Las Vegas Raiders coach Klint Kubiak is fond of having bridge quarterbacks.

No one sentiment is more important for the Raiders this offseason than the stance that Kubiak took at the annual league meeting this week.

According to ESPN’s Ryan McFadden, Kubiak wants a rookie quarterback to learn from a veteran starter right out of the gates in the NFL.

#Raiders HC Klint Kubiak explained how he is not a fan of starting a rookie QB right away and having him learn behind a veteran until ready.

Cousins spent three seasons w/ Kubiak in Minnesota (2019-2021). Andrew Janocko was the QB coach in 2021 when Kubiak was the OC.

— Ryan McFadden (@ryanmcfadden_) April 2, 2026

Fernando Mendoza is the incoming rookie quarterback that has everything save a handshake with commissioner Roger Goodell as the No. 1 overall pick on draft day spelling his future as the Raiders’ next franchise quarterback.

Then Kirk Cousins happened. The Raiders struck a deal with Cousins in free agency on Thursday. Instead of being a forgone conclusion to be the incumbent backup quarterback to Mendoza in 2026, Kubiak’s attestation at the league meeting sets the stage for a potential position battle to unfold in Las Vegas between Indiana’s Heisman Trophy winner as well as the veteran QB prior to the start of the 2026 season.

Though Kubiak is more inclined to take the traditional route with his quarterback room, Mendoza’s talent, coupled with Cousins floating between being a starter as well as a backup with the Atlanta Falcons from 2024-25, makes Raiders’ future starting job for next season less clear.

This article originally appeared on Raiders Wire: Klint Kubiak in favor of bridge QB as Raiders’ room shifts

Dave McMenamin: 5-time NBA champ Derek Fisher will call tonight’s game between two of his former teams — LAL and OKC — on Spectrum SportsNet, alongside PxP man Bill Macdonald. Longtime Lakers color analyst Stu Lantz is not on the trip as he recovers from a medical procedure, the Lakers say.

x.com

This article originally appeared on Hoops Hype: Longtime Lakers color analyst Stu Lantz is not on the …

But sources said the NBA franchises, at least, were finally told Wednesday that once they sign a dissolution agreement with the league and with Main Street, they should receive a rebate based on a complex formula related to the NBA/NHL teams and Main Street’s creditors. Multiple sources said it’s possible each team could receive as much as 60% of their lost TV money.

Sports Business Journal

This article originally appeared on Hoops Hype: Multiple sources said it’s possible each team could …

Steve Pikiell used to hate it when someone approached him and his teammates at the airport and asked what school they played for. The stranger would hear the name UConn, notice the Husky logo emblazoned on Pikiell’s clothes and inevitably ask, “Is that in Alaska?” 

“No,” the former point guard would have to explain. “It’s UConn with a U, not Yukon with a Y.” 

That was an easy mistake to make back in the late 1980s, before a former agricultural college surrounded by nothing but livestock and farmland became an unlikely destination for some of the nation’s most decorated basketball prospects. Now UConn is the center of the college hoops universe, home to twin dynasties that have combined for 33 Final Four appearances and 18 national championships.

UConn has been the women’s basketball standard-bearer for more than three decades, deftly adapting to the changing landscape of college sports to keep racking up trophies and pumping out superstars. The men have emerged as a modern-day blue blood, climbing to a tie for third behind UCLA and Kentucky for the most national titles despite not capturing their first one until 1999.  

Braylon Mullins’ dramatic last-second 40 footer against Duke last Sunday evening ensured that this would be the sixth time that the UConn’s men’s and women’s teams reached the Final Four in the same season. No other school has achieved that feat more than once since the women’s NCAA tournament began in 1982. No other school besides UConn has ever won men’s and women’s basketball national titles in the same year.

How did the UConn men emerge as one of the nation’s elite programs barely a decade after some within the newly formed Big East questioned why Dave Gavitt even let the Huskies into the league? And how did the UConn women launch a dynasty only a few years after frustrated players accused the school’s administration of being indifferent whether the program won or lost? 

Says former UConn women’s basketball player Chris Gedney, “If someone tried to tell me what UConn men’s and women’s basketball would become, I would have recommended they go to a mental health professional.”

‘We have a girl’s basketball team here?’

On the day that Gedney moved into her freshman dorm room in August 1977, her mom proudly informed her new roommate that Gedney was the first UConn women’s basketball player to be awarded a full scholarship.

“My roommate turns around and says to my mom, ‘We have a girl’s basketball team here?’” Gedney recalled with a chuckle.

