The Yankees and Dodgers will reprise their legendary rivalry this weekend at Dodger Stadium, and just like last year’s World Series, there’s plenty of interest from fans and broadcasters in the high-profile matchup. 

The two teams will have their lone regular-season series Friday through Sunday, marking a high point in a 2025 season that thus far has featured another attendance boost, and plenty of drama surrounding other stars such as the Mets’ Juan Soto and Pirates’ Paul Skenes. The Yankees-Dodgers series will once more bring together arguably MLB’s two greatest talents: Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge. Both players are again off to strong starts and are currently strong betting favorites to win Most Valuable Player awards in 2025. 

Each of the three games will be shown nationally, with Apple TV+ carrying Friday’s opener as part of its streaming package, Fox following on Sunday, and ESPN airing the finale on Sunday Night Baseball. The audience for that last game is likely to challenge, if not surpass, the average of 2.54 million seen on May 18 for the end of a Subway Series between the Mets and Yankees.

Part of that will draw from a strong base of last year’s World Series, won by the Dodgers in five games, that drew the largest average audience for that event since 2017. 

While the Dodgers already enjoy a perennial status as the league’s top attendance draw, currently averaging 50,231 per game, ticket resale pricing for each of the three games has started at nearly $100 per ticket across multiple marketplaces. That figure is about twice the comparable get-in resale prices for seats to games in the Dodgers’ home series next week against the Mets.  

There are plenty of baseball-related subplots to the weekend tilt at Dodger Stadium. Yankees slugger Aaron Judge will again return to the site where he injured a toe running into the outfield wall, ultimately derailing a 2023 season that was setting up to be another strong one for him. Judge will again be manning right field this weekend after primarily playing center field last year while Soto was a Yankee.

Ohtani, meanwhile, is continuing non-game work to build himself back up to return to starting pitching for the Dodgers, something expected sometime after the All-Star break in July.

The series also sees the teams going in somewhat different directions. The Yankees have won 16 of their last 20 games, rising to the second-best record in the American League as the club dramatically reshaped its roster after the departure of Soto and is seeing the fruits of that effort. The Dodgers still are tied for the third-best record in the National League, but they have gone just 13–12 so far in May and have more than $102 million in payroll tied up in currently injured players, a total greater than the overall payrolls of six teams.

A modern-day NHL dynasty is quickly developing, one that could have been all but unthinkable just a few years ago.

The defending-champion Panthers clinched a third-straight trip to the Stanley Cup Final on Wednesday, closing out the Hurricanes in five games in the Eastern Conference final. Florida’s back-to-back-to-back berths to the Final mark the NHL’s first such trifecta since the Lightning’s run from 2020–22, and the Panthers are just the ninth franchise in league history to do so. 

The circumstances by which the Panthers achieved the feat, however, and the nature of modern hockey economics, make the team’s achievement even more remarkable. Tampa Bay’s run included two pandemic-shortened seasons, while Florida has been able to keep the core of its team together despite the NHL salary cap rising only 8% over the last five years in advance of a much more aggressive coming escalation. 

Long struggling in a Sun Belt market that wasn’t a traditional one for hockey, the Panthers went through a 26-year stretch without a playoff series victory until that finally happened in 2022. Since then, the Vincent Viola–owned Panthers franchise has engaged in a comprehensive franchise overhaul that has included new local media-rights deals with over-the-air and streaming operators, a sizable attendance boost, and a new training facility, the Baptist Health IcePlex.

In the process, the team’s estimated franchise value has reached $1.4 billion, nearly five times the comparable $295 million in 2020. 

“There’s been a lot of work put in by this organization to become better and reach the level where we want to win Stanley Cups, we want to compete for Stanley Cups every single year,” said Panthers captain Aleksander Barkov. “There are 31 other teams in the league, and it’s hard every single year. They want to do that, too, so it’s not easy. But we’ve managed to do it three years in a row, which is, I think, an incredible achievement so far.”

Barkov, meanwhile, also extends a still-active streak of 45 years in which former NHL star Jaromír Jágr has a teammate playing in the Stanley Cup Final. 

The Panthers will face a repeat in the Stanley Cup Final against the Oilers, the matchup from last year. Edmonton eliminated the Stars Thursday night in a five-game Western Conference final. Last year’s Game 7 of the Panthers-Oilers matchup garnered the NHL’s best U.S. television audience in five years as well as the largest viewership for Canada’s Sportsnet in the network’s 26-year history to that point. 

The NHL had not had a repeat matchup in the Stanley Cup Final since the Red Wings and Penguins in 2008 and 2009.