tournament Page 6 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

It's mini-March Madness, only in November
Gather round. It’s Feast Week: When college basketball and holiday branding collide in a breathtaking fireworks show of national championship contenders facing off in gyms barely fit for a church league game....

The NBA's In-Season Tournament is broken. Here's how it can be fixed
Nobody expected the NBA’s inaugural In-Season Tournament to have it all figured out right away. However, there are some drastic changes that need to be made. Friday night marks the final portion of the NBA In-Season Tournament’s Group Stage. After this week, the tournament whittles down to eight tea...

2023 NBA assists per game leaders
This article is based on data from Sportradar....

The 2023 Champions Classic was a tale of two games
CHICAGO — You know a game isn’t the most exciting when the biggest roar from the crowd in the first half occurs when Magic Johnson is shown on the video board. That was the story for Duke and Michigan State early on, Tuesday night. Kansas and Kentucky fans didn’t need the greatest point guard of all...

Lexi Thompson’s PGA Tour debut comes with a chance at history and to pierce through golf’s sexism
In the modern history of golf, no female has made a cut on a PGA Tour event. Only Babe Didrikson Zaharias has done it ever, playing all four rounds at the 1945 Phoenix Open, and Tucson Open. And as Lexi Thompson becomes the seventh woman to play in a PGA Tour event next week, on a sponsor’s invitati...

Welcome to the Pac-12 funeral procession
Stating “we’ve never seen something like this before” in sports is usually overused. ...

The NBA can try all it wants, player rest is impossible to stop
Remember when the Dallas Mavericks concluded an embarrassing 2022-23 season by not dressing Kyrie Irving and Luka Dončić instead of attempting to qualify for the Play-in Tournament? The Mavericks were fined $750,000, and I think that the NBA reached a breaking point in its never-ending saga of star-...

Women’s World Cup Day 23: It’s (probably) coming home to England
Sam Kerr got her first start of the World Cup. Possibly the best striker on Earth still wasn’t fully fit, but the Chelsea starlet at 80 percent is better than most in prime form. The Australian juggernaut scored one of the best goals of the tournament in the 63rd minute with her club teammate, Milli...

World Cup Day 21: This tournament will be remembered for how far the women’s game has come
We have our final four. When you get this deep into a tournament, anyone who’s not seen as chalk has done something grand, like Morocco’s men’s team last year and Colombia’s women’s team would’ve been this year. The South Americans entered as the lone surprise to make the quarterfinals. They benefit...

The budding rivalry between the Aces and Liberty is a massive win for the WNBA
Aside from the Connecticut Sun possibly playing spoiler, the current WNBA season has been conducted essentially known its champion resides in Las Vegas or Brooklyn. The Aces are putting together arguably the most impressive regular season in league history. But there’s always an asterisk. A road to ...

World Cup Day 9: England wins and loses at the same time
Doing the bare minimum to win seems to be England’s way in this World Cup. The Three Lionesses have a pair of 1-0 wins in the tournament, including the win over Denmark early Friday morning. Already without Leah Williamson, Beth Mead, and Fran Kirby for the global showcase, Keira Walsh was taken off...

World Cup Group H Preview: Why can’t there be more like Morocco?
The women’s World Cup should be, and still is in a lot of ways, a celebration of how far the game has come from where it was even just four years ago. The attention is more, the players, and teams are better, the quality of play keeps rising, the anticipation grows, as does the appreciation when it ...

Emoni Bates is fighting his way back from the abyss
It’s hard to believe that it’s been six years since Emoni Bates was the nation’s No. 1 middle schooler in the country. Three years ago, Bates was imagined as the type of ethereal prospect who would have viewed the summer league as a formality. By the time he arrived in Memphis during the fall of 202...

Women’s World Cup 2023 preview: Can anyone stop the Nords in Group A?
It’s Norway and then everyone else. That’s how Group A will shake out, even with hosts New Zealand trying to defend home territory from two European foes and a debutant from Asia. The runaway favorites to win the group are the Nordic, who will be one of the countries making the journey from the nort...

It’s the summer of Grant!
The NBA Playoffs were not nearly as kind to Grant Williams in 2023 as 2022. However, the summer has been his oyster, specifically this month. He spent Independence Day weekend at the event of the summer — Michael Rubin’s White Party. A couple of days after mingling with A-Listers, the Boston Celtics...

Changing of the guard (at center): The Oscar Tshiebwes & Drew Timmes of the world are undraftable
Evolve, or die. College basketball big men, beware....

First-round NBA Draft grades on a pass/fail system
If you’re like most underachievers and procrastinators, the letter grade doesn’t matter as long as you pass. I’ve lived most of my life by the mantra that “C’s are for degrees” and look where it’s gotten me: Writing about sports for living, and passing judgment upon others without retaliation....

Scoot Henderson went third, but is still the second-best player in this NBA draft class
Scoot Henderson is not the ideal 2023 NBA basketball player. That archetype is a 6-foot-7 or taller shooter with good defensive instincts. Henderson is 6-foot-2 and his jump shot is still a work in progress. With the profile of a franchise point guard prospect from 2002, Henderson is considered the ...

The Miami Heat ran out of gas, just like they did in 2014, 2020 NBA Finals
When we were all stuck in the house in the middle of the pandemic, basketball was the first sport available to watch on TV. The Bubble proved that sports could go on despite COVID-19. And while the 2020 NBA Finals were forgettable to some, it gave us one of the best memorable memes of all time — exh...

The Sooners survived Stanford again and appear destined for another WCWS title
It’s over. Maybe it was over before the festivities began in Oklahoma City? That’s why you play the game right? This year’s Women’s College World Series had eight national seeds survive regionals and super regionals to become the elite group in college softball. Seven teams hoping to knock the crown...