NEW YORK — Betnijah Laney-Hamilton couldn’t immediately pick her favorite moment from the New York Liberty’s WNBA Finals Game 2 win over the Minnesota Lynx on Sunday. So here are some possibilities.

Perhaps she will reflect on her first made 3-pointer just over five minutes into New York’s eventual 80-66 win. That’s when Courtney Vandersloot knew it would be Laney-Hamilton’s night. “She looked different tonight,” Vandersloot said. “When she’s playing like that we’re a different team.”

Or maybe Laney-Hamilton will look back on her final 3-pointer with 3:21 remaining in the contest — a triple that stretched the Liberty’s lead from two points to five and halted another furious fourth-quarter Lynx rally — with the most fondness. “A corner 3 for (Laney-Hamilton) is a layup,” guard Sabrina Ionescu said.

Or will it be Laney-Hamilton’s postgame hugs with Ionescu and Kayla Thornton as a Barclays Center record 18,040 fans basked in the joy of a New York victory? Or her receiving the game ball in New York’s locker room that will be the most meaningful?

The options are numerous because Laney-Hamilton’s impact was immense. She tied her season high with 20 points and played stifling defense on Minnesota’s Courtney Williams and Kayla McBride.

“She plays at both ends of the floor, and plays hard,” Liberty coach Sandy Brondello said. “She’s a winner, so happy that she got this success tonight and (can) keep building on it.”

Bucket 🐝 was ACTIVATED 👑@BetnijahLaney is our @Withings Player of the Game 🔥 pic.twitter.com/C82OIprXaI

— New York Liberty (@nyliberty) October 13, 2024

If Game 1 of the 2024 WNBA Finals will be remembered because of New York’s historic collapse, the second game will be remembered because of contributions made up and down the Liberty roster. An X-factor was the key factor.

“You need players beyond your starters, and for two games they’ve done that,” Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve said. “And we’re having trouble getting that consistently. We’ve got to have that.”

Laney-Hamilton’s starring role was especially welcomed for New York after her relatively minimal impact in Game 1. Her 26 minutes in that loss were the fewest among New York’s starters. On the eve of Game 2, Brondello was tempered while assessing Laney-Hamilton’s performance. “I think everyone sees that she’s trying. It’s not the same ‘B’ that we’ve seen all season long, but it is what it is,” Brondello said on Saturday.

Yet, Brondello noticed Laney-Hamilton knocking down 3-pointers consistently at the Liberty’s off-day practice and during Sunday’s pregame warmups.

Then the ball tipped, and Laney-Hamilton made an instant impact. Minnesota had been consistently going under screens she was involved in. Aggressive and open, she sunk her first 2-point jumper and her first 3-pointer two possessions later.

That was all part of the plan. New York has preached for her not to be passive.

“We know she can do this,” Liberty star Breanna Stewart said.

But Laney-Hamilton didn’t always show it because of injury. She played in only 28 games during the regular season, missing 12 games between July 6 to Aug. 26 because of a knee procedure. Brondello said New York missed Laney-Hamilton’s playmaking and grittiness. “How she’s the ultimate competitor,” Brondello said.

Players other than Stewart, Ionescu and Jones emerged in her absence, which was paramount to the Liberty’s league-best 32 regular-season wins. It has also been key throughout the postseason as they stormed past the Atlanta Dream in the first round and overpowered the Las Vegas Aces in the semifinals. Laney-Hamilton had scored double-digits only one other time this postseason, and she hadn’t scored 20 points since early July.

It’s a credit to New York’s roster that different players can play a key role on any given night. In Game 1, for instance, Leonie Fiebich shined, making five 3-pointers and tallying 17 points. Fiebich had only one basket Sunday, and it didn’t matter.

“(General manager Jonathan Kolb) built this team to be able to withstand anything that any of the opponents in the W are going to be able to throw at us, and so it’s really good to see everybody stepping up,” Jonquel Jones said. “That’s what it’s going to take.”

The Lynx have X-factors who have emerged as well throughout their postseason run. Their two All-Stars, Napheesa Collier and McBride have been effective throughout the playoffs. But offensive bursts from Williams or Bridget Carleton, or rim-protection and timely 3-point shooting from Alanna Smith have often been the difference in Minnesota’s journey.

