Once the Gophers men’s basketball team completed its runaway 80-56 exhibition win over North Dakota State on Oct. 16 and Niko Medved wrapped up his news conference, the new head coach shared a parting thought as he left the Williams Arena interview room.

Gophers wing Cade Tyson poured in a game-high 28 points in Minnesota’s 80-54 exhibition win over North Dakota State at Williams Arena on Oct. 16, 2025. Tyson is a senior transfer from North Carolina. (Brad Rempel / Gophers Athletics)

“Wish it counted,” Medved said with a laugh.

Minnesota played well over the final 30 minutes in its first of two tune-up games. That was especially true for transfer wing Cade Tyson, who scored a game-high 28 points.

The Gophers’ second exhibition game is noon Saturday against North Dakota at The Barn. The season opener is Nov. 3 against Gardner-Webb.

Among the U’s nine new transfers, Tyson represents one of the most intriguing incoming players this season. The Monroe, N.C., native started his career at Belmont in Nashville, averaging 16.2 points and shooting 46% from 3-point range as a sophomore in 2023-24.

His first transfer move was to North Carolina, but didn’t play much while putting up 2.6 points in eight minutes per game, while shooting 29% from deep. So he hit the portal a second time.

“We always talk about fit matters,” Medved said after the NDSU win. “For whatever reason, it didn’t work out for him. If you remember a couple of years ago, he was one of the top transfers in the transfer portal. … North Carolina has a great program. It just wasn’t working out fit-wise. We thought he would be a great fit here. I think you are seeing that.”

Tyson didn’t look like a player searching for confidence after a down year with the Tar Heels. Against the Bison, he went 6 for 9 from behind the arc and made all four of his free throws.

“I felt confident out there on the floor,” Tyson said. “The most important thing that I felt was just having fun out there with my teammates. That was the best feeling.”

Tyson scored 11 straight points against NDSU, which is picked to finish in fourth of the Summit League this season.

“Every time he put up a three ball, I’m like, ‘Man, that’s money,” said guard Isaac Asuma said. “I’ve seen him rep it in practice.”

Medved listed a few things he likes about the 6-foot-7 Tyson, whose brother Hunter played at Clemson and is a reserve for the Denver Nuggets.

“(Cade’s) got great skill, great size,” Medved said. “He can shoot it. He’s a tough guy and you don’t see a kid that didn’t have confidence (vs. NDSU). He puts in the work and he believes in himself, and I think he’s going to have a really good year for us.”

Medved didn’t stop there. He said Tyson “kind of reminded” him of Nique Clifford, a guard who transferred from Colorado to Colorado State to play for Medved the previous two seasons.

Clifford, who was the Sacramento Kings’ 24th overall pick in the 2025 NBA draft, shot 40% from 3-point land for the Buffaloes in 2021-22, but that number dipped to 28% the following year.

Clifford’s 3-point shooting improved 38% across his two years in Fort Collins, Colo., but so did his overall game, with jumps in scoring and rebounding and assist numbers.

The Gophers would love to see a similar bounce back from their new wing over the course of the upcoming campaign.

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By TIM REYNOLDS

MIAMI (AP) — As a new NBA season opened this week, coach Rick Carlisle and the Indiana Pacers received their annual briefing on the do’s and don’ts of gambling.

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Betting in casinos is generally allowed. Betting on other sports, provided it is legal, is also allowed.

Betting on NBA basketball is not.

For veterans of the sport, it’s the type of training that can seem routine — almost boring, perhaps. But the potential repercussions for breaking the rules are now abundantly clear after Portland coach Chauncey Billups and Miami guard Terry Rozier were among nearly three dozen people arrested Thursday for what federal law enforcement officials described as their involvement in various illicit gambling activities.

The developments pose an unexpected challenge for a league that hoped to begin its season on a strong note, fueled by an opening night game watched by millions as it went into a thrilling double overtime. There have been amazing performances already: Victor Wembanyama scoring 40 points in his season debut with San Antonio, reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scoring 55 for Oklahoma City, Golden State’s Stephen Curry and Denver’s Aaron Gordon putting on an I-can-top-this show.

Those should be the talk of the league right now. That’s not the case. All that has been overshadowed. The NBA now faces questions about the pervasiveness of gambling in basketball, and uncertainty about what might happen next.

