Will Lakers fans board Warriors’ bandwagon for the NBA Finals?
• We were sure there would be little reason for Laker fans to pay attention to the NBA Finals. But there might indeed be a legitimate rooting interest. Should Boston beat Miami in Game 7 Sunday and advance to play the Golden State Warriors, beginning next Thursday night in San Francisco's Chase Center, Laker fans will be scrambling to hop on the Dubs' bandwagon.
The reason, of course, is the fear of the faithful that the Celtics might break that 17-17 deadlock in NBA championships with the Lakers. Anyway, rooting against Boston is probably a good distraction from the current state of the franchise, although the Lakers apparently do now have a coach with the reports that Darvin Ham is getting a four-year contract . ...
• It's not just L.A.-based fans, either. Leonard Pitts Jr., a political columnist for the Miami Herald, is a Laker fan and usually has little use for his own city's team. The last couple of weeks he made an exception (and got called out by a co-worker).
And you could tell he's a true Laker fan. He got in a dig at the Clippers in the process . ...
• You could make the case that the Warriors are actually America's Team. They're the league's most fun-to-watch team now that their roster is whole again. And their superstar, Steph Curry, isn't a diva . ...
• Incidentally, we won't remind our friends from New England that the NBA title race between the Lakers and Celtics is 12-6 L.A. since Bill Russell retired 53 seasons ago, and 8-2 Lakers since 1987 . ...
• The Kings' season and particularly its ending, a Game 7 loss to Edmonton, is a lot more palatable in light of the Oilers' five-game victory over division champ Calgary. There's work to be done to bolster the L.A. roster, but there's a lot more reason for optimism going into this offseason than in any since the last Stanley Cup summer, 2014 . ...
• Here's the issue with waiting to retire somebody's number: A lot of others might lay claim to it. The Dodgers will get around to retiring Gil Hodges' No. 14 on his bobblehead night next Saturday during the New York Mets series, six months after the Golden Days Era veterans committee finally elected him to the Hall of Fame.
As Eric Stephen of
noted, since Hodges left the club after the 1961 season, 23 other Dodgers have worn the number. The most notable: Mike Scioscia and Kiké Hernández. The most obscure? Larry Barnes, a first baseman whose Dodger tenure consisted of 30 games and a .494 OPS in 2003 . ...
• The all too frequent revelations of coaches bullying and abusing their athletes, the latest of which are the allegations against Cal women's swim coach Teri McKeever
uncovered this week by SCNG's Scott M. Reid, are as puzzling as they are sickening. Why do coaches feel they need to motivate by threats, fear and intimidation?
• And for all of the hand-wringing we hear about the transfer portal and college athletes' ability to change their situations, this is a reminder that it's not all about playing time or NIL money. It can also be a response to mistreatment that probably happens far more than any of us are aware, both toxic situations like Cal swimming and the many smaller indignities in which coaches remind their players who has control.
“The power dynamic between the college athlete and his or her coach is completely one-sided,” athletes' rights activist Ramogi Huma told me a couple of years ago. “And that's exactly how the NCAA designed it.”
It's not quite as onesided now, but it's still lopsided . ...
• This has been another week of grief and recriminations and horror, and in the wake of Tuesday's school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that took the lives of 19 children and two adults — one of more than 200 mass shooting incidents in just five months — athletes and franchises have taken a stand against this country's inability to regulate assault weapons.
On Tuesday night, in the wake of the school shootings and before Game 4 of his team's Western Conference finals series in Dallas, Warriors coach Steve Kerr made an emotional, angry statement about the inability of politicians to address the problem. “I'm tired of the moments of silence. Enough!” he said.
On Wednesday night before the Heat-Celtics game, Miami's public address announcer urged fans to contact their legislators and demand “common-sense gun laws.” On Thursday night, while the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays played each other, both teams used their Twitter feeds to disseminate information on gun violence in the United States. Athletes, coaches and managers in a variety of sports have spoken and tweeted about stopping the violence.
On Friday afternoon, San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler wrote a blog item titled, “Home of the Brave?” Among the passages: “When I was the same age as the children in Uvalde, my father taught me to stand for the pledge of allegiance when I believed my country was representing its people well or to protest and stay seated when it wasn't. I don't believe it is representing us well right now.”
Subsequently, he told Giants beat writers in Cincinnati before Friday's game that he would not be on the field for the anthem going forward . ...
• Yes, I know. “Stick to sports,” you say. We try. We realize that the games and the conversation offer an escape from an everyday environment that just seems to get harder instead of easier.
And sometimes it's just too much.