Bet on it…The US Supreme Court threw a bone to sports bettors Monday as it struck down a federal law prohibiting sports gambling in most states. Now your friends don’t have to go to Vegas to place that all-important bet. Look for several states to legalize sports gambling and capture some of the Vegas, Internet and bookie money.

Let’s take a look at what fans (and gamblers) are focusing on…

TINK Sports Big-3

Here are three things you need to know:

1) The NBA’s goliaths, the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets, face each other in the Western Conference Finals

2) Up 2-0, the Washington Capitals are looking to exorcise their NHL playoff demons and advance to the Stanley Cup Finals

3) Bitter rivals Boston and New York are at it again as the Red Sox and Yankees are the best two teams in baseball.

National Basketball Association (NBA)

The Houston Rockets and Golden State Warriors, the NBA’s two best teams are going at it in the Finals…too bad it’s the Western Conference Finals, not the NBA Finals.

The defending champion Warriors lead the series 1-0 after an impressive victory in Houston Monday night. League MVP frontrunner James Harden performed admirably with 41 points but ultimately fell short to Kevin Durant who scored 37 points to propel his Warriors to a series opening victory.

Source Sporting News

In the Eastern Conference, the surprising Boston Celtics, playing without their two best players, lead LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers 1-0. LeBron has come back from bigger deficits and is not worried about being down in the series.

National Hockey League (NHL)

Giving DC fans something other than politics to talk about, the Washington Capitals are up 2-0 on the Tampa Bay Lightning in their Eastern Conference Finals. The Caps are notorious for their playoff struggles despite having one of the best hockey players ever, Alex Ovechkin.

Source: Sports Illustrated 

Washington fans are cautiously optimistic this time but the Caps have been in this movie before. They are only 3-5 in best-of-seven series in which they lead 2-0. To make matters worse, the Caps lost to the Lightning in 2003 despite having a 2-0 series lead.

Hollywood Ending? The Las Vegas Golden Knights and Winnipeg Jets are tied 1-1 in their Western Conference Finals. Either team advancing to the Stanley Cup Finals would make a great story: The Knights are in their first year in existence, and the Jets have played in and left Winnipeg as a franchise.

The original Winnipeg Jets were a staple of the NHL for 25 years but were relocated to – of all places – Phoenix, Arizona in 1996. The current Jets franchise started out in 1999 as the Atlanta Thrashers but eventually realized that hockey and Georgia wasn’t a great fit and moved back to Canada as the (new) Winnipeg Jets in 2011.

Soccer

Player alert – Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah is a big deal. “The Pharaoh”, as he is affectionately known in the media, is a 25-year-old Egyptian national taking English soccer by storm.

 

Source: Sports Illustrated

Salah broke the record for most goals in a 38-game Premier League season in Liverpool’s 4-0 victory over Brighton Sunday.

Major League Baseball (MLB)

A quarter of the way through the baseball season, American League East rivals the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox have the two best records in the league. Both teams were expected to be good, but not this good.

Surprise, surprise…The two best teams in the National League right now are the Atlanta Braves and Arizona Diamondbacks. Both teams were predicted to finish in the middle of the pack before the season began.

 

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