“A shocking day,” said Carlisle, who said he unsuccessfully tried to connect with Billups to offer support. “This is a very serious situation.”

The accusations against Rozier and Billups

Rozier, who was arrested in Orlando, Florida, where the Heat opened the season against the Magic, stands accused of telling an associate that he was going to play sparingly in a game on March 23, 2023, when he was with the Charlotte Hornets. Rozier played just under 10 minutes and fell well short of many of the lines set for prop bets regarding his performance.

Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier leaves the U.S. Federal Courthouse through a side door after his arraignment, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025, in Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)

More than $200,000 worth of wagers were won, federal officials said, based on the information Rozier shared.

Billups — a Hall of Fame player — was arrested in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and charged with being involved in a poker scheme that federal officials said cheated victims out of at least $7 million. Billups was one of 31 people arrested on the poker-related charges, and some of those arrested were, according to officials, members of three Mafia families.

The indictments for the insider betting and poker cases were separate, but it appears Billups was mentioned — albeit not by name — in the betting one as well. Someone who matches Billups’ resume, an Oregon resident who played in the NBA from 1997 through 2014 and has been a coach since 2021, was alleged to have given insider information to someone who used it to craft wagers involving Trail Blazers’ games in 2023.

That person is described in that document only as Co-Conspirator 8.

Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups leaves a federal court after his appearance on Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025, in Portland, Ore. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)

Billups and Rozier appeared in court on Thursday and are out of the league indefinitely, being placed on leave by the NBA just hours after their arrests. An attorney for Billups called his client a “man of integrity” while a lawyer for Rozier said the player is “not a gambler” and “looks forward to winning this fight.”

In a statement, the NBA said it takes “these allegations with the utmost seriousness, and the integrity of our game remains our top priority.”

Betting is big in pro sports

Yet betting has become big business for the NBA, as it has with virtually all pro sports leagues in this era where sports wagering is legal in much of the country. The practice is allowed in some form in 38 states now. Missouri will join that list later this year, and it’s also permitted in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

“It’s a world that’s a different world than it was a few years ago with the advent of legalized gambling,” Carlisle noted.

Some leaders in the league encouraged the growth of legalized gambling. In 2014, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver wrote an op-ed in The New York Times noting a “thriving underground business” of illegal sports gambling that “operates free from regulation or oversight.” He called for a “different approach.”

A 2018 Supreme Court decision ultimately cleared the way for the modern era of legalized sports gambling. Today, the NBA has two official gaming partners, FanDuel and DraftKings Sportsbook, and has relationships with at least 12 authorized gaming operators. There is even a portion of the NBA’s website devoted to gambling — NBABet.

As legalized gambling has taken off, Silver has expressed some worries about the implications.

“Obviously, I’m very concerned if there’s any illegal activity going on in our league,” he said in July. “But I’d say similar to the way a public financial market works, the fact that there might be insider trading doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to shut down those public markets. Often the way they are catching insider traders is because they have a system, a complex system, that detects aberrational behavior.”

“But,” he added, “anybody in this league, any player who engages in that activity, there’s no question they are putting their livelihood at risk.”

Golden State coach Steve Kerr said an unfortunate reality for players and coaches in this betting era is that fans reach out — often angrily, sometimes while sitting courtside — to complain that this or that happened and they lost their bet or parlay.

Kerr has even gotten emails from people who want to complain about how they believe he has personally cost them money.

“Our guys get nasty social media posts from people who have bet on games,” Kerr said. “And that’s the thing that I don’t like about this the most. Our players should not have to deal with that, but they do. … It’s just kind of the modern life.”

Billups’ arrest hit home for the Denver Nuggets. Rodney Billups, Chauncey’s brother, is a member of Denver’s coaching staff.

Michael Porter Jr. was with the Nuggets in 2024 when his brother, Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter, was banned for life after a league probe found he disclosed confidential information to sports bettors and wagered on games — sometimes even betting on the Raptors to lose.

There have been other probes since, none quite like what the NBA finds itself dealing with now.

“This is not how we want to start the season in the NBA,” Nuggets coach David Adelman said.

AP NBA: https://apnews.com/hub/nba

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the floodgates to legalized sports-betting industry, now worth billions of dollars a year, even as it recognized that the decision was controversial.

That high-court ruling is back in the spotlight after the arrests on Thursday of more than 30 people, including an NBA player and coach, in two cases alleging sprawling criminal schemes to rake in millions by rigging sports bets and poker games involving Mafia families.

What did the Supreme Court decide?

The court’s ruling struck down a 1992 federal law, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, that had barred betting on football, basketball, baseball and other sports in most states.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his majority opinion that the way Congress went about the gambling ban, barring states from authorizing sports betting, violated the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment, which protects the power of states.

“The legalization of sports gambling requires an important policy choice, but the choice is not ours to make,” Alito wrote. The court’s “job is to interpret the law Congress has enacted and decide whether it is consistent with the Constitution. PASPA is not.”

The trouble with the law, Alito explained, was that Congress did not make betting on sports a federal crime. Instead, it prohibited states from authorizing legalized gambling, improperly infringing on their authority. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, Neil Gorsuch and Elena Kagan joined Alito’s opinion.

Dissenting justices said the court should have acted more narrowly

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that even if the part of the law regulating the states’ behavior should be struck down, the rest of it should have survived. In particular, Ginsburg wrote that a separate provision that applied to private parties and betting schemes should have been left in place.

Writing for Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer, Ginsburg said that when a portion of a law violates the Constitution, the court “ordinarily engages in a salvage rather than a demolition operation,” preserving what it can. She said that instead of using a “scalpel to trim the statute” her colleagues used “an axe.” Breyer agreed with the majority that part of the law must be struck down but said that should not have doomed the rest of the law.

But Alito, in his majority opinion, wrote that Congress did not contemplate treating the two provisions separately.

Opponents of gambling warned about corruption

Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, a former college and NBA star, was a sponsor of the law that he said was needed to protect against “the dangers of sports betting.”

All four major U.S. professional sports leagues and the NCAA had urged the court to uphold the federal law, saying a gambling expansion would hurt the integrity of their games. They also said that with legal sports betting in the United States, they’d have to spend a lot more money monitoring betting patterns and investigating suspicious activity.

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The Trump administration also called for the law to be upheld.

Alito acknowledged in his majority opinion “the legalization of sports gambling is a controversial subject,” in part for its potential to “corrupt professional and college sports.”

He included references to the “Black Sox Scandal,” the fixing of the 1919 World Series by members of the Chicago White Sox, and the point-shaving scandal of the early 1950s that rocked college basketball.

But ultimately, he wrote, Congress couldn’t require states to keep sports gambling prohibitions in place.

By STEFANIE DAZIO

BERLIN (AP) — Forget France: The Louvre Museum jewelry heist was a classic case of German efficiency.

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Photos of a German-made freight lift that the thieves used in a lightning-fast daylight heist at the Louvre have gone viral. And its manufacturer is now riding high from the unexpected endorsement.

Alexander Böcker, the managing director and third-generation owner of Böcker Maschinenwerke GmbH, told The Associated Press that when he and his wife saw the images online, they were “shocked that our lift had been misused for this robbery.”

“Once the initial shock had subsided, black humour took over,” he wrote in an email to the AP.

Authorities say the thieves spent less than four minutes inside the Louvre on Sunday morning. They wheeled the freight lift up to the museum, rode the basket up the façade, forced open a window, smashed display cases and grabbed priceless Napoleonic jewels before spiriting away on motorbikes through central Paris.

It didn’t take long for the Germans to seize on the marketing opportunity. By Monday morning, Böcker’s company had come up with a social media post featuring a photo of the freight lift — which is typically used for furniture and construction materials — and a slogan in German that translates to “when something needs to be done quickly.”

The post also touts the ability of the “Böcker Agilo” to transport up to 880 pounds of “your treasures” at a speed of 46 yards per minute. And it moves “whisper quiet” thanks to its 230 Volt E-Motor, the post says.

“We had hoped for a bit of attention and some good humour, but the feedback was overwhelming,” Böcker wrote Thursday. “I can understand that not everyone shares this sense of humour, but the vast majority laughed heartily.”

But the freight lift is not permitted to transport humans, Böcker said.

Crown jewels, yes. Thieves, no.

Philipp Jenne in Vienna contributed to this report.