Dallas, TX
Vegas-Dallas NHL Games 3-4 Stanley Cup Playoffs Odds And Betting Tips
The top-seeded Dallas Stars face long odds ahead of Game 3 Saturday night in Las Vegas. The defending Stanley Cup champions Vegas Golden Knights hold a commanding 2-0 lead in the opening round series of the Western Conferece Playoffs.
NHL playoff teams with a 2-0 series lead “go on to win the series 86.4% of the time,” Vegas play-by-play announcer Dan D’Uva said post game following the Golden Knights Game 2 road win. The Stars had not lost back-to-back games in regulation all season until this year’s playoffs.
Game 3 and 4 Odds
NHL game odds from FanDuel Sportsbook refresh periodically and are subject to change, including on props and live betting. Favorites in ( ).
Sat., April 27
- Dallas at Vegas (-110), Total Goals 5.5
Many prop bets during the NHL Playoffs along with game-by-game picks and player props. Fans can also bet on if a team will win the game in regulation, which offers better odds – (Vegas +128), Dallas (+130).
Other NHL matchups and game odds Saturday:
- Carolina (-196) at NY Islanders – Hurricanes lead series 3-0
- Florida (-120) at Tampa Bay – Panthers lead series 3-0
- Boston at Toronto (-126) – Bruins lead series 2-1
Sunday, April 28
- Winnipeg at Colorado (-166) – Avalanche lead series 2-1
- Vancouver at Nashville (-122) – Canucks lead series 2-1
- NY Rangers (-192) at Washington – Rangers lead series 3-0
- Edmonton (-152) at LA Kings – Oilers lead series 2-1
Monday, April 29
Boston, Colorado, Vancouver and Edmonton all took a 2-1 series lead after those series were tied 1-1. The Game 3 winner goes on to win the playoff series 65.9% of the time (234-120) in NHL history when the series was tied 1-1, according to NHL Public Relations.
NHL Playoffs Picks
You can follow my sharp Canadien colleague Brian Steinberg (Sherwood) and his extensive knowledge and understanding of the betting markets at Sportswagers.ca. He provides NHL series selections, value-added insight and game-by-game picks throughout the playoffs. That includes key insight in Game 3 between the Golden Knights and Stars, where Sherwood has been riding Vegas in all three games of the series.
“The Stars’ heads have to be spinning after dropping the first two games of this series at home,” Sherwood notes. “The Fortress is never an easy place to play, and with the Knights up 2-0, that rink is going to be rocking.”
I’ll be at Game 3 to see it live, and “the Golden Knights cannot be a coin flip (-110) in this spot. They’ve beaten the Stars six times in a row, and ended their season last spring and they’ve not let Dallas breathe in this series,” Sherwood says. “If the Golden Knights let up here and the Stars are able to steal a game, so be it, but a coin flip this is not.”
Sherwood and sharp bettors see value on the Golden Knights in Game 3.
Vegas took a 3-0 series lead over Dallas in last year’s Western Conference Finals before losing the series 4-2.
Last year, Sherwood bet and picked the huge upset by the Florida Panthers over the Boston Bruins in the opening round of the 2023 Stanley Cup Playoffs., and he’s been providing adjusted NHL series bets and recommendations during this year’s 2024 playoffs.
Additional stats and performances of notes favoring Vegas:
- The Knights are 50-3 when scoring 3 goals or more in the playoffs in their six years making the post season.
- Vegas is 9-0 when Jack Eichel has multi-point games, which he’s done in both playoff games vs Dallas.
- Eichel is the 5th NHL player to record 20 or more career points in 24 games or fewer.
- Jonathan Marchessault has scored a goal in each of his last two games. Should he record another in Game 3 it would mark his fifth goal streak of three-plus games in the playoffs. The only active player with as many three-game goal streaks in the postseason is Alex Ovechkin (6x).
- Vegas has won 9 of the last 11 games over Dallas including 6 straight.
- The Golden Knights have made the playoffs in five of their six seasons in the NHL and won the Stanley Cup in 2023. Vegas is 4-0 advancing to the next round when leading a series 2-0, and 7-1 when leading 2 games to 1.
