Month: December 2019

Wayland Baptist senior guard J

Rick Bowness wins 1st game as Dallas Stars’ interim head coach, Ben Bishop has 32nd career shutout in 2-0 win over Devils

Right-hander Gerrit Cole is expected to sign a record-setting contract by the end of the winter meetings, sources tell ESPN’s Jeff Passan. The New York Yankees, Los Angeles Angels and Los Angeles Dodgers are the top bidders.

Rickard Rickell and Max Comtois scored in the shootout for Anaheim, and the Ducks fended off the Minnesota Wild 3-2

No

Ducks top Wild 3-2 in shootout

J.J. Culver, a senior guard for Wayland Baptist in the NAIA, became just second player in NAIA history to score 100 points, reaching the magical mark in his team’s 124-60 rout over SW Adventist on Tuesday night.

In addition to the Yankees and Angels, the Dodgers have a heavy presence in the ongoing bidding for Gerrit Cole.

SAN DIEGO — It doesn’t happen often, but the last two times a free-agent pitcher turned down the Yankees he did so for less money to pitch in the National League: Cliff Lee with the Phillies in 2010 and Greg Maddux with the Braves in 1992. The Los Angeles Dodgers are hoping Gerrit Cole chooses the same path.

“Oh, we’re in it–strong,” a Dodgers source said Tuesday night.

The Yankees offer a ready-made World Series contender and a legacy-making path similar to what free agent pitchers CC Sabathia and Mike Mussina took. The Angels, Cole’s hometown team, have the advantage of locale, but need to convince Cole they are close to fielding a World Series contender. Only the Dodgers can offer the best of both worlds.

Any team left in the Cole sweepstakes knows the cost: in the neighborhood of $300 million over at least eight years. Money being somewhat equal, sometime soon Cole will decide where he wants to finish his career. It’s that simple. By now it’s not about the deal, but where he wants to play.

“It’s probable that something can get done in the short term,” agent Scott Boras told reporters in his annual media scrum Tuesday afternoon.

What does “short term” mean?

“It could be as soon as [Wednesday],” said one source from a club in the mix.

The inevitable rumors of a “mystery team” have surfaced. (Don’t laugh; in 2010 with Lee that was the Phillies.) But that team with Cole is unlikely to be the Astros. “No, not really,” said a Houston source about the Astros playing a role in the Cole endgame.

The Dodgers have positioned themselves as a wild card player in this offseason market: money to spend with what a string of postseason failures have knitted into a championship-or-bust mandate. They’ve been connected to free agents Cole and Anthony Rendon and on the trade market to Francisco Lindor. This deep into the Cole sweepstakes, Cole must be the priority.

The Dodgers have won the National League West seven consecutive seasons but have not won the World Series since 1988, the fifth longest drought in the league. With the help of a productive farm system, they have cut $75 million off their payroll in four years, avoiding competitive balance taxes each of the past two years. This offseason they have to replace 42 starts that came off their roster: free agents Hyun Jin-Ryu, their innings leader, and Rich Hill.

Signing Cole would give Los Angeles a rotation with prestige and talent to match those of the past two world champions, the 2018 Red Sox and 2019 Nationals, as well as the 2019 Astros, who fell eight outs short: Cole, 29, Walker Buehler, 25, Clayton Kershaw, 31, Kenta Maeda, 31, Julio Urias, 23, and Dustin May, 22. All of them would be controlled by the Dodgers through 2023 except Kershaw, who is signed through 2021. Los Angeles is 15-17 in Kershaw’s 32 postseason games, including 3-7 in his past 10.

Eleven years ago, Cole, then a first-round draft pick, said no to an offer from the Yankees. Actually, after deep study with his father, Cole arrived at a decision so quickly that the Yankees never even made an offer.

Two years ago, the Yankees tried to get Cole again, this time in a trade from the Pirates. But Pittsburgh preferred the package from the Astros.

“He’s our white whale,” Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said. “Maybe the third time is our time.”

The Yankees have been viewed as the frontrunner for Cole because of their history with him and because he is the perfect finishing piece for their club, which largely has been built around young position players and bullpen firepower. No Yankees pitcher has thrown 200 innings in a season since Hiroki Kuroda and Sabathia in 2013.

When Cashman and the rest of the Yankees contingent sat down last week with Cole and Boras, they talked about how important Cole is to their plans. Over the next four years, no front-end starters like Cole will shake loose on the free-agent market. Luis Castillo, James Paxton, Noah Syndergaard and Jose Berrios are all very good pitchers, but are not among the truly elite difference makers. This is the time and this is the pitcher.

