Kinney | Stats & Stories

William Contreras is a World Series MVP now. Watching this moment from 2 years ago makes it even sweeter to see him win. ❤️ A street vendor sold him $16 worth of sandwiches. Contreras handed him $100 and told him to keep it. As the man teared up, Contreras reached over and put a hand on his shoulder. The generosity is beautiful. So is the care he shows the man in that moment. You’ve got a good heart, William

Ref's first touch was naughty

“They were incredible professionals and genuinely wonderful people.” That’s how former Cincinnati Bengals running back Joe Mixon remembered the two pilots who flew him last month. On Sunday, that same plane crashed in Florida. Both pilots and all seven passengers died. Mixon sent his condolences to their families. He ended his tribute with these words. “Love on your loved ones while you can, because you never know what tomorrow may bring.” DEVASTATING 💔 🙏

Draymond Green is 3 ejections away from tying Rasheed Wallace’s NBA record. Two techs on the same play against Phoenix gave him No. 26 Most career NBA ejections, including the play-in and playoffs Rasheed Wallace — 29 Draymond Green — 26 DeMarcus Cousins — 18 When Sheed heard Draymond was ten away in 2023, he started pumping his fist. Somebody show that man the standings now

Tyrese Maxey has dropped 15+ in the fourth quarter FOUR times in Philly’s first eight games. The Bulls held him to 11 through three quarters. Then he hit a reverse layup, buried a 25-footer and went right back to the rim twice. Maxey finished with 26 points, 15 of them in the fourth, as Philly beat Chicago 126–107. Maxey is one hell of a closer. 🔥

Gabby Williams scored 28 of her 30 points after halftime to win Game 7 in a pair of Air Jordan 41s. On Monday morning, the new WNBA Finals MVP got a text from Michael Jordan himself. “Stay hungry,” he wrote. Gabby texted right back. “I’ve never been hungrier.”

Today, 20-year-old Rafael Jódar is the No. 10 tennis player in the world. He got there 287 days after his ATP Tour debut. The previous record for making the top 10 was 490 days. That was Gustavo Kuerten. Two years ago, after Jódar won the US Open boys’ singles title, Francis Roig, one of Rafael Nadal’s former coaches, went all the way to Madrid to try to talk Jódar’s dad into letting his son turn pro. His dad thought his son should go to university. So did Rafa. He went to the University of Virginia to study economics instead. While people back in Spain were urging him to make the jump, the coaches and players at Virginia were texting him to enjoy the win. That junior US Open was where Rafa met Brian Rasmussen, one of Virginia’s coaches. “I can choose whatever I want,” Jódar said while he was weighing his options. He had started playing at the Chamartín club in Madrid when he was six, spending hours on court with his dad just to have fun together. Plenty of kids his age beat him when he was little. Whenever Rafa came home to Madrid after a big tournament win, his dad sent him down to the club to hit with one of the little kids. Sometimes Rafa just fed the kid balls. In Charlottesville, Rafa went from living with his parents in Spain as an only child to sharing a place with nine teammates. His roommate was Jangjun Kim from South Korea. Taking classes in English was tough at first. But one thing he liked about studying was that he got to spend part of his day thinking about something other than tennis. His first match at South Carolina was something else entirely. Several courts were going at once, fans were yelling in the stands, and every match counted toward the team score. Jódar and Kim won their doubles set. Then, out on the singles court against Connor Thomson, Jódar looked over at Virginia head coach Andrés Pedroso. “Coach, where am I? This is a different sport.” Jódar lost his singles match. A little later, his roommate Kim won his own singles match to clinch the tie for Virginia. Here’s the part I love. When Pedroso told that story later, what he remembered about the kid who’d lost was how happy he was for his team. That summer, after Carlos Alcaraz lost the Wimbledon final and spoke about accepting what comes, Pedroso sent the clip to his Virginia players. By the end of the year, leaving Virginia was a real decision to wrestle with. Jódar felt himself getting better in college, yet he knew that if he wanted to face the best players at the biggest tournaments, he had to give the tour a shot. He talked it over with his dad and his Virginia coaches before turning pro in December. A couple of weeks later, Jódar qualified for his first Grand Slam main draw at the Australian Open. He went up two sets to love on Rei Sakamoto in the first round, lost the next two sets, and won the fifth. “As Coach Pedroso would say, I just try to accept all things that come,” Jódar said afterward. In Shanghai that October, Rafa lost the first set in each of his first four matches. He won them all. Then he beat Daniil Medvedev in straight sets to reach his first Masters 1000 final. Just over two weeks later, he was world No. 10. Go back to Melbourne, where those 287 days began. When Rafa won that first five-setter, his dad was in the stands. Sitting right next to him was Brian Rasmussen, his coach from Virginia.

The Winnipeg Jets took 26 shots at Carolina goalie Pyotr Kochetkov on Sunday and couldn’t get one past him. His own teammate got him twice at the end of a morning skate. Sunday was his tenth win in ten games. He only got eight starts all of last season. Here is the whole thing. Last season, Kochetkov shut out the Rangers in New York in his first start. You’d have figured he was fine. He’d finish a game, go home, and still feel the pain in his hip when he lay down to sleep. Every game left him hurting a little more. By December, he was worried about what another few games on that hip might cost him. He went for surgery. For months he skated on his own or with his goalie coach. Then one morning in April he got to stay out there with the guys and face their shots again. Andrei Svechnikov put a couple past him. Afterward, somebody asked Kochetkov how close he was to playing again. “I’m probably very far from play if he scores on me.” By June he was back in uniform as the backup for the last three games of the Stanley Cup Final. The night Carolina won the Cup, Kochetkov had his pads on. He watched the whole game from the bench. He finally got another NHL game in October, 287 days after his last one. A few weeks later in Edmonton, he said something about the nights when things don’t go his way. “I just think about how it’s better to have a bad night than to not be playing at all.” I read that and thought of him sitting there in June. Even on a rough night, you get to square up for the next shot. On Sunday he stopped them all. Carolina won 7-0, and Kochetkov joined Carey Price and Jack Campbell as the only goalies in NHL history to open a season like this: ten games, ten wins.

Walker Kessler is the first Laker in 54 years with 15+ points, 15+ boards and no misses from the floor or the line in a regular-season game. Wilt Chamberlain (1972) · 15 & 19, 3/3 FT Kessler (2026) · 16 & 15, 4/4 FT Both went 6-for-6 from the floor. Beautiful work, big man. 👏

Connor McDavid at full tilt with the puck on a string is straight-up unfair. No dangles, no tricks. He nudges it past two reaching sticks, skates right between them, and all those guys see now is 97 getting smaller. McDavid’s a one-man power play, unreal.

“He won’t have much time to celebrate,” Eintracht Frankfurt coach Adi Hütter said on Friday. Niko Iličević was turning 16 on Saturday, and Hütter reckoned he’d need him in the squad on Sunday. At 14, Niko had already scored for Frankfurt’s first team in a friendly. To play even a minute in the Bundesliga, though, he had to be 16. On Sunday against Hamburg, Hütter sent him on for Can Uzun in stoppage time. At 16 years and one day old, Niko tied Youssoufa Moukoko’s record as the youngest player in Bundesliga history. And the kid still found time to get two shots off. As for that celebration? After Frankfurt’s 3-1 win, his teammates clapped as Niko jogged out to face the home fans. He raised both arms in front of a stand full of waving flags. When he came back, he had his head down and a grin on his face. A second later you could barely see No. 23 in the huddle.