But through two games, the Lynx haven’t shown who will consistently step up. Williams was held in check with 15 points on Sunday. “(It’s) a huge difference,” Reeve said. “Both games (New York has) gotten help.”

Perhaps a return to Target Center will lift Carleton in particular. She has made only six of her last 30 3-point attempts. Perhaps a Minnesota reserve will provide a spark off the bench (it received just five bench points in Game 2).

After Sunday’s win, Laney-Hamilton wouldn’t go into specifics on her health. She chose to instead dwell on her accomplishments.

“To see a glimpse of what I’m capable of, it felt really good,” she said. And it was meaningful too. Her final 3-pointer especially changed the game’s momentum as the Lynx had slashed a 17-point New York lead to two.

History will show if that shot, and Laney-Hamilton’s overall play, changed the series when the finals resume on Wednesday night.

“She played a huge role in the game ending up in the way that it did and she’s gonna continue to do it for these next two games,” Ionescu said. “We believe in her. She knows that.”

 (Photo: Dustin Satloff / Getty Images)

Clayton Kershaw is out for the rest of this postseason because of a toe injury. But he appears to have no plans this offseason to call it a career.

Before Game 2 of the National League Championship Series, Kershaw told the Fox Sports pregame show that he is planning to play in 2025, when he can exercise a player option to stay with the Dodgers or (in a much more unlikely scenario) opt out of his deal and test free agency for a third straight winter.

“Mentally, I feel great,” Kershaw said. “I had shoulder surgery last offseason, and my shoulder and elbow, everything, my arm, feels great.

“Obviously, I had some tough luck with my foot this year. But I want to make use of this surgery. I don’t want to have surgery and shut it down. So I’m gonna come back next year and give it a go and see how it goes.”

The 36-year-old Kershaw, who would be entering his 18th MLB season in 2025, pitched in only seven games this year after missing the first four months of the regular season recovering from offseason shoulder surgery.

Though Kershaw’s fastball averaged less than 90 mph, he was 2-2 with a 3.72 ERA in his first six starts, and he was in line for a possible postseason rotation spot on the Dodgers’ injury-plagued pitching staff.

But then, on Aug. 30, the injury bug bit Kershaw.

In a start against the Arizona Diamondbacks, a bone spur on Kershaw’s right big toe flared up so bad he was forced to leave the game in the second inning. He went on the injured list the following day.

Despite trying to continue to throw over the final month of the regular season, in hopes of making a return in time for the playoffs, Kershaw’s toe failed to cooperate. Ahead of the NLDS, manager Dave Roberts ruled him out for the rest of the postseason.

It’s unclear if Kershaw, who is just 32 strikeouts away from 3,000 in his career, will be ready for the start of the 2025 season.

He acknowledged earlier this month that surgery on his toe is “in the conversation” for this offseason.

Kershaw also developed other physical issues while injured that he said resulted from trying to compensate from his toe injury in throwing exercises. One affected area, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, was Kershaw’s oblique.

Despite all that, the Dodgers could still use the three-time Cy Young Award winner and former MVP in their 2025 rotation — which will likely be hampered by limited workloads from Shohei Ohtani, Dustin May and Tony Gonsolin as they return from elbow surgeries.

“Obviously I don’t want to get hurt all the time,” Kershaw said recently, having gone on the IL at least once in every season since 2016. “Like, it’s not fun to do that.”

“But,” he added, “I also really love to pitch, too.”

Roberts silences the critics

There was elation and exhaustion, pride and vindication, but the overwhelming emotion that Roberts felt after a grueling five-game National League Division Series win over the San Diego Padres was “relief.”

Not just because the Dodgers vanquished their pesky division rivals to advance to the NL Championship Series against the New York Mets, but because Roberts silenced a large segment of the team’s fan base that would have called for his head if the Dodgers suffered a third straight first-round playoff exit.

“Unfortunately, the reality is, that’s the nature of this business,” Roberts said. “I could argue that we’ve won a lot in my tenure here, but when you’re in this market, it’s still about winning championships.

