LAS VEGAS — If you return from a four-day trip to Vegas able to say you broke even, you’re ahead of the game.

After as dominating a 30-minute stretch of hockey as they have played this season, the Minnesota Wild are heading home from Sin City having broken even in the first 120 minutes of their first-round playoff series against the Vegas Golden Knights.

The duo of Matt Boldy and Kirill Kaprizov led the way as the Wild took advantage of a rash of Vegas turnovers, jumping out to a commanding lead on the way to a 5-2 win in Game 2 of this best-of-seven, sending the team back to Minnesota with the series knotted 1-1.

Game 3 of the series is Thursday evening in St. Paul. Opening faceoff is 8 p.m. CT.

Anchoring the team’s top line with Joel Eriksson Ek and Boldy, Kaprizov had two goals, while Boldy had a goal and an assist. Filip Gustavsson stopped 29 shots for the Wild, who led 4-0 halfway through the game, quieting the normally raucous crowd inside the rink that locals call “the Fortress.”

Minnesota Wild players celebrate a goal by left wing Kirill Kaprizov against Vegas Golden Knights goaltender Adin Hill (33) during the second period of Game 2 of a first-round NHL hockey playoff series Tuesday, April 22, 2025, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/David Becker)

Marcus Foligno and Mats Zuccarello scored goals, as well, as Minnesota beat Vegas for the first time this season in their fifth head-to-head meeting. Adin Hill had 12 saves for the Knights.

Gustavsson was busy right from the start, turning aside a pair of Vegas shots in the game’s opening minute, including one off of his mask. After four minutes the shots were 5-0 Knights, but the Wild pushed back, hard. Hill had to stop Ryan Hartman on a solo rush to the net, then brought the crowd to its feet when he denied Joel Eriksson Ek with a glove save on what looked like a sure goal shot from the side of the net.

Undaunted, the Wild struck first near the midway point of the opening period when Kaprizov’s long lead pass found Boldy a half-stride ahead of two Vegas defenders at center ice. Boldly held off his pursuers long enough to slip a low shot past Hill, giving Minnesota its first lead of the series.

The Wild doubled the lead less than 2 minutes later when Hartman’s pass from behind the net found Foligno uncovered at the top of the crease for a quick shot and Foligno’s first playoff goal. It was 3-0 before the period ended after Marcus Johansson’s pretty backhand pass from just inside the blue line caught Zuccarello in stride, and the veteran wing went around a Knights defender and to the net alone, flipping a wrist shot past Hill’s glove.

It was a play that began when a Vegas defender tried to deliver a hard check on Zuccarello along the boards and missed, giving Minnesota a numbers advantage heading into the offensive zone.

Not content with their three-goal advantage, the Wild pounced on another Vegas turnover early in the second, keying a two-on-one rush with Kaprizov and Boldy. Carrying the puck and given the option to pass or shoot, Kaprizov took the second option and the puck slipped under Hill’s pad after the goalie made the initial save for a 4-0 Minnesota lead.

Vegas made a push midway through the second, pinning the Wild’s fourth line in their zone for more than a minute, with two Minnesota players missing their sticks, and forcing Gustavsson to make a trio of saves before the puck deflected out of play.

But the home team kept pressuring and got on the board with just under eight minutes left in the middle frame when defenseman Noah Hanifin zipped a wrist shot past Gustavsson’s glove from 15 feet out. Vegas outshot Minnesota 11-3 in the second, but the Wild emerged up by three goals.

But the home club kept chipping away at Minnesota’s lead, with Tomas Hertl getting his second goal of the series early in the third, not long after Hill had stuffed an Eriksson Ek scoring chance on the doorstep.

The “let them play” approach by the on-ice officials continued, with just one penalty called in the game. The Wild got the game’s lone power play in the third period but did not get a shot on Hill. Vegas defenseman Nicolas Hauge, who was not called for a cross check to the face of Hartman in Game 1, got away with a clear punch to Kaprizov’s face late in Game 2.

The Russian sniper’s revenge came on the ice, as he hit an empty net with a 190-foot shot from beyond the far goal line for the clincher.

This is the 18th playoff series in Wild franchise history, and they avoided falling in a 0-2 hole for the 10th time with the win.

LOS ANGELES — Minnesota stunned the Los Angeles Lakers with its physicality in Saturday’s Game 1 victory in Los Angeles.

The Lakers returned the favor on Tuesday.

Los Angeles was the clear aggressor from start to finish, putting Minnesota on its heels early. The Wolves never recovered, falling 94-85 to even the series at 1-1.

Game 3 is Friday in Minneapolis.

Minnesota has the ability to match and exceed just about anyone’s physicality. But the Wolves instead grew frustrated and frequently demonstrated an utter lack of composure for 48 minutes that ultimately did them in.

In the fourth quarter alone, Naz Reid ran the ball down the floor out of frustration following a whistle that triggered the team’s second delay of game violation of the contest, giving the Lakers a technical free throw when the Wolves were trying to mount a rally.

