Minnesota quiets Boston to take first PWHL title
LOWELL, Mass. — Kendall Coyne Schofield once showed off her speed racing against the men in an NHL skills competition at All-Star Weekend.
On Wednesday night, she made a mad dash into women’s hockey history.
The three-time Olympian chased down a rolling puck and knocked it into an empty net to seal Minnesota’s 3-0 victory over Boston in the winner-take-all Game 5 to claim the inaugural championship of the Professional Women’s Hockey League.
Liz Schepers scored to break a scoreless, second-period tie, Michela Cava made it 2-0 midway through the third period and Nicole Hensley stopped 17 shots for Minnesota. Coyne Schofield added the empty netter with two minutes left, and then the captain and oldest member of the roster took the first lap on the ice with the Walter Cup.
“It makes me want to tear up thinking about it. She’s done so much for this sport,” forward Taylor Heise said. “She’s definitely one of the people that’s helped this sport grow and one of the reasons why this arena is sold out here tonight.”
Coyne Schofield, 32, was fresh off of winning the 2018 Olympic gold medal when she was invited to take part in a timed lap around the ice at the 2019 NHL All-Star Game. She finished seventh out of eight, but was a crowd favorite in an arena filled with chants of “U-S-A!”
“What was so important about that moment wasn’t the skate itself. It’s what happened after,” she said on the ice while her teammates posed for pictures with the trophy and and her husband stood nearby holding the son she gave birth to less than a year ago.
“It was the attention that that skate drew to so many people. That moment brought a lot of eyes and helped catapult the reality we’re living today.”
Three nights after Minnesota prematurely celebrated a would-be game-winner in double overtime that was waved off for goaltender interference, Hensley earned her second shutout of the playoffs. Minnesota limped into the playoffs on a five-game losing streak and then got shut out in the first two games of best-of-five semifinal against Toronto.
Heise, whose eight points in the postseason was tied for the most in the league, was named the inaugural Ilana Kloss Playoff MVP. The former Minnesota Gopher was the league’s first No. 1 draft pick.
“We’re ‘the State of Hockey,'” she said. “And I think this proves it.”
Boston goalie Aerin Frankel, dubbed the “Green Monster” in her forest green home sweater, made 41 saves for the runners-up. The sold-out crowd at the Tsongas Center, about an hour north of Boston, chanted her name and “Thank you, Boston!” after the final buzzer, even as the Minnesota players celebrated on the ice and league officials set up the podium for the trophy presentation.
Boston forced a decisive fifth game only after Sophie Jaques’ apparent goal in double overtime in Game 4 was taken off the board because of goaltender interference. The Minnesota players, who had already streamed onto the ice to celebrate, throwing their equipment in the air, gathered up their gloves and sticks to resume the game.
One minute later, Alina Muller scored to send the series back to Boston.
The crowd was eager to see the home team claim the new trophy, named for league benefactor and Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter, chanting “We want the Cup!” just like Bruins fans do down in Boston. A Fenway-style “Sweet Caroline” singalong kept them busy during the second break.
But with the game scoreless early in the second, Minnesota forward Sydney Brodt skated through the slot toward the goal. She whiffed on a wrist shot, drawing Frankel out of position, then slid around to the right side and centered the puck behind her, where Schepers tipped it in.
It was still 1-0 when Cava circled behind the net and stuffed the puck between Frankel’s pads; it trickled toward the net before the goalie knocked it over the line when she reached back to save it with her stick hand.
The game was a crowd-pleasing conclusion to the six-team league’s first season, when it blew through some benchmarks but left others unmet.
A game in Montreal against Toronto drew more than 21,000 fans to the Bell Centre. Average attendance in the regular season was 5,448, giving the league confidence to expand the schedule from 24 games to 30 next year. Toronto is looking for a bigger home than the 2,500-seat arena where it played most of its games.
One negative was below-average attendance for the New York team, which split its home between Connecticut, Long Island and New Jersey. Games were broadcast nationally in English and French in Canada, but U.S. fans were left with regional networks and YouTube.
And the teams don’t have nicknames yet — a result of the rush to get on the ice in six months after the two competing pro women’s hockey leagues in North America declared a truce, with help from Walter and tennis great Billie Jean King, last summer. The league said Wednesday that names and logos will be announced in August.
“This year was a historic year,” Boston captain Hilary Knight said. “We built it. We’re extremely ecstatic about where it is Year 1. If anything, that reflection point is something we can take away from tonight and celebrate.”
LOS ANGELES — Shohei Ohtani hit two homers in an 11-5 win over the San Francisco Giants on Saturday night, emphatically ending the three-time MVP’s longest homer drought since joining the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Ohtani led off the bottom of the first with his 24th homer, hammering Landen Roupp‘s fourth pitch 419 feet deep into the right-field bleachers with an exit velocity of 110.3 mph.
The slugger had been in a 10-game homer drought since June 2, going 10-for-40 in that stretch with no RBIs, although he still had an eight-game hitting streak during his power outage.
Ohtani led off the sixth with his 25th homer, sending Tristan Beck‘s breaking ball outside the strike zone into the bleachers in right. He also moved one homer behind the Yankees’ Aaron Judge and Seattle’s Cal Raleigh for the overall major league lead.
Dodgers fans brought him home with a standing ovation as Ohtani produced his third multihomer game of the season and the 22nd of his career.
Ohtani reached base four times and scored three runs in his first four at-bats, drawing two walks to go with his two homers.
Ohtani hadn’t played in 10 straight games without hitting a homer since 2023 in the final 10 games of his six-year tenure with the Los Angeles Angels.
Ohtani had slowed down a bit over the past two weeks after he was named the NL Player of the Month for May with a formidable performance, racking up 15 homers and 28 RBIs.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
BOSTON — Hunter Dobbins had quite the week.
First, he said last weekend that he would rather retire than pitch for the Yankees because his father was drafted by New York twice before being traded.
Then, he went out and beat the Yankees.
A few days after his comments about never wanting to pitch for New York, he had to defend his dad’s story about being drafted by the Yankees in response to a New York Post article that cited multiple official databases and the Yankees’ own records that couldn’t confirm Lance Dobbins ever played with the organization.
On Saturday night, Dobbins (4-1) followed up by going six shutout innings in Boston’s 4-3 victory over New York, his second win over the Yankees in less than a week.
“It’s a lot of fun,” he said. “I’m more worried about just the win column, whether it’s against them or anybody. My job is to try and help this team win as many ballgames as we can, and pitch in meaningful playoff baseball games. That’s what I’m more focused on.”
But he realizes what it means to the fan base in this longtime rivalry, with the Red Sox fans heard chanting about the Yankees outside the park before he spoke in an interview room.
“Yeah, I love being able to perform and get those wins for the fans here,” he said. “They deserve it. It’s a great city, passionate fan base, so being able to get those wins — especially twice in one week — means a lot and looking forward to trying to build on that going forward.”
In his victory over New York last Sunday, Dobbins held the Yankees to three runs over five innings, two on a first-inning homer by Aaron Judge.
On Saturday night, Judge went 0-for-3 against him, striking out twice on curveballs.
“It was just kind of scouting,” Dobbins said of his game plan against New York’s slugger after Garrett Crochet struck him out three times in the series opener Friday.
“Crochet has an electric fastball. I can throw it hard, but the shape isn’t quite as elite,” he said. “So we knew we had better weapons to go at him with, so I felt like we did a good job of kind of keeping a balanced attack throughout the order.”
Dobbins struck out five and gave up only two singles Saturday.
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