Larson double quest exemplifies NASCAR, IndyCar cooperation
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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
Please excuse Kyle Larson if he looks a bit distracted this weekend at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. No, his mind won’t be occupied with his upcoming run at a second NASCAR Cup Series title, with the postseason only weeks away. No, it won’t even be occupied with concern over how his teammates will recover from last week’s debacle in Michigan.
During the Saturday-Sunday IndyCar-NASCAR doubleheader, if we catch Larson dreamily staring off into the skies of Speedway, Indiana, like Luke Skywalker looking toward the sunset, it’s because he is already thinking about the next time he will be at Indy with a helmet in hand. He will be there to make his long-sought first start in the Indianapolis 500 … all while commuting back and forth to his stock car day job in Charlotte.
“Of course, I am excited, so excited,” the 31-year-old said. “But ever since we announced that I would be doing to the Indy-Charlotte double back in January, I have also been constantly thinking about the logistics of it, how we are going to pull it off. Especially when I am in Indianapolis, and that’s been a lot.”
Anyone who has had their eyes open over the past eight months knows that. He’s popped into town a couple of times for seat fittings and meetings with Arrow McLaren, the team that will field his 2024 Indy 500 ride. And amid the hundreds of thousands who packed the Brickyard over Memorial Day weekend, Larson was spotted strolling Gasoline Alley, the pit lane and, perhaps most importantly, the roads around the Speedway and the helipads located in and around the Racing Capital of the World.
“We are here just to check it all out, because as a racing fan I have always wanted to see this, I’ve just been a little busy racing somewhere else,” Larson explained, laughing, on Sunday morning, May 30, sneakily working his way through the race-day crowds. “But really, this is about getting a feel for this place today. What are the crowds like? What are the roads like? How amped up am I going to be and how am I going to navigate getting out of here? We don’t want any surprises a year from now. At least not that we can avoid.”
Soon after that conversation, Larson ran a de facto dress rehearsal. He bolted via golf cart to that helipad, where a chopper carried him to the Indianapolis airport, where a plane flew him to Concord, North Carolina, where an SUV took him to Charlotte Motor Speedway, where he ran up front in that night’s Coca-Cola 600 before spinning off a restart, wrecking and finished 30th.
Of course, the real deal in May 2024 will feel much different than that. And there will most definitely be surprises. Any of the other five drivers who have taken their swings at the double could tell Larson about that.
John Andretti, who died in 2020, was the first to pull it off way back in 1994, when Larson was not yet 2 years old. The following year Davy Jones failed to qualify for Charlotte. Rain literally dampened Robby Gordon’s first attempt in ’97, and rain delays caused him to be late to Charlotte in 2000 and to leave Indy early in ’04, but he successfully did it twice, in 2002 and 2003. Tony Stewart did it twice, finishing top-10 in both races both times, and Kurt Busch finished sixth and 40th in 2014.
“It is way more physically demanding than you think it’s going to be,” Stewart said. “The first time you think, ‘OK, it’s just racing, so give me some lunch on the plane and I’ll be fine.’ But the next time you do it, it’s like, ‘No, get me a doctor and some damn IV bags and whatever else you think might help,’ because it kicks your ass.
“But the big thing that is different now, what’s going to be great for Kyle, is the schedule and the cooperation. Back in the day there were times when you’d look at NASCAR and at IndyCar and ask, ‘Do y’all actually want me to do this or not?’ Because getting them to play ball could be hard. They didn’t want to.”
His dream came true ❤️
In 2005, @TonyStewart FINALLY won at #IMS when he scored his first Brickyard 400 and delivered one of the best celebrations in all of sports.
Nearly 20 years later, we still get chills.#TheBrickyard | #NASCAR pic.twitter.com/YcALs3ZoSI
— Indianapolis Motor Speedway (@IMS) August 9, 2023
They do now. See: this weekend, the third straight summer of an IndyCar-NASCAR doubleheader at IMS. Any old-school garage or paddock veteran will tell you that for most of their lives, the idea of America’s two premier racing series sharing the same facility on the same weekend was as expected as the Red Sox and Yankees sharing the same team bus.
It’s a rift powered by corporate rivalry that goes way back. According to legend, more than a half century ago, Tony Hulman, the man who saved the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, spotted Bill France Sr., the man who founded NASCAR, snooping around Gasoline Alley and promptly had him tossed out. In 1959, when France christened his new Daytona International Speedway, among the first cars to roar around that high-banked facility was an IndyCar driven by Marshall Teague, who was killed while attempting a closed-course speed record. Later that spring, 1958 Indy 500 runner-up George Amick was killed in an IndyCar race at Daytona.
Decades later, IndyCars had never run on another NASCAR-affiliated racetrack, and when asked when it might happen again, France replied, “When hell freezes over.”
Indy loyalists were angered by the arrival of “taxi cabs” and the Brickyard 400 in 1994. NASCAR’s devotees reluctantly watched Indy Racing League doubleheaders with the NASCAR Truck Series in the late 1990s. When asked if he would ever consider driving for boss Roger Penske at Indy, Rusty Wallace famously replied, “I wouldn’t get out of an electric chair to drive one of those things.”
In the past decade, though, the cross-pollination between Indy and NASCAR became too frequent to not begin changing the culture of both worlds, especially how they viewed each other. IndyCar president Jay Frye moved to open wheel racing a decade ago after years in NASCAR team front offices, from MB2 Motorsports to Dale Earnhardt Inc. to Red Bull. When the Indy 500 celebrated its 100th running in 2016, Frye invited NASCAR brass, including then-CEO Brian France, to have a VIP experience of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing. That group included then-NASCAR CMO and now-president Steve Phelps.
And anyone who knows American motorsports history should not be surprised that Larson’s boss at Hendrick Motorsports greenlit the idea of the double. Because that same boss has always wished he could have attempted it himself.
“I am excited for Kyle, I am excited for us and I am excited for both NASCAR and IndyCar,” HMS vice chairman Jeff Gordon said in May. Gordon famously tried to land an open wheel ride as a youngster but was rebuffed by Indy’s teams at the time for his lack of sponsorship, which forced him to look south to NASCAR. The five-time Brickyard 400 winner didn’t attend his first Indy 500 until 2015, as the honorary pace car driver. “But if I am being honest, I am also super jealous. In my world, this just wasn’t really possible for me. I just hope he lets me ride along with him next May.
“We’ve all competed in this motorsports space for so long. I’ve always wondered, it would be something to see what might happen if we finally worked together, wouldn’t it?”
Now they do.
Competition for ticket sales and television eyeballs is never going away, but when the pandemic forced everyone to reexamine how they did business and how they stacked their schedule, NASCAR and IndyCar conjured up their first top-shelf IMS doubleheader in 2020. While other out-of-the-box ideas from that summer have faded from memory, this one has continued, for now.
There are no crossover moves being attempted this weekend, but those on the world’s most famous racetrack, racing with or without fenders, hope that the concept keeps sticking around. Especially the guy who will be attempting to run both series on the same day a little more than nine months from now.
“I just think that if you are a racing fan, then you are a racing fan, and that includes those of us who are driving,” said Larson. “The chance to see as many different cool cars at once, who wouldn’t want that? I know I do. Clearly, right?”
Sports
Ranking the top 50 players in the Stanley Cup playoffs: Where do Hellebuyck, MacKinnon, Kucherov land?
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Neil Paine
As the 2025 Stanley Cup playoffs began, a number of storylines dominated the conversation: Can Connor Hellebuyck turn his historic regular season into a Dominik Hašek-esque postseason run for the ages for the Winnipeg Jets? Will the Colorado Avalanche–Dallas Stars showdown be a quasi-Cup Final right away in Round 1? Is it finally the year for Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl to win it all, after the Edmonton Oilers came so close last season?
But beyond the matchups and narratives, it’s also a good time to take stock of which players bring the most value into the postseason.