The Yankees also brought along Andy Pettitte to the meeting with Cole. At one point Cole and Pettitte broke into a sidebar discussion about what it’s like to start a potential playoff clincher. Pettitte started 12 of them–more than any pitcher in history–and his team won eight of them. Cole has started three of them, losing in 2013 NLDS Game 5 and the 2015 NL wild-card game before winning ALDS Game 5 this year against Tampa Bay with an eight-inning, 10-strikeout gem.

The conversation was vintage Cole: a student of baseball history and ever thirsty for knowledge no matter how granular that might help him on the mound.

But Cole’s decision will come down to where he wants to live and pitch. Boras has made it clear that geography is not a priority. (No agent would limit his client’s field of interest, of course). Cole has pitched in both leagues. Would Cole prefer the National League? As a flyball pitcher, would he prefer Dodger Stadium over Yankee Stadium? (Cole has started only four games at Dodger Stadium, going 2-2. He did go to the 2017 World Series there as a fan. He is 2-0 at Yankee Stadium in two starts there.)

Home is a relative term in baseball, and place of birth tends to be overrated in where someone chooses to play. Manny Machado and Eric Hosmer are from Miami and signed with San Diego. Bryce Harper is from Las Vegas and signed with Philadelphia. Mike Trout is from New Jersey and signed an extension to stay in Anaheim. Stephen Strasburg is from San Diego and stayed in Washington D.C.

With Maddux, his priority was to stay in the NL. The Yankees brought him to Broadway musicals, showed him golf clubs in New Jersey, introduced him to Donald Trump and offered him $34 million. Maddux took $6 million less to sign with the Braves. He didn’t want to yield his institutional knowledge from pitching in the NL.

Lee also turned down less money from the Yankees pitch in the NL. Lee’s wife had been harassed at Yankee Stadium during 2010 ALCS Game 3, though Lee later downplayed the effect of such ugliness on his decision to sign with the Phillies.

We don’t know Cole’s priority. We know he wants to win the World Series. But where? Sometime very soon Cole, as he did when he was a high school senior advised by Boras, will end his careful study and research and decide on the answer. 

A sport with silence and conformity deeply rooted in its culture, hockey has seen a major shift in recent weeks. And these revelations are only the start.

The stories came to Daniel Carcillo in droves. Emails and texts, Instagram and Twitter direct messages, more than 300 total in less than a week. Some came from teenagers in faraway corners of the hockey world, others from NHL veterans with blue-check mark accounts. All recounted instances of physical, sexual and emotional trauma suffered, as Carcillo once did, while playing hockey.

Almost exactly one year ago, Carcillo spoke out against the brutish hazing rituals he suffered through at the hands of teammates as a 17-year-old rookie in the OHL. Since then he has provided a safe space of sorts for others to share their own stories. “I want to be a conduit for healing,” says Carcillo, 34, a career enforcer who won the Stanley Cup twice with Chicago before retiring in 2015. “I want these kids to understand that it’s not their fault, that what happened to them was abuse.” Until late last month, though, such messages were sparse. Now? As Carcillo says, “A dam broke. It’s like a tidal wave.”

The initial spark came on Nov. 25, when a journeyman blueliner named Akim Aliu posted details of a racist tirade directed at him by then-coach Bill Peters in the minors in 2009–10: “Dropped the N bomb several times towards me in the dressing room in my rookie year because he didn’t like my choice of music.” The following afternoon, former Hurricanes defenseman Michal Jordan recounted how Peters had kicked him and punched another player in the head during the ’15–16 season.

Peters, who apologized in a letter addressed to Flames general manager Brad Treliving—an apology that Aliu, who was not named in the letter, later blasted as “misleading, insincere and concerning”— resigned from his position behind the Flames’ bench on Nov. 29. But as Carcillo’s inbox indicates, these revelations cannot be dismissed simply as a matter of one rotten fruit falling from the Don Cherry tree. After all, improper behavior can take many forms, from Mike Babcock—the NHL’s highest-paid coach until the Leafs dismissed him amid a six-game losing streak last month—facing allegations that he once verbally abused former Red Wings forward Johan Franzen into having a “nervous breakdown” to overzealous parents hollering behind peewee benches.

