Bay Area sports calendar, June 16-17
COLLEGE BASEBALL
MAJOR LEAGUE CRICKET
NBA FINALS
TUESDAY
BASEBALL
BOWLING
4p
U.S. Women's Open CBSSN
COLLEGE BASEBALL
College World Series
11a
Louisville vs. TBD ESPN
4p
Teams TBD ESPN
HORSE RACING
5:30a
Royal Ascot Peacock
MAJOR LEAGUE CRICKET
6p
Washington vs. Los Angeles, at Oakland Coliseum
SOCCER
SOFTBALL
STANLEY CUP FINALS
5p
Game 6: Edmonton at Florida TNT TruTV (1050)
WNBA
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Yahoo
22 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Sources: Jrue Holiday 'is a name to monitor' for the Lakers
The Los Angeles Lakers took another step forward toward possibly fielding a championship-caliber team this coming season by snagging veteran guard Marcus Smart on Saturday. Smart, who won the Defensive Player of the Year award in 2022, agreed to a buyout of his contract with the Washington Wizards and quickly agreed to join the Lakers on a two-year, $11 million deal that he can officially sign once he clears waivers. But one cannot safely assume the Lakers are done making moves this summer. They could still use a true 3-and-D guard or wing, and as great a defender Smart has been, he's not a 3-and-D player, as he's always been an anemic 3-point shooter. Per Grant Afseth of the Portland Trail Blazers' Jrue Holiday, another veteran guard known for his defense, "is a name to monitor" as far as L.A. is concerned. "Multiple sources recently told that Holiday is a name to monitor, particularly as a potential target for the Los Angeles Lakers," Afseth wrote. "That's not to say active conversations are taking place, but his name continues to surface in NBA circles as the team evaluates options to add more talent around LeBron James and Luka Doncic. Other teams are monitoring the situation, though the Lakers are widely viewed as one of the most natural fits if Portland explores a deal." Holiday has been named to one of the NBA's All-Defensive teams six times in 16 seasons, and he's an absolute menace as far as locking up opponents on the perimeter. Unlike Smart, he's a dependable 3-point shooter — he has a career mark of 37% from that distance, as well as career averages of 15.8 points and 6.2 assists a game, and he has won two championships with the Milwaukee Bucks and the Boston Celtics. But landing him would be difficult for Los Angeles. He will make $32.4 million this coming season, which would make him expensive, and he has three years left on his contract, which includes a player option for the 2027-28 season. Holiday recently turned 35 years of age, so one has to question whether it would be wise for L.A. to take on that type of contract for a player who could bring diminishing returns. Holiday happens to originally be from the San Fernando Valley, and he played his lone season of college basketball at the University of California, Los Angeles. The Celtics traded him to Portland earlier this month as they look to trim salary. This article originally appeared on LeBron Wire: Sources: Jrue Holiday 'is a name to monitor' for the Lakers
Miami Herald
23 minutes ago
- Miami Herald
The Panthers are nearly $4 million over the salary cap. How they can remedy that
The Florida Panthers, rightfully so, are enjoying their summer right now. The back-to-back Stanley Cup champions handled most of their business already. President of hockey operations and general manager Bill Zito managed to re-sign the trio of defenseman Aaron Ekblad plus forwards Sam Bennett and Brad Marchand. Forwards Tomas Nosek and Mackie Samoskevich got new deals, too. Plus the Panthers got their backup goaltender (Daniil Tarasov) and depth defenseman (Jeff Petry) to round out the roster. So until training camp begins in September, the team is going to revel in its success just as it did last summer. But before the 2025-26 season begins on Oct. 7 and the Panthers attempt for a rare three-peat, some