- Dallas had 26 wins and 57 points on the road during the regular season, which was the highest points percentage among all teams. The Stars have 19 road victories during the playoffs in the past five years – tied for the third most with the Golden Knights among all teams (TB 25, COL 21).
MoneyPuck now rates Vegas’ chances of advancing to Round 2 at 77.7%, and Round 3 at 40.2%. Other Western Conference contenders chances of advancing to Round 2 holding 2-1 series leads include Colorado (73.7%), Vancouver (77.3%) and Edmonton (79.2%) with those teams chances to advance to the Western Conference Finals similar to the Golden Knights from 37% to 44%.
The opening weekend of the National Hockey League’s (NHL) 2024 Stanley Cup playoffs delivered an average audience of 2.62 million viewers across North America, up 11 per cent year-on-year (YoY).
The interest and engagement in NHL playoff hockey with spectacular saves and players strengths to skate, shoot and score continues to drive more watch and wager action and fan interest.
You can bet on it.
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Dallas, TX
Top Dallas-area performers in Texas high school football, Week 10
Below you’ll find the top performances in rushing, receiving and passing from Dallas-area Texas high school football players in Week 10.
More Texas high school football content
Week 10 scores, stories for Dallas-area teams | Standings | Statewide scores
Rushing
Player, School, Yards
Darrion Bowers, Arlington Bowie, 244
Deondrae Riden Jr., DeSoto, 208
Michael Henderson III, Wylie East, 190
Leo Anguiano, Prosper, 177
Keenan Jackson, Haltom, 176
Obadiah Goble, Argyle, 169
Terrence Collins, North Mesquite, 169
Brendon Haygood, Sachse, 169
Vudrico Roberson, Haltom, 163
Jaylon Woods, Mansfield Timberview, 162
Ayson McCray-Jones, Hebron, 159
Alex Osterman, Aubrey, 158
Receiving
Player, School, Yards
Lovell Neal, W.T. White, 226
Matthew McClain, Prestonwood Christian, 199
Triston Gooch, Rockwall, 188
Bryson Jones, Frisco Lone Star, 180
Lowery Asel, Frisco, 155
Cameron Lomax, Frisco Heritage, 150
Will Krzysiak, Argyle, 147
Harry Hassmann, Coppell, 145
Kameron Powell, McKinney North, 142
Julius Spencer, Garland Lakeview Centennial, 136
Jamari Andrews, Mesquite Horn, 129
Vincent Aparicio, Princeton, 128
Passing
Player, School, Yards
Marcus Flowers, Princeton, 457
Andrew Paredez, W.T. White, 407
Edward Griffin, Coppell, 403
Hayes Hackney, Prosper Walnut Grove, 380
Presley Harper, Richardson Pearce, 355
Luke Glass, Prestonwood Christian, 328
C.J. Daughtry, Mesquite Horn, 310
Cobyn Harbert, Frisco, 302
Chris Jimerson Jr., North Crowley, 297
Buck Randall, Highland Park, 285
Graylyn Fry, Frisco Panther Creek, 262
Billy Middleton, Red Oak, 260
Find more high school sports coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.
Sign up for our FREE HS newsletter.
Dallas, TX
Dallas Cowboys must cut the cord with failing defensive tackle
It’s not just one thing that has led the Dallas Cowboys to a 3-4 start this season. Inadequate offensive play and a defensive unit marred by injury are just two examples of what this team has dealt with. However, it is time to call out some of the poor play that has been happening this season.
2023 first-round pick Mazi Smith didn’t have the ideal rookie season. Smith started in three games in 2023 but never gave a performance that would be promising to the front office. Unfortunately, Smith’s 2024 campaign has been exactly the same.
Fans had a field day with Smith’s Pro Football Focus (PFF) grade last week when the Cowboys played the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday night. PFF grades are not meant to be the only thing that completes a player’s evaluation. But it is hard to ignore the fact that Smith ranks dead last with defensive tackles.
