College basketball:
Mississippi State freshman Nick Weatherspoon, a five-star point guard and the former top recruit in Mississippi, was arrested and charged with driving under the influence Sunday in Starkville. Weatherspoon, 18, is the brother of Mississippi State junior guard Quinndary Weatherspoon, who led the team with 16.5 points per game last season.
College football:
Auburn coach Gus Malzahn said sophomore Jarrett Stidham beat out returning starter Sean White and will be the Tigers’ starting quarterback for the season opener against Georgia Southern on Sept. 2 . ... Notre Dame and Wisconsin will play a two-game Shamrock Series at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wis., in 2020 and Soldier Field in Chicago in 2021.
The Islanders said center Shane Prince will miss 4-6 months after having ankle surgery.
NHL: Tennis:
Wimbledon champion Roger Federer withdrew from the Western & Southern Open in Mason, Ohio, because of a back injury. He has won this Masters series tournament seven times. The U.S. Open warmup has lost five of the top six players in the men’s rankings. The Swiss star, ranked No. 3, is sidelined along with No. 1 Andy Murray, No. 4 Stan Wawrinka, No. 5 Novak Djokovic and No. 6 Marin Cilic, the defending champion. Only No. 2 Rafael Nadal, the top-seeded player, remains in the draw.
■ In first-round men’s play at the Western & Southern Open, Richard Gasquet beat qualifier John-Patrick Smith 6-4, 6-4.
Among the women, 14th-seeded Petra Kvitova rallied past Anett Kontaveit 1-6, 7-6 (2), 6-3, while Kristina Mladenovic, seeded 13th, became the first seeded player to lose, 6-0, 7-6 (6) to Daria Gavrilova.
DeMarcus Cousins NEWYORK— will make an early season trip back to Sacramento, while Gordon Hayward will wait almost all season to see Utah again.
Chris Paul’s return to his old Clippers home is part of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day tripleheader that includes another NBA Finals rematch, while Paul George and Jimmy Butler also learned the dates of their return games Monday when the NBA released its full 2017-18 schedule — which for the first time in history features no teams playing four games in five nights.
The league had unveiled its opening-week national TV games and its fivegame Christmas schedule last week. Opening night is Oct. 17, the earliest the regular season has started since 1980.
Cousins will return to California’s capital city to play for the first time since the Kings traded him to New Orleans last February when the Pelicans visit on Oct. 26 as part of a TNT doubleheader.
From there, it’s another five months until Hayward plays in Salt Lake City for the first time since joining the Boston Celtics as a free agent in July. The Celtics visit the Jazz on March 28 for an ESPN game.
Other games of note include George going back to Indiana on Dec. 13 for
Kyle Larson BROOKLYN, MICH. — finished second in a prestigious sprint car event in Iowa on Saturday, then made it back to Michigan International Speedway in time to win Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race.
So the question team owner Chip Ganassi faced in the news conference afterward wasn’t all that outlandish: Could the Indianapolis 500 be a possibility in the future?
“See what you do to me?” Ganassi said to Larson.
Larson’s plan for the weekend the first time since the Pacers surprisingly dealt him to Oklahoma City; and Butler, another All-Star who went East to West in the summer, taking the Timberwolves into Chicago on Feb. 9.
The NBA’s top two picks go head-to-head for the first time Nov. 15 when Markelle Fultz and Philadelphia visit Lonzo Ball and the Lakers.
The All-Star Game is Feb. 18 in Los Angeles.
The Christmas schedule, as usual, is headlined by NBA Finals foes Golden State and Cleveland meeting for the first time since the Warriors’ five-game victory in June. They will meet again Jan. 15 on the Cavaliers’ home floor.
Later that night, Paul’s Houston Rockets play the required some leeway from Ganassi, but the victory Sunday was all the validation Larson needed and may have earned him a little more latitude for the future.
It was the type of adventurous effort that can help a talented young driver build his fan base, and that’s something Ganassi seemed to understand.
