Thunder, Warriors get wins on NBA Opening Night Kendall Baker and Jeff TracyOctober 22, 2025 at 10:48 PM 0 Yahoo Sports AM is our daily newsletter that keeps you up to date on all things sports. Sign up here to get it every weekday morning.
- - Thunder, Warriors get wins on NBA Opening Night
Kendall Baker and Jeff TracyOctober 22, 2025 at 10:48 PM
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🚨 Headlines
⚾️ Bichette is back: Blue Jays star shortstop Bo Bichette, who's been sidelined since early September with a sprained knee, plans to return for the World Series. "I'll be ready."
🏈 Jets owner slams Fields: Woody Johnson criticized QB Justin Fields while defending head coach Aaron Glenn on Tuesday. "It's hard when you have a QB with the rating that we've got," said Johnson. "If you look at any head coach with a QB like that, you're going to see similar results."
⚾️ Angels hire Suzuki: The Angels are hiring Kurt Suzuki as their next manager. The longtime catcher finished his career with the Halos in 2022 and spent the past three seasons as a special assistant to GM Perry Minasian.
⛳️ Nicklaus wins $50M suit: A Florida jury has awarded Jack Nicklaus $50 million in his defamation suit against his former business partners and the company that bears his name. Nicklaus challenged allegations that he'd entertained LIV Golf offers.
⚾️ Coming soon: Boston, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco have been announced as the first four teams in the Women's Professional Baseball League (WPBL), which will begin play in 2026.
🏀 Thunder, Warriors win as NBA returns to NBC
(William Purnell/Getty Images)
Oklahoma City — The Thunder raised their championship banner, then followed that up with a thrilling 125-124 (2OT) win over the Rockets to mark the start of the NBA season — and the league's return to NBC.
Box score: Reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (35 pts) and Chet Holmgren (28 pts) led the way for OKC, while Alperen Şengün (39-11-7) and Kevin Durant (23 pts) paced Houston.
(Adam Pantozzi/NBAE via Getty Images)
Los Angeles — The well-balanced Warriors overcame a huge game from Luka Dončić to notch a 119-109 victory over the Lakers, who were without LeBron James.
Box score: Jimmy Butler (31 pts), Stephen Curry (23 pts), Jonathan Kuminga (17-9-6) and Buddy Hield (17 pts) powered Golden State past Dončic (43-12-9) and Austin Reaves (26-5-9).
🏈 The coach Texas A&M never knew it needed
(Nelson Chenault/Imagn Images via Reuters)
From Yahoo Sports' Dan Wolken:
Remember the Swagcopter? In a different era of Texas A&M football, it was merely a way for Kevin Sumlin and his staff to hop from one high school game to another but became a symbol of the program's largesse and ultimately its superficiality as the recruits it helped sign didn't translate to enough wins.
Remember the faux national championship trophy with a space left blank to fill in the year Jimbo Fisher and his groundbreaking $75 million contract were supposed to bring one back here? It became, yet again, the emblem of a school trying to speak something into existence that nobody around here realized had to be earned rather than bought.
For its first dozen years in the Southeastern Conference, Texas A&M and its supporters would stand on their proverbial mountain of cash and shout to the masses how they had everything needed to win championships.
Now, as undefeated and third-ranked Texas A&M pushes for its first appearance in the College Football Playoff, it seems the Aggies finally have the one thing money can't buy in this sport. After all the choreographed attempts to turn this program into an image of something it could never be, it took an accident to fill the void with the substance it needed most.
"People always want to take the elevator to success," said Mike Elko, the Jersey-born, Ivy League-educated 48-year-old head coach that Texas A&M never knew it needed. "That's not really how it works."
Elko during his first SEC Media Days last year. (Omar Vega/Getty Images)
In many ways, Elko was never supposed to be here, sitting in the palatial suite of the Texas A&M head coach where he can push a button and the double doors automatically swing open so that he can invite a reporter in for a conversation about why these Aggies seem different and far more legitimate than the pretenders of previous years.
Not only is Elko an odd fit on the surface — raised in the Northeast, he never worked anywhere close to Texas until Fisher hired him as defensive coordinator in 2018 — he wasn't even at the forefront of Texas A&M's coaching search when the school admitted its mistake two years ago and bought out Fisher for a record $77 million.
On the final Saturday of the 2023 regular season, it appeared former Texas A&M athletic director Ross Bjork (now at Ohio State) was ready to hire Kentucky's Mark Stoops. But as the process got closer to the finish line, the fan backlash became significant enough that the school's board of regents vetoed the decision. Elko, who had just completed his second season at Duke, became the default option — and ultimately the right one.
Though Elko didn't check the traditional Texas A&M boxes and wasn't perceived as some exciting home-run candidate, he had spent much of his life as an adapter. Born to a teenage mother and raised in a trailer park, what he learned as he became a student at the prestigious University of Pennsylvania and then during a coaching career that crisscrossed the East Coast was that he didn't need to fit in at a place as much as understand it.