MORE: Update on Trevon Diggs injury is nightmare for Cowboys depleted defense
Pulling the plug on such a young player is a difficult thing to do. However, the NFL is a fast-moving business. The Cowboys cannot afford to keep putting Smith on the field if these are the results he is bringing. It is time for the Cowboys to cut Smith.
— Enjoy free coverage of the Cowboys from Dallas Cowboys on SI —
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Dallas, TX
37 years as Dallas County’s medical examiner taught Jeffrey Barnard about death — and life
Jeffrey Barnard’s office is nearly cleaned out: Gone is the grand, 500-pound bodark desk embossed with the Texas A&M seal. The trash is filled with empty Bubly sparkling water cans and there’s a box of snacks — including a bottle of apple cider vinegar he uses as salad dressing — tucked in the corner. Notebooks and papers are strewn across plastic tables, and he hurriedly tries to neaten them.
“I think I got most of the junk out,” he quips.
He left out a 1981 leather-bound ledger of cases — light reading since he’s been benched from the autopsy rotation in anticipation of his departure. He wants to walk out of the medical examiner’s office with no open cases. A desk clock, a gift from his wife, counts down three days, five hours, 24 minutes and 16 seconds to his retirement. It’s been running for six months.
A trained physician and forensic pathologist, crusader of public safety and administrator by necessity but not passion, Barnard is retiring Friday after 37 prolific years with the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences, which houses the medical examiner and crime lab.
The roughly 140-person staff investigates sudden and unexpected deaths in Dallas County. An autopsy — where a physician cuts into a corpse — can take hours, while a report detailing the cause and manner of death can take months and requires as many as 10 people. The information the doctors, technicians, investigators, toxicology analysts and transcriptionists gather informs the justice system, law enforcement and public health. In 2022, Dallas County performed autopsies on 81% of its nearly 5,900 deaths, according to Barnard.
Barnard has spent the majority of his tenure as director of the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences and chief medical examiner — responsible for budgeting, personnel, occasional politicking and more than 300 autopsies a year.
At 69, he’s focusing on other roles: husband, father, friend, doting grandfather, frustrated fisherman, attic-cleaner, fledgling writer and adventurer.
“Thirty-seven years, that’s a long time to do this,” Barnard said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News. “It’s time for somebody to have new ideas.”
After shepherding Dallas’ dead — victims of serial killers, mass shootings, plane crashes, Hurricane Rita, the Big Flood and a pandemic — he realizes he has put off too much living.
‘Everybody counts, or nobody counts’
After medical school at A&M, Barnard did a year of general surgery residency in Temple. During a rotation in Harris County, working out of the basement of Ben Taub General Hospital, he was allowed to do things no doctor-in-training got to do — like exhume a pioneer grave out of a backyard. That case, he says, became the synopsis of a Patty Duke movie.
He followed a mentor to Suffolk County, New York, for a forensic pathology fellowship before coming back to Texas in 1987. Barnard didn’t expect to be here long, but 3½ years later, he became the boss. He says his rapid, unplanned ascent to chief was a combination of serendipity and good and bad luck.
Then 35, he inherited a department in distress. Dallas had three or four medical examiners, Barnard recalled, and a ballooning homicide rate, which meant the office could autopsy only half of the cases that came through the door. In 1991, Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences had 99 employees and a $5.1 million budget. The 2025 budget is about $25.7 million.
Commissioner John Wiley Price, who was on the court in 1991 and has been a confidant for Barnard, described the chief’s management as frugal and “no-nonsense.”
“He took a full complement of work just like anyone else,” Price told The News. “There’s no better respect for leadership than when the troops see you, as the kids say, grinding just like they do. You could call him — it didn’t matter — day or night, weekends.”
Barnard rehabilitated and grew the staff; made strategic hires who took the physical evidence section from a budding DNA laboratory and made it a high-functioning office; modernized toxicology analysis; helped the office become a regional center to do autopsies for smaller counties; and helped design the state-of-the-art Stemmons Corridor office, twice the size of the former building where there was enough space for only six autopsies at a time.
The administrative tasks are something he has to do. Forensic work is what Barnard loves to do. Each case is a puzzle, a mystery to solve, a test of his merits. He’s not sure when his job became a calling.