business will need to be tended to. Specifically, the Panthers will have to address their salary cap situation. According to PuckPedia, the Panthers' are currently carrying a $99.225 million cap hit for next season when factoring in their top 23 contracts — 14 forwards, seven defensemen and two goalies. That's $3.725 million over the league's salary cap of $95.5 million for the season. Florida is one of three teams that is currently over the cap, along with the Vegas Golden Knights ($7.64 million over) and the Montreal Canadiens ($4.52 million over). At the moment, Florida is able to be over the cap. The league allows teams to be up to 10% above the cap — this offseason, that's $9.55 million — during the offseason, but teams have to be cap compliant by the start of the regular season. How will the Panthers handle the cap crunch? Only two options seem truly feasible at this point. Option 1: Matthew Tkachuk opens the season on long-term injured reserve, during which time his $9.5 million cap hit would not count toward the Panthers' salary cap. The star winger played through the entire Stanley Cup playoffs with a tadductor muscle that had torn all the way off the bone in addition to a sports hernia, both of which were sustained during the 4 Nations Face-Off in February. Tkachuk, who got married to his fiancee Ellie over the weekend, said shortly after the Cup Final that there's a 50-50 chance he would need surgery this offseason. He has not yet had the surgery. Should that happen, it's likely Tkachuk would not be ready to start the season and they could use LTIR to provide temporary salary cap relief. Players on LTIR must miss a minimum of 10 games or 24 days of the season, whichever is longer. Option 2: The Panthers can trade players under contract for prospects or draft picks to offload salary. Looking at the roster, the only players making significant enough money that don't have a no-movement clause in his contract that would be logical trade candidates are forwards Evan Rodrigues and one of either Jesper Boqvist or Dmitry Kulikov. Rodrigues has a cap hit of $3 million each of the next two seasons, Boqvist $1.5 million each of the next two seasons, and Kulikov $1.15 million each of the next three seasons. Rodrigues has played a key role for Florida the past two seasons but doesn't necessarily have a defined role. He is the player coach Paul Maurice has moved up and down the lineup to fill whatever gap is needed, a Swiss Army Knife of sorts. Boqvist is in a similar spot. He primarily played in the bottom six during the season but showed he can rise to the occasion in the playoffs when needed, filling in on the top line twice when Rodrigues and Sam Reinhart each missed time with injury. Kulikov has been a standout on Florida's third defense pairing. The other players on the roster without no movement clauses, in descending order of cap hit for next season, are center Anton Lundell ($5 million), forward Eetu Luostarinen ($3 million), defenseman Niko Mikkola ($2.5 million), forward A.J. Greer ($850,000), defenseman Uvis Balinskis ($850,000), forward Jonah Gadjovich ($775,000), Petry ($775,000), Nosek ($775,000) and Samoskevich ($775,000). Lundell, Luostarinen and Mikkola are seen as part of Florida's core, and the six making less than $1 million apiece wouldn't offset the cap enough to justify moving them. The possibility of trading Rodrigues and Boqvist — or making any other deals of that sort — likely won't become serious conversations until the Panthers have clarity on Tkachuk's status. If Tkachuk starts on LTIR, then Florida can carry both Rodrigues and Boqvist and have $5.775 million to work with until Tkachuk returns. However, should both Rodrigues and Boqvist be dealt, that would put Florida exactly $775,000 under the cap — just enough money to add a player making the league minimum to the roster and be cap compliant.
