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Hope for the future: Lakers introduce Dalton Knecht and Bronny James

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Hope for the future: Lakers introduce Dalton Knecht and Bronny James

LeBron James stood off stage, back in the shadows behind the assembled reporters there to see the two newest Lakers, one of whom happens to be his eldest son.

Bronny James, the team’s second-round draft pick sat with first-rounder Dalton Knecht to his right and general manager Rob Pelinka and head coach JJ Redick to his left.

Tuesday marked a big day inside the Lakers’ facility in El Segundo, the organization celebrating its hope for the future while one of the biggest factors in its present watched from the back.

This moment underlined the biggest challenge the Lakers face as they prepare for what’s in front of them — a moment when they feel more heavily invested in the future out of necessity while still trying to wring out every win now.

On one hand, the focus was on the Lakers, to use Pelinka’s words, “launching” the careers of two of the more discussed NBA draft prospects.

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In Knecht, the Lakers capitalized on an unexpected draft slide to take the All-American scorer with the No. 17 pick. And in Bronny James, the Lakers made the most discussed No. 55 pick in league history, fueling days of debate about nepotism and pressure.

“Everything has been surreal,” Bronny James said. “I’m trying to take it all in. I’m extremely grateful for everything that JJ and Rob have given to me. I’ve just been extremely excited to get to work.”

Lakers star LeBron James shakes hands with son Bronny after a news conference to introduce the team’s two draft picks.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

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Redick was quick to correct his rookie guard.

“Rob and I did not give Bronny anything. Bronny has earned this, right?” he said. “Bronny talks about his hard work. Bronny has earned this through hard work. And for us prioritizing player development, we view Bronny as like, case study one, because his base level of feel, athleticism,point-of-attack defender, shooting, passing … there’s a lot to like about his game. And as we sort of build out our player development program holistically, he’s going to have a great opportunity to become an excellent NBA player.”

Redick later said the team is close to hiring a director of player development to oversee things such as nutrition, weight training, recovery and mental wellness.

“I had a chance to spend a few minutes with Dalton this morning and one of the things we talked about is just being open-minded, having an openness and just letting go of outcomes,” Redick said. “And the thing that excites me about both these guys is that their basis of basketball is as workers. And that’s a great starting point if you want to develop into a great NBA player.”

Redick, who said he’ll be involved heavily in summer league while ceding coaching duties to South Bay Lakers coach Dane Johnson and his staff, said Knecht and James will be a part of the Lakers’ summer rosters in San Francisco and Las Vegas.

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The Lakers will play their first summer league game Saturday against Sacramento at the California Classic in San Francisco. Last year’s first-round pick, guard Jalen Hood-Schifino, will not be on the roster as he continues to recover from the back surgery that ended his first season in the NBA.

While the Lakers try to institute the foundation of the program they’re trying to build, Pelinka is seeing the first-hand realities that the NBA’s new collective bargaining agreement is putting on some of the league’s highest payrolls.

Going over the “second apron,” which is a payroll exceeding approximately $189 million, is considered a last resort if it’s even an option, with executives believing the restrictions on trades, free-agent acquisitions and other consequences to be too severe.

To date, the team has not made any moves in free agency beyond adding Knecht and James in the draft and re-signing guard Max Chrisitie ahead of his restricted free agency. Once LeBron James agrees to the kind of contract he wants with the Lakers, the roster will be at 15 players — full capacity.

“I think we’re gonna always be aggressive to try to make roster upgrades and will be relentless to continue to look at what we can do,” Pelinka said. “… This is the season of being mindful of all the different things we can approach to improve the roster. So we’re in the midst of that as we speak. That will continue in the coming days, and it often spills into, you know, Vegas, where all the GMs meet and gather, and other deals get done. But we’ll stay aggressive.”

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Pelinka said that could even mean a bigger deal including the two future first-round picks he has available for trades in 2029 and 2031 — though the new restrictions make moves more difficult.

“I think if the right deal comes and we have to put in draft picks, we will,” Pelinka said. “I think we’ve talked about it before, we’re now in the apron world. We’ve seen, you know, contending teams or championship-level teams have to lose players. That’s a result of the apron world we’re living in.

“So, does it make trades more challenging? Yes. Does it make good trades impossible? No. So we’ll continue to pursue upgrades to our roster.”

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LIV Golf star posts bizarre motivational message as next event looms

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LIV Golf star posts bizarre motivational message as next event looms

LIV Golf’s Anthony Kim posted a bizarre motivational message on social media on Wednesday as he prepared for the series’ next event at Andalucía in Spain next week.

