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TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Andrei Vasilevskiy stopped 33 shots to improve to 16-0-1 in his past 17 games, helping the Tampa Bay Lightning beat the Florida Panthers 6-1 on Thursday night in the final game for both teams before the Olympic break.

Panthers Lightning Hockey

Brandon Hagel, Oliver Bjporkstrand, Jake Guentzel, Erik Cernak, Pontus Holmberg and Zemgus Girgensons — who will all participate in the Olympic Games — scored for Tampa Bay. The Lightning are 19-1-1 in their last 21 games.

Lightning forward Nikita Kucherov extended his scoring streak to 10 games, his 13th career scoring streak of at least 10 games — which is tied for fifth in NHL history.

Mackie Samoskevich scored for the Panthers. Danil Tarasov finished with 20 saves for Florida before leaving due to injury in the third period. Sergei Bobrovsky finished the game for the Panthers, who played without regulars Brad Marchand, Aaron Ekblad, Evan Rodrigues. They all sat out after playingWednesday against Boston.

After Tampa Bay went up 4-0, tempers flared between the two rivals, which started when Matthew Tkachuk hit Kucherov from behind well away from the puck during a delayed penalty. Tkachuk and Hagel, who fought off the opening faceoff between Canada and the U.S. at last year's Four Nations Cup dropped the gloves during the dust up at 4:06 of the third period. All 11 skaters on the ice were given penalties while Florida coach Paul Maurice was ejected.

In the final preseason game between the teams in October, they combined for more than 300 minutes in penalties. They combined for 137 on Thursday.

Hagel opened the scoring 2:08 into the game, tipping a Victor Hedman shot. Girgensons made it 2-0 at 14:08, whacking a backhand past Tarasov during a scramble in front.

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Tkachuk took an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty at the end of the first period and Guentzel made the Panthers pay for it, getting a rebound off a Darren Raddysh shot at 1:14. Cernak scored his first of the season on a wraparound with 2:10 to go.

Holmberg scored for Tampa Bay at 6:09 of the third before Samoskevich scored a power-play goal at 9:50. Bjorkstrand capped the scoring with 4:19 remaining.

Panthers: Host Toronto on Thursday, Feb 26.

Lightning: Host Toronto on Wednesday, Feb. 25.

AP NHL:https://apnews.com/hub/nhl

A three-person independent arbitration panel has awarded Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal a $32 million contract for the 2026 MLB season,ESPN's Jeff Passanreported Thursday. It is a one-year deal for Skubal, 29, and he will be eligible for unrestricted free agency next offseason.

A Wednesday hearing saw both the Tigers and Skubal present their cases for what theback-to-back AL Cy Young Award winnershould earn for the 2026 season. Prior to the hearing, Skubal's agent, Scott Boras, asked for an arbitration-record salary of $32 million — $1 million more than the $31 million Juan Soto got in 2024 with the New York Yankees. The Tigers proposed $19 million, and the$13 million difference in filings was the largest in MLB arbitration history.

The panel was tasked with selecting one of the two numbers from Skubal and the Tigers, not determining an amount between the totals.

The previous arbitration record for a pitcher was $19.75 million, which was awarded to former Tigers lefty David Price in 2015. Toronto Blue Jays first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s $19.9 million salary in 2024 was the highest total in an arbitration case decided by a panel. Jeanne Charles and Walt De Treaux, who were on the panel for Guerrero's decision, were also part of the Skubal hearing.

Skubal's was the third arbitration case decision this offseason, with the previous two also going the player's way. Baltimore Orioles pitcher Kyle Bradish was awarded $3.55 million over the team's ask of $2.875 millio, and Houston Astros catcher Yainer Diaz received $4.5 million rather than the $3 million the team proposed.

[Get more Tigers news: Detroit team feed]

Seven more players have arbitration hearings scheduled, including Milwaukee Brewers catcher Willson Contreras, Kansas City Royals pitcher Kris Bubic and Cincinnati Reds catcher Tyler Stephenson.

The 29-year-old Skubal has been one of the best pitchers in baseball the past two seasons, compiling a 31-10 record with 469 strikeouts, a 0.91 WHIP and a .201 opponent batting average in 381 1/3 innings pitched. He's a two-time All-Star and All-MLB first-team player, he won the pitching Triple Crown in 2024, and he's one of six players who have won multiple Cy Youngs in the past 15 years.

Last season, Skubal led the Tigers pitching staff backed by Jack Flaherty and Case Mize. Detroit finished second in the AL Central with an 87-75 record and reached the ALDS, in which they lost to the Seattle Mariners in five games.