New York Times
24 minutes ago
- New York Times
What I heard about Damian Lillard, LeBron, NBA expansion and more at summer league
LAS VEGAS — What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, as the saying goes, but the underlying presumption of that is something will actually happen in the first place. Las Vegas Summer League has become sort of the opposite: Player movement comes to a halt aside from a few restricted free-agency situations playing out, the best young players only take the court for a couple of games (if that), and the entire league unwinds from a long year. Advertisement Six years ago, we had an earthquake and Chris Paul getting traded for Russell Westbrook; this year, we had … the buyout market? Those of you working the police scanner since summer league started July 10 have been treated to a few two-way and minimum deals and some previously announced deals becoming official — and not a whole lot else. NBA job-chasers have also noted that summer league isn't the hiring free-for-all it used to be. With too few execs overwhelmed by too many resume-toters who are incredibly excited about opportunities with Team X, and a lot of said execs decompressing themselves from a brief and wild NBA transaction season (and keeping their Vegas stays shorter, I should add), I kept hearing that many clubs pushed back hiring and staffing decisions — including a couple of high-level front office positions — until later in the summer. Still, plenty of situations had people talking. Let's check in on what everyone was saying: Technically, I left Las Vegas before the Trail Blazers reached a deal to bring back franchise icon Damian Lillard on a three-year, $45 million deal, but talking to people in the league in the wake of it, this one had people scratching their heads. The part about Lillard's return to the Blazers is much more easily understood than the team's half of the deal. Lillard still has his entire circle in Portland and returns as a living legend. He also got the exact contract that is most favorable for him, with only the league's second active no-trade clause, plus a player option that lets him become a free agent in 2027 if he has a big return year in 2026-27. In the meantime, Lillard will miss all of the 2025-26 season recovering from a torn Achilles tendon. However, he will make a combined $29 million from the Blazers in the two seasons; about $12 million of that will go back to the Milwaukee Bucks as offset after they decided to waive-and-stretch Lillard earlier this offseason, but it's still a nice payday. Between the two contracts, Lillard will make about $64 million for the next two seasons, although most of the money will be stretched over five. Advertisement On the court for Portland, this amounts to a one-year, $28 million deal for Lillard in 2026-27, when he'll be 36 and coming off that Achilles injury. Suffice to say, this doesn't feel like much of a hometown discount. There's also the issue of timing on this roster, given that it's basically a young rebuilding team, but one that has now locked itself into contracts for Lillard, Jerami Grant and Jrue Holiday that will soak up more than half the cap in 2025-26 and 2026-27, and also 2027-28 should Lillard and Grant opt into the final year of their deals. If you're one of those people who likes to plot out multi-layered conspiracies with charts and arrows, there's also plenty of room for that type of thinking. Between the impending sale of the team, the Lillard move and the surprise selection of Chinese center Yang Hansen in the first round of June's draft, a lot of the conversation in Vegas was about whether the Blazers are making purely basketball decisions right now. How much is the optics for a potential buyer influencing the basketball choices? One thought is that recent contract extensions for general manager Joe Cronin and Chauncey Billups would give them the leeway to be more patient, but instead, the Blazers have seemingly gone in the opposite direction. The two big offseason moves have been adding Holiday and Lillard to a young team that doesn't seem particularly close to challenging the Western Conference's upper crust. Can I get to a defensible basketball logic for the Lillard move? Sure. It goes something like this: The Blazers came into their nontaxpayer midlevel exception late after Deandre Ayton's buyout, and Lillard was by far the best player they could get with that tool, this summer or next. Portland is far enough from next year's tax line that this deal (and Holiday's) have no material impact; even extensions for Shaedon Sharpe, Robert Williams and Toumani Camara wouldn't push the Blazers into the tax in 2026-27. And the Blazers give themselves an off-ramp from the Scoot Henderson Experience if he doesn't take a step forward in 2025-26. By that logic, all Portland did was take itself out of some unlikely cap-room scenarios next offseason, scenarios that would likely disappear if the extensions I enumerated above happen. (I wrote about Camara's situation for an extension earlier this summer.) Still, there are a million ways this can go wrong. Lillard is a dead-money roster spot for 2025-26 and leaves the Blazers very thin in the backcourt after the Anfernee Simons trade; one presumes Portland will land a veteran point guard with its final roster spot (the Blazers can sign a veteran's minimum contract and stay a few pennies below the tax line). Lillard will come back in the fall of 2026 wanting to prove he's that Damian Lillard, which could be problematic if Henderson emerges in 2025-26; that combined with Lillard's status in Portland could lend itself to some Kobe-in-2016 vibes. Advertisement Most importantly, however, is that the Blazers subtract the opportunity cost of having their nontaxpayer MLE available for trades that could add more long-term talent to the roster. If they have to wait on Lillard anyway, wouldn't they be better off waiting on somebody younger? At the league's Board of Governors meeting in Vegas, the NBA basically pumped the brakes on expansion, and our Mike Vorkunov and David Aldridge already told you the big reasons. However, I think another aspect to this that people aren't appreciating is the one-directional nature of it: You can't un-expand. That, in part, helps explain why the league is slow-rolling the concept and forming review committees. 