And in his time as the coordinator here, Elko came to understand both the resources this place had and exactly what it lacked.
"We had successful moments, and we were trending in a really positive direction at times," he said of a four-year stretch where Texas A&M went 34-14 but never quite broke through. "I just had confidence that you could put it together here. And I think there's a uniqueness to being able to be the one who figures it out. That was a challenge that I kind of really wanted."
Keep reading.
⚾️ History favors Toronto
Rogers Centre will host Games 1 and 2. (Mark Blinch/Getty Images)
The Dodgers unsurprisingly open as World Series favorites (-220 at BetMGM) over the Blue Jays (+180), but history actually favors Toronto in the Fall Classic, which begins on Friday.
4-for-4: This is the fifth time since the LCS changed to a seven-game format in 1985 that one finished in a sweep and the other went the distance. Each of the previous four times, the team that won in seven games went on to win the World Series.
1988: Dodgers over A's
2006: Cardinals over Tigers
2007: Red Sox over Rockies
2012: Giants over Tigers
2025: Blue Jays (won ALCS in seven games) vs. Dodgers (swept NLCS)
Fun fact: Regardless of who wins, two players have already earned their World Series rings: Relief pitcher José Ureña and infielder Buddy Kennedy played for both the Dodgers and Blue Jays this season.
📊 By the numbers
(Cooper Neill/Getty Images)🏈 5 60-yarders
After nailing a 61-yarder on Sunday, Cowboys kicker Brandon Aubrey has now made five career field goals from at least 60 yards, breaking a tie with Brett Maher for the most in NFL history. Not bad for a guy who's only been in the league since 2023.
A new era: Aubrey is the best of a new generation of kickers for whom 60-yarders have become relatively commonplace. Halfway through the 2020s, there have already been 25 field goals made of 60+ yards. Just 15 such kicks were made in the 2010s, and just three were made in the 2000s.
🏀 135 international players
NBA opening night rosters will feature a record 135 international players from a record-tying 43 countries. The best represented countries: Canada (23), France (19), Australia (13), Germany (7), Serbia (6), Cameroon (4) and the U.K. (4).
⛳️ 27 winners
Sei Young Kim's victory at the BMW Ladies Championship made her the LPGA's 27th winner of the season, the most ever in a single year. And there are still five tournaments left to extend that record.
🏈 6 unbeaten teams
No. 1 Ohio State, No. 2 Indiana, No. 3 Texas A&M, No. 7 Georgia Tech, No. 11 BYU and unranked Navy are the only undefeated FBS teams remaining after an upset-filled Week 8 saw the other five all go down (Miami, Ole Miss, Texas Tech, Memphis, UNLV).
⚽️ 400 goals
Harry Kane's blistering start to the season with Bayern Munich continued in Saturday's win over Dortmund, where he scored his league-best 12th goal (no one else has more than five) and became just the ninth player this century with 400 goals at the club level. He's scored 104 goals in 107 matches since joining the German giant in 2023.
📺 Watchlist: Wednesday, Oct. 22
Basketball returns to the Garden tonight. (Angelina Katsanis/Getty Images)🏀 Cavaliers at Knicks | 7pm ET, ESPN
Cleveland, fresh off earning its first No. 1-seed of the post-LeBron era, takes on a New York team led by Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns and new head coach Mike Brown.
🏀 Spurs at Mavericks | 9:30pm, ESPN
The Lone Star State clash pits the alien himself, Victor Wembanyama, against No. 1 overall pick Cooper Flagg. Not a bad way to cap off the season's first full slate of games!
⚽️ MLS Playoffs | Apple TV
The road to the MLS Cup begins with two single-elimination Wild Card games. No. 8 Chicago hosts No. 9 Orlando (8:30pm) in the opener, then it's No. 8 Portland vs. No. 9 Salt Lake (10:30pm) in the nightcap. The winners move on to Round One, which begins Friday.
More to watch:
🏒 NHL: Red Wings at Sabres (7:30pm, TNT) … Detroit has won five straight to climb to the top of the Atlantic Division.
⚽️ Champions League: Real Madrid vs. Juventus (3pm, Paramount+); Chelsea vs. Ajax (3pm, Paramount+) … Two of nine games to close out Matchday 3.
🏈 NCAAF: Middle Tennessee at Delaware (7:30pm, ESPN2); Missouri State at New Mexico State (9pm, CBSSN) … Delaware and Missouri State are the only two newcomers to the FBS this season, and both are 3-3 so far.
Today's full slate.
🐅 Tigers trivia
(Craig Jones/Getty Images)
"Tigers," shared by five different FBS schools, is the most common nickname in major college football.
Question: Can you name those five schools?
Hint: SEC, ACC, American.
Answer at the bottom.
🏀 NBA League Pass rankings
(Stefan Milic/Yahoo Sports)
Which NBA teams will be the most fun to watch in 2025-26? Dive in.
Plus: 33 bold predictions, including one for every team
Trivia answer: Auburn, Clemson, LSU, Memphis, Missouri
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