Skubal, who willbe one of Team USA's top armsat next month's World Baseball Classic, won one of his three postseason starts, pitching 20 2/3 innings and allowing four earned runs while striking out 36 with opponents batting .143 against him.

The Los Angeles Clippers continued their activity leading up to the trade deadline, sending center Ivica Zubac and forward Kobe Brown to the Indiana Pacers on Thursday, ESPN reported.

The Clippers are set to receive Bennedict Mathurin, Isaiah Jackson, two first-round draft picks and one second-round pick in the deal. Los Angeles' own first-round pick in the upcoming draft is owned by the Oklahoma City Thunder.

If Indiana's first-round pick this year's draft is outside of the 1-4 and 10-30 picks range, it converted to the Pacers' 2031 unprotected first-round pick, according to the report.

The 7-foot Zubac, who is in his 10th NBA season, has averaged 14.4 points with 11.0 rebounds in 43 games (42 starts) for Los Angeles this season. Brown, 26, has averaged 2.9 points in 34 games off the bench.

Mathurin, 23, is scoring 17.8 points with 5.4 rebounds in 28 games (24 starts) for the Pacers this season and 16.1 points with 4.6 rebounds in 237 games (109 starts) over four seasons with the team after he was the No. 6 overall pick in the 2022 draft.

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Jackson, 24, is scoring 6.4 points with 5.6 rebounds in 38 games (14 starts) for Indiana.

The Clippers opened the season with a 6-21 record but turned it around while Zubac was out with an ankle injury. He has since returned following a five-game absence, with the Clippers now on a 17-6 run, although they have lost three of four.

It is the second trade of a Clippers starter in two days after the team officially sent guard James Harden to the Cleveland Cavaliers on Wednesday for guard Darius Garland.

Zubac, who did not play in Wednesday's game against the Cavaliers following the birth of his child, has averaged 10.5 points and 8.3 rebounds in 627 games (493 starts) with the Los Angeles Lakers (2016-19) and Clippers.

--Field Level Media

The Oregon supreme court has ruled that a large number of criminal cases across the state must be dismissed due to a severe shortage of public defenders, a major decision that attorneys say will impact more than 1,400 pending cases.

The problem has been years in the making and has become a significant constitutional crisis, as people charged with crimes are routinely unable to fight their cases as they wait weeks, months or sometimes years for the state to appoint them lawyers. The attorney shortage – due in part to the increasing difficulty of recruiting attorneys for the low-salary, high-caseload jobs – has meant that people have had cases hanging over them for extended periods of time, impacting their housing, employment and families, advocates say.

Oregon's highest court ruled on Thursday that dismissals are required if the state failed to provide counsel within 60 days after arraignment for a misdemeanor and within 90 days for a felony. Statedataon unrepresented defendants showed that as of this week, more than 1,400 active cases fall in that category, including hundreds of people who have been waiting more than a year for an attorney.

The ruling dictates that the cases be dismissed without prejudice, meaning prosecutors can re-file charges. The court said charges can be brought again "when the state is able to provide the counsel to which a defendant is entitled". The ruling also said dismissal isn't required if during the 60- or 90-day period the defendant failed to appear in court for a required hearing.

The case originated with a man named Allen Rex Roberts, who was charged with unauthorized use of a vehicle and possession of a stolen car in August 2021. The charges were dismissed in October 2022 because of the state's failure to appoint him a lawyer, but in April 2024, prosecutors re-indicted Roberts on the same charges. For the next year, Roberts repeatedly returned to court for hearings where he was supposed to be appointed counsel, but each time no attorney was available. Eventually, his case was again dismissed due to a lack of attorneys.

The right to counsel isenshrinedin the Oregon and US constitutions, and the shortage of attorneys has led to mass violations of those fundamental rights and pushed the criminal legal system to the brink, advocates say. The vast majority of defendants in the state are indigent and cannot afford a private attorney.

"Many folks who are eligible for dismissal after the court's opinion today have been facing the criminal justice system without assistance for months or years," said Jessica Snyder, a lawyer who co-wrote an amicus brief in the case on behalf of the federal public defenders in Oregon. "The harm is great. It has led to individuals losing their housing, losing contact with their children because of no-contact orders, [and] losing the opportunity to preserve evidence in their criminal case."

Some defendants would have been able to quickly resolve their cases if they simply could afford a private attorney, Snyder noted.

"The toll is also psychological. A lot of clients talked about the despair they felt coming back to court over and over again without someone to help them, how confused they felt, how the court wouldn't listen to their concerns or prosecutors wouldn't help them navigate the system," said Snyder.

A previous courtrulingdictated that the state must release defendants from jail within seven days of appearing in court if they aren't appointed an attorney. That means the more than 1,400 cases impacted by Thursday's ruling mostly involve defendants who are already out of custody.

The attorney shortage is a systemic and statewide problem in Oregon, and thecauses are complex, with criminal defense lawyers noting the state has long underfunded public defense, leaving few public defenders overwhelmed with massive caseloads. A backlog of cases during the pandemic and increasing time required to review materials like body-camera footage and digital evidence has further strained the system, advocates say.

Oregon's crisis is particularly acute, but attorney shortages have createdproblemsacross the country, including inWashington state,Maine,Illinois,UtahandNew Hampshire.

Nadia Dahab, a Portland-based attorney who argued the Roberts case, said she hoped the ruling would force the state to pursue a "solution that recognizes the importance of access to counsel for people charged with a crime and allocates the resources necessary to make sure the public defense system adequately protects them".

"Roberts," she added, "is one of thousands, and the harms he suffered through the arrest warrant when the state recharged him and through the impact of having to take off work to go to court every month – those are very exemplary of what lots of others are facing."

Oregon's department of justice had argued against blanket dismissals in the Roberts case.

Dan Rayfield, the state attorney general, said in a statement on Thursday that the state's legislature had stepped up to increase investments, and he said: "Oregonians deserve solutions." He continued: 'Too many are being left without legal representation – some sitting in jail, others stuck in limbo outside of custody, unable to move their cases forward. That is not acceptable for public safety."

Rayfield said the state respects the supreme court's decision to "set clear limits on how long someone can go without counsel" and he expected the Oregon Public Defense Commission (OPDC), the agency that oversees the public defense system, to meet the standards established by the court and "take responsibility for ensuring people are represented".

The OPDC said in a statement it was assessing the decision and that the commission had made progress in reducing the number of unrepresented individuals and would "continue to address the crisis with urgency and transparency". The statement noted that there were 2,494 people without an attorney at the end of January, down 37% from the year prior.

"We will collaborate with our partners in the criminal justice community to respond to this ruling and build on this progress while protecting defendants' rights and public safety," the statement said.

The public defender crisis was exacerbated last year as Oregon abandoned a policy effort to decriminalize drugs, leading to a surge in arrests for possession that furtherburdened attorneys and clogged up the courts.

The Metropolitan Public Defenders, which represents indigent defendants in Portland and the surrounding region, said in a statement that increasing the number of public defenders alone would not solve the crisis, and urged for more reforms that would reduce the volume of cases in the system: "Oregon needs more community-based resources, and the system needs more … alternatives to prosecution and incarceration."

John Wentworth, president of the Oregon District Attorneys Association, which represents the state's prosecutors, criticized the supreme court decision in a statement, saying: "Criminal defendants, their victims and our communities will continue to lack justice as potentially thousands of cases will now be dismissed. This is an immense waste of taxpayers' money."

Wentworth, the district attorney of Clackamas county, called on the state's governor and OPDC to "fix this problem now", writing: "Our indigent defense system must deliver the service it is funded to provide."

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The U.S.Census Bureauplans to use a survey form with a citizenship question as part of itspractice testof the 2030 census, raising questions about whether the Trump administration might try to make a significant change to the once-a-decade headcount thatfailedduring the president's first term.

Census 2030

The field test being conducted in Huntsville, Alabama, and Spartanburg, South Carolina, is using questions from the American Community Survey, the comprehensive survey of American life, rather than questions from recent census forms.

Among the questions on the ACS is one that asks, "Is this person a citizen of the United States?" Questions for the census aren't supposed to ask about citizenship, and they haven't for 75 years.

Last August,Trump instructedthe Commerce Department to have the Census Bureau start work on a new census that would exclude immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally from the head count.

The Constitution's 14th Amendment says "the whole number of persons in each state" should be counted for the numbers used for apportionment, the process of divvying up congressional seats, and Electoral College votes among the states. The Census Bureau has interpreted that to mean anybody living in the U.S., regardless of legal status.

The bureau did not respond Thursday to inquiries seeking comment about why the ACS questions were being used for the 2026 test.

Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former congressional staffer who consults on census issues, said the ACS questions have never been used for a census field test before. She said the 2026 test — which was pared down from six locations to two — has become "a shell of what the Census Bureau proposed and should do to ensure an accurate 2030 Census."

"This full pivot from a real field test is alarming and deserves immediate congressional attention, in my view," Lowenthal said.

The field test gives the statistical agency the chance to learn how to better tally populations that were undercounted during the last census in 2020 and improve methods that will be used in 2030. Among the new methods being tested is the use of U.S. Postal Service workersto conduct taskspreviously done by census workers.

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The test originally was supposed to take place insix places, but the Trump administration earlier this week announced that it had eliminated four sites — Colorado Springs, Colorado, western North Carolina, western Texas and tribal lands in Arizona.

Mark Mather, an associate vice president at the Population Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan research group, said he couldn't speculate on political motivations behind the decision to use the ACS questions, but said the more fundamental concern was methodological.

"The ACS form wouldn't provide a valid test of 2030 census operations," he said. "It's a completely different animal."

In his first term, President Donald Trump unsuccessfullytried to adda citizenship question to the 2020 census form. He also signed orders that would have excluded people who are in the U.S. illegally from the apportionment figures and mandated the collection of citizenship data.

The attempt to add the citizenship question was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court, and both orders wererescinded when Democratic President Joe Biden arrivedat the White House in January 2021, before the 2020 census figures were released.

Republican lawmakers in Congress recently have introduced legislation that would exclude some non-citizens from the apportionment figures. Several GOP state attorneys also havefiled federal lawsuitsin Louisiana and Missouri seeking to add a citizenship question to the next census and exclude people in the U.S. illegally from the apportionment count.

Follow Mike Schneider on the social platform Bluesky:@mikeysid.bsky.social.

Follow the AP's coverage of the U.S. Census Bureau athttps://apnews.com/hub/us-census-bureau.

South Carolinachildren who havecontracted cases of the measles virusin recent months have also been affected by a worrying and sometimes deadly complication, the state's epidemiologist said Wednesday.

Some have developed an inflammatory brain condition known asencephalitis, which refers to swelling in the brain that can cause seizures, intellectual disability or even death.

It's unknown how many children have encephalitis, but Dr. Linda Belltold reportersthat any time people develop theknown complication of measles"there can be long-term consequences, things like developmental delay and impacts on the neurologic system that can be irreversible."

"We want to prevent this potential complication in anyone," she said.

The majority of the state's876 casesare in children, including 233 under the age of five years old and 555 between the ages of five and 17, according to data from the South Carolina Department of Public Health released Tuesday.

Encephalitis usually occurs within 30 days days of an initial measles infection. Among children who get measles encephalitis, 10 to 15 percent die, according toWired.

And, encephalitis isn't the only complication health authorities have seen due to infections.

Bell noted that there had been cases of pneumonia — a leading cause of child deaths around the world — as well as 19 hospitalizations for complications related to measles in South Carolina since the outbreak's start in October.

"These are complications we hope to prevent, and increasing vaccination coverage protects those who cannot be vaccinated like young infants, pregnant women and those with weakened immune systems," she said.

The majority — a whopping 95 percent — of cases are in unvaccinated individuals. That's a trend that's been seen in other outbreaks across the country since last year, though South Carolina's is now the largest since another sickened hundreds in West Texas.

The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine offers lifelong protection for 97 percent of people who receive two doses, which is how the U.S. eliminated the highly infectious measles virus in 2000.

But, rising vaccine hesitancy and misinformation has left communities unprotected, doctors say.

"There's also a misconception that measles is just a routine childhood infection, that it's not consequential," Stanford Medicine's Dr. Sruti Nadimpalli explained in astatement. "In reality, it suppresses the immune system and the potential complications are very serious, including severe debility and death."

In the Palmetto State, however, the tide is starting to turn.

Bell said there had been a strong increase in vaccinations last month: the largest since the beginning of the outbreak.

"No vaccine offers 100 percent protection against infection, but the MMR vaccine is one of the most effective vaccines in preventing infection," she said.

Nimari Burnett scored a career-high 31 points to lead No. 2 Michigan to a 110-69 rout of Penn State in a Big Ten contest on Thursday in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Burnett went 11 of 16 from the field overall and 7 of 10 from 3-point range while playing just 21 minutes. L.J. Cason, Trey McKenney and Morez Johnson each scored 12 points for Michigan (21-1, 11-1 Big Ten), which is now off to its best start in school history.

Michigan shot 60.6% from the field overall (40 of 66), including 51.7% from 3-point range (15 of 29), and held a 44-21 rebounding advantage.

Freddie Dilione V scored 19 points and Josh Reed and Melih Tunca each had 15 points in defeat for Penn State (10-13, 1-11), which shot 2 of 20 from 3-point range and 37.1% overall (23 of 62).

Going up against a bigger Michigan frontline was going to be challenging enough for Penn State, but the task got harder for the Nittany Lions at the beginning of the game when 7-foot freshman center Ivan Juric was ruled out with an illness.

Michigan dominated the first half, taking a 56-24 lead into the locker room. The Wolverines shot 21 of 32 from the field overall and made 7 of 13 shots from 3-point range in the half. Meanwhile, Penn State was 0 of 10