“People don’t want to hear about the uncertainty of [October] baseball, how you can’t predict who the World Series champion is gonna be. I don’t do any of the social media, but to be honest, you can kind of feel [the pressure] around you.”

Roberts has the best winning percentage (.627) of any manager with at least 1,300 games, having guided the Dodgers to an 851-506 record, eight division titles, nine playoff appearances and three World Series — winning in 2020 — in nine seasons. But every October, it seems Roberts is managing to save his job, and frankly, he is tired of it.

“I think it’s absolutely ridiculous considering the body of work that I’ve been a part of, the stuff that I do on the business side and the community relations side, my history with the Dodgers,” Roberts said. “But it is what it is.”

Roberts has made his share of regrettable October decisions, but he redeemed himself in the eyes of critics with his deft bullpen management against the Padres, steering eight relievers through an 8-0 Game 4 win and four through four hitless innings in a 2-0 Game 5 win.

“I thought he was surgical in Game 4 and 5,” said Andrew Friedman, the team’s president of baseball operations. “I thought he had the pulse and the right feel for when to make a move and who to go to.”

Roberts also kept the team together through his “most challenging season,” one that featured a slew of pitching injuries and the loss of Mookie Betts for two months and Max Muncy for three months.

“The number of injuries we withstood was a little deflating to the clubhouse,” Friedman said. “They’re out there battling, doing everything they can to accomplish our goal of winning the division, and things keep happening. Doc’s relentless optimism helped keep things positive and moving forward.”

Hip check

Gavin Lux tweaked his right-hip flexor breaking out of the box on his fourth-inning bunt Sunday night and was pulled from the game in the seventh inning. Lux was not in the lineup for Game 2 but was available to pinch-hit.

Even if the left-handed-hitting Lux were healthy, he probably wouldn’t have started against Mets left-hander Sean Manaea in Game 2. With rest and Tuesday’s off-day, “it will give me a little extra time to recover,” Lux said. “It’s just wear and tear. I’ll be fine.”

No pressure

Rookie reliever Ben Casparius had no idea when he took the mound in the ninth inning Sunday night that the Dodgers were on the verge of tying the 1966 Baltimore Orioles for the longest consecutive scoreless innings streak in playoff history at 33.

“I found out after the game,” Casparius, who retired the side in order in his first career playoff appearance, said before Game 2 on Monday. “I’m honestly glad it was after the game and not before it.”

Two weeks ago, Uruguayan tennis player Pablo Cuevas announced his retirement.

When it came, tennis fans the world over dipped into their memory banks in admiration of the modern master of the trick shot. With excellent hands and a huge amount of talent, Cuevas could pull off shots from between his legs, no-look winners, drop-shot returns and so much more at will.

But like Mansour Bahrami, the trick-shot king to whom he was heir, Cuevas was far more than just a flashy shotmaker. On his day, he could compete with the very best players in tennis. In 2016, he defeated Rafael Nadal on clay in Rio de Janeiro en route to winning one of his six ATP titles (all of which came on the surface), achieving a singles career-high ranking of world No. 19 later that year. He also won the 2008 French Open doubles title with Peru’s Luis Horna, beating the legendary Bob and Mike Bryan along the way.

Speaking from his home on the outskirts of Montevideo, Cuevas looks back on some of his most spectacular shots and insists that, with one exception, they weren’t something he practised.

“It was all spontaneous,” he says.

On the day we speak, Cuevas looks refreshed from a morning spent surfing in the South Atlantic Ocean. He is enjoying being able to do water sports regularly, when he isn’t hanging out with his wife and two daughters or coaching promising under-18 Uruguayan tennis players. Occasionally he plays tennis or padel with his compatriot Diego Forlan, the former Manchester United striker who, this summer, told The Athletic about his switch from football to the ITF veterans’ tour.

Before we get into the clips, I want to know how he developed his ability to hit extraordinary shots:

As a young player, did you always hit fun trick shots? How did that develop?

I didn’t practise that at all. Just as there was one every 50 games in a match, also in training, every 20 games there was one. It wasn’t like a training session for those kind of shots. They just came out like that. And in matches, more spontaneous plays would come out in different situations.

