Drake clearly has been enjoying Giannis Antetokounmpo's struggles during the Eastern Conference finals, but the superstar rapper's antics are rubbing some people the wrong way.

A senior executive for Octagon, the agency that represents Antetokounmpo, tweeted Wednesday that he has "never seen anything as disrespectful" as Drake's repeated trolling of Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks.

Georgios Dimitropoulos, the senior director for Octagon Basketball Europe, took to Twitter one day after the Toronto Raptors routed Antetokounmpo and the Bucks 120-102 in Game 4 to even the best-of-seven series at 2-2.

Drake once again was a visible presence from his usual seat near the Toronto bench throughout the game, laughing when Antetokounmpo missed free throws while roaming the sideline and even touching Raptors coach Nick Nurse.

Imagine a gig & an athlete on VIP seats, right next to the band, stands up on the stage just to show off during the entire game, knowing cameras are on him, occasionally even massaging the singer. Security&him both allow it. Never seen anything as disrespectful as this before...

— Georgios Dimitropoulos (@DimitropulosOCT) May 22, 2019

Antetokounmpo scored 25 points in Game 4 but shot just 6-of-10 from the free-throw line and airballed a free throw for the second consecutive contest. He scored just 12 points in Milwaukee's double-overtime loss in Game 3 and went 2-for-7 from the line.

Antetokounmpo was not asked about Drake after Tuesday's game, but countless Bucks fans ripped the rapper on Twitter.

Several of those tweets were posted in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story with the headline: "Milwaukee totally hates Drake, somehow allowed to roam the court and troll Giannis."

The series resumes in Milwaukee for Game 5 on Thursday night. But Drake will get one more chance to taunt Antetokounmpo and the Bucks when the series returns to Toronto on Saturday for Game 6.

WITH 24 MINUTES in the books, the LA Clippers are stuck in a steep hole, staring up at a 23-point halftime deficit on the road to the two-time defending champion Golden State Warriors. Clippers coach Doc Rivers addresses his players in the locker room at Oracle Arena, telling them that, somehow, they're going to figure it out -- that, somehow, they're going to win this game.

"Just hang in there long enough," Rivers says.

But their hole becomes even steeper in the second half of Game 2 of this first-round playoff series: Soon, they're down 31 points with 7:31 left in the third quarter. Then, JaMychal Green trails a driving Lou Williams and throws down a slam. Green finds a cutting Williams on the next possession for a quick 2. And on the very next play, Williams pushes the ball to Green for a corner 3. The 31-point lead is down to 24 in less than a minute and shrinks to 14 by the end of the third quarter.

Oracle Arena is silent as the Clippers continue their frenetic march -- an 11-point deficit becomes eight on a Danilo Gallinari 3 with just over six minutes left; the eight-point deficit becomes four on a Williams floater. All the way down the lead dwindles until rookie guard Landry Shamet nails a clutch 3-pointer late in the game to seal what becomes one of the greatest comebacks in NBA playoff history.

For the Clippers, such a turnaround isn't a surprise -- the rally in Oakland was their third win like this of the year. Before this season, no team had more than one 25-point comeback win in a season since play-by-play data became available in 1996-97.

It's not just the Clippers, though. Comebacks are on the come-up all across the league -- and dramatically so. In fact, there were 28 different comebacks from a 20-point-or-larger deficit during the 2018-19 season, up from 26 the previous year.

Before that, in the 23 seasons for which NBA Advanced Stats tracked in-game margins, there were never more than 19 such comebacks in any season.

So what happened?

ONE PLAUSIBLE EXPLANATION? The explosion of huge in-game leads.

Consider: There were 491 games out of 1,230 this season in which a team had a 20-point lead.

Previously, the most was 473 in 2016-17, and as recently as 2010-11, there were just 369 games featuring a lead of 20-plus points.

