This past week in sports has not let us down, from jaw-dropping touchdowns to firings of major personnel. Fans have not been disappointed recently, so let’s dive into what has happened.
LOCAL SPORTS:
The Las Vegas Golden Knights kicked off the regular season against their pre-season rivals, the Colorado Avalanche, last Tuesday, October 9th. The Knights won 8-4 for the first game of their eighth season. The Avalanche’s Mikko Rantanen scored the opening goal, but the Knights didn’t waste any time to catch up, scoring their first goal less than a minute later. The Knights went on to score 2 more goals that period and 5 more throughout the rest of the game. The Knights played two more games last week, against the Blues and the Ducks, and both were wins.
The Las Vegas Raiders took a devastating loss yesterday, losing 32-13 against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Vegas lost multiple touchdowns to out-of-bounds calls and false starts. With a missed punt in the first quarter, the Raiders set themselves up for failure. The Steelers were established as the powerhouses of the game early on with multiple longshot touchdowns including the 36-yard drive by Najee Harris in the third quarter.
NFL:
Ahead of week six in the NFL regular season, New York Jets coach, Robert Saleh, was fired. The decision comes after poor performance under his coaching last season and for the first five weeks that put the Jets behind the Buffalo Bills in the AFC standings with only two wins to their three losses.
Sunday Night Football had absolutely no shortage of exhilarating plays in the fourteen games played yesterday. Of those games, the most dominant performance was from the Detroit Lions who won 47-9 against the Dallas Cowboys. Dallas took an early lead in the first quarter with a field goal, but David Montgomery of the Lions took the first touchdown of the game to make the score 7-3. The Cowboys only ran a total of 251 yards compared to Detroit’s 492. While the Lions scored 10 points in the fourth quarter, Dallas scored nothing and only took three points in each of the last quarters.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers took another dominant win– this time against the New Orleans Saints. The game had plenty of 50+ yard touchdowns, with Rashid Shaheed taking a very impressive 54-yard punt return for one of those touchdowns. Chris Godwin took the other long touchdown, driving 55 yards to take the lead of the game from the Saints after they took a dominant start. Tampa only scored seven points in the second quarter to the Saints’ 27, but with New Orleans not taking a single point after that, Tampa took a fairly easy win.
NBA
The NBA is still in the preseason with the regular season set to start on the 22nd of October. The game between the Orlando Magic and the New Orleans Pelicans on Friday was canceled due to Hurricane Milton affecting the area around Orlando, where the game was being held. The match was not rescheduled for another date.
The Pelicans went on to play against another Florida team, the Miami Heat, yesterday where they unfortunately lost. The finish was fairly close with New Orleans scoring more in the fourth quarter, but they still weren’t able to come back and take the lead. The game finished 99-101 with the Heat winning.
MOTORSPORTS:
Kyle Larson won the Bank of America Roval 400 on Sunday with a 1.2-second lead on Christopher Bell in P2. The pole position award was taken by Shane Van Gisbergen with an 82.706 second lap. Tyler Reddick was close to pole– only 0.057 seconds behind. Reddick wasn’t just close to pole, however, as he could have been knocked out in the round of 12 and become the first regular season champion to miss out on the next round. Joey Logano, who was wrecked in the last race, was eliminated from the round of 12 by four points to the cut-off line just ahead of Austin Cindric, Daniel Suarez, and Chase Briscoe.
American team, MoneyGram Haas F1 Team, has announced that– effective immediately– Toyota Gazoo Racing will make their return to Formula 1 as the Official Technical Partner for the team. Toyota previously dropped out of the series in 2009 after 8 years of disappointment for the company and a huge loss of investment due to the global recession.
Current Indy NXT champion, Louis Foster, has signed a multi-year deal with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing for IndyCar. Foster won this year’s Indy NXT championship with Andretti Global by over 100 points to the second place driver, Jacob Abel.
THIS WEEK:
This week, the Golden Knights will take on another tri-game schedule, going against the Washington Capitals, the Tampa Bay Lightning, and the Florida Panthers. The Knights currently lead undefeated the Pacific Division and hope to carry on with that momentum through the rest of the season.
NASCAR will kick off the playoffs round of eight at our own Las Vegas Motor Speedway for the South Point 400. Kyle Larson currently leads the playoff standings after advancing early along with William Byron and Christopher Bell.
Formula 1 will return after a four-week break for the United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. The race is on the 20th of October at 12:00 PM. Liam Lawson will make his “full-time” debut during the race but starts with an immediate 10-place grid penalty.
Our Las Vegas Raiders will play against the L.A. Rams at Sofi Stadium next Sunday, October 20th. The Raiders will hope to make a significant improvement after the devastating loss they took against the Pittsburgh Steelers yesterday.