Kim made a reference to working harder than a crackhead as he posted early on X.

Anthony Kim is shown during the first day of LIV Golf Miami at Trump National Doral Miami on April 5, 2024, in Florida. (Megan Briggs/Getty Images)

“Good morning. Does a crakhead (sic) ever let a day go by w/out finding a way to get high? NO. I would know,” he wrote. “Not gonna let a crakhead (sic) outwork me today. 1% better today lessssgoo!!!”

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Kim is tied for last in the LIV Golf standings. In Nashville last month, he finished 46th in the standings, posting an even score in 54 holes. He was 48th in Houston and 53rd in Singapore, dating back to early May.

He disappeared from the PGA Tour years ago and his return to the professional ranks was highly publicized back in January.

HAYDEN SPRINGER ETCHES HIS NAME INTO PGA TOUR HISTORY WITH EPIC JOHN DEERE CLASSIC 1ST ROUND

Anthony Kim at hole 8 in Singapore

Anthony Kim acknowledges the crowd after holing out on hole 8 during the first day of LIV Golf Singapore at Sentosa Golf Club on May 3, 2024. (Getty Images)

The last time Kim competed before joining LIV Golf was at the 2012 Wells Fargo Championship when he was 26 years old. He withdrew from the tournament due to injury, which was his third straight withdrawal.

One month later, Kim had surgery to repair his left Achilles tendon, and then he wasn’t heard from in the golf world as many wondered whether he would be back at all.

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Kim also dealt with tendinitis in his left arm and a left thumb injury during his 122 starts on the PGA Tour.

He was open about his battle with addiction in an interview on LIV Golf Plus in April.

Anthony Kim in Tennessee

Anthony Kim is shown during the opening round of LIV Golf Nashville on June 21, 2024, at the Grove Golf Course in College Grove, Tennessee. (Michael Wade/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

“Golf is important to me and not important to me at the same time,” Kim said, per ESPN. “I’ve had some very dark moments. I’ve had some very low moments. I’ve felt very alone, even when there’s a million people around. I needed to get my mind straight and figure out what my purpose was on this planet.”

Fox News’ Scott Thompson contributed to this report.

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Opinion: End the blows against the beauty of baseball

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Opinion: End the blows against the beauty of baseball

The following confession may come as a shock to those who know me: I am now a conservative. When it comes to baseball, that is.

I watched the blown check-swing call that allowed the Dodgers to win a game against the Rockies last month in an improbable comeback and to the fury of Colorado fans. The ump’s clear mistake will only add to demands that check-swing calls be included in the instant replay protocol.

But check-swing subjectivity is a fundamental part of the way baseball is supposed to function: humanly, in sublime, sometimes maddening imperfection. MLB interventions to “fix” it — larger bases, the ghost runner at second base in extra innings, batters limited to one timeout per at-bat and, worst of all, the pitch clock — are blows against the beauty of the game.

Admittedly, these changes seem to be quite popular. Games had been running longer and longer with incessant pitching changes, dawdling batters and, yes, replay reviews. But what monstrous hubris to think we know better than baseball’s Original Framers! Ninety feet between bases, 60 feet, 6 inches between pitching rubber and home plate — these are divinely induced measurements. Start messing with tradition and the heart of the game is lost to hyper-regulated “reality.”

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Baseball is not reality. It is myth performed by real bodies. And imperfection, which is also the unexpected, beyond the reach of metrics, is where the magic comes from — magical triumph and magical heartbreak, larger than life, operatic.

There is no doubt that soccer is the “beautiful game,” but baseball gives it a run for its money. Its own beauty has resulted from the gradual accrual of tradition, which has given us a poetics.

Languor is one of baseball’s essential characteristics. Seemingly nothing happens for long minutes; no one scores, no “bang-bang” double plays, just lazy fly balls and dribbled grounders; you are swayed by the lullaby of sun and beer into a somnambulant state.

And then “just like that,” as Vin Scully used to say, there’s a majestic home run blast, a leaping catch, a fierce duel between pitcher and batter, a spectacular strikeout. The explosion of affect is all the more powerful for having emerged so suddenly from the caesura. (Soccer fans experience a version of these symphonic changes of tempo on the pitch.)

Baseball’s temporality is inseparable from its physical dimensions, the space-time of the game. The vast swath of grass between outfielders, the closer quarters of the infielders, the tunnel of focus that connects pitcher, batter, catcher and umpire.