That’s where goals above replacement (GAR) comes in — my evolved spin on earlier all-in-one value stats like Tom Awad’s goals versus threshold and Hockey-Reference’s point shares. The core idea of GAR is to measure a player’s total impact — in offense, defense or goaltending — above what a generic “replacement-level” player might provide at the same position. It also strives to ensure the league’s value is better balanced by position: 60% of leaguewide GAR is distributed to forwards, 30% to defensemen and 10% to goaltenders.
To then assess who might be most valuable on the eve of this year’s playoffs, I plugged GAR into a system inspired by Bill James’ concept of an “established level” of performance; in this case, a weighted average of each player’s GAR over the past three regular seasons, with more emphasis on 2024-25. And to keep the metric from undervaluing recent risers, we also apply a safeguard: no player’s established level can be lower than 75% of his most recent season’s GAR.
The result is a blend of peak, recent, and sustained performance — the players on playoff-bound teams who have been great, are currently great or are still trending upward — in a format that gives us a sense of who could define this year’s postseason.
One final note: Injured players who were expected to miss all or substantial parts of the playoffs were excluded from the ranking. Sorry, Jack Hughes.
With that in mind, here are the top 50 skaters and goaltenders on teams in the 2025 playoff field, according to their three-year established level of value, ranked by the numbers:
Five series of the 2025 Stanley Cup playoffs have begun, and two more will begin Monday. Meanwhile, the two matchups in the Central Division are on to Game 2.
Here’s the four-pack of games on the calendar:
What are the key storylines heading into Monday’s games? Who are the key players to watch?
Read on for game previews with statistical insights from ESPN Research, recaps of what went down last night, and the Three Stars of Sunday Night from Arda Öcal.
Matchup notes
Montreal Canadiens at Washington Capitals
Game 1 | 7 p.m., ESPN
You might’ve heard about the 2010 playoff matchup between these two teams a time or so in the past week.
In that postseason, the overwhelming favorite (and No. 1 seed) Capitals, led by Alex Ovechkin, were upset by the No. 8 seed Canadiens, due in large part to an epic performance in goal from Jaroslav Halak. Halak isn’t walking out of the tunnel for the Habs this time around (we assume); instead it’ll be Becancour, Quebec, native Sam Montembeault, who allowed four goals on 35 shots in his one start against the Caps this season.
Washington’s goaltender for Game 1 has yet to be revealed, as Logan Thompson was injured back on April 2. But there’s no question that there is a disparity between the offensive output of the two clubs, as the Caps finished second in the NHL in goals per game (3.49), while the Canadiens finished 17th (2.96). Can Montreal keep up in this series?
St. Louis Blues at Winnipeg Jets
Game 2 | 7:30 p.m., ESPN2
The Blues hung with the Jets for much of Game 1 and even looked like the stronger team at certain times, so pulling off the series upset remains on the table. But getting a win on the unfriendly ice at the Canada Life Centre would be of some benefit in shifting momentum before the series moves to St. Louis for Game 3. The Blues proved that Connor Hellebuyck is not invincible in Game 1, and they were led by stars Jordan Kyrou and Robert Thomas, who both got on the board.
The Jets have a mixed history after winning Game 1 of a playoff series, having gone 3-3 as a franchise (including the Atlanta Thrashers days) on such occasions. Like the Blues, the Jets were led by their stars, Kyle Connor and Mark Scheifele, but the game-tying goal came from Alex Iafallo, who has played up and down the lineup this season.
Colorado Avalanche at Dallas Stars
Game 2 | 9:30 p.m., ESPN
The Stars might like a redo on Game 1 after the visiting Avalanche essentially controlled the festivities for much of the contest. Stars forward Jason Robertson missed Game 1 because of an injury sustained in the final game of the regular season, and his return sooner than later would be excellent for Dallas; he scored three goals in three games against Colorado in the regular season. Also of note, teams that have taken a 2-0 lead in best-of-seven series have won 86% of the time.
Slowing down the Avs’ stars will be critical in Game 2, which is a sound — if perhaps unrealistic — strategy. With his two goals in Game 1, Nathan MacKinnon became the third player in Avalanche/Nordiques history to score 50 playoff goals, joining Joe Sakic (84) and Peter Forsberg (58). In reaching 60 assists in his 73rd playoff game, Cale Makar became the third-fastest defenseman in NHL history to reach that milestone, behind Bobby Orr (69 GP) and Al MacInnis (71 GP).