Then Julius Randle, who scored a new playoff career-high 27 points to pace Minnesota, had a bucket wiped away when he needlessly swiped his off hand into the face of LeBron James before the ball could fall into the bucket. So instead of Minnesota trimming its deficit to 11, it stayed at nine.

Little things like that kept Minnesota from ever mounting a serious rally.

After getting overrun on Saturday, Los Angeles busted out of the gates Tuesday with a renewed tenacity and intensity on both ends of the floor that helped it build a 22-point first-half advantage.

Minnesota’s defense finally matched the Lakers in the second half, making every Los Angeles bucket difficult over the final two frames. But Minnesota never got any type of rhythm going offensively. The Wolves relied almost entirely on Randle isolations.

One game after seemingly dissecting the Los Angeles defense, Anthony Edwards did little in the form of playmaking. The guard finished with zero assists. And after they shot the lights out from deep in Game 1, Minnesota went ice cold from the field Tuesday.

Minnesota went 5 for 24 from beyond the arc, and shot just 38% from the field.

Luka Doncic had 31 points, 12 rebounds and nine assists for the Lakers.

For a moment on April 9, the average U.S. tariff rate leapt to 32%, making American consumers the highest tariffed people in the world. For the next 90 days, the average U.S. tariff rate will be about 25%, which will leave Americans paying more than the citizens of any other industrialized nation, putting us in the company of Sudan and Djibouti.

America, despite what you may have heard, is currently a pretty great place to live and work. While Americans represent just 4.2% of the world’s population, they produce more than 26% of the world’s GDP. As a result, U.S. median income is nearly nine times the global average and the U.S. poverty rate is about one-fortieth the global rate.

We have our problems. Every nation does. But Americans are among the healthiest and wealthiest people to ever walk the planet and are generally quite satisfied with their lives.

But this prosperity didn’t just happen. It was built on a foundation of economic freedom. And by our calculations, that freedom is rapidly eroding thanks to President Donald Trump’s trade war.

Individuals are more economically free when they are allowed to make more of their own economic choices. Governments can protect these choices by impartially safeguarding everyone’s right to own, use and exchange property. Or they can limit economic choice through taxes, regulations, tariffs and manipulation of the value of money.

One of us (Lawson) has been measuring economic freedom for nearly three decades. His annual Economic Freedom of the World report, published by the Fraser Institute in Canada and the Cato Institute in the U.S., measures the degree of economic freedom in each of 165 countries using 45 indicators of government policy. Ten of these indicators measure trade freedom, reflecting its importance in overall economic freedom.

Many of us cherish economic freedom for its own sake, believing that each of us has the inalienable right to choose our own vocation, to spend our own resources as we see fit, and to contract with others as we like.

But even if these considerations don’t appeal to you, you should value economic freedom. That’s because — as has been documented in nearly 1,000 peer reviewed studies — it makes life better. Compared with the least-economically free places, people in the freest nations earn 7.6 times as much, live 16 years longer, and are 40% more satisfied with their lives. They also tend to be more literate, more tolerant and less corrupt.

All of this helps explain why the United States — which last ranked as the fifth-freest economy in the world — is so prosperous. Americans have long been some of the most economically free people on the planet. U.S. trade freedom, the area of economic freedom that gauges our ability to exchange with people in other nations, is a key component of that. It accounts for tariffs, regulatory trade barriers, controls, and black-market exchange rates. U.S. trade freedom peaked in the 1990s at 8th in the world. But as other countries allowed their own citizens to trade more freely, the U.S. failed to keep up and by 2022, it had fallen to 53rd place.

As U.S. tariff rates have gyrated up and down, we have re-run the numbers, estimating the effects on U.S. trade freedom and on U.S. economic freedom more broadly. For the brief time this month when average U.S. tariff rates were 32%, U.S. trade freedom slipped to 72nd place, just behind Haiti, a country that the president has brutally mocked for its poor living conditions.

We also slipped to 10th place in overall economic freedom. Now, with average U.S. tariffs at 25%, U.S. trade freedom has crept back up to 70th place, just ahead of Rwanda while overall economic freedom remains 10th.

America is a great nation. But our prosperity depends on our freedom and Trump’s trade war is a clear threat to that.

Robert Lawson is Fullinwider Chair in Economic Freedom and director of the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom at Southern Methodist University. Matthew Mitchell is a Senior Fellow in the Center for Human Freedom at the Fraser Institute and a Senior Affiliated Scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. They wrote this column for Tribune News Service.

Two of my books are among the 381 volumes that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered removed from the library of the U.S. Naval Academy because they were deemed to relate to the topics of diversity, equity or inclusion.

The arbitrary removal of these books reveals a sophomoric approach to history by word search. That amateurish tactic of linking title and theme has already resulted in comical yet depressing results. A recent DEI purge at the Pentagon led to the removal in its digital archive of images of the B-29 plane Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, presumably because of the word “gay” in the title. The Defense Department is at it again on a bigger scale, with higher stakes: our grand American democratic experiment.

Censorship by keyword search is not only anti-intellectual but also foolish, presuming that there is solidarity of thought or unanimity of vision when it comes to race, gender, sexuality or class — as though every author who uses a certain term is making the same argument on the issue. Scholars, writers and other thinkers are a notoriously cantankerous lot. We often find useful or sometimes petty ways to disagree even with those with whom we ought to agree.