That exchange perfectly sums up the afterthought status of the UConn women’s basketball program in the pre-Geno Auriemma era. Those early teams only seemed to exist so that the university could claim it was in compliance with Title IX.

Players would lift weights before dawn, as Gendry recalls it, “because the weight room was reserved for all the men’s sports at reasonable hours.” Scheduling practice time was also difficult because men’s teams had priority. One year, the women’s team wore hand-me-down warmup pants from the men that were so long and baggy they resembled clown pants. 

“We had to triple roll them up so that we could wear them,” recalled Cathy Bochain, who piled up 1,354 points playing for the Huskies from 1979-83. 

Crowds at UConn women’s games in those days were seldom more than a few dozen friends and family members, except when the men played immediately afterward. Then fans would start arriving by the end of the women’s game, but they wouldn’t always bother to stay off the court on their way to their seats. 

“There was one game where they were literally walking across our floor,” Bochain said. “I was like, ‘Get the blank off,’ but they didn’t care. Literally, we were some pickup game going on to them. That really, really annoyed me.”

Late in Gedney’s junior season in 1980, she became fed up with coach Wanda Flora’s habit of removing the team’s best players at critical junctures of the second half so that everyone on the team could get playing time. Gedney organized a team meeting and took her complaints to the UConn administration, calling the school out for hiring an underqualified coach and retaining her for five consecutive losing seasons without ever putting pressure on her to win.

“I went to the administration and I said, ‘Hey, we want to win,’” Gedney recalled. “You’re giving us sneakers, warmups and practice gear, but we don’t feel like you’re really interested in us winning.”

UConn made a coaching change that offseason, hiring Jean Balthaser, who had amassed a 47-42 record in three seasons coaching at the University of Pittsburgh. Balthaser led UConn to its first winning record in her debut season as head coach, but she failed to win more than nine games in any of her four subsequent seasons.

By April 1985, UConn was again ready to start fresh. Luckily for the Huskies, there was a young, brash, energetic assistant coach from the University of Virginia who was among those interested in the job.

UConn’s leap to the Big East

At the same time that the UConn women were fighting for equal treatment on their own campus, the school’s men’s program was battling to be taken seriously in the newly formed Big East.

Head coach Dom Perno faced the unenviable challenge of trying to compete with the northeast’s top programs despite lagging behind in everything from facilities, to academic support staffing, to coaching salaries, to recruiting budget.

When Gavitt first pitched the idea of uniting the East Coast’s strongest basketball-centric schools in one league in the late 1970s, he might have been the only one who wanted UConn to be part of it. It wasn’t just that the state school didn’t fit the private, Catholic profile of many of the Big East’s other founding members. Successful in the small-time Yankee Conference but still a relative nobody nationally, UConn didn’t have the same men’s basketball pedigree either. 

What Gavitt saw in UConn was “untapped potential,” longtime UConn deputy spokesperson Mike Enright said. There were no top-tier professional teams in the state of Connecticut at the time besides the NHL’s Hartford Whalers. As a result, Gavitt believed UConn men’s basketball could build a larger following and fill that void.

Robert W Stowell Jr via Getty Images

In May 1979, UConn athletic director John Toner had 72 hours to decide whether to accept the chance to join Syracuse, Georgetown, St. John’s, Providence, Seton Hall and Boston College as founding members of the Big East. Toner quickly accepted, sacrificing UConn’s regional rivalries with its New England state-school neighbors to play on a bigger stage.

“I think it was one of those propositions you couldn’t say no to for fear of being left in the dust down the road,” said Randy Lavigne, who played guard for the UConn men’s basketball team from 1975-79.

“Sometimes you have to accept an invitation even if you’re not quite ready, and to be honest with you, we probably weren’t ready for it,” Enright added. “We didn’t have a Big East-caliber facility to play in, we didn’t have academic support services, we didn’t have marketing, we didn’t have a lot of the things that the other schools did. For awhile, we were playing in the Big East with a Yankee Conference mentality.”

The resource gap was most glaring when comparing UConn’s facilities with those of other Big East schools. 

The fieldhouse where the Huskies held practices and games on campus featured a basketball court situated in the middle of an indoor track. For privacy, coaches could draw a large curtain around a section of the court, but it did not block out the crack of a starter’s pistol, nor the pings of athletes taking swings in an adjacent batting cage. Players would sometimes careen into the curtain chasing after a loose ball and find themselves in the path of a sprinter or hurdler bearing down on them at full speed. 

When they weren’t dodging track athletes, UConn players often had to maneuver around other obstacles. The roof was so leaky that coaches would place buckets all over the court to catch water when it rained or when snowfall melted. 

Perno produced brief flashes of success in the early 1980s, but too many top in-state prospects chose to play elsewhere in the Big East. With star player Earl Kelley academically ineligible and the program having just completed its fourth straight losing campaign, Perno resigned at the end of the 1985-86 season.

Whoever succeeded him seemed to have his work cut out for him.

How Geno Auriemma won over UConn

On an overcast spring day in 1985, Cathy Bochain drove to the airport in her beat-up Mercury Bobcat with no muffler to quiet the exhaust noise.

She was there to pick up a University of Virginia assistant coach who had flown in to interview to become the next UConn women’s basketball coach.

When Bochain pulled up, a sharply dressed young man in a blue jacket, white shirt and red tie approached her and introduced himself as Geno Auriemma. They then drove to dinner at a nearby steakhouse so that Bochain could learn more about Auriemma’s coaching background and vision for how to build the UConn program.

“At the end of dinner, I remember thinking to myself, ‘This guy could sell my car,’” Bochain said. “He was just so charismatic, so charming.” 

Bochain went into the coaching search hoping that UConn would hire a woman to coach the women’s team, but she returned home that night believing, “No, this is the guy.”

“There are very moments in your life that you’re sure of something, but I was sure of it,” she said. 

Robert W Stowell Jr via Getty Images

When Auriemma met the rest of the UConn search committee the following day, he made a similarly emphatic impression. UConn senior women’s advisor and search committee chairwoman Pat Meiser remembers getting “a real strong sense that he wanted to be a head coach, that he had an idea how to build a program and that he believed Connecticut was a place where he might be able to get it done.” 

Before meeting Auriemma, Meiser had met with a few other candidates and was leaning toward offering the job to Nancy Darsch, a Massachusetts native who had spent the previous seven years as an assistant coach under Pat Summitt at Tennessee. Between Auriemma’s impressive interview and glowing reviews from Virginia coach Debbie Ryan and others, Meiser threw her support behind the 31-year-old Italian-American.

Over coffees and old-fashioned donuts at the Dunkin Donuts in Willimantic, Connecticut, Toner offered Auriemma the job at an annual salary of $28,229 and Auriemma accepted. Forty years later, Auriemma swears that he didn’t know quite how big a challenge he was taking on when he signed on the dotted line.

“Our gym was so bad they didn’t even show it to me,” Auriemma said two years ago while reliving the day he was hired. “They didn’t even go, ‘Hey by the way, here’s where we play our games. I had no idea.’ Here’s your locker room. Nothing. Zero.”

Those challenges didn’t keep Auriemma and assistant coach Chris Dailey from taking a program that had one winning season before he arrived and building it into a powerhouse. By 1989, the UConn women won the Big East and made the NCAA tournament. By 1990, the program moved from the dingy Fieldhouse to the sparkling new 8,000-seat Gampel Pavilion. By 1991, the Huskies made the Final Four alongside traditional women’s basketball powers Virginia, Tennessee and Stanford. 

In 1995, a Rebecca Lobo-led UConn team popularized the sport and launched a dynasty by leading UConn to an undefeated national championship. 

Robert W Stowell Jr via Getty Images

Before long, Auriemma had his pick of the nation’s top recruits and had to battle critics who now insisted UConn won too much.  

‘The guy could coach, he could motivate and he was tough’

The hiring process that led to Jim Calhoun landing the UConn men’s job unfolded a little differently.

The only audition tape the South Boston native needed to persuade UConn administrators that he was their guy came on the basketball floor five months earlier.

On Dec. 28, 1985, with Toner seated at the courtside scorer’s table, a Calhoun-coached Northeastern team clobbered UConn 90-73 in the title game of the Connecticut Mutual Classic. Led by Reggie Lewis, Northeastern went on to win 26 games, make the NCAA tournament for the fifth time in six seasons and push fourth-seeded Oklahoma deep into the second half in a round of 64 game.

“When they came in and kicked our butts, I think that opened some eyes and helped him out big-time,” said Lavigne, who was one of several former players on the UConn search committee that hired Calhoun. “It was like you’ve got to look twice at this guy and say ‘How did he do that?’ The guy could coach, he could motivate and he was tough.”

Calhoun was the consensus choice of the search committee, beating out Fairfield’s Mitch Buonagaro and Canisius College’s Nick Macarchuk. When asked during his introductory press conference if he thought UConn could ever compete for Big East and national titles, Calhoun famously replied, “It’s doable.” 

Through sheer force of will, Calhoun achieved the unthinkable, dragging UConn rung-by-rung up the Big East standings. He sold recruits with the one thing he had to offer — the opportunity to play on Big Monday in the Big East and beat the likes of Syracuse’s Sherman Douglas, Pitt’s Charles Smith and Georgetown’s Alonzo Mourning. He also vowed to stop local products from leaving Connecticut for other Big East programs and signed Bridgeport native Chris Smith, who left the Huskies as the program’s leading scorer.  

The university was initially too cash-strapped to close the resource gap between UConn and the rest of the Big East right away, so Calhoun had to fight for everything from more academic support to facilities upgrades. One year he turned a long hallway overlooking some racquetball courts into a makeshift players lounge.

“He put in two doors and a whole bunch of couches and chairs,” Pikiell recalled with a laugh. “It looked like a furniture store.”

The progress began to show after a 9-19 debut season. Calhoun guided UConn to an NIT title in 1988, an achievement celebrated on campus deep into the night because it signified how far the Huskies had come and provided a reason for optimism for the future. 

What happened after that is all part of UConn lore: The “Dream Season,” the Rip Hamilton Sweet 16 buzzer-beater, shocking the world against Duke. Six overtimes, five wins in five nights at Madison Square Garden. Kemba Walker going nuclear.

Decades later, it’s clear that Calhoun and Auriemma didn’t just elevate the basketball programs at UConn. They lifted an entire university. Applications skyrocketed. So did the school’s enrollment standard. New construction popped up all over campus. 

No one ever confuses UConn and Yukon anymore. 

“When those guys took the job, this place was not what it is today,” Enright said. “It’s really hard to get into school here now. It’s not a safety school anymore. Those two changed not only the athletic department but the university.”

Tiger Woods was seen in body camera footage released Thursday by the Martin County (Florida) Sheriff’s office talking on the phone as he was approached by police in the wake of a rollover crash that led to his arrest last week.

After he got off the phone, he told an officer he was “just talking to the president.”

Woods was arrested on suspicion of DUI after crawling out of his rolled-over vehicle following a two-vehicle crash on Jupiter Island just after 2 p.m. ET on March 27.

Tiger Woods body cam footage: ‘I’m being arrested?’

The golfer was driving a Land Rover northbound at high speeds before overtaking a truck pulling a trailer with a pressure cleaner and clipping it. The speed limit posted was 30 mph.

It was not explicitly clear if Woods had just gotten off the phone with President Donald Trump, but Trump did send well wishes in the hours following Woods’ accident.

“He’s got some difficulty. There was an accident, and that’s all I know,” Trump said when asked about Woods. “Very close friend of mine. He’s an amazing person. Amazing man. But some difficulty. I don’t want to talk about it.”

The 50-year-old golfer is dating Vanessa Trump, 48, the ex-wife of Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr. Trump awarded Woods the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2019.

Woods was released late on March 27 from the Martin County Jail in Stuart, Florida. He was seen leaving the side entrance of the jail, riding in the passenger seat of an SUV.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Tiger Woods ‘talking to the president,’ he says in body cam footage

Mets lineup

1. Francisco Lindor – SS
2. Juan Soto – LF
3. Bo Bichette – 3B
4. Jorge Polanco – DH
5. Luis Robert – CF
6. Mark Vientos – 1B
7. Marcus Semien – 2B
8. Francisco Alvarez – C
9. Tyrone Taylor – RF

David Peterson – LHP

Giants lineup

1. Willy Adames – SS
2. Rafael Devers – DH
3. Heliot Ramos – LF
4. Luis Arraez – 2B
5. Matt Chapman – 3B
6. Jung Hoo Lee – RF
7. Harrison Bader – CF
8. Daniel Susac – C
9. Casey Schmitt – 1B

Robbie Ray – LHP

Broadcast info

First pitch: 9:45 PM ET
TV: SNY
Radio: Audacy Mets Radio WHSQ 880AM, Audacy App, 92.3 HD2

/pattern

The Los Angeles Lakers have secured their spot in the playoffs. Now, with six games remaining in the regular season, they have a chance to solidify their claim to the No. 3 seed in the Western Conference.

LA’s path is relatively simple: four wins, or four Denver Nuggets losses, or a combination of two Lakers wins and two Nuggets losses would keep them in the third seed at the end of the season. With two tanking teams in the Dallas Mavericks and Utah Jazz, that should be more than feasible — but getting at least a split in an upcoming two-game series against the top-seeded Oklahoma City Thunder would be crucial for the Lakers, and for Luka Doncic’s MVP campaign.

The top six in the Western Conference are pretty close to set, with the current sixth seed, the Minnesota Timberwolves, holding a 4.5-game lead over the Phoenix Suns entering Thursday. The Thunder, San Antonio Spurs, and Nuggets are all locked in, along with the Lakers. The Houston Rockets can clinch on Thursday night with a Suns loss.

Here’s a quick rundown of possible first-round playoff matchups the Lakers may face, ranked from most to least desirable.

Phoenix Suns

This is an unlikely matchup as the Suns trail the current sixth-seed Timberwolves by 4.5 games and are almost certainly bound for the play-in.

Phoenix has had LA’s number this season, winning three of their four matchups, but the Lakers have been a different team over the last month, while the Suns have scuffled down the stretch, losing seven of their last 10 games, including a six-game skid from March 13-21. Ranked 13th in USA TODAY Sports’ latest NBA power rankings, the Suns have been stuck in the middle of the pack in the West for months now. Part of it is due to injury — longtime LeBron James pest Dillon Brooks was having a breakout year individually, putting up a career-high 20.6 points on 43.8% in 30.4 minutes per game.

That, along with his usual physical style of play on defense helped him emerge as a key contributor in Phoenix until he fractured his left hand on Feb. 21 and missed 18 consecutive games before returning last Tuesday in a 115-111 loss to the Orlando Magic that handed the division to the Lakers. The Suns (42-33) went 9-9 in Brooks’ absence.

Houston Rockets

When the Rockets traded for Kevin Durant last summer, it was supposed to take them from a fun team of young up-and-comers to the upper echelons of the Western Conference. That looked to be the case early in the season, but they eventually middled out as they dealt with growing pains and another KD burner account scandal.

Houston (47-29) currently has a half-game advantage over the Timberwolves in a heated battle for the fifth seed. The Rockets have size and athleticism, two things that have proven to be matchup nightmares for the Lakers in the playoffs the last few years, but this Lakers squad got two big wins over them on March 16 and 18, so they’ve shown that this is a team they can handle.

FINAL 3:19 LUKA MASTERCLASS Lakers vs Rockets last night. pic.twitter.com/qc6N8avtXM

— NBA Replays (@NBAReplays_) March 19, 2026

Minnesota Timberwolves

This is who the Lakers would face if the season ended today, and it’s also the one with the most question marks.

The Wolves swept the Lakers in the first round a year ago (see: size and athleticism), but the Lakers swept the season series this year. Last year, the Lakers were horribly outmatched with no bona fide center to stop Rudy Gobert as Jaxson Hayes was basically unplayable. Hayes has improved by leaps and bounds this season with a full year of playing next to Doncic, not to mention this is why Rob Pelinka signed Deandre Ayton, who seems to have finally bought in and has been key in the Lakers’ late-season surge.

One more thing to keep an eye on: Minnesota ruled Anthony Edwards out of Thursday’s game against the Detroit Pistons with an illness and right knee injury management, putting him below the 65-game threshold and making him ineligible for end-of-season awards. There could now possibly be a scenario in which the Timberwolves shut down Edwards for the remainder of the season, giving him a chance to enter the playoffs rested and as close to 100% as possible.

Denver Nuggets

For the last few years, Lakers-Nuggets games have felt like the myth of Sisyphus. The Lakers would get out to a quick start, build a big lead and look to be well on their way to victory until Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray make some insane shots that defy logic and all of a sudden, Denver wins and the rock rolls all the way back to the bottom of the hill.

But two weeks ago, fate seemed to finally go the other way when the Lakers rallied against Denver for what felt like their biggest win of the season when Austin Reaves got his own putback from a missed free throw with 1.9 seconds left to tie the game at 118 and force overtime, where Luka Doncic eventually hit an 18-foot stepback fadeaway over Spencer Jones to take a two point lead with 0.5 seconds left to seal the game.

LUKA HITS THE GO-AHEAD JUMPER TO WIN IT FOR THE LAKERS IN OT 🚨 pic.twitter.com/CIkuCBvExv

— NBA (@NBA) March 15, 2026

The Lakers are 2-1 against Denver this season (2-0 when Doncic plays), so they’re not nearly as outmatched as their recent playoff history might suggest. The Nuggets are also currently the fourth seed in the West, so a first-round meeting probably won’t happen unless they crash and burn over their remaining five games. Either way, this still would be the worst of their hypothetical first-round matchups.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Ranking LA Lakers best playoff matchups as postseason looms