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🚨Heads
⚾️ Banned for life: MLB suspended Padres infielder Tucupita Marcano for life for betting on baseball. The league also suspended four players for one year in a scandal that appears to be just the tip of the iceberg.
🎾 Djoker withdraws: Novak Djokovic withdrew from the French Open (torn meniscus) and will undergo surgery, which will likely force him to miss Wimbledon next month.
🏀 Auriemma expanded: UConn signed Geno Auriemma to a five-year, $18.7 million extension that will keep him at Storrs until 2029, when he turns 75.
⚾️ Tommy John for Javier: Astros starter Cristian Javier will reportedly undergo Tommy John surgery, further depleting Houston’s injury-plagued rotation.
🏀 Kyrie signs his father: Kyrie Irving has signed his father, Drederick, to a shoe deal with ANTA, the Chinese sportswear brand where he serves as Chief Creative Officer.
⚽️ Yohannes, 16, scores in USWNT debut
16-year-old Lily Yohannes made her USWNT debut on Tuesday night, scoring the team’s third goal in a 3-0 win over South Korea.
Historical evening: Yohannes (16 years, 358 days) is the eighth youngest player to debut for the USWNT and the third youngest to score, behind only Kristine Lilly in 1987 (16 years, 22 days) and Tiffany Roberts in 1994 (16 years, 340 days) . to dawn).
How she got here: Yohannes was born in Springfield, Virginia, and moved to Amsterdam with her parents and two older brothers at the age of 9. At the age of 13, she started training at the country’s most successful club, Ajax, where she has since become a starter.
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Her path is unique in that regard, as virtually all of her USWNT teammates spent their formative years playing for American clubs and universities.
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But with women’s football on the rise in Europe, more players in the future could follow Yohannes’ example and choose to develop their game abroad.
From Henry Bushnell of Yahoo Sports:
While the U.S. men’s and boys’ national teams have an extensive recent history of recruiting players who grew up abroad, the women’s program has relied exclusively on players who spent their formative years in America.
And there’s a very simple reason for that: while Europe has long had the best boys’ football academies, on the girls’ side the US has been the standard bearer; Europe lagged behind.
But that is changing. The same professional clubs that scouted Lily’s brothers now scout – and tutor – girls like them. They use existing infrastructure and methodologies.
Many experts would argue that at least a dozen top European clubs, including Ajax, and perhaps many more, now offer a better soccer education than most or all youth clubs in the US.
🏀The “best player wins the series” doctrine.
From Ben Rohrbach of Yahoo Sports:
There’s an age-old saying in the NBA: More often than not, the team with the best player wins the series.
If this is a doctrine, Luka Dončić’s Mavericks will win the NBA Finals even though Jayson Tatum’s Celtics still won fourteen games in the regular season.
Dončić finished three places higher (third) in the MVP voting. Tatum may be the superior defensive player, but Dončić averaged more points (33.9), assists (9.8) and rebounds (9.2) per game and did so more efficiently. Advanced statistics are significantly in Dončić’s favor.
I think it’s almost universally accepted that Dončić is a better player than Tatum, even if the gap isn’t that great between a five-time first-team All-NBA selection and a three-time first-team All-NBA honoree.
Using each season’s MVP race as the determining factor for who voters thought was the best player in that particular campaign, the better player has won 41 of the 68 NBA Finals since 1956 – or about 60%.
Since the turn of the century, the player who finished higher in the MVP voting is 12-11 in Finals matchups. Those are not overwhelming numbers. Hardly any doctrine.
However, if you take a more general idea of who the best player was in each series—for example, when Charles Barkley won the MVP in 1993 only to have his Suns lose to Michael Jordan’s Bulls—you could make the argument that the best player won 56 of 68 championships (82.4%).
That’s a pretty compelling number. Enough to give that saying some credibility.
Read the full story.
⚾️In photos: Cosmic Baseball
The Tri-City Chili Peppers have made history on Saturday when they turned out the lights and introduced the world to Cosmic Baseball, Jeff writes.
The collegiate summer team in the Coastal Plain League* spent more than $100,000 to install a series of black lights at their stadium in Virginia. Every piece of equipment glowed in the dark during the Chili Peppers’ 9-4 victory over the Greenbrier Knights, believed to be the first sporting event ever played under a blacklight.
