The Sports Section

Brad Richards would nicely fill a need on the Rangers roster, as presently constructed: He's a first-line center — he's surpassed the 40-assist mark eight times — who can not only skate on a line with Marian Gaborik but play the point on the power play. And he's already played for John Tortorella, not only getting his name on the Cup with Tampa Bay but winning the Conn Smythe Trophy. The Rangers have a strong core of young players, but they lack an elite top line. And though pairing Richards with Gaborik is no sure thing — injury histories aside, we've given up trying to predict who will and won't click with Gaborik — the two of them could provide the type of top-line scoring punch too often missing last season.

Rafael Nadal is in acute distress. He's just lost the game, he's facing a momentum-defining tiebreaker, and his opponent has his second wind. Rafa's just hit yet another impossible shot from an impossible angle, and one foot seems to have borne all the acrobatic brunt. He's in deep crouch, trying to gauge the extent and implications of the pain. Then he heads to his chair and calls for the trainer; the tiebreaker will have to wait; his opponent, oozing adrenaline, will have to cool his heels. After a tense interlude during which his opponent, visibly upset, remonstrates with the umpire to restart, Nadal returns, takes the tiebreaker, and romps. The press waits with bated breath to hear the results of the MRI — will he be able to carry on and defend his title? The results show nothing of any concern, and Nadal smashes his next opponent in four sets, fresh as a daisy.

Here are the first seven human beings Donnie Walsh added to the Knicks roster after he was hired as team president/GM/pooh-bah on April 2, 2008: Chris Duhon, Anthony Roberson, Patrick Ewing Jr., Larry Hughes, Cheikh Samb, Joe Crawford, and Darko Milicic. The legacy of Donnie Walsh's tenure with the Knicks, which ends today, will never really be judged by whom he brought to the team, even though Amar'e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony are here because of him. It will be whom he cleared off it, the mess he cleaned up: a savage, gnarled, hideous mess. It's still kind of amazing he did it.

The Mets have won four straight games, but that kind of thing tends to happen over the course of a baseball season. But the offensive explosion that's powered those four victories? That's not so common. The Mets beat the Tigers last night, 16–9, a day after routing them 14–3. And those wins come on the heels of victories over Texas by the scores of 8–5 and 14–5. (These might as well be football scores, albeit in a league in which safeties and two-point conversions are unusually commonplace.) That's 52 runs in four games, and though they've had some impressive offensive stretches in their history, that's a new franchise record for a four-game span.