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The imperfection of umpires is indispensable in the gestalt. Video appeals rob us of the opportunity to yell at the ump to get glasses, or suffer much worse things. A blown call can lead to simultaneous jubilation and heartbreak, with the losers rending their garments and smarting from the insult of being “robbed.”

All as it should be.

I say: Bring back smaller bags and keep stealing a base a rare art! I say: No more ghost runner (what did he do to deserve to be there?) and go on all night with punch-drunk players if that’s what the game demands. And most of all I say: Smash the pitch clock with an Adirondack bat. The timer is an abomination under baseball heaven, depriving us of the organic crescendo of tension in an epic at-bat in the late innings of a close World Series game (Kirk Gibson, 1988).

When I interviewed Scully after the Los Angeles riots-uprising of 1992, I asked him what he‘d said on the air about the chaos unfolding that first night, as a game was underway at Dodger Stadium. “I didn’t say a word,” he told me. He thought first of his responsibility to the fans and their safety — what if he caused panic? And he added: “There should be one place left where the rest of the world doesn’t intrude.”

He might as well have said baseball is sacred. Not to be messed with. Not even (as if it were possible) by history itself.

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On all this, I come down as far more conservative than, say, old-school, bow-tied traditionalist George Will, who for once approves of the “progressive” in the form of the new rules he thinks augur a return of baseball to its one-time status as national pastime. The game, awash in play-by-metrics, Will has argued, is bloated not by poetic languor but by analytical ennui.

True that, Mr. Will. We agree about baseball’s slow death-by-numbers. At the end of the day, all the measurements miss the point — the ineffable beauty of a summer afternoon ever so slowly turning to night at the ballpark.

Some of us know when a cure is worse than the disease.

There is a reason baseball was famously the preferred sport of American literati in the mid-20th century. And the pitch clock wasn’t part of the poetry.

Rubén Martínez is a literature professor at Loyola Marymount University, the author of numerous books and co-creator and executive producer of the performance piece “Little Central America, 1984.”

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Pat Bertoletti crowned hot dog eating champion amid Joey Chestnut's absence

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Pat Bertoletti crowned hot dog eating champion amid Joey Chestnut's absence

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The Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest has a new champion, as Pat Bertoletti ate 58 hot dogs.

Bertoletti’s victory comes as Americans across the nation are celebrating Independence Day. Thousands of fans descended on Conley Island to watch competitive eaters wolf down as many hot dogs (and buns) as possible in a 10-minute time span during the hot dog eating contest.

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However, this year’s slate of competitors was noticeably missing one high-profile contestant — 16-time champion Joey Chestnut.

Patrick Bertoletti wins the men’s title with 58 hot dogs at Nathan’s Annual Hot Dog Eating Contest on July 4, 2024 in New York City. (Adam Gray/Getty Images)

He was reportedly barred from competing in this year’s event. Chestnut recently signed a deal with Impossible Foods, a rival of Nathan’s that has launched a vegan wiener, the New York Post reported.

JOEY CHESTNUT GEARS UP FOR INDEPENDENCE DAY HOT DOG COMPETITION FACEOFF AGAINST HUNGRY SOLDIERS

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Instead, he will compete against soldiers at a U.S. Army base in El Paso, Texas, beginning at 5 p.m. ET.

Chestnut’s absence left the traditional Brooklyn event wide open for a new winner in the men’s division, with eaters from around the world competing for the highly-coveted mustard belt.

Joey Chestnut with hot dogs

Joey Chestnut, winner of the 2021 Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog-Eating Contest, poses for photos in Coney Islands Maimonides Park on July 4, 2021 in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/Brittainy Newman, File)

Last year, Chestnut, of Indiana, chewed his way to the title by downing 62 dogs and buns in 10 minutes. The record, which he set in 2021, is 76.

He was initially disinvited from the event over a sponsorship deal with Impossible Foods, a company that specializes in plant-based meat substitutes.

Hot dogs on a plate

Hot dogs are ready for the 2024 Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July hot dog eating competition at Coney Island in the Brooklyn borough of New York on July 4, 2024. (LEONARDO MUNOZ/AFP via Getty Images)

Major League Eating, which organizes the Nathan’s Famous contest, has since said it walked back the ban, but Chestnut decided to spend the holiday with the troops anyway.

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Chestnut said he would not return to the Coney Island contest without an apology.

Impossible Foods will also donate to an organization supporting military families based on the number of hot dogs eaten at the event, a spokesperson said.

Fox News’ Ryan Morik contributed to this report.

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