Many of these removed books argue with prevailing notions of race, class, sex and gender. Some are critical of earlier or competing versions of these subjects and advocate relentless revision and tireless interrogation.

Ibram X. Kendi’s influential “How to Be an Antiracist” topped the list of removed books, but with more careful consideration the Defense Department might have kept it around, because it argues for a radically different view of racism than many of Kendi’s scholarly predecessors and colleagues.

Old-school race thinkers argue that racism concerns power. They would say that although Black folk can be bigoted, prejudiced and willfully biased, they technically can’t be racist. Kendi shatters such a paradigm and argues that one is either racist or antiracist, whatever one’s color or circumstance. That ought to suggest to white critics that Kendi is being evenhanded in grappling with the manifestation of racist belief or behavior from people of any background. The Trump administration stated in January that students should not be “compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color.” In a far different political register, Kendi’s work comes to a similar conclusion.

In one of my banished books, “Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America,” I argue against white guilt as a strategy for social change. In my other removed book, “Long Time Coming: Reckoning With Race in America,” I offer a harsh rebuke to cancel culture on the left as a proxy of sorts for the very white supremacy it aims to destroy.

Hegseth doesn’t seem to understand, or care to know, that most of the books he fears and disagrees with, and thus removes, offer nuanced and complicated visions of race and other forms of diversity.

These books are not dogmatic or indoctrinating; they are self-critical and invite readers to question their own understandings. Courageous curiosity and open-minded engagement should lead us to read widely to determine what we like and what we don’t like, what we agree with and what we oppose. This contributes to us being informed citizens upholding our democratic experiment. The state has no business shrinking reading lists from a perch of partisan fear.

It is bitterly ironic that the political party that rages against ideological orthodoxy, virtue signaling and purity tests is now their most brutal exponent. The war against “wokeness” is a war against enlightenment. Its advocates despise science and are allergic to curiosity and reason. Instead, they embrace denial, ignorance, avoidance, erasure and amnesia.

Hegseth’s move offers the nation a peek into the frightening fascist imagination. Its characteristics are noxious. It conceives of dissent as disloyalty. It misrepresents vulnerable populations as freeloaders and frauds. It turns healthy skepticism about government into unhinged paranoia about the “deep state.”

Yet there is good news. The fascist imagination is not yet the fascist state. The fascist imagination points toward a poisonous authoritarianism that masquerades as legitimate politics. We must oppose the fascist imagination with an emancipated worldview that combats the illusion of security that fascism offers.

The emancipated worldview also draws connections between accepted “white” classics and spurned “Black” books — and those of other diverse communities — in this perilous moment. There may be 381 perspectives on diversity, equity and inclusion that are now purged from the Naval Academy, but there are literally thousands of classic literary avenues for those ideas to get back in.

If James Baldwin is slighted, Ralph Ellison ignored, W.E.B. Du Bois despised, Toni Morrison disdained and Maya Angelou dissed, we can read race and other identities through the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Michel de Montaigne, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We can interpret complicated cultural concepts by using the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson or Thomas Gray.

Society must also push back as the Republican administration tries to whitewash the curricula of public schools, from kindergarten on up. We can also establish Saturday schools where we practice defiant pedagogy to teach our children the books that are banned. We can creatively wrestle in Black communities with ideas that are deemed dangerous and troubling, but which matter greatly to Black folk under attack. Such schools might usefully counter the flurry of executive orders that seek to erase history, deny truth, perpetuate lies and eviscerate community.

We must also support local museums of Black history that preserve memory and transmit knowledge. It is tragic that Black folks for whom reading was once outlawed are brought full circle to a culture that is hostile to Black cultural literacy. It would be tragic to allow a renewed taboo against exploring the intellectual heritage of Black life and underscoring the crucial Black contribution to American democracy.

One of the best ways to combat autocracy is to remember that racism is a dry run for fascism. All the features of the fascist imagination have been rehearsed in the spitefully creative effort to suppress Black speech, oppress Black culture, control Black mobility and to curtail Black progress. Fascism applies to the broader culture the racist principles first applied to Black life.

Many other Americans become like honorary Black folk in the mistreatment they endure in the fascist imagination — which, beyond targeting many white folks who voted for Trump, tries to erase other racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and women. Therefore, the fight to uphold Black liberty is the fight to uphold American liberty. The Black fight for democracy is the American fight for democracy.

Hegseth may have targeted “woke” America with his book ban, but his beliefs, and those of his boss, ridicule and threaten the entire nation. Today the peril is for 381 books with which the secretary of Defense assumes he would disagree; tomorrow it may be that our very freedom to openly disagree about the administration is at risk.

Instead of our democracy dying in the dark of an aspiring dictatorship, we must insist that our democracy be an open book to be read by all citizens.

Michael Eric Dyson is a professor of African American studies at Vanderbilt University and an author, most recently co-author of “Represent: The Unfinished Fight for the Vote.” He wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.