He’s in position to help because Chip Ganassi Racing has cars on both the NASCAR and IndyCar circuits, and he publicly urged the sprint Clippers at Staples Center for the first time since acquiring the point guard to play alongside James Harden in their backcourt. The opener of the TNT tripleheader features Memphis’ return to the Martin Luther King Jr. Day schedule, hosting the Lakers.
With an extra week of days to play with, along with some much deeper looks at arena availability and ways to try to help competitive balance, the NBA believes the schedule released Monday should be the most user-friendly in the league’s history. The regular season ends April 11.
Back-to-backs? Only 14.4 per team on average, an alltime low for the third straight year.
Single-game road trips, car fans to tune in for the NASCAR race Sunday.
“Indy 500 is definitely on my bucket list,” said Larson, 25, who has four career Cup victories, three of them at Michigan. “I don’t know if it is right now at this moment, but for sure some day I’d like to, and Chip knows that.”
That may mean trying to complete 1,100 miles in one day, because NASCAR’s CocaCola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway is usually scheduled in the evening after the Indianapolis 500.
Kurt Busch was the most recent driver to try both, in 2014, before engine failure ended his bid 400 miles into the Charlotte race.
Larson said he impressed on the team that his love for sprint car racing would not average miles traveled and time zones crossed? All down a bit as well.
“I think at this point, and frankly the minute we got the extra week, we could conclude the schedule is really, undebatably, the best basketball schedule we’ve ever had,” said Evan Wasch, the NBA’s senior vice president for basketball strategy and analytics. “That’s what the week affords you, the opportunity to focus on all these different metrics.”
The league this year will label the schedule by week — Week 1, Week 2, so on, from Monday to Sunday. It’s essentially an effort to present fans, and fantasy players, with a schedule that’s broken down into smaller bites. affect his main focus, which was Sunday’s race.
“I had concerns, and I was getting ready to take a lot of heat in the media for that if we didn’t have a good day,” Ganassi said Sunday.
“I just don’t want to do something that’s going to slow him down, you know? I think you run the risk of that when you have a talent like that, that wants to go drive other kinds of cars and things. I’ve never been a team owner to keep my drivers from driving other kinds of cars, and obviously — you know, you want to do the best you can for the guy all the time and do what you can do, and hopefully we can continue to do it.
“I don’t want to make any promises.”
The New York Mets saved $3 million by trading infielder Neil Walker to the Milwaukee Brewers and have cut payroll by more than $11.6 million in recent weeks.
As part of Saturday’s trade, the Mets agreed to pay the Brewers $1.699 million on Sept. 30. Walker was owed $4.699 million of his $17.2 million salary at the time of the deal.
New York saved $3.765 million when it dealt outfielder Jay Bruce to Cleveland on Wednesday.
In deals late last month, the Mets cut payroll by $2.6 million when they traded first baseman Lucas Duda to Tampa Bay on July 27 and $2.26 million when they sent reliever Addison Reed to Boston four days later.
New York began the season with a $156.8 million payroll. But the Mets are 53-62 and out of playoff contention.
Giancarlo Stanton’s 43rd home run Monday night broke Gary Sheffield’s franchise record for home runs in a single season, set in 1996. Stanton has homered in five straight games, another team record.
Los Angeles took 2 of 3 from San Diego in the weekend series. The Dodgers are 16-0-3 in their last 19 series and haven’t lost one since June 5-7 to Washington.
The three-game weekend series against the Cubs drew 123,110, the most for a three-game set at Chase Field since 132,925 for a series against San Francisco from Sept. 23-25, 2011. Many were Cubs fans.
Rafael Devers became only the second left-handed hitter to homer off Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman in his eight-year career when the rookie hit a 103 mph fastball for a tying homer in the ninth inning Sunday night. The only other left-handed hitter to homer off Chapman was Luke Scott for Baltimore in 2011.
Fans in Washington loudly booed Hunter Strickland when he emerged from the bullpen in both games of Sunday’s doubleheader. The reliever hit Nationals star Bryce Harper with a pitch on May 29, leading to a bench-clearing brawl and suspensions for both.
Marlins: Dodgers: Diamondbacks: Red Sox: Giants: