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Kings beat Pistons to boost post-season hopes

Zach LaVine celebrates a basket
Zach LaVine scored eight three-pointers [Getty Images]

The Sacramento Kings boosted their NBA post-season hopes with a 127-117 win at the Detroit Pistons.

Zach LaVine scored 43 points and DeMar DeRozan 37 for the Kings, who came from 18 points down to secure a third successive victory.

They remain ninth in the Western Conference, one win ahead of the Dallas Mavericks.

Teams finishing from seventh to 10th qualify for the play-in tournament, which runs from 15-18 April.

The only side who can deny the Kings are the 11th-placed Phoenix Suns, who have three fewer wins with four regular-season games remaining.

The Miami Heat, assured of a play-in place in the East, won 117-105 at home against the already eliminated Philadelphia 76ers, who suffered a 12th successive defeat.

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Three Takeaways from the Calgary-San Jose Game (April 7)

Calgary Flames right wing Adam Klapka (43) shoots the puck past San Jose Sharks goaltender Georgi Romanov (31) during the third period at SAP Center at San Jose on Monday, April 7, 2025 (Photo: Stan Szeto-Imagn Images)

The Calgary Flames. Will. Not. Quit.

They beat the San Jose Sharks in a come-from-behind 3-2 victory on Monday night in the shark tank.

Here are my three takeaways from the game:

1)     Comeback from an atrocious 40 minutes

We’re always told “it’s not how you start, but it’s how you finish.”

Well, the Flames may have gotten that memo.

In the first period, San Jose outshot Calgary 18 to 8. The final shot for the home-side resulted in the ice-breaking goal.

By the end of the second period, the Sharks had blocked shooting lanes on the Flames to a point that San Jose players had registered 12 blocks, while Calgary had eight.

The tide turned in the third period where in a span of 7:18 minutes, the Flames scored three unanswered goals and never trailed again. Absolutely brilliant stuff.

2)        Special teams showed up

I mentioned in my preview article that after the 0-for-4 showing against Vegas, the Flames power play had to make an emphatic comeback.

Well… nothing better than scoring the go-ahead goal off the man-advantage.

The penalty kill was as great as expected going 2-for-3, although understandably, the 4 vs 6 situation at the end was never going to end well for the Flames.

3)      Dustin Wolf proves he is the REAL Calder Trophy favorite

We sound like a broken record at this point, but when Wolf earns his second consecutive First-Star award in a row, can you blame us? He was pelted with 31 shots, including four coming from current rookie of the year favorite Macklin Celebrini. The first-overall pick from last year had an Expected Goal value of 0.49 (highest on the team) against Wolf, but was ultimately stonewalled by the California kid.

The Flames gathered two valuable points in their pursuit of snatching the second wild-card spot from the Minnesota Wild, who had widened the gap between themselves and Flames after their win on Sunday.

The two teams will get a chance to prove who is really deserving of a playoff spot when they face off on Friday.

But before then, the Calgary Flames will stay in sunny California to play the Anaheim Ducks at 10:00 MDT/8:00 EDT on Wednesday.

 

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LA Kings Get Blindsided by Seattle Kraken in 2-1 Loss

© Kiyoshi Mio-Imagn Images

Los Angeles, CA — The Los Angeles Kings (44-24-9) were defeated and shocked by the Seattle Kraken (34-38-6) in a close 2-1 match at Crypto.com Arena on Monday, April 7. 

This loss will impact the chances of the Kings playing to win the Pacific Division, but may affect the seeding for Los Angeles as the Stanley Cup playoffs near the corner, with the Las Vegas Golden Knights and the Edmonton Oilers vying to clinch the division. 

Going into this game, the Kings had a 29-4-4 home record, treading new waters as the new franchise record. Notably, though, Kings defenseman Drew Doughty was kept on the bench tonight with an ankle injury in order to heal and maintain him with playoffs around the corner. 

In the first period, Kings center Quinton Byfield struck first blood early for his team by hitting a backshot into the Seattle net with help from defenseman Kyle Burroughs to score, 1-0. Byfield’s goal also cements him in Kings history as one of the players able to score 20+ goals in consecutive seasons. 

The last time that happened was way back in 1991-1992 and 1993-1994, both times by Luc Robitaille during the Forum days. 

Though the Kings committed the first penalty of the night — defenseman Brandon Clarke tripping one of the Kraken players —, Seattle gave up a hooking and high sticking penalty to give the Kings two power plays. Neither were taken advantage of. 

Near the end of the first period, Seattle’s offense began rolling with a tipped wrist shot from Kraken center Matty Beniers to even the scoreboard, 1-0. Less than a minute later, there was a roughing play between Kings’ Brandt Clarke and Kraken’s Jared McCann, stopped just in time by the referees before they were gunning to fight each other. Right after that moment, the Kraken took the lead away from Los Angeles when Seattle defenseman Brandon Montour scored with a wrist shot, making it a 2-1 score going into the second period. 

The Kings began the second period with a much more aggressive push onto the Seattle Kraken. LA catches a break after the Kraken makes a slashing penalty, granting them a power play. The Kings make no use out of the power play. Despite a few great saves by Kuemper throughout the second period, the Kings were denied progress by the Kraken goaltender Joey Daccord. 

The third period reared its head around, and throughout the first half of the final period both teams went back and forth with missed shots into each respective net. Throughout the first half of the third period, both the Kraken and the Kings played clean hockey, with neither team giving up a goal nor a penalty. The rest of the period played out the same way, and at this point Los Angeles became desperate enough to leave their net empty in order to add another player to their scoring drive. 

As the final minutes of the game reared their head around the corner, the Kings went out without any roar to lose the game 2-1 despite many good attempts by the offense. The Kings perhaps played too clean of a period, since they kept the scoreboard clean of any additional goals. 

If anything, despite Seattle being a relatively worse team in the Pacific Division, Daccord’s superb goaltender play tonight proved to challenge the Kings’ offense will make or break the LA Kings’and stand as their biggest challenge to prepare for and outmaneuver as the Stanley Cup playoffs inch ever closer.

Their 30th home game win may have to be put on hold for now.

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Is Walter Clayton Jr. now an NBA lottery pick?

Yahoo Sports’ Jason Fitz and former Big 12 player of the year Marcus Morris Sr. discuss how this year’s Final Four Most Outstanding Player shined throughout the entire NCAA tournament - leading Florida to the national championship - and improving his draft stock at the next level.

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‘Great One’ Gretzky and ‘Great 8' Ovechkin: Great goal-scorers and completely different players

NEW YORK — The only player in NHL history who has been teammates with Wayne Gretzky and Alex Ovechkin chuckled.

Mike Knuble loves the stat that Gretzky has more assists than any other hockey player has points.

“If he didn’t score a goal, he’d still be leading everybody in points,” Knuble said. “That’s crazy.”

Now, Ovechkin has more goals after breaking Gretzky’s record by scoring the 895th of his career Sunday, putting the “Great 8” ahead of the “Great One” in terms of putting the puck in the net. But Gretzky’s dominance through the high-scoring 1980s and into the ‘90s was more about playmaking and setting others up, while Ovechkin entered the league in 2005 during a new era of rule changes that opened the door for more offense and earned the record as a hard-shooting pure scorer who affected the sport in different ways.

“Wayne, the way he changed his game was by his thinking: just the turn-ups, the delaying, kind of evolving the game into a little bit more of a thinking man’s game and figure out how to capitalize the area behind the net, really use that to his advantage,” said Knuble, who played a combined 1,133 NHL regular-season and playoff games from 1997-2013. “Alex is just straightforward like, ‘I’m just going to go around you, I’m going through you or however to get this puck in the net.’ Two different styles.”

Reigning Stanley Cup-winning coach Paul Maurice opined, “They’re completely different styles of play: completely different players, other than what an incredible record.”

By the time Maurice started coaching in the NHL in the mid-'90s, Gretzky and Mario Lemieux were on the downside of their careers, and Ovechkin was nearly a decade from starting his.

Teams turned to clutching, grabbing, hooking and holding to slow down skilled stars such as Gretzky.

“Gretzky made the game offensively so much more dynamic,” said St. Louis Blues coach Jim Montgomery, who played a few NHL seasons against Gretzky as well as one game in Russia against Ovechkin. “That led to real more defensive-minded approach by a lot of coaches: How do we stop these delays? How do we stop Gretzky behind the net, so the game got better offensively and then it got better significantly defensively.”

From a height of 8.02 goals a game in 1981-82, when Gretzky set the single-season record with 92, the so-called dead puck era hit its nadir in 2003-04 at 5.14. The Washington Capitals won the draft lottery that spring — 21 years to the day of Ovechkin scoring No. 895 — but a lockout wiped out the entire next season, bringing with it a salary cap and better enforcement of penalties that encouraged scoring with extra room for skating and creativity and more power plays.

“The game opened for most things, and I think that created the opportunity for a great player to come in and challenge the record,” said Maurice, who has coached the second-most games in NHL history behind the legendary Scotty Bowman. “If the game doesn’t change, you wouldn’t have seen somebody challenge Wayne Gretzky’s record.”

Ovechkin has scored a record 325 power-play goals. Gretzky has the most at even strength with 617 and 73 short-handed.

“Ovechkin is the best goal-scorer ever,” said Hall of Famer Teemu Selanne, who’s 12th on the career goals list with 684. “I don’t think a lot of people would consider Gretzky as a goal-scorer, really. He has 894 goals. It’s unbelievable. And he still has 1,000 points more than No. 2 on the scoring list, so those are sick numbers.”

Technically 936 more than second-place Jaromir Jagr and 714 more assists than Ron Francis. Gretzky’s 2,857 points and 1,963 assists are records are far more untouchable than his goal mark ever was.

Gretzky was also so influential that he made the league rewrite part of its rulebook. His teams were too good at 4 on 4 with more ice to work with that each team taking a penalty no longer led to that, and the play remained 5 on 5.

Goaltenders also geared up more along the way, adding padding as stick technology improved and shots got harder and faster. It got more difficult to score, yet Ovechkin still did it more than anyone else.

“It’s so hard,” Gretzky said. “I don’t care what era you play in: ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, it’s hard to score goals. Good for him. Players are better today. The equipment’s better. The coaching’s better. But that’s the progression in our game.”

The game also got faster and more physical — not fighting, exactly, but bigger and stronger players dishing out bone-crushing hits. And unlike so many of his Soviet predecessors, Ovechkin was not fancy and finesse.

“You think of the great Russian players — Pavel Bure, Alexander Mogilny, Sergei Fedorov, Artemi Panarin, Kirill Kaprizov — all of these guys are beautiful skaters with great passing, and they’re the chess players that you expect from Russia,” said Steven Warshaw, a marketing executive who lived and worked in Moscow for the Pittsburgh Penguins in the 1990s when they invested in a team there. “Whereas Ovechkin is more like Bamm-Bamm from the ‘Flintstones.’ He’s got his 100 mph slap shot. He’s a brutal player. He defines power forward. He is clearly a machine.”

Trying to stop Ovechkin the machine and Gretzky over his career that overlapped theirs, Mike Grier acknowledged one was a physical battle and the other more mental.

Gretzky, Lemieux and their ilk were always thinking two steps ahead, while Ovechkin was two steps from laying out a big hit or sniping a shot into the top corner.

“It was kind of a different job when you checked them versus someone like Ovechkin,” said Grier, now general manager of the San Jose Sharks. “Ovi, you have an idea where he’s going to be and he’ll engage in the physical game with you a little bit. I think that sometimes gets him going. But that was the challenge: He could physically take over games and be hard on you and your defensemen, but I think Wayne and those guys, they were just so smart that you think you had a lane covered or something and they’d find the next option.”

Rick Tocchet, who played against and coached with Gretzky and has been on the other bench facing Ovechkin during several playoff series over the years, thinks physicality is a big reason why Ovechkin broke the record.

“People are like, yeah, he’s a great goal-scorer, but this guy’s made some big hits in his career that’s loosened up those goals,” said Tocchet, now coach of the Vancouver Caucks. “That’s why he gets those goals because the next thing you know, the (defensemen) are not going as hard and they lose him and he gets those slot shots and he scores on a million shots around the net, too, because he’s not afraid to go in front of the net.”

But is it harder to score goals during Ovechkin’s time than Gretzky’s?

Tocchet isn’t sure. Knuble is well aware that changes in equipment, goalies and more make it difficult, if not impossible to compare the two, and he and others around the sport prefer to appreciate the varying degrees of greatness.

“It’s a little different era,” Selanne said, “but getting close to 900 goals like Ovechkin right now, it’s remarkable.”

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Three Takeaways From Blues' 3-1 Loss Against Jets

St. Louis Blues forward Jordan Kyrou (25) battles Winnipeg Jets defenseman Haydn Fleury on Monday. (James Carey Lauder-Imagn Images)

All good things must come to an end, and for the St. Louis Blues, a franchise record came to an end on Monday.

The Winnipeg Jets ended the Blues' record 12-game winning streak with a defensive clinic, winning a knock-em-out, drag-em-out 3-1 victory at Canada Life Centre.

Alex Iafallo's rebound goal at 7:05 of the third period snapped a 1-all tie and enabled the Jets (53-21-4) to end the Blues' streak and keep them from clinching a playoff spot in the process and dropping their record to 43-29-7.