So when you were practising you would just hit them as they came?

The fake smash and hitting it under the legs, I did practise it once. The first and only person I saw do it was (former French Open champion Gaston) Gaudio in a training session we shared. Other than that, that tweener point with Nadal and so on, I never practised it.

Yep, we’ll get to that one. These shots are probably what you’re most remembered for — is that a nice feeling for you, to know that your memory will live on in that way? Does it bother you that that’s what you’re best known for?

It’s something I definitely realised people like a lot, something that’s very present in their minds. But you feel more pride at something you achieve with hard work, that you practise and little by little you incorporate into your game until you achieve it. And that’s not the case here. So it’s not something that I worked at and I’m super proud of, but it doesn’t annoy me that I’m remembered for that or that people enjoyed it.

The first point we watch features both a tweener (tennis speak for a shot between the legs), and then a lob over Gael Monfils, himself a spectacular shotmaker. It comes from a tight match at the Madrid Open eight years ago, which Cuevas won 6-7(5), 6-3, 7-6(4).

This first shot is one from between between your legs. Was that a favourite shot of yours?

It’s definitely one of the nicest shots to see. It’s a nice play.

Some types of players, the ones that are very monotonous in their game, kind of bore me.

You have a few choices. You go for the lob. Why did you hit that there? Did you see how close Gael was to the net?

I don’t think I was a great lobber or a shot I used a lot. Gael is a very agile guy and saw that he was very close to the net and thought the best place to put the ball was there.

Was it fun playing against someone like Monfils, who also hit trick shots?

Yes, he was a very flashy player, the kind I like to watch. One of those that I also liked to play against. He could surprise you at any moment with his serve, with his shots or with his great reach that he uses to defend or hit spectacular shots.

As the best player hitting spectacular shots, is your successor Alexander Bublik? Or Nick Kyrgios? Who do you think is the man now?

What Kyrgios does is more spectacular, but with his ball speed, with his wrist acceleration or even sometimes more with his attitude than shots like that. Bublik tries to do more of this kind of thing and you also have Monfils, who is the most similar in that sense, because it’s not that he’s constantly looking for it, but every now and then he comes up with something similar.

If there’s one player out there who’s looking for more of that it could be Bublik. He’s looking for that magic all the time, that kind of shot.

Are these the kinds of players you most like to watch?

I like to see players like Kyrgios. Not necessarily when he’s a little bit out of his mind, but when he has those moments of magic. He’s a player I like to watch. I like to watch Monfils, but I also enjoy some more classic players. (Stan) Wawrinka doesn’t do that kind of thing, but I really like to watch him.

With possibly the most outrageous shot of the bunch, Cuevas hits a forehand winner against Nadal at the Paris Masters seven years ago, in a manner barely seen before or since.

You mentioned this shot earlier, and you were saying this was just pure improvisation.

Yeah, totally. In 10 years of practice, I maybe produced that shot once.

How did it feel when it came off?

Well, you can see a little bit on my face, and there’s a guy in the crowd with an expression like, ‘Wow!’. It’s also having that unconsciousness. Not thinking about the shot makes it flow that way, because when you miss those shots, it’s horrible. When it works somewhere like that, like a centre court in Paris-Bercy or Madrid, it’s spectacular.

Did Rafa say anything about it?

No. He looked at me with a surprised look on his face, as if to say, ‘What a great shot, but I’m not too amused by you doing this to me!’.

But we have a great relationship and he was far from offended by that. He was one of the players I was closest to on the tour.

How was it playing Rafa compared to Roger Federer or Novak Djokovic?

All three were super different. Roger was the most aggressive, the one who served the best but at the same time gave you the most free points. It was almost difficult to suddenly lose 6-2, 6-2, 6-2. With Roger, maybe I would lose 6-4, 6-4 or, in fact, the two times I played him it was even closer than that (7-6, 6-4 and 6-3, 7-6). Even with those results, you were far from beating him because it was so dependent on him. The game was very aggressive and you always felt very uncomfortable.

With Rafa, when he wasn’t aggressive, he let you play. You felt like you could get into the match all the time, he even made you feel that the match depended a little bit on you.

