Editor's note: only the marquee game carries a line here. We pull it from a real sportsbook page the morning of. The rest of the slate stays pick-free until our picks model ships. Full slate and live status at watch.uristocrat.com.
Saturday is stacked three ways. The WNBA puts its two best teams on national TV at night, MLB runs fifteen games from lunch to last call, and the NFL dumps seven preseason games onto the afternoon. If you only watch one thing, watch the last one on this list of three: Minnesota at Las Vegas is the closest thing to a Finals preview the regular season will give you.
Marquee: Minnesota Lynx at Las Vegas Aces (8:00pm ET, CBS)
Minnesota comes in at 28-7, the best record in the league. Las Vegas is 24-11 and already locked into the postseason. These two met a week ago in Minneapolis and the Lynx won 98-87, with Olivia Miles going for 26 and seven assists and Napheesa Collier holding A'ja Wilson to a season-low 16. That is the whole game in one sentence: if Collier can take Wilson out of her spots again, Minnesota wins the season series and the tiebreaker conversation is over. Las Vegas has the home floor and the defending title, and Wilson has not had two quiet nights in a row all year. Vegas thinks it is basically a coin flip, which tells you how much the Aces' floor is worth even against the league's best team.
Vegas line (via ESPN): Lynx -1.5 (-115), total 182.5, moneyline Minnesota -130 / Las Vegas +110.
Also today
- Yankees at Blue Jays (3:07pm ET, YES / Sportsnet). New York is 68-54 and Toronto is 60-64, which is not the AL East anyone drew up in March. The Jays have played themselves out of the race and into spoiler duty, and this is the kind of series the Yankees have quietly dropped all season.
- Orioles at Rays (6:10pm ET, Rays.TV / MASN). Tampa Bay is 74-47 and owns the best record in baseball. Baltimore at 59-63 is the team that was supposed to be here instead. Worth an inning or two just to see what the Rays are doing with a payroll that would embarrass most teams.
- Cardinals at Cubs (2:20pm ET, Marquee). Chicago is 72-51 and running the NL Central. A day game at Wrigley against St. Louis is the most reliably pleasant three hours on any August calendar, standings be damned.
- Brewers at Dodgers (7:15pm ET, FOX). The national Saturday window. Milwaukee has been the better team for stretches of this season and gets to prove it in front of a full Chavez Ravine.
- Eagles at Ravens (7:00pm ET, ESPN). Preseason, so temper everything. Still the best matchup on the exhibition board, and the only one where both starting units might see a real drive.
- Liberty at Sun (1:00pm ET, Fox 5 New York). New York is 21-14 and Connecticut is 8-24. Not competitive on paper, but it is the earliest WNBA tip of the day and a clean lead-in to the night game.
The through line today is that the two best teams in their sports are both playing, and only one of them is on a channel you already have. Tampa Bay keeps piling up wins nobody is watching. Minnesota gets CBS at 8. Take the free one.
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