Pavel Buchnevich scored for the fourth time in five games, and Joel Hofer had himself a steady performance with 23 saves.

The Blues' lead on the Minnesota Wild remains two points, but the Wild now have a game in hand and hold the tie-breaker with regulation wins (33-31), so the Blues will all but likely need to have more points than Minnesota in the battle for the first wild card.

Let's dive into Monday's Three Takeaways:

* Blues didn't handle Jets pressure -- For the first time in quite some time, the Blues seemed a bit overwhelmed.

The Jets came out with a plan of attack with a forechecking style and had the Blues hemmed in the zone for large swaths of the game.

The Blues have been good at puck retrievals and moving it out of the zone effectively, especially during this 12-game run, but the Jets seemed to be a step ahead and disrupted a lot of the play, hemmed the Blues in their own end, retrieved pucks and kept pressure on, especially in the first period when shots were 8-3 and 31-8 on attempts.

What the Blues did do well was block shots (14 in the first period) and kept the Jets away from Grade A scoring opportunities, and when Hofer was called upon, he stood his ground.

The Blues pushed back in the second period and played pretty evenly there, and got an equalizing goal from Buchnevich on what amounted to be the line with Robert Thomas and Jimmy Snuggerud, their best shift of the game to that point, but the Jets were able to get back on the front foot again in the third and limited the Blues to four shots while putting on pressure in all three zones and again clogging the middle of the ice.

On the Buchnevich goal, Thomas, who was named the NHL's third star of the week last week, did extend his point streak to nine games (four goals, 16 assists).

The Blues just had trouble for large portions of the game moving through the three zones and when they did, the Jets were right in their face to disrupt the flow. There simply wasn't any time or space out there.

* Two costly mistakes; in a game like this, Blues didn't KISS -- In what amounted to be a playoff type of feel to it, this game had all the earmarks of just playing a simple, play-it-safe, chip pucks and go on the hunt, not risky types of plays.

And it amounted to be just that, but two costly errors in a game where scoring chances were going to be limited proved to be the fatal pills to swallow for the Blues.

On the first, the Blues had, for one of the few times after being overwhelmed in the first period, possession of the puck in the offensive zone and near the blue lineCam Fowler gave the puck to Mathieu Joseph, and instead of making a 'KISS' play (Keep It Simple Stupid), perhaps just whipping it down low and allow the forecheckers to go to work, Joseph tried a return flip pass, and a stick from Josh Morrissey broke it up and Morgan Marron was off to the races down the right side.

Joseph was in pursuit, but Barron fought off Joseph and cut to the net and buried a shot low to the far side at 2:34 of the second period for a 1-0 Winnipeg lead.

And despite being outplayed for a good stretch, in a 1-1 game in the third period, the Jets had a hard forecheck in progress again, but the Blues were able to move the puck to the wall and get it away from danger and onto the stick of Buchnevich. Again, 'KISS' ... flip it out of the zone and reload, move it along the wall, not make that flip pass towards the middle of the ice. Well, that's what he tried to do, it got picked off and Iafallo knocked in a rebound at 7:27 for a 2-1 lead.

This game had all the earmarks that it needed to be a safe kind of a period, manage the game properly, get it to overtime, get a crucial point and fight for a second one, which they've been able to do.

Once the Jets got that go-ahead marker, it just felt like they would lock the remainder of the game down and that's what they did.

When the Blues did pull Hofer, they did have some good sustained zone time, but there were simply no shooting lanes. The Jets clogged the middle and made the ice as mucky as possible. Buchnevich did have a big chance late but hit Connor Hellebuyck in the chest with the chance to tie.

* Faksa line provided consistent forecheck -- On a positive note, I liked the play of Radek Faksa, Alexey Toropchenko and Nathan Walker in this game and coach Jim Montgomery rewarded that trio with 14:27, 14:38 and 16:06 of ice time, respectively.

The Blues had just 15 shots on goal in the game, which matched a season low, and that group had 33 percent of them.

The first period in particular, when the Blues could not generate anything offensively, when the Faksa line stepped onto the ice, it played the game to its strengths: get pucks deep, go to work, play below the goal line, force the Jets to work and they did.

Faksa had an early two-shot chance early in the second period to actually put the Blues ahead by driving the net but was stopped. The game was played to this line's strengths and I thought this trio played it to a tee and did exactly what it needed to do to have success.

* Hear what Montgomery and Buchnevich and Brayden Schenn had to say after the game: