the final episode aired. But The Wire would...
We need to talk about Oklahoma’s softball team
We complain about unbeatable, un-compete-able, unstoppable dynasties in college football, bemoaning how no one will ever be able to be on Alabama’s level, that any championship victory over them is but a blip in their seemingly god-given power. We shook our heads and shrugged our shoulders for years...
Is the NHL now rigging games for Connor McDavid?
OK, obviously not. But maybe?...
Hope springs eternal, justified or not, for Texas fans
Lift up the annual refrain: “This is going to be our year! No, we know we said that last year after Sark got hired and then promptly went 5-7, and the year that Tom Herman got hired and we went 7-6, and just about every year for the last decade with nothing much to show for it, but 2022? Yeah, it’s ...
The Flames cost us a truly transcendent moment
The going story out there has been that the NBA Playoffs have been kinda trash. It’s easy to see why people think that, because there’s been a ton of blowouts, and neither of the conference finals has produced a close game in eight tries. What we want out of the playoffs are moments and performances...
Is the NHL’s Presidents’ Trophy curse real?
The Florida Panthers breezed through the first round of the playoffs and then got bounced from the second round so fast we barely had time for the annual discourse about the Presidents’ Trophy and whether it’s a curse for a team’s Stanley Cup hopes....
The Sacramento Kings will get another shot to blow it in NBA Draft
The Sacramento Kings received another undeserved lifeline during Tuesday night’s NBA Draft Lottery in the form of a three-pick bounce from their projected slot at 7th to the 4th overall pick. Cue the PTSD. The 2022 Western Conference Finals is a testament to how badly the Sacramento Kings have bungl...