Watch these 3 chase Cup
THREE to keep a close eye on during the Stanley Cup playoffs:
Panthers center and captain Aleksander Barkov: Tremendous work rate, vision and senses. He’s a large reason why linemate Sam Reinhart has 54 goals.
Rangers forward Barclay Goodrow: Though a fourth-liner, he makes things happen. Plays hard and is an action-magnet, difficult to move off the puck.
Oilers winger Zach Hyman: The Toronto native and former Maple Leaf has quietly scored 54 goals this season by being a pesty presence for goaltenders. He’s an interesting dude, having written books for children. Jewish, he’s expected to play if a game lands on Yom Kippur.
➤ Now that most of North America realizes the Kelce Brothers are a pair of self-entitled, classless jerks, the only folks left to declare that everyone loves them are pandering media.
➤ Say here’s a reasonable idea: To reduce the protracted, dreary endings of close college basketball games with multiple timeouts per teams, disallow teams from calling time after they score. It’s no longer their ball, so why can they call time?
➤ Weekend Boomer Award goes to Scott Van Pelt, the wisecrack-reliant “SportsCenter” anchor who played it straight on Masters’ telecasts.
➤ Eighth-grade basketball players — children — are now taking to social media to declare which high school they’ve chosen to play for. There are even national rankings for sixth-to-eighth graders. And you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction?
➤ Suzyn Waldman is now forced to play sports gambling drum-banger on Yankees radio. What if she’d just said no?
➤ Buck Showalter has returned to MLB Network as a studio analyst. If only he were encouraged, let alone allowed, to speak unvarnished truths about the state of big league baseball, MLBN would be worth the stop.
➤ As baseball savvy reader Jim Curnal reminds us, the computerized strike zone boxes that appear on our screens are significantly inaccurate, as they show the strike zone to be the knees to the waist. But MLB rules identify the zone from the knees to the letters.
➤ Suddenly toothpaste seems to be named after erotic dancers. I’m now brushing with Crest’s “Vibrant Peppermint,” recommended by four out of five bouncers.