'They want to get to yes,' said one plugged-in team spy, but there's really no urgency. The league can always sell buyers on a team in Seattle later, but whenever it does, it needs to make sure it's a win beyond the initial windfall of an expansion fee. In particular, figuring out the imploding local TV landscape is critical, given that two new teams would just dilute the league's national TV contract for the other 30 owners. The league already missed its two best chances at fresh pro sports markets that have since been colonized by other leagues (Nashville and Las Vegas). Meanwhile, as long as Seattle has no team, it serves as a useful boogeyman for every other franchise that wants a new arena. The other factor here is that the league's European plans have taken on much more urgency. This isn't NBA expansion; the basic elevator pitch is more along the lines of, 'The Europeans are bad at making money from basketball, and we can do better.' The league sees a clear growth opportunity and has a much more specific time window for action. Inevitably, that has taken some focus off expansion, but the long-term expectation from most people I've talked to is that it still happens … eventually. Just probably not soon enough for those in the 206 area code. Oh yes, people were talking about LeBron James at summer league. Of course they were. While he opted in to the final year of his contract and does not appear to be an imminent trade candidate, as our Joe Vardon and Dan Woike reported here, that doesn't necessarily mean returning to the Los Angeles Lakers on a one-year deal was at the top of his wish list. In particular, the whispers about him having eyes for Dallas — a place where he could have teamed up with former teammates Anthony Davis and Kyrie Irving and young phenom Cooper Flagg — before opting into his deal were hard to ignore. Advertisement Obviously, James wasn't willing to leave $52 million on the table to take a nontaxpayer MLE or something similar from the Mavericks or another team. A buyout seems similarly unlikely. Additionally, the tax aprons on both sides will make any in-season transaction with a contender-class team challenging. Nonetheless, this situation bears watching from both sides, particularly if L.A. starts the regular season slowly. The Lakers set themselves up to have max cap room next summer once James' salary comes off their books, taking advantage of an artificially low cap hold for Austin Reaves. If that's their angle, wouldn't it make sense to cash in their James stock if they aren't challenging at the top of the West? Meanwhile, James has some power to choose his next destination via a no-trade clause, but free agency isn't what it used to be. The best realistic way for him to get paid next summer by his team of choice is to land at his preferred destination via trade, and then have intact Bird rights in the summer of 2026. The Phoenix Suns bought out Bradley Beal and stretched his remaining money, taking them out of the luxury tax entirely after they began the summer over the second apron. While that has some positive implications for unfreezing the Suns' 2032 and 2033 draft picks, it's hard to think that Team Damn the Torpedoes had that factor top of mind. Instead, it's a continuation of another theme: The Suns paring back sharply on expenses after owner Mat Ishbia's opening two years in charge. That carried over in a humorous way to the postgame scene in Vegas, where other teams' staffers noted with sadness that Suns personnel were no longer buying rounds for everyone and putting it on Ishbia's tab. After trading Kevin Durant, cutting Cody Martin and buying out and stretching Beal, the Suns are set to finish the year slightly under the luxury tax. One presumes they'll be under by year-end to sidestep an onerous repeater tax. (Going deeper: A veteran's minimum signing for a 14th player would leave Phoenix slightly over the tax line entering the season, but it's a pretty easy two-step to get back under if the player has a partial guarantee. Alternatively, promoting two-way Koby Brea into that spot on a rookie contract would ensure the Suns stay under all year. Cap nerds will note that some unlikely incentives in Dillon Brooks' contract could also factor in here.) Alas, the Suns' previous profligacy has still left them with $22.5 million dead money through 2030 for Beal and the previously waived Nassir Little, to go with no control of their own draft picks through 2031. On the bright side, a more financially responsible operating model might help them stumble into some better decisions, but this franchise still has the league's most depressing long-term outlook. In this case, the beer glass is truly half-empty. (Top photo of LeBron James and Damian Lillard: Stacy Revere / Getty Images)