Extensive tests have been done to ensure they could play a real game under these conditions, and even though it was dark, “it’s not as dark as you think,” catcher Jacob Lee told MLB.com. “I was actually very surprised.”
More to come: The Chili Peppers have three more Cosmic Baseball games scheduled this summer, on June 15, June 28 and July 20.
*Famous alumni: The Wood-bat Summer League consists of 15 teams across Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina and has numerous MLB playersincluding stars like Justin Verlander and Ryan Zimmerman.
🏀 NBA Mock Draft 8.0
The 2024 NBA Draft It’s still three weeks away and there’s a new name on top of our latest design: French wing Zaccharie Risacher.
Where things stand: Here’s Krysten Peek from Yahoo Sports…
Some prospects are traveling around the country training for teams and meeting with executives, while others are still wrapping up their seasons in Europe, where many scouts are heading to Italy this week for the Adidas Eurocamp to gain extra exposure for eligible prospects come for the draft. players.
The Lakers now have two draft picks, with the Pelicans deferring the 17th pick in 2024 for a first-round pick in 2025. Klutch Sports CEO Rich Paul has made it clear that Bronny James will only work out for a select few teams. , including the Lakers and Suns, all but cementing Bronny as a lock for the Lakers in the second round.
📆 June 5, 1977: Winds win the title
47 years ago today, the Trail Blazers defeated the 76ers in six games to win their first and only NBA title and become the league’s first champions after the NBA-ABA merger, Jeff writes.
RIP, Big Red: 24-year-old Bill Walton exploded for 20 points, 23 rebounds, 7 assists and 8 blocks in Game 6 to earn Finals MVP.
“I’ve never coached a better player. I’ve never coached a better competitor. And I’ve never coached a better person than Bill Walton.” — Blazers coach Jack Ramsay
More about this day:
*Sign of the times: To give you an idea of the NBA’s popularity at the time, Game 6 was originally scheduled for 10:30 a.m., marking the final day of a mid-tier golf tournament called the Kemper Open. CBS ultimately agreed to an afternoon tip-off and went to golf immediately after the final buzzer, skipping the trophy presentation entirely.
📺 Watchlist: Quarter-finals in Paris
The quarter-finals of the French Open close today, with two women’s matches and one men’s match, Jeff writes.
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Women: No. 4 Elena Rybakina vs. No. 12 Jasmine Paolini (8:15 p.m. ET, Tennis); No. 2 Aryna Sabalenka vs. Mirra Andreeva* (9.30 am, Tennis)
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Gentlemen: No. 4 Alexander Zverev vs. No. 11 Alex de Minaur (2:15 p.m., Tennis); No. 7 Casper Ruud defeats. No. 1 Novak Djokovic (walkover)
More to watch:
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🥎 WCWS Final: No. 1 Texas vs. No. 2 Oklahoma (8 p.m., ESPN) … The twelve major foes meet in the best-of-three championship in their final season before moving to the SEC.
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⚾️ MLB: Padres at Angels (9:38 p.m., FS1)
*Teen phenomenon: Andreeva, 17, is the youngest woman to reach the quarterfinals of the French Open since Sesil Karatantcheva in 2005. She is also the youngest to reach the Round of 16 in Grand Slam events on any surface since Anna Kournikova in 1998 .
🏀 Trivia about the NBA Finals
This year’s NBA champion will be only the third this century that didn’t have a current or former MVP on the roster.
Answer below.
🇭🇷 Croatia’s newest citizen: Bill Belichick
For the first time since 1975 Bill Belichick is not a coach in the NFL. That has given him the freedom to do other things, such as exploring his Croatian roots.
Man of the hour: Belichick, who has worn a Croatian pin at news conferences in recent years, became a Croatian citizen on Monday and was honored on Tuesday during the Croatia-North Macedonia football match, where he addressed the team.
“My grandparents came to the US from Draganić in 1910 and had a difficult life, but that’s why my father [Steve], also an American football coach, managed to make his American dream come true. … Yesterday I became a Croatian citizen. Now I’m one of you.”
Trivia answer: Pistons (2004) and Raptors (2019)
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