He performed the autopsies on Nancy Lyons, who was poisoned with arsenic; Aubrey Hawkins, the Irving police officer slain by the Texas 7 prison escapees; “American Sniper” Chris Kyle; Billy Chemirmir’s victims; and the autopsy of the 7/7 police ambush shooter (the only time he used the word “robot” in a death certificate). Among Barnard’s last few cases: homeless, alcoholic, natural causes.
Barnard’s driving purpose is summed up by fictional LAPD detective Harry Bosch, from Michael Connelly’s books: “Everybody counts, or nobody counts.”
‘You just got to keep going’
Barnard left the office early Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022, and headed to the gym. He took off his Apple watch, unaware of the stream of notifications flooding his phone. After his workout, he checked the smartwatch and thought, Why all these calls?
It was his deputy chief. Gunfire had erupted in a second-floor office. An employee was injured, and medical examiner Beth Frost and her estranged husband were dead. James Frost is believed to have shot his wife and the other employee before turning the gun on himself.
Barnard’s silence worried his deputy chief. “I thought you might have been killed,” he recalls her saying. Barnard went back to the office. Over the next few days, he consoled staff that witnessed the shooting, dealt with other cases and met with Beth Frost’s family, he said. The Collin County medical examiner’s office handled the autopsies.
Barnard was fond of Frost and devastated by the killings. He thought about retiring then. The murder drove home he couldn’t put off traveling with his wife, picking up the grandkids from school, mundane chores and embracing the unknowns. But he couldn’t bail on his staff. You have to keep going, you have to keep carrying the office, he thought to himself.
“For him to leave the ship at that time would have been like a ship without a rudder,” Commissioner Price said. “He needed to be there to be that glue that kept things together.”
About a year later, Barnard gave county commissioners notice of his intent to retire. The timing “wasn’t coincidental,” he said. His departure will come just before the two-year anniversary of the shooting.
“That’s asking a lot for somebody to keep going,” he said. “You’re having to hold it together, and you feel awful yourself, and everybody else is suffering and you’re suffering. You just got to keep going.”
A portrait of Frost hangs in the office lobby, above a bench. There’s a metal detector at the front door.
Barnard compartmentalized his feelings for decades. He kept his head down, did his job and focused on the medicine. Frost’s death put into perspective the temporal nature of life and that there are loved ones — someone grieving like him — on the other side of every autopsy.
Legacy of hard work, inspiration
The long tenure has not been without controversy: In 1992, he was sued for not holding an inquest into the death of former President John F. Kennedy. (Barnard was in the second grade and not the chief medical examiner at the time of Kennedy’s 1963 assassination) Most recently, an NBC News investigation found thousands of unclaimed bodies since 2019 have been given to the University of North Texas Health Science Center per agreements with Dallas and Tarrant counties. The medical school has since stopped the program.
“It was a bad set of circumstances,” Barnard said, “but the real ultimate is what do you do to improve? And I think all we can do is try and expand more to finding next of kin. … It wasn’t that we did anything untoward, we were following by statute. Change the statute, change your policy — that’s the way you deal with it.”
Jessica Dwyer is Barnard’s successor, the county announced Monday. Dwyer — a fifth-generation Texan and fellow Aggie — will be the first woman chief. She joined the medical examiner’s office in 2017 and was promoted to deputy chief in 2023. In a statement, Dwyer called it a “privilege to work alongside” Barnard and said she is honored to carry forward “the legacy of excellence he established here.”
“She’s very talented and motivated, and I think she has a good vision,” Barnard said of Dwyer. “There will be things that’ll be different than I did — because there should be. Everybody looks at things differently, and she’s got some ideas that sound to me like really great plans to move forward.
“The fact that she went to A&M was an even bigger bonus.”
When asked what he hopes for the next chief, Barnard said, “Good fortune.”
Barnard hopes his legacy is one of hard work, putting the public and taxpayers first, and inspiring the 70 forensic pathologists he trained. Although Friday is his last official workday, he must return to the Dallas County courthouse Monday to testify in a 1989 cold case murder trial.
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