And with Djokovic, it was a mix between those things. He didn’t have the aggressiveness, especially with his serve, of Roger. And he didn’t slow down the game as much as Rafa. He was somewhere in between.

This year, Ons Jabeur, another gifted shotmaker, told The Athletic: “I love messing around with some players. It’s a lot of fun.”

Cuevas possessed a similar ability to drive his opponents to distraction. In the first example, against John Isner in Madrid in 2018, the American collapses in disbelief at Cuevas’ brilliance. In the second example, Alejandro Davidovich Fokina is so wound up by his opponent’s retrieval skills that he smashes a ball out of the stadium on the way to losing the semifinal in Estoril five years ago.

With this Isner shot, what’s really funny about this is the reaction that John gives when you squeeze the ball past him…

There’s a mixture of feelings. He’s saying, ‘I can’t believe where you’re hitting this ball from and where you’re putting it’. And in a way, he’s thinking, ‘That’s the only one I have to cover. I have to cover the down-the-line. If there’s one place he can’t get past me, it’s there’.

Did you find it funny when players would react like that after your shots?

There’s not so much time to see all that on the court, compared to when you see it thousands of times in a replay. But you sense it, and at the same time it’s a confidence boost — both the reaction of the opponent and your own good shot.

Somehow the ball lands in — to Isner’s disbelief (Tennis TV)

This is another reaction that’s a bit similar, against Davidovich Fokina. He can’t believe the shot you hit. 

Yeah, that was much more of a fluke than the Isner one. And yes, he looks frustrated. I don’t remember what the score was, but I think if I was ahead it was to finish him off and if things were even it was to start to take advantage in that match.

It was a big turning point — Cuevas broke his opponent’s serve and then won nine of the final 12 games.

Undoubtedly, there were emotional things that had an influence. It took the opponent down and lifted me up.

Is this one pure instinct again?

Absolutely, to practise that I would need a person to throw me that ball because that ball was coming very fast. That was a last-resort thing. My body is going one way and the ball is staying behind me. There was nothing to come up with. I don’t know how that came out.

The next shot is something associated with Federer — a drop-shot return. It comes against the diminutive Argentinian, Diego Schwartzman, from a match in Hamburg in 2015 that Cuevas won in straight sets. This one was more premeditated.

Given this was a return rather than a shot in the middle of a rally, was it a bit more tactical? Or a shot you had talked about with your coach?

Yeah, this is less improvised. I didn’t suddenly discuss a drop shot with my coach, but Schwartzman was a solid guy from the baseline. You had to change his speed, his rhythm, and also take him out of his comfort zone.

There’s so much sidespin on the ball that by the time it bounces for a second time it’s almost outside the tramlines (Tennis TV)

Did your coaches ever say to you, ‘You need to hit fewer crazy shots’, or was it something you discussed? Or did they know that was just how you played and so they embraced it?

No, that didn’t happen. Because in my 15, 20 years of tennis, there are 15, 20 shots like that. If you take that average, it was one per year. Luckily a lot of those shots came off, so there was no reproach.

This one is the showboating shot against Stefanos Tsitsipas in Estoril that Cuevas said earlier was a shot he had practised. It’s an outrageous no-look, behind-the-legs volley. 

This is showboating, isn’t it? This is having some fun?

Maybe it’s the most controversial shot, in the sense that, for the others, there were no better options. In this case, there were many. This was the worst option, to do that. And even when this goes well, the person on the other side may not like it. A lot more people liked it than didn’t like it, but there are also some who didn’t like it and I can understand that.

It’s one where you miss a shot like this, you look bad and are left asking yourself, ‘What did I do?’.

But I made it and it raised my level.

Did Stef mind, do you think?

He didn’t like it on the court. There wasn’t even eye contact to say, ‘Hey, that was a good one’ or, ‘I can’t believe what you did’. It was like, ‘I’m not looking at you because I didn’t like it’. But those are things that happen in matches. I have a really good relationship with Stefanos.

Arguably the best shot of Cuevas’ career, against Zverev from a quarter-final he won in 2017, is so memorable that the Madrid Open tasked Bublik with trying to recreate it this year. He eventually just about got there.

