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• The Braves lured an old Alex Anthopoulos lieutenant away from the Blue Jays last night, when Anthopoulos, Atlanta’s new general manager and executive vice-president, hired Jays assistant GM Andrew Tinnish as his vice-president of amateur and international scouting. Tinnish spent 16 years in Toronto and directed the club’s international scouting efforts in recent seasons. The move reunites him with Perry Minasian, another former Jays scouting director who joined the Braves just prior to Anthopoulos and was elevated to AGM and VP of baseball operations yesterday.

• TSN reported yesterday that 10.6 million Canadians watched some part of Sunday’s Grey Cup on TSN or RDS, with the average audience coming in at 4.3 million. Nearly six million were watching when Matt Black intercepted Bo Levi Mitchell in the end zone to clinch the Argos’ victory in the final minute.

• Chicago’s Alex DeBrincat had a hat trick in a 7-3 win over Anaheim last night, making him the second-youngest Blackhawks player to score three or more goals in a game. DeBrincat was 19 years, 344 days old when he did it, falling five days short of bettering Jeremy Roenick, who did it in 1989 against the Maple Leafs.

According to Hockey-Reference.com, DeBrincat is the 38th teenager to score three or more goals in a game since the 1988-89 season. Most only have the one game, but a handful have more. Jimmy Carson did it five times in 1988, Patrick Laine did it three times last season, and Trevor Linden, Eric Lindros, Peter Mueller, Owen Nolan and Joe Sakic each have two.

• The NHL slapped Gabriel Landeskog with a four-game suspension yesterday for cross-checking Flames forward Matthew Tkachuk in the face, a misdeed he committed in the first period of a 3-2 Calgary win last Saturday. The Avalanche captain will sit out Colorado’s home date with the Jets tomorrow night, plus ensuing home games against the Devils, Stars and Sabres.

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• Two Russian athletes were retroactively bounced from the 2012 Olympics for doping offences this morning. The country’s track and field federation said the disqualified athletes are long jumper Anna Nazarova and relay runner Yulia Gushchina, who had previously lost all three of her medals from Beijing 2008 and London 2012 when teammates of hers were caught doping. The bans come a week before the IOC’s expected Dec. 5 ruling on Russia’s participation at the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang.

• LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and other NBA luminaries rushed to Twitter yesterday to deride the firing of Grizzles head coach David Fizdale, the team’s chosen scapegoat for an eight-game losing streak. Fizdale, who won NBA titles in 2012 and 2013 as an assistant coach on James and Wade’s Heat, went 50-51 over little more than a season in Memphis, including a 43-39 mark last year. He’s the second NBA coach fired this season; Phoenix let Earl Watson go on Oct. 22 after an 0-3 start.

• On a related note: No NHL coaches have been fired so far in 2017-18, officially surpassing the early standard of a season ago. Nov. 27, 2016 was the day Florida canned Gerard Gallant after a road game at Carolina and left him to hail his own taxi outside the arena.

Nutritional information

On Saturday’s Raptors game broadcast from Atlanta, play-by-play man Matt Devlin noted that DeMar DeRozan had a scoring streak on the line — he could tie teammate Kyle Lowry for the most consecutive regular-season games with 10 or more points in franchise history. The record was 114 games, which Lowry began on April 10, 2015 and ended on Jan. 3, 2017. DeRozan’s streak started Feb. 28, 2016 and ended on Saturday night when he scored just two points on six shots in the 112-78 blowout win over the Hawks.

DeRozan was rightly praised by Devlin and Jack Armstrong for spending his time in the second half feeding the ball inside to Jonas Valanciunas to get the centre back into the offensive flow after he struggled for several games. DeRozan finished the night with a team-high eight assists and a double-digit point streak that ended at 113 games.

Below are two charts comparing the streaks compiled by Lowry and DeRozan.

Chart No. 1, the boxplot, shows the range of points scored in their streaks. Oddly, they both topped out at 43 points, although Lowry’s is a treated as an outlier because of the distance to which it exceeds his median of 21 points. Half of Lowry’s games in the streak fell between 16 and 26 points. DeRozan’s median was 26 points with an interquartile range between 22 and 32.

Chart No. 2 shows side-by-side histograms of their games during the streak. DeRozan’s is much more of a normal distribution, while Lowry’s is weighted to the left, with the largest bin being his 36 games in the 15- to 19-point range (noted on the chart by the median value of 17). Seventy-two of DeRozan’s games fall in the middle ranges (20-24, 25-29, 30-34). He also had 18 games of 35 or more points where Lowry only had four.

The streaks only cover the regular season and the Raptors’ playoff struggles would have chopped up the streaks had they been counted overall. Lowry was held under 10 points in two of four playoff games in 2015 and in two of 20 games in 2016. DeRozan’s was held under 10 points in three of 20 post-season games in 2016 and two of 10 last season.

Photo of the day

Three days before the 2018 World Cup draw is to be held at the Kremlin in Moscow, soccer’s governing body made a point of defending the honour of the tournament’s embattled host country. FIFA secretary general Fatma Samoura said today that there is no evidence of “widespread” doping in Russian soccer, a cautious rebuttal to allegations that Russian authorities were prepared to conceal any national-team player’s positive test in the lead-up to the 2014 World Cup.

As host, Russia will automatically be included in the first pot of the draw along with the seven highest-ranked qualifiers. The national team’s world ranking has taken a hit in the past couple of years because it didn’t have to go through the rigorous European qualifying stages. And Russia was a dud at the 2014 World Cup, where it lost once and drew twice in the round robin and was eliminated. Russian Deputy Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko referred to that tedious showing to deny the doping allegations earlier today.

“If we play like that while doped, then how would we do without?” Mutko said, per the Associated Press. “It’s absolute stupidity.”

At nationalpost.com

• Meet hockey’s “other” Crosby: Taylor, a third-year goalie at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota whose older brother has made somewhat of a name for himself in the NHL. Growing up in the shadow of a Canadian hockey phenom wasn’t easy at times, especially when Taylor told her parents she wanted to take up the game too. But as New York Times reporter Seth Berkman writes, the 21-year-old is now tracing her own distinct path on and off the ice.

• The Argonauts defence has a motto they’ll often voice amongst themselves: “Zero, one, three,” as in the range of points they’re willing to concede when the ball is near their end zone. Cassius Vaughn pondered the phrase as the Stampeders threatened to score late in the fourth quarter on Sunday. Seconds later, writes Steve Simmons, the defensive back and unlikely Grey Cup hero saw a Kamar Jorden fumble bounding towards him, with 109 yards of daylight and a tie game in his sights.

TV tonight

All times Eastern

2:45 p.m. Soccer: Premier League
— Leicester vs. Tottenham Sportsnet
— Brighton vs. Crystal Palace SN One
3 p.m. Soccer: Premier League
— Watford vs. Manchester United TSN1,3-5
— West Brom vs. Newcastle SN World
7 p.m. NHL: Vancouver at NY Islanders SN Pacific
7 p.m. NBA: Miami at Cleveland SN One
7:30 p.m. NHL: Los Angeles at Detroit SN East, SN Ontario
8 p.m. NBA: Washington at Minnesota TSN1,3
9 p.m. NHL
— Toronto at Calgary SN West, TSN4
— Arizona at Edmonton SN Oilers
10 p.m. NHL: Dallas at Vegas SN One, Sportsnet
10 p.m. NBA: Denver at Utah NBATV

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