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SPORTS Thursday, March 2, 2017 East Oregonian Page 3B Men’s College Basketball UCLA quiets Washington to finish out home slate By BETH HARRIS Associated Press PAC-12 LOS ANGELES — Bryce Alford scored 29 points and No. 3 UCLA routed Washington 98-66 on Wednesday night for its eighth straight win despite losing starter TJ Leaf to injury. Lonzo Ball added 19 points, seven rebounds and eight assists for the Bruins (27-3, 14-3 Pac-12), who improved to 15-1 at home. They completed a season sweep of Washington after winning by 41 points on the road last month. Leaf twisted his left ankle 5 minutes into the game and didn’t return, but that didn’t hurt the Bruins. They led by 21 points at halftime and extended the lead to 42 in the second half. Noah Dickerson tied his career high with 23 points for the Huskies (9-20, 2-15). They have lost 11 in a row and 13 of 14. Their 20 turn- overs led to 34 points by the Bruins. Alford hit three consecutive 3-pointers in the game’s final 5:15. He finished with eight, one off his career high, and the Bruins had 14. Early in the second half, Ball put on a show. The freshman phenom took a bounce pass from Thomas AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill UCLA guard Bryce Alford, left, shoots as Washington guard David Crisp defends during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game, Wednesday, March 1, 2017, in Los Angeles. Welsh and scored on a fastbreak layup. He and Alford passed the ball back and forth before Alford stepped back in the left corner and hit a 3. On the Bruins’ next play, Ball swiped David Crisp, picked up the ball bouncing low on the court and dunked. He later made back-to- back 3-pointers. The Bruins opened the game by hitting their first four shots, including three 3-pointers, for an 11-point lead. They were ahead by seven when Leaf got hurt. He stepped on the foot of a Huskies player as they came down Washington #3 UCLA 66 98 from rebounding. Leaf landed on the court and stayed down until he was helped up by two staff members. He limped off with his arms draped over the staffers and went into the locker room. He didn’t return and a team spokesman said Leaf would be reevaluated on Thursday. The Bruins rolled on. They went on a 16-2 run that extended their lead to 37-16. Six players scored in the spurt, including three points by G.G. Goloman and a three-point play by Ike Anigbogu, who both entered the game after Leaf left. Aaron Holiday’s alley-oop pass set up Ball’s dunk. BIG PICTURE Washington: The Huskies continue to be in a major funk, just one spot out of the bottom of the Pac-12 standings. Lorenzo Romar is the longest tenured coach in the league with 15 years at the helm and the program faces a long slog back to respectability. Next week’s league tourney in Las Vegas is the end of the Huskies’ season. UCLA: The Bruins were the only Pac-12 school to go unde- feated in February at 7-0, the first time the school was unbeaten in that month since the 1994-95 team went 9-0 on its way to winning a record 11th national championship. All three of their defeats have been in conference; the third-place Bruins need a weekend sweep and losses by first-place Arizona and second- place Oregon to grab a share of the league regular season title. LAKERS NIGHT OUT Lakers coach Luke Walton, guard D’Angelo Russell and rookie Brandon Ingram, who played one season at Duke, attended the game. Former Laker and Clipper Lamar Odom chatted with Walton. UP NEXT Washington: Visits Southern California on Saturday in the regular season finale. UCLA: Hosts Washington State on Saturday in the regular season finale and last home game for seniors Alford, Isaac Hamilton and Jerrold Smith, who has played a total of 20 minutes this season. NHL NFL Salary cap gets $12 million boost By BARRY WILNER Associated Press NEW YORK — The NFL salary cap for the upcoming season will be $167 million per team, up more than $12 million over last year. The league and the NFL Players Association compile the cap from specific revenues, and it has risen annually. It was $143.28 million two years ago. This is the fourth consecutive year the cap has risen at least $10 million. Player benefits also are included under the 10-year labor agreement reached to end the 2011 lockout. That comes to $37 million per team, bringing the players’ total compensation package to over $200 million per club for the first time. In comparison, baseball had 12 teams with luxury-tax payrolls beyond $167 million in 2016. Since 2011, the cap has increased by $47 million. Also, 2017 is the first year of a four-season minimum spending period of 89 percent per club and 95 percent leaguewide. The added cap room should have a major impact on teams’ spending when the NFL’s new year begins next Thursday. “A lot,” Seahawks general manager John Schneider said Wednesday at the NFL combine in Indianapolis. “It’s an ongoing process, trying to make sure you can hang on to your top players all the time, what we view as our core players. A lot of times when we do those deals we’re like: ‘Hey, look, there’s going to be some tough decisions that are made. There’s going to be some guys that have to leave.’ It’s just part of the game. “This year in particular I think you see there’s a huge discrepancy in terms of cap space with a number of teams. It’s what the NFL’s about. It’s about parity, and so you have those teams that are just going to be able to that much more than you possibly can. It’s all about trying to move those pieces around and try to stay in the game with the free agents and your own free agents as much as you possibly can.” Pittsburgh GM Kevin Colbert believes more teams are taking the path the Steelers usually do of developing players they draft and rewarding their own free agents. “As a result, you’re seeing less and less quality free agents (on the market),” Colbert said. “There’s an inherent danger in that, because some of the players who are hitting the market with the number of dollars that are available might not be quite worth what they’re going to get paid because of the supply and demand. “I think that it reinforces that you’re wanting to sign your own and keep your own.” Yet, beginning next week, the money will flow to many free agents, even though this crop seems lacking in franchise-type players. ——— AP Pro Football Writer Arnie Stapleton in Indianapolis contrib- uted to this report. Expansion draft, playoff races keeps trade deadline day unusually quiet By JOHN WAWROW Associated Press Blame Vegas and an ever-tight- ening playoff race for turning the NHL’s trade deadline day into mostly a dud. With teams jockeying to stay in contention and eager to preserve their protected lists to brace for the NHL expansion draft in June, there were only a few notable deals completed before the deadline struck Wednesday afternoon. Officially, the NHL said, there were 18 trades completed involving 33 players, the lowest totals since April 2013, when 17 deals were made involving 30 players. Even so, quantity didn’t equate to quality on Wednesday, with 17 of the players dealt having been placed on waivers at one point this season. And of the 18 deals completed, only 12 involved NHL players. The others were limited to minor leaguers. “Obviously, everybody is looking at expansion,” Colorado Avalanche general manager Joe Sakic said. “It’s a unique year, a different year. And expansion did weigh into a lot of teams’ deci- sions.” Sakic was at least one of the GMs able to move a name player. The Avalanche traded veteran forward Jarome Iginla to the Los Angeles Kings for a conditional fourth-round pick in the 2018 draft. The only other notable move involved the Detroit Red Wings, who traded veteran forward Thomas Vanek to the Florida Panthers for defenseman Dylan McIlrath and a conditional third- round pick in June. Veteran defenseman Mark Streit changed teams twice and stayed in Pennsylvania. First, Streit was traded by Philadelphia to Tampa Bay for forward Valtteri Filppula and two conditional draft picks. Then the Lightning dealt Streit to Pittsburgh for a 2018 fourth-round pick. The Boston Bruins acquired forward Drew Stafford from Winnipeg. More notable was the list of players staying put, including Arizona’s Shane Doan and Radim Vrbata, Buffalo’s defensive tandem of Dmitry Kulikov and Cody Franson, and Avalanche forwards Matt Duchene and Gabriel Landeskog. It wasn’t for a lack of trying, Sabres general manager Tim Murray said. “I couldn’t make a trade,” Murray said, noting he made numerous attempts to deal Kulikov and Franson, both of whom are in the final years of their contracts. “Am I disappointed? Of course I’m disappointed.” Murray said the Vegas Golden Knights played a role ahead of their first season next fall. In being limited to protecting only eight players, teams placed an emphasis on keeping youngsters because they don’t have to be exposed in the expansion draft. One strategy: Exposing aging, high-priced players in hopes they’re selected by Vegas. Red Wings general manager Ken Holland said the expansion draft in June and a stagnant salary cap are reasons teams are turning to younger players and draft picks, making it more difficult to make trades. “Everybody understands, no matter where you are in the standings the importance of youth moving through your system,” Holland said. “It’s all factored into all of our thinking at the trade deadline. It’s going to factor into the expansion draft and it’s going to factor into the thinking once the expansion draft is over at the June entry draft. It’s the league, and it’s ever evolving.” The Golden Knights officially opened for business on Wednesday when the final installment of owner Bill Foley’s $500 million expansion payment was cleared. Vegas can begin making trades for draft picks and unsigned prospects and sign free agents whose college or European league seasons are over. The Canadiens were also relatively busy, beefing up their Atlantic Division team by acquiring checking-line veteran Dwight King from Los Angeles. This continued a trend for Montreal to add toughness to a team that’s 4-2 since Claude Julien replaced Michel Therrien as coach. BULLDOGS: Play first round game at Bend on Friday night at 5:30 p.m. Continued from 1B Juul had given Hermiston (14-10) a 4-0 lead, and the Bulldogs opened the game on a 9-0 run. Hermiston led by double-digits much of the game, but an eight-point spurt from the Pioneers trimmed the lead to seven to start the third quarter. But Hermiston responded with another nine- point run and that was the last trouble they would see out of the Pioneers. The Bulldogs shot 15-for-32 (46.9 percent) from the field, but a whopping 72.2 percent (13-18) from inside the three-point arc for the No. 2 team out of the Columbia River Conference. “We talked about them jumping on top early, and putting (Sandy) away early, and I thought they did a good job of that,” Rodriguez said. “We had never seen them play zone, either, and they tried to slow us down a little bit there. But I thought Maddy (Juul) and Kynzee (Padilla) did a good job kind of establishing aggressive- ness.” Juul finished with a game-high 15 points and nine rebounds, and she and Padilla each had five points in the first quarter as Hermiston broke down the Sandy zone with lots of quick, short passes. Padilla finished with nine points and nine rebounds, and Jazyln Romero scored all of her 11 points in the second half. Rileigh Andreason added eight points, and Hayden Meyers had three assists and a pair of steals. Sandy got its first point of the game when Marley Salveter hit a free throw with 2:07 left in the first quarter, and no Pioneer finished with more than four points. Sandy shot 11-for-47 (23.4 percent) from the field. Hermiston took its first double-digit lead when senior guard Shaelynn Gilbert stepped inside the arc to drain a long jumper that made it 15-5 with 5:13 to play in the second quarter, and Andreason had baskets to answer Sandy later in the half and make sure the lead didn’t drop below 12. Hermiston took a 24-9 lead into the locker room at halftime, and although the Pioneers hadn’t shown much yet, Rodriguez warned the Bulldogs to be ready for a second-half push. It started right away as Sandy’s Leah Barnett hit a three-pointer 22 seconds in. The Bulldogs missed three shots on the other end, then Taya Vance scored a putback and Mattie Burns nailed a wide open three-pointer in the corner to cut Hermiston’s lead to 24-17 after two minutes. Rodriguez called a timeout there, and the Bulldogs were able to regroup and come out with Andreason hitting a short jumper in the lane to stop Sandy’s run. Padilla scored a pair of free throws to make it 28-17, and Romero then got into the action with three the hard way to make Hermiston’s Maddy Juul fights for the ball with Sandy’s Makenna Wells in the Bulldogs’ 53-29 win against the Pioneers on Wednesday in Hermiston. Staff photo by E.J. Harris Staff photo by E.J. Harris Hermiston’s Rileigh Andreason puts up a shot between Sandy’s Leah Barnett (43) and Makenna Wells in the Bulldogs’ 53-29 win against the Pioneers on Wednes- day in Hermiston. it 31-17 with 4:32 left in the third. That was the closest Sandy would get the rest of the way. “One of the things we talk about all the time is that those first five minutes of the third quarter are big. They’re game changers,” Rodriguez said. “You can either pull away and get up big, win big, or they come back. And (Sandy) came out with energy, and I just told the girls in the locker room I was really proud of the fact that they took basically a blow to the stomach and they responded pretty quickly with some baskets. And that’s what we’ll need here going into Friday and hopefully next week.” The Bulldogs did have a scary moment late in the game when Gilbert went down with an ankle injury and needed to be helped from the court. “We’ll see, it’s tough to tell,” Rodriguez said of her availability. “Obviously it’s a pretty bad injury because she was wearing ankle braces, like all the girls do. We’ll just take it from there and we’ll miss her, but we have very capable back-ups and one of the things I like is our bench is pretty deep.” Gilbert would have bounce back pretty quickly to suit up in their next game as the twelfth-seeded Bulldogs will be headed to fifth-seeded Bend on Friday for their first-round game. Tip-off is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. ——— SHS 3 6 14 6 — 29 HHS 11 13 14 15 — 53 SANDY — T. Dwyre 4, T. Vance 4, M. Wells 4, H. McKinney 4, L. Barnett 3, M. Burns 3, M. Salveter 3, C. Brown 2, I. Cabrera 2, I. Kansala, E. Hutchins, A. Thomas. HERMISTON — M. Juul 15, J. Romero 11, K. Padilla 9, R. Andreason 8, S. Gilbert 4, H. Meyers 2, H. Thompson 2, S. Stefani 2, M. Wilson, R. Meyers, A. Green. 3-pointers — SHS 2; HHS 2. Free throws — SHS 5-9; HHS 21-29. Fouls — SHS 21; HHS 9. Fouled out — M. Wells, H. McKinney (SHS). ———— Contact Matt at mentrup@eastoregonian. com or 541-966-0838.