But it’s still not a patch on the original:

“Are you kidding me?! This guy is absolutely mainline,” as commentator Rob Koenig put it. There’s also a drop shot and the chasing down of an Alexander Zverev drop shot leading up to the flicked no-look winner that Cuevas hits.

Possibly your most famous shot — talk us through it.

Well this one, I really had no other option. I was really far back and I had to run fast to get to that ball. I ran the whole court from that drop shot back there. That might be the best one. Maybe the toughest one to pull off is the one we just saw with Tsitsipas. But this one I’ve taken the best option in the best way.

You must have been pretty quick. How much was it natural, and how much did you work on your athleticism?

I worked a lot, in the physical part and in the hours spent playing tennis. I dedicated a lot of time to training in general and without a doubt to the physical part.

The last couple of shots we see show some more of the variety in Cuevas’s game.

First, he puts a ridiculous amount of spin under the ball to take it away from Matteo Berrettini in the quarter-final of the 2019 Hungarian Open.

Cuevas says: “I don’t think I made up anything. Undoubtedly, after so many years of tennis, you see a lot of things, you practise, you put your stamp on it. It’s a mixture, a bit of everything.”

The next one is a diving backhand against home favourite Fernando Gonzalez in the 2008 Chile Open semifinal, which won Cuevas a spectacular point but at the cost of an injured back.

Was that something you were comfortable doing, diving around the court?

I basically never did it. In 20 years, I did it twice: that time and in a Davis Cup tie. That point was good. It was at the end of the second set, almost to get me to match point. But that fall gave me back pain for something like six months.

So did you regret doing it?

A little bit, yeah. I remember thinking many times, ‘How important is it to win a point or not?’, and being careful before doing something like that. But those things happen so fast that there’s not much time to think before doing it.

As we finish up, I wonder if there are any other shots that Cuevas remembers particularly fondly.

He chooses an underarm serve, that he hit having missed his first serve when up championship point in the 2017 Brazil Open final in Sao Paolo, against Albert Ramos-Vinolas. He ended up winning the point and cites it as an example of a shot that might look like the choice of a maverick but is, in reality, simply the most expedient way to win at that moment.

“A lot of people said, ‘Wow, what talent’, or, ‘Wow, how did he dare do something like that?!’,” Cuevas says of this point.

“The reality was a lot less talented or glamorous than what people see.

“I’d committed 12 double faults in that match, I wasn’t controlling my serve. When I missed the first serve, in those five seconds between one serve and the other you start to think: ‘Oh, I can’t commit another double fault… if I don’t win it here, I’ll never win it again… don’t miss the serve… serve underarm… but if you serve underarm, what are they going to say after the match?’.

“All that in five seconds,” he says.

“So I said to myself, ‘Serve, get it in and finish this. Then we’ll see’.

“But if you look at it, there’s nothing talented about it. It’s stiff, tense. The only thing I didn’t want to do was miss the serve.”

Looking back on his career, Cuevas mentions the “spectacular achievement” of winning the Roland Garros doubles in 2008, and cites his 6-7(6), 7-6(3), 6-4 win over Nadal in Rio de Janeiro eight years later — because, unlike the trick shots, it was the consequence of years of hard graft.

“In singles, you put in a lot of hard work. In that long match with Nadal on clay, where you have to spend three hours playing, it’s very tough,” he says.

“To win, you have to finish playing better than the other player. It’s not like football, where you do things well for a while and if the other team doesn’t score goals, the match is over.

“Here you have to keep up that level and that’s what I managed to do in that match.” Cuevas backed up that win by beating Guido Pella in the final, to win his only ATP 500 title.

In retirement, he is enjoying spending time with his family, hitting the beach and coaching junior players; he wants to get involved in real estate development and develop an investment portfolio.

And the tennis world might yet see him in Bahrami-style exhibition matches.

“I like that idea,” he says, smiling at the possibility of getting to experiment with some new shots.

— Tomas Hill Lopez-Menchero contributed translation.

(Top photos: Adam Pretty, Elsa / Getty Images; Design: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic)