Trail Blazers' Damian Lillard on Yang Hansen: 'He got some swag to him'
Damian Lillard was welcomed back to the Portland Trail Blazers over the weekend, and the nine-time NBA All-Star is excited to get to work with the organization and his new teammates.
Lillard was waived by the Milwaukee Bucks on July 6, clearing the way for him to sign a three-year, $42 million contract with the Trail Blazers on Saturday. He spent the past two seasons with the Bucks after playing the first 11 years of his career in Portland.
The Trail Blazers' all-time leading scorer is expected to miss the entire upcoming season to rehabilitate a torn left Achilles tendon sustained on April 27. He said at a press conference on Monday that he wants to take as much time as needed to ensure a full recovery on the court.
Lillard watched the Trail Blazers from afar and believes they are poised to take another step forward, with a core featuring Jerami Grant, Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe, among others. He is also intrigued with the addition of 7-footer Yang Hansen.
"Watching him during summer league, I was like, 'This is a real player,'" Lillard told team reporter Casey Holdahl. "Especially with the way the league is now, with a lot of these bigs that teams use as a hub to play make and facilitate the offense at times. He got some swag to him, too. He got some stuff to him. I think that is good for a rookie, especially somebody coming over that is not from the United States."
Yang logged four appearances in the NBA Summer League, averaging 10.8 points, five rebounds, 3.8 assists and 2.2 blocks on 45.7% shooting from the field, including 33.3% from 3-point range. He scored in double figures three times, including a 15-point effort on July 15.
The 16th pick established himself as one of the top international prospects with Qingdao in the CBA, the top professional league in China. He was an All-Star and All-CBA domestic first-team selection in each season, and was named the 2024 CBA Defensive Player of the Year.
Yang is highly touted for his overall skill set and ability as a player who can work down low, space the floor and protect the paint. The organization has had him on its radar for the past two years and believes he can be a player who contributes at a high level on both sides of the court.
Though Lillard won't play next year, his addition has created buzz around the team after the group went 23-18 to finish last season. Yang even honored Lillard by recreating his patented "Dame Time" celebration during a postgame interview last week.
"He got some personality on him," Lillard said of Yang. "You can tell the way he plays and the way he goes about it, he has some real confidence."
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USA Today
24 minutes ago
- USA Today
Milwaukee Brewers are an 'island of misfit toys' – and MLB's hottest team
They're that Toyota Prius in a parking lot full of Bentleys and Rolls-Royces. They're that ground chuck burger on a menu with tomahawk steaks and lobster tails. They are the unwanted, the discarded, and the castoffs of Major League Baseball. They are the Milwaukee Brewers. 'The island," Brewers reliever Grant Anderson tells USA TODAY Sports, 'of misfit toys.'' It was the moniker Brewers pitching coach Chris Hook placed on his staff, with Brewers manager Pat Murphy chiming in, saying his entire team, is 'Just a bunch of average Joes." MLB POWER RANKINGS: Brewers sweep Dodgers again, leaving big-bucks LA in dust Well, these anonymous castoffs just may be the best darn team in all of baseball, tied with the Chicago Cubs for baseball's best record, 60-41, while winning 35 of their last 48 games, including 11 of their last 12. Yes, the Brewers, whose $124 million payroll is the seventh-smallest in baseball, and less than what the Los Angeles Dodgers are projected to pay in luxury tax penalties this year. Yes, the Brewers, who don't have a single player hitting .300, who has 20 homers, or whose WAR ranks higher than 60th in MLB. Yes, the Brewers, who have only two players earning more than $10 million this season. 'No one knows who we are," Murphy says, 'but we do. It's like I told the reporters in LA. No disrespect to the great fans of Japan baseball, but they can't name five players in our lineup.' Well, hate to break the news to Murphy, but baseball fans right here in the good ol' USA can't name five Brewers players, either. Sure, go ahead and try. There's former MVP and two-time batting champion Christian Yelich. There's 21-year-old center field sensation Jackson Chourio. There's two-time All-Star catcher William Contreras. There's uh, well, that kid who throws 101mph on every pitch, what's his name, Miz something? Anyone else? 'We don't get recognized anywhere," Brewers left fielder Isaac Collins says. 'I mean, even in town, I think I've only been recognized once or twice. No one knows who we are." Well, considering they're on pace to reach the postseason for the seventh time in the last eight years, with four NL Central Division titles, it's about time everyone finds out. 'We're going to start wearing 'Power of Friendship' T-shirts," All-Star closer Trevor Megill says, 'then people can start recognizing who we are. I mean, people were freaking out last year when we won 93 games. Maybe they didn't think we could do it again." The Brewers are reminding folks that even if you don't wear Armani suits, Gucci shoes and David Yurman gold chains, all you need is a comfortable pair of spikes, a broken-in glove, the right bat, and the unselfish desire to play the game the right way to make the rich and famous wallowing in jealousy. The Brewers have no power, and not a lot of speed, but, oh, do they play the game hard, they play it right, and they will beat your brains in playing small ball. 'We're the little engine that could," Murphy says. 'We have no pop. We have no slug. We don't have a lot of things. But we have a lot of heart 'These guys are hungry. 'And it's hard to be hungry when you're full." The Brewers make up for their power deficit by putting the ball in play. They rarely strike out. They bunt. They hit-and-run. They play defense. They attack. Simply, they're relentless. 'It's nice for America to see that our brand of baseball works," Collins says. 'You don't have to live and die by the long ball. You just have to do all of the little things right. 'That's all we're doing, just being ourselves." And, poking a little of fun at themselves in the process. When the Brewers signed a backup player for $1.35 million during the winter, Murphy sent Andrew Friedman, Dodgers president of baseball operations a note: "Hey Andy, sorry, but when you were signing Shohei Ohtani, [Yoshinobu] Yamamoto and Blake Snell, we stole this guy from you. Sorry about that." When players are traded to Milwaukee, GM Matt Arnold cracks, 'You don't get traded to the big leagues. You get traded to Milwaukee JUCO." And when you enter the Brewers clubhouse, you feel as if you're walking into a movie set or a comedy club, with Murphy being called 'Patches O'Houlihan," from the 2004 movie 'Dodgeball." 'That's what we do here,'' Murphy says. 'We dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge. We need to get those T-shirts made." This also is the place where you can be released, designated for assignment, traded or dumped, and come resurrect your career. The Brewers will take your sick, your hungry, your weary, and even your ex-Colorado Rockies. The Brewers acquired reliever Nick Mears from the Rockies for two minor leaguers last July, and picked up Collins from the Rockies in 2022 in the Triple-A phase of the Rule 5 Draft. Mears has since become one of their most reliable relievers, yielding a .200 batting average this season with a 0.86 WHIP – sixth among all relievers. Collins won the starting left field job and is hitting .269 with a .777 OPS. 'It seems like half the guys here have been DFA'd or come over in a trade," Mears says, 'but once you get over here, you buy into the culture. There's a hunger to win, especially coming from a bad team. You want to prove to yourself that you're more than just a DFA guy. Just imagine how first baseman Andrew Vaughn was feeling. The former first-round pick couldn't even stick with the Chicago Sox. He was demoted and sent back to the minors for the first time since 2019. He was still languishing in the minors when Brewers veteran Aaron Civale asked to be traded, upset he was being taken out of the rotation for rookie sensation Jacob Misiorowski. In less than 24 hours, Arnold was sending Civale to the White Sox for Vaughn. Vaughn returned to the minors but when first baseman Rhys Hoskins sprained a thumb ligament two weeks ago, he was summoned. Vaughn hit a three-run homer in his first at-bat with the Brewers, and never stopped, hitting .333 with two doubles, two homers, 12 RBI and a 1.071 OPS during an 11-game winning streak. 'It's pretty special being here," Vaughn says. 'You can see why they have so much success." There is starter Quinn Priester, given up by the Pittsburgh Pirates after being a first-round draft pick in 2019, and then the Boston Red Sox, who traded him April 7 to the Brewers. The Red Sox didn't think he could help them, but the Brewers believed in his pedigree, and with a little tinkering of his arsenal, could be a force. You think the Red Sox could use him now? Priester, who added a cut-fastball to his arsenal, is 8-2 with a 3.33 ERA. He pitched six shutout innings, yielding just three hits and striking out 10 without a walk in his last outing against the Dodgers. 'I remember as soon as I got traded here," Priester says, 'I had a bunch of guys text me telling me how good this team is developing pitchers in the system, and they do such a great job. You look at how many of us came from different organizations and got better here. 'We're not here to prove people wrong, but to just enjoy the camaraderie, with everyone buying in to do whatever it takes to win." There is Caleb Durbin, a Division III player at Washington University in St. Louis, who was traded twice in two years without spending a day in the big leagues. The Brewers scouts loved his fiery demeanor, playing almost with a chip in his shoulder, knowing his style perfectly fit Murphy's mold. So, when the Brewers traded All Star closer Devin Williams to the Yankees, they made sure Durbin was in the deal along with veteran starter Nestor Cortes. 'I know we're a small market team," Durbin says, 'but we're still a big-league team. We still have good baseball players. It's just we're overlooked because of our makeup. 'That's OK. We know how good we are. If you're not ready to scrap nine innings with us, at the end of the game, you're going to be on the wrong end of it." Infielder Joey Ortiz came over from Baltimore in the Corbin Burnes trade along with pitcher DL Hall. He was their starting third baseman last season, is now a Gold Globe candidate at shortstop, reminding Arnold of former defensive whizzes Walt Weiss or Rey Ordonez. Megill was an original Padre. Then a Cub. Then a Twin. And two years later, after being acquired by the Brewers for a player to be named later, Megill is now an All Star. He has 44 saves the last two years and became the Brewers' full-time closer when the Brewers traded Williams. 'When we told him he made the All Star team," Arnold says, 'he gave me a big hug. It was like hugging a Sequoia tree. He's just a big moose. We thought he could handle the job, and he's been great." Williams sensed he was gone last year after giving up that game-winning homer to Mets first baseman Pete Alonso in the Division series. It was a gut-wrenching end to the Brewers' season, the last game beloved Hall of Fame broadcaster Bob Uecker called. 'That was as tough a loss as I've ever been part of," Arnold says. 'But nobody said, 'That's it.' We've been knocked down a lot of times here. We always get up. 'We have a standard here that we tried to hold ourselves to. We're never going to make excuses where we are in the world being the smallest market in baseball. We believe in ourselves, but we just have to do it differently, try to be creative, and have guys that nobody heard of step up." It was really no different when the Brewers opened the season losing their first four games of the season by a combined score of 47-15, the biggest run differential in MLB history. They still were four games under .500 (21-25) six weeks into the season. Then, a funny thing happened. The pitching staff, which opened the season with 11 of their top 16 pitchers injured, began to get healthy. Those cast-offs started gelling. And then, on May 25, they rallied from a 5-3 deficit in the eighth inning against the Pirates to win, 6-5. They have since been baseball's hottest team. 'We don't have guys making $20 million a year," says Anderson, who's on his third team after being designated for assignment last December by the Rangers, 'like we did when I was in Texas. We don't have four MVPs in the lineup like the Dodgers. We don't have a lot of things. 'But we believe in each other. We know how to win games. And we have a lot of confidence." It's proven to be quite the lethal combination So, you may want to hurry up and get to know these Brewers' names. Come October, it could be quite handy. The USA TODAY app gets you to the heart of the news — fast. Download for award-winning coverage, crosswords, audio storytelling, the eNewspaper and more.
Yahoo
26 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Detroit's fallen stadiums: What happened to Cobo Arena?
This is Part 3 of a six-part series looking back at the arenas and stadiums that housed some of Detroit's greatest teams over the past century. Come back to every day this week for more historic Detroit sports site memories. Cobo Arena stood on some of the most historic land in Detroit and only added to that history. Allegedly built on the spot where the first French settler of the city, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, claimed the land for King Louis XIV in 1701, Cobo was constructed by the city in 1960. It was named after deceased Detroit Mayor Albert E. Cobo, who pushed for the construction of the arena as well as the convention hall attached to it. Detroit Pistons owner Fred Zollner moved his NBA franchise – newly arrived from Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1957 – from Olympia Stadium, on Grand River to the newly constructed Cobo Arena at the corner of Jefferson and Washington along the Detroit River for the beginning of the 1961-62 NBA season. The Pistons were a franchise constantly struggling to remain afloat, but Cobo wasn't the issue. In 1990, Sports Illustrated writer Jack McCallum wrote, 'There was something special about Cobo, an intimacy, a connection with the essence of the game (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, no fan of fans, once called those in Cobo the most knowledgeable in the league) and, above all, a kind of bad-dude charm.' The Pistons played at Cobo for 17 seasons – winning just two playoff series in nine tries – but they left after the 1977-78 when new owner Bill Davidson decided the team needed to move to the suburbs in order to draw crowds. Pistons games were regularly underattended at Cobo; in an arena that could seat 12,000, the highest average annual attendance was 7,492 in 1974-75, and wealthy suburbanites were wary to come downtown. So, the team moved to the gargantuan Pontiac Silverdome, already home to the NFL's Detroit Lions. Of the first game at the Silverdome, The Michigan Daily's Ernie Dunbar wrote, '[T]he crowd at last night's Piston game was predominantly white. … This is exactly what the Pistons hoped for when they announced their move-the financial support of the suburbs. The argument for not supporting the Pistons at Cobo was that Detroit is not safe at night. Well, now the more generally affluent suburbanites must feel that Pontiac is safe, as they turned out in record numbers to the tune of 13,688." Cobo couldn't beat numbers like that. When Davidson's widow, Karen, sold the team to Platinum Equity chairman Tom Gores in 2011, the team stayed in the suburbs. It was only in 2017 that Gores reached an agreement with Olympia Entertainment to bring the Pistons back downtown, but he wasn't bringing them back to Cobo. Cobo survived for as long as it did because of the versatility of the building. An arena attached to a convention center, Cobo could host any sort of event. The horseshoe shape of the arena and its acoustics made it perfect for concerts. Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, KISS and the Rolling Stones were just some of the names that performed there over the years. The current convention center still hosts the Detroit Auto Show each year, as it has since 1965. The arena might be most well-known for being the site of the 'Whack Heard 'Round the World,' figure skater Tonya Harding's attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan at the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships. The event was held next door at Joe Lous Arena, but practices were held at Cobo Arena. While leaving Cobo after practice on Jan. 6, 1994 Kerrigan was hit on the right thigh with a baton by Shane Stant, an associate of Harding. The aftermath of the attack, with Kerrigan crying, 'Why? Why? Why?' was recorded by a local television crew. Stant went through the glass of one of Cobo's doors as an exit route. Harding won the U.S. title, and a spot in the 1994 Olympics, two days later while Kerrigan watched from the press box. Eventually, Cobo became less popular as a venue as downtown added sites such as Little Caesars Arena and Ford Field. In 2015, the arena was deconstructed internally and renovated to become more convention space. Today, following the sale of sponsorship rights following a review of Cobo's tenure as mayor, and a few bank mergers, it stands as Huntington Place – a testament to Detroit's appeal to tourists, if not to championship sports teams. Contact Matthew Auchincloss at mauchincloss@ The series Come back all week for our series on Detroit's fallen stadiums: July 21: Tiger Stadium. July 22: The Palace of Auburn Hills. July 23: Cobo Arena. July 24: Joe Louis Arena. July 25: Pontiac Silverdome. July 26: Olympia Stadium. This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit's fallen stadiums: Cobo Arena
Yahoo
42 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Warriors may part ways with 2nd-best defender, NBA champion to rival team
The Golden State Warriors need to watch out. If they don't make some free agency signings soon, all the best available players could be gone. All Warriors rumors indicate that the team has handshake agreements with Al Horford and De'Anthony Melton. Still, there is one key Warriors player that they could lose in free agency. Recently, Evan Sidery named multiple Warriors rivals as teams interested in Gary Payton II. 'Gary Payton II has generated recent free agent interest from the Bucks, Heat, Lakers, Suns, and also a potential return to the Warriors. Payton is one of the best remaining on-ball defenders in free agency.' With GP2 garnering so much interest around the league, the Warriors could definitely lose him. A lot will probably come down to what the other teams can offer. The Warriors likely won't be giving Payton more than a veteran's minimum. Will other teams take the risk and offer more? If they do, it might just be time for the Warriors to move on from GP2. He has looked a step slower on the defensive end the last couple seasons, and his offense is what it is. He has seen a steady decrease in three-point efficiency over the last two seasons. It would definitely hurt to see GP2 leave in free agency. He is a fan favorite and was a key piece in the Warriors' 2022 NBA Championship. Still, he is a constant injury risk and looks to be declining. Follow The Sporting News on WhatsApp For now, the Warriors may want to revamp their roster with some fresh faces. More NBA: 3-team Warriors trade idea lands team 6'9' center, picks for multiple rotation pieces