Carlos Alcaraz was a little kid standing by a tennis-court fence, telling a group of grandparents where to serve. Today, that kid won the title in Vienna. Here's how his dad's longtime friend Alfredo Sarria remembered it. He'd gone to the club for a meeting with Carlos's father and found young Carlitos watching the older players on Court 3. The kid knew the score. He spotted their mistakes. Sarria recalled him telling them, "You have to serve here." Imagine going out for a game of tennis and finding out the little guy at the fence has notes. By the time Carlos was 17 years old, that love of the game was shaping his whole day. He was living mostly at Juan Carlos Ferrero's academy. In a December 2020 interview, he described mornings on court followed by fitness work, then another session of tennis and physical training later in the day. Going home wasn't always easy. His friends got to go out more than he could. In his words, "it is my choice to play tennis and I love it." He finished that year ranked No. 141. Becoming world No. 1 and winning a Grand Slam were still dreams he was telling an interviewer about. Today in Vienna, he beat Alex de Minaur 6-1, 6-4 to win the title without dropping a set all week. Their championship-point rally had a drop shot, a lob and, finally, Carlos sending a forehand cross-court into the open court to finish it. Man, I'd have loved to hear the little guy at Court 3 talk us through that point.

Carlos Alcaraz has overtaken fellow Spaniard David Ferrer on the ATP singles title list. At 23, he’s already No. 3 among Spanish men. 🤯 His 6-1, 6-4 win over Alex de Minaur in Vienna brought career title No. 28. His first Vienna crown, his fourth of 2026, and not a single set dropped all week. David Ferrer finished his career with 27 ATP singles titles. Only Rafael Nadal (92) and Manuel Orantes (34) are still ahead of Carlos. He’s now reached 37 finals in 95 tour-level singles tournaments. That’s 38.9%, almost 2 finals for every 5 events. Career finals rate at the same age, 23 years and 180 days: 🇪🇸 Alcaraz: 38.9% (37/95) 🇪🇸 Nadal: 38.2% (47/123) 🇷🇸 Djokovic: 27.7% (31/112) 🇨🇭 Roger Federer: 23.3% (31/133) Even young Rafa was slightly behind that pace. 6 more titles to catch Orantes. At 23, that’s a pretty wild next target. 🔥 Finals comparison includes Olympic singles and excludes team events.

At 20, Harriet Dart sometimes played a whole tennis match overseas and then had to tell her coach what happened. He hadn’t seen a single point. On Sunday in Guangzhou, at 30, she won her first WTA singles title, 11 years after her tour debut. Go back to 2017. At home in England, Dart trained from eight in the morning until five thirty in the afternoon, six days a week. Taking her coach, Alan Jones, abroad meant paying for his flight, his room and his time. Most weeks she went on her own. If Jones could catch a livestream, great. Otherwise, he got Dart’s version afterward. “A coach spots things that you might not spot for a week,” she said. In 2016, she lost the deciding set of her last Wimbledon qualifier 13 games to 11. A year later, she told The Independent what a place in the main draw would mean to her. With that prize money she could take a coach on the road for a few more weeks. I love that answer. A few more weeks when somebody else could tell her what they’d seen. She lost in qualifying again that summer. Looking back on her career in 2020, Dart wrote about a limit she’d once set herself. She’d give her tennis a year. If she didn’t see progress, she’d think about putting her rackets away. Her dad had encouraged her to keep another option open, so she studied forensic psychology. Some nights she was still studying at two in the morning with a match to play later that day. Funny thing was, she said she played better. The studying took her mind off the pressure. In 2018, a wild card gave Dart her first place in the Wimbledon singles main draw. The next summer she played world No. 1 Ash Barty on Centre Court. Seven years later, in her opening qualifier in Guangzhou, she lost the first set and went down 4-2 in the second. By Sunday she’d won six matches to reach her first WTA singles final. Across the net was 18-year-old Lilli Tagger, who’d beaten her in a final in Fujairah earlier this year. Dart lost the first set to her again. She won the second. One more deciding set, her sixth in seven matches that week. At 5-3 on Tagger’s serve, Dart had two championship points. Tagger saved the first with a big serve. On the second, Dart had a forehand from the middle of the court and hit it into the net. “I’ve wanted it so much so badly, sometimes too much,” Dart had said after Saturday’s semifinal. Now she had to serve for it herself. She lost one point in that game. When her last serve went unreturned, Dart fell onto her back. “I’ll try not to get too emotional,” she said. Then she thanked her team. She’d thanked them on Saturday, too, before she knew how the final would go. “Thank you to my team for sticking by me.” nitter.gq/WTA/status/21168475626…

Here’s what Kayla Burton saw when she pulled out her phone that day. It was May 15, 2024. Dallas had just cut her little sister, Veronica. At their hometown YMCA, Veronica stood with a basketball against her hip, waiting for the pickleball players to finish so she could get a few shots up. Kayla wanted her sister to have those 11 seconds to look back on someday. Two years later, Veronica gets to watch them as a WNBA champion. ❤️ nitter.gq/Kay_Breezy22/status/21…

Veronica Burton had to wait for the pickleball players at her hometown YMCA to finish before she could get some shots up. Last night, with 5.1 seconds left in Game 7 of the WNBA Finals, everybody was waiting on her. The Dallas Wings had drafted Burton seventh overall, then cut her days before the 2024 opener. At the Y in Newton, Massachusetts, her sister Kayla saw her holding a basketball, staring down the court. Kayla quietly took out her phone. “I recorded it because I wanted her to see it down the road,” she said. A month went by before the Connecticut Sun gave Burton a spot for the rest of the season. That December, when the Golden State Valkyries got to build a team from scratch, they picked her in the expansion draft. Burton wanted to make a good first impression. In her Golden State debut, her only points came on two free throws. Then her new coach, Natalie Nakase, wanted to sit down with her and watch every turnover. “Great, just what I want to do,” Burton remembered thinking. But Nakase could see why she’d made those passes. As Burton remembered it, her coach told her, “These three aren’t even your fault. You’re gonna be fine.” By August, Burton had a game against Phoenix with 14 assists and zero turnovers. A month later, she was the WNBA’s Most Improved Player. Back to Game 7. With Golden State up three, Atlanta forced a jump ball. Burton came up with it, and the Dream fouled her with 5.1 seconds left. Two free throws again. This time she sank them both to seal the Valkyries’ first championship. Man, I’m glad Kayla pulled out her phone that day.

Gasperini’s Roma needed 4 goals at Udinese to break a club record. They helped themselves to 5. The 5–2 win takes them to 28 goals in their opening 10 Serie A games, the most in Roma’s history. The previous best was 26, set in 1960/61 and matched in 2016/17.

Bruno Fernandes was in tears after United’s 9th straight game without a win Why was he crying? Was it because he missed so many chances?

Morgan Rogers scored first. Cole Palmer got the second. Chelsea beat Manchester United 2-0 today, and nearly six years ago those two friends scored in the same order in a cup final. Go back to when Morgan was about fourteen. He and Cole met playing for England’s youth teams. Before every camp, they’d text the staff with the same request: could they share a room? By 2020 they were teammates at Manchester City. In the FA Youth Cup final, Morgan put City 2-1 up. Their opponents equalized. Then, with seven minutes left, a blocked shot fell to Cole a few yards from goal. He smashed in the winner. The team they beat that night was Chelsea. Within a year, Cole had scored his first Champions League goal for City. Morgan was out on loan. He’d leave City without playing a competitive game for the first team. Here’s the part I love. Morgan remembers Cole “always asking me how I played, even in the games nobody knew about in the Championship or League One.” They’d talk those games through together. Last year, England asked Morgan who he usually sat next to on the senior team’s plane or bus. It was still Cole. When Morgan had news about his move from Aston Villa to Chelsea, he rang Cole. No answer. So Morgan sent a text: Cole had five minutes to call him back. “I went downstairs and I rang him,” Cole said. “He told me he was coming, but I didn’t believe him at first.” Morgan got his call back, all right. By the time Chelsea interviewed him, he was saying, “He’s non-stop ringing my phone, texting me, and I can’t wait.” Cole posted some old photos of the two of them on Instagram. His caption: “Playing for Chelsea with one of your best friends in life.” Cole didn’t have to ask how Morgan played today. He was right there when his old roommate slipped past two United defenders and chipped the keeper. Fourteen minutes later, Cole buried his penalty. Chelsea fans got to cheer both of them this time