Edmonton Oilers at Los Angeles Kings
Game 1 | 10 p.m., ESPN2
This is the fourth straight postseason in which the Oilers and Kings have met in Round 1, and Edmonton has won the previous three series. Will the fourth time be the charm for the Kings?
L.A. went 3-1-0 against Edmonton this season, including shutouts on April 5 and 14. Quinton Byfield was particularly strong in those games, with three goals and an assist. Overall, the Kings were led in scoring this season by Adrian Kempe, with 35 goals and 38 assists. Warren Foegele — who played 22 playoff games for the Oilers in 2024 — had a career-high 24 goals this season.
The Oilers enter the 2025 postseason with 41 playoff series wins, which is the second most among non-Original Six teams (behind the Flyers, with 44). They have been eliminated by the team that won the Stanley Cup in each of the past three postseasons (Panthers 2024, Golden Knights 2023, Avalanche 2022). Edmonton continues to be led by Leon Draisaitl — who won his first Rocket Richard Trophy as the league’s top goal scorer this season — and Connor McDavid, who won the goal-scoring title in 2022-23 and the Conn Smythe Trophy as MVP of the playoffs last year, even though the Oilers didn’t win the Cup.
Arda’s Three Stars of Sunday
For the last several seasons, much of the postseason narrative for the Leafs has been the lack of production from the Core Four. So this was a dream Game 1 against Ottawa for Marner (one goal, two assists), Nylander (one goal, one assist), John Tavares (one goal, one assist) and Matthews (two assists) in Toronto’s 6-2 win over Ottawa.
Stankoven’s two goals in the second period put the game out of reach, with the Canes winning 4-1 in Game 1. Stankoven is the second player in Hurricanes/Whalers history to score twice in his first playoff game with the club (the other was Andrei Svechnikov in Game 1 of the first round in 2019)
Howden had two third-period goals in the Golden Knights’ victory over the Wild in Game 1, including a buzzer-beating empty-netter to make the final score 4-2.
Sunday’s results
Hurricanes 4, Devils 1
Carolina leads 1-0
The Hurricanes came out inspired thanks in part to the raucous home crowd and took a quick lead off the stick of Jalen Chatfield at 2:24 of the first period. Logan Stankoven — who came over in the Mikko Rantanen trade — scored a pair in the second period, and the Canes never looked back. On the Devils’ side, injuries forced Brenden Dillon and Cody Glass out of the game, while Luke Hughes left in the third period but was able to return. Full recap.
0:44
Logan Stankoven’s 2nd goal gives Hurricanes a 3-0 lead
Logan Stankoven notches his second goal of the game to give the Hurricanes a 3-0 lead.
Maple Leafs 6, Senators 2
Toronto leads 1-0
The first skirmish in the Battle of Ontario goes to the home side, as the Leafs never let the Senators get very close in this one. Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Mitch Marner scored in the first, John Tavares and William Nylander tallied in the second, while Morgan Rielly and Matthew Knies put the game away in the third. Drake Batherson and Ridly Greig — scorer of a controversial empty-net goal against Toronto in 2024 — scored for Ottawa. Full recap.
0:42
William Nylander zips home a goal to pad the Maple Leafs’ lead
William Nylander zips the puck past the goalie to give the Maple Leafs a 4-1 lead.
Golden Knights 4, Wild 2
Vegas leads 1-0
In Sunday’s nightcap, the two teams played an evenly matched first two periods, as Vegas carried a 2-1 lead into the third. Then, Brett Howden worked his magic, scoring a goal to pad the Knights’ lead 2:28 into that frame, and putting the game to bed with an empty-netter that beat the buzzer. The Wild were led by Matt Boldy, who had two goals, both assisted by Kirill Kaprizov. Full recap.
0:31
Brett Howden buries Wild in Game 1 with buzzer-beating goal
Brett Howden sends the Minnesota Wild packing in Game 1 with an empty-net goal for the Golden Knights in the final second.
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