“Far too many people in sports think that you have to be tough and abusive in order to get the best out of athletes,” says Gretchen Kerr, a University of Toronto professor who researches athlete maltreatment. “All of that stuff around mental toughness runs against everything that we know about how people learn, what motivates people, under what conditions do people perform their best, and yet we continue to perpetuate these misconceptions. It’s just been normalized.”

Last April Kerr and her colleagues published a report based on a survey of 1,001 current and former Canadian national team athletes across more than five dozen sports. The results were sobering: Roughly 60% of the athletes reported experiencing “psychologically harmful behavior” while competing for their country, 20% had experienced “sexually harmful behavior,” and 14% had endured “physically harmful behavior.” For every category of maltreatment, the most commonly cited perpetrators were coaches.

But the standard for what is acceptable is clearly shifting. Decades ago, who would’ve cared about a coach forcing a teenage rookie to rank his teammates according to work ethic before reading aloud said list to the entire locker room, as Babcock did with Leafs winger Mitch Marner in 2016–17? For that matter, how many would’ve praised these methods by heralding the wisdom of old-school, hard-ass leadership? “In modern society, I can think of no other job that gives somebody so much power, especially over rather young people, than coaching,” says Brian Gearity, director of the Sport Coaching master’s program at the University of Denver. “Now the players are saying, I’ve put up with this abuse and bad behavior for too long.”

Indeed, in the week after the initial Peters allegations emerged, the WHL’s Swift Current Broncos fired their athletic trainer “following revelations of a recent pattern of demeaning and derogatory comments, threatening behaviour and unprofessional conduct,” according to a team statement; Blackhawks assistant Marc Crawford was placed on leave after allegations surfaced that he kicked a player in 2006–07; and Carcillo tweeted about having “personally witnessed the abuse first hand” under ex-Kings bench boss Darryl Sutter.

If a true reckoning is coming at the rink, then these revelations are only the start. “It’s one thing to get rid of a couple of people who were problems,” says Courtney Szto, a professor at Queens University whose doctoral research focused on racism in hockey. “But this is really about being proactive and making sure these people never make it into the system to begin with.”

Accountability in the form of actual punishment—not just through internal talking-tos or mealy public statements of condemnation—is a solid first step. So was the Dec. 3 meeting in Toronto between Aliu, commissioner Gary Bettman and other NHL officials, where the 30-year-old Nigerian-Ukrainian-Canadian addressed, among other issues, the racism he has faced in the predominantly white sport. A week later, Bettman announced plans for the league to implement a “mandatory annual program on counseling, consciousness-raising, education

and training on diversity and inclusion” for head coaches and general managers, as well as a crisis hotline for team employees to report incidents without fear of repercussions.

There are myriad reasons to be skeptical, of course. History has swept all manner of bad behavior under the rug because championships were at stake. Silence and conformity are also deeply entrenched in hockey culture, albeit masqueraded as positive ideals like modesty and teamwork. “The desire to not stick out and be the troublemaker in the locker room is stronger than in other sports,” Szto says. “Even our superstars don’t want attention.”

Still, Carcillo is hopeful. After going public with his abuse last year, Carcillo says his inboxes were flooded with predominantly hateful messages. “Telling me to kill myself, saying that I had brain damage,” he says. The trolls still lurk, but 300 (and counting) testimonials from fellow players is proof enough that meaningful, systematic change isn’t far behind. “Now the victims have the power,” Carcillo says. “That’s the shift we needed to happen.”

Love threw for 3,085 yards and 17 touchdowns as a junior in 2019.

Utah State quarterback Jordan Love announced Tuesday he will enter the NFL Draft. 

The junior quarterback has logged 37 starts in three seasons with the Aggies from 2017–19. Love is 24–13 in his career at Utah State. 

Love said he will play one more game for the Aggies as they face Kent State in the Frisco Bowl on Dec. 20. 

“Playing for the Aggies has been a dream come true, and with that being said, I am ready to chase after my next dream,” Love tweeted on Tuesday. “I have decided to forgo my senior year at Utah State and enter the 2020 NFL Draft.”

Love threw for 3,567 yards and 32 touchdowns as a sophomore in 2018 as Utah State went 11–2. The Aggies finished the season with a 52–13 blowout to beat North Texas in the New Mexico Bowl.

Utah State regressed in 2019 after former head coach Matt Wells left the program to coach Texas Tech. The Aggies went 7–5, and Love threw just 17 touchdowns along with 16 interceptions.

Love enters Utah State’s bowl game second in school history in passing yards behind Jose Fuentes.