Nonetheless, even when we look at the winning percentage of teams with 20-point leads, the past two seasons stand out as featuring comebacks most frequently. Although it fluctuated from year to year, the average winning percentage for teams with 20-point leads at any time during a game from 1996-97 through 2016-17 was 97.2 percent. Over the past two seasons, that has dropped to 94.6 percent, meaning such comebacks have been nearly twice as common.

The two trend lines -- more 20-point leads, and more comebacks -- suggest a common cause: bigger swings within games, attributable both to increasing pace of play and the rising share of shots from beyond the 3-point line. Teams are building larger leads earlier (there were 44 games this season in which a team went up by at least 20 in the first quarter, as compared to 28 in 2015-16), but finding them more difficult to protect.

"It doesn't surprise me because I think the 3-point line has helped," Rivers says of the rise in comebacks. "For sure. In the old days, that would surprise me."

"Because of the proliferation of 3 shots, it's a great equalizer and certainly allows you to come back in games quicker than before," says Portland Trail Blazers coach Terry Stotts.

A polling of general managers, front-office executives and coaches across the league reflects the same sentiment.

"It's just exceptionally hard to preserve leads when the potency of offense these days is just so much greater," one veteran assistant coach says. "With the way it's trended, it puts so much pressure on the other team who finds themselves playing not to lose instead of playing to win."

HOW DOES A comeback happen?

If you're looking for signs that a lead is vulnerable, they're fairly common-sense. On average, teams that lose 20-point leads tend to be worse than those that come back. Weighted by the number of times they were involved, the teams on the wrong end of 20-point comebacks averaged 39 wins during the regular season to 43 for the teams that come back and win. So naturally, unexpected leads are more tenuous than predictable ones.

Three times this season, the lead reached 20 or more in the first quarter before the opposition eventually came back. Most frequently (16 times), the lead peaked in the second quarter. And nine times, teams came back from 20-point deficits in the second half.

Additionally, teams that amass 20-point leads tend to be unusually hot from 3-point range, making 55.3 percent of their shots from downtown up to the point where their advantage peaks, while the team that falls behind shoots just 28.5 percent on 3s. And then, over the course of the comeback, that advantage flips. During the comeback, trailing teams shoot 45.7 percent from beyond the arc to a dismal 22.2 percent for the teams that lose their lead -- more than doubling them up from long distance.

What's perhaps more interesting is what doesn't happen during the comebacks. The style of play doesn't change much, even if some coaches and executives believe -- anecdotally -- that it becomes a factor.

Pace of play is virtually the same before and after the biggest lead of the game, and trailing teams don't really go wild in terms of shooting 3s. (The percentage of their attempts from 3 does go up from 38.4 percent before the biggest lead to 41.2 percent during the comeback, but so do 3-point attempts for teams with the lead, from 35.6 percent to 37.5 percent, so this might be a product of teams shooting more 3s as they fatigue over the course of a game.)

That strategic standoff may reflect both coaches emphasizing opposite objectives to their teams.

"[With a lead] I find myself and my coaching staff all throughout the fourth quarter saying, 'Don't give up 3s. Don't give up 3s. Don't give up 3s.' I think that's the biggest mentality," Stotts said. "On the flip side of it, if you're the team coming from behind, you're basically saying, 'If you're open, let it fly. We've got to make up some ground.'"

The conventional wisdom that teams that shoot more 3s are vulnerable to comebacks doesn't bear out statistically. The 10 teams with the highest rates of 3-point attempts this season collectively won 96.4 percent of games they led by 20-plus, as compared to 91.7 percent for the bottom 10 teams in 3-point attempts and 94.4 percent for the other 10 teams.

Though teams that attempt a lot of 3s were more likely to come back (they won 9.9 percent of games they trailed by 20-plus, as compared to 3.0 percent for teams in the bottom 10), that could be explained by the fact that teams that attempt more 3s are generally more successful. The top 10 teams in 3-point attempt rate averaged 47 wins, as compared to 33 wins for the bottom 10 teams in 3s attempted.

ON THE LAST night of the NBA regular season, the Western Conference playoff picture -- and ultimately the path to the NBA Finals -- is in the hands of the Blazers' reserves.

A win against the lottery-bound Sacramento Kings, along with one by the Denver Nuggets over the Minnesota Timberwolves, would give the Blazers the third seed in the West and push the Rockets down to fourth and a potential semifinals matchup with the Warriors.

Yet Portland, wary of overtaxing its key players in the second game of a back-to-back and perhaps not wanting to face the Oklahoma City Thunder in the first round after getting swept in the regular-season series, has rested all five starters and three top reserves. Just six players, four of them in their first or second season, take the court against Sacramento.

Nearing halftime, the Kings take a 28-point lead. Throughout the West, travel plans and scouting reports start being made under the assumption the Blazers will finish fourth.

But then, as quickly as Sacramento had built the lead, it vanishes. Portland's makeshift squad, three players from which (Jake Layman, Anfernee Simons and Gary Trent) play all 48 minutes, make up the deficit, setting up a first-round series against Oklahoma City that the Blazers would win behind more predictable heroics from All-Star Damian Lillard.

"That comeback changed the dynamics of the playoffs for a lot of teams, but certainly for us," Stotts said during the second round en route to a Western Conference finals loss to Golden State. "You'd like to think that we still would have won the first series and we would have been competitive in the second series, but it certainly did change the dynamics of the playoffs."

As important as the Portland's 28-point comeback was, Stotts doesn't buy that it's emblematic of the larger trend.

"The problem with the Sacramento game is it was both teams' third team out there, so I don't know if I could lump that in with NBA regular-season games," he said. "It was at home, there was a lot of momentum, you had a lot of young guys running around out there playing hard."

If Portland's comeback was atypical because of the reserves involved, so was the Clippers' rally from a 31-point deficit because of the setting, the opponent and the playoff stakes. Rivers preached belief in the locker room, but it goes beyond that.

"You have to believe that you can [come back]," he said later. "But then you need something that will happen on the floor that allows them to believe. Belief ain't good enough."

What a team needs next, according to Rivers, are manageable goals -- such as shrinking a deficit to 18 points, then 14, then 12.

"Then once you get it to 12, you don't have to talk about goals anymore," Rivers said. "Now they're going [to think], 'We're going to win this.'"

TOKYO -- Pitcher Koji Uehara, whose dominant season in relief helped the Boston Red Sox win the 2013 World Series, has retired with Japan's Yomiuri Giants -- the team that he first played for in Japan.

The 44-year-old Uehara announced his retirement at a news conference in Tokyo, saying it was time to step away after he was unable to perform well early in the season for the Giants' farm team.

Uehara joined the Baltimore Orioles in 2009, but he became a star in 2013 with the Boston Red Sox, who defeated the St. Louis Cardinals that year in the World Series. He was dominant in relief that season for the Red Sox and it was Uehara who threw the last pitch in the final game when Boston beat the Cardinals 6-1 to win the World Series.

Uehara was 22-26 in his nine-year career in MLB and pitched his final season in 2017 with the Chicago Cubs. He also pitched for the Texas Rangers.

Uehara started with the Yomiuri Giants in 1999 and pitched for 10 seasons in Japan before moving to MLB.

The Indians on Wednesday designated Carlos Gonzalez for assignment after a five-week stint in Cleveland in which the outfielder hit .210.

Gonzalez had started the season at Triple-A Columbus after signing a minor league contract with the Indians following 11 seasons with the Colorado Rockies. He was called up April 14, and had two home runs, seven RBIs and 33 strikeouts in 30 games.

His final game with Cleveland was an 0-for-2 effort during Tuesday's 5-3 loss to the Oakland Athletics.

Catcher Eric Haase was called up from Columbus in a corresponding move.

Haase could fill in for Roberto Perez, who was diagnosed with a concussion after he was struck in the mask by a foul ball in the third inning of Tuesday's game. The Indians are not placing Perez on the seven-day concussion list.

Major Michael Rotich suspended for 10 years due to “dishonest and corrupt” conduct during drug tests

The head coach of Kenya’s Rio 2016 Olympic Games athletics team, Major Michael Rotich, has been banned for 10 years by the IAAF ethics board.

A panel of the board found that Major Rotich “sought to undermine anti-doping controls and to obtain a personal financial benefit in doing so”, adding that his conduct had been “dishonest and corrupt”.

The IAAF ethics board case arose following allegations in a Sunday Times article entitled “Rio Olympics hit by new doping scandal” and accompanying video footage published on August 7, 2016.

An IAAF ethics board decision document reads in part: “This decision concerns allegations that the Defendant, Major Michael Rotich, agreed to provide advance notice of drug tests to athletes and/or coaches in exchange for money.

“The allegation is that he knew when doing so that this would allow athletes to flush banned substances from their systems in order to circumvent doping tests.

“It is also alleged that the Defendant suggested excuses which athletes could use to avoid being penalised for missing a drug test.”

It adds: “At all relevant times, Major Rotich was the Head of Athletics Kenya North Rift Province and he was the Head Coach of the Kenyan Athletics team for the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro held from 5 – 21 August 2016.”

The IAAF ethics board decision document, which includes further details of the Sunday Times investigation, can be downloaded here.

“In January 2016, George Arbuthnott and David Collins, two undercover reporters from the Sunday Times, met Joseph Mwangi and Major Rotich in Kenya,” reads the decision document in part. “The journalists purported to be the sports manager and coach of a fictional team of British athletes. Mr Mwangi offered to sell the reporters the banned substance EPO for use by their athletes.

“The reporters met with Major Rotich on 21 January 2016, 22 January 2016 and 21 February 2016. During those meetings, which were secretly filmed, the reporters explained that they planned to dope eight British athletes with EPO and asked Major Rotich’s assistance to protect their athletes from testing.”

While the IAAF ethics board panel noted that there is no evidence that Major Rotich provided advance notice of doping tests to specific athletes, or that any payments actually changed hands, it found that he “acted corruptly and in deliberate violation of core principles of the Code (IAAF Code of Ethics).”

According to the decision document, when Major Rotich was confronted with the footage by the reporters “the (Sunday Times) article claims that he said he had gone along with the interview because he was investigating the reporters and Mr Mwangi because he wished to protect his athletes”.

Major Rotich has a right of appeal against the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Meanwhile, the Athletics Integrity Unit has announced that Bahrain’s Olympic marathon silver medallist Eunice Jepkirui Kirwa has been provisionally suspended after testing positive for erythropoietin (EPO).

The AIU confirms Provisional Suspensions against Indian sprinter Gomathi Marimuthu and Bahraini long-distance runner Eunice Jepkirui Kirwa, both for a violation of the @iaaforg Anti-Doping Rules.
Find out more ➡ https://t.co/opInfkVlnV#AIUNews #CleanSport pic.twitter.com/teT6llQDrO

— Athletics Integrity Unit (@aiu_athletics) May 21, 2019

Kirwa, who was born in Kenya but switched allegiance to compete for Bahrain, secured silver in Rio after clocking 2:24:13 behind winner Jemima Sumgong of Kenya, who has since been banned following a positive test for EPO.

Diamond League could be on its way to North East England due to Birmingham being unavailable

World-class athletics is poised to return to Gateshead International Stadium as the North East England venue looks set to act as a home for televised events while the Alexander Stadium in Birmingham undergoes redevelopment ahead of the 2022 Commonwealth Games.

Gateshead held a number of British televised track and field events at the turn of the millennium and staged the European Team Championships in 2013 – in addition to its predecessor, the European Cup – in 1989 and 2000.

Great Britain even won the European Cup in 1989 (main image, above) and 2000 at Gateshead in exciting style. In the latter, for example, the host nation fielded a depleted squad due to many stars saving themselves for the Sydney Olympics a few months later, but the Bob Weir-captained team still won by half a point from Germany in a nail-biting finish to the weekend (pictured below).

More recently Birmingham and London have been the venues for the two IAAF Diamond League meetings held in Britain.

But it is thought Gateshead could now be in the running to host a Diamond League while Alexander Stadium is redeveloped.

The Chronicle newspaper on Tyneside reports that councillors in Gateshead have agreed to stage at least three major athletics events, despite the potentially high costs.

The Chronicle says: “If the competitions are hosted in the borough it’s estimated to cost the council £320,000 per event, which will be paid for out the authority’s Economic Growth, Culture and Place Shaping reserve.”

The newspaper also reports that Gateshead could be tempted to bid to stage the European Athletics Championships.

Events like the English Schools Championships have been held at Gateshead in recent years – and runners in the Simplyhealth Great North Run pass the stadium each year in their thousands – but it has not staged international televised athletics lately.

The venue has seen many fine athletics moments over the years. Pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva, 100m sprinter Asafa Powell and distance runner Brendan Foster are among those to set world records at Gateshead with local hero Foster in particular popularising the venue in the 1970s.

Culprits resign after complaints of sexism
By ALAN THATCHER – Squash Mad Editor

Female squash players in Spain have complained bitterly after a sex toy was among the prizes on offer in a recent tournament.

Competitors in the recent Asturias Championship were furious as female participants discovered that prizes included a vibrator and a waxing kit.

The incident resulted in the tournament winner, Elisabet Sado, complaining about host club Squash Oviedo to the regional Asturias squash federation.

Following an enquiry, it is understood that club officials responsible for sourcing the prizes have resigned.

The incident received international coverage via the BBC and Ms Sado said: “Things have got to change.”

As well as receiving a trophy, she was given a Durex vibrator for winning the competition. The runner-up and semi-finalists received prizes that included hair-removal wax and a foot scraper to remove hard skin.

The prizes were forwarded to the local federation along with a letter of complaint.

Ms Sado told the BBC: “We were very surprised, very shocked. I think probably they just wanted to be funny or different, but we think it’s very sexist. There is too much discrimination against women.”

At the highest level in squash, most major tournaments are offering equal prize money to men and women.

But this kind of stunt is an insult to female players and the game itself. The morons responsible should be kicked out of the sport for good.

According to the BBC, Ms Sadó said she was pleased that the incident had resulted in people across Spain talking about sexism in sport.

She added: “I think the important thing is that there is a public debate and laws in Spain, and more protection so women can practise sport.”

BBC report here

+++

Readers are invited to leave comments below. 

Bristol Bears head coach Pat Lam has signed a new long-term contract to become director of rugby at the club.

Former Newcastle, Northampton and Samoa back row Lam, 50, will remain at Ashton Gate on a deal until 2023.

Bears finished in an impressive ninth place in the Premiership this season, just five points off the top four and a place in the European Champions Cup.

"I'm proud to commit my future to Bristol and it was an easy decision to make," Lam said.

Bristol recorded the highest Premiership points total for a promoted side since 2007 with nine wins from 22 matches.

Lam joined the club in 2017, helping them clinch promotion from the Championship at the first attempt.

"We've set out a plan to bring a Premiership trophy to Ashton Gate and we're at the start of that journey," he said.

"Although my title changes to Director of Rugby, my passion and enjoyment for hands-on coaching remains stronger than ever. I will be in a tracksuit on the field as long as I can still walk!

"We are striving for the Bristol Bears to be world class at everything we do, so it's my responsibility to ensure every department fulfils that expectation."

Owner Steve Lansdown said Lam had "reinvigorated" the club and "given us a clear purpose and direction for the future".

"He has created an environment and team spirit that the whole city has bought into," he added.

"Myself, [chairman] Chris Booy and the board are hungry to see Bristol competing at the very top of domestic and European competition. Under Pat's leadership, that ambition can become a reality."