Morning Line Archives: May 7-13

 THE WEEK AHEAD: MAY 7-13

The day-to-day agenda is pretty well locked in right now here at TheSportsNotebook. Seven days a week you can expect to see NBA & NHL playoff updates posted in the morning, recaps of the previous day’s games and look aheads to the next. As new series matchups are created, there will also be previews done and the way things are shaping up, it’s looking like the NBA could be doing second-round action this weekend, and the NHL is close to getting its conference final matchups finalized. Stay tuned for previews on those.

From Monday thru Saturday are MLB divisional reports. TheSportsNotebook picks one topic within the division to discuss, then summarizes what each team’s recent form has been and what the schedule looks like ahead. These are usually posted in the late morning, some time after the basketball and hockey is complete, although occasionally it can go into the late afternoon before the most current edition is published.

Our special feature this week will be a look at the NBA’s MVP race. This was something I wanted to get to before the playoffs started, but with the raw volume of series previews, both here and in the NHL, it became lost in the shuffle.

Friday’s special weekend features are about racing, either on wheels or four legs. After I’ll Have Another’s thrilling Kentucky Derby win we don’t have anything to talk about in horse racing until the Preakness on May 19, but we do have NASCAR this week, as the drivers head to Darlington Raceway in South Carolina on Saturday night. As usual, I’ll be calling up my brother Bill, the NASCAR expert at TheSportsNotebook to break down the race. Look for that preview on Friday afternoon.

Finally, the Historical Museum continues to grow. We just added a piece on what it was like to be a sports fan in Arizona in 2001, when you saw the Arizona basketball team make the NCAA final and then the Diamondbacks win the World Series. Our theme of “Most Livable City By Year” continues this week, with a focus on Northern California in 2002, the year they just missed. The Sacramento Kings, Oakland Raiders and Oakland A’s all had legit shots to win championships and came up narrowly short, although the Kings were robbed in the worst officiated game in the history of professional sports. We’ll relive it all in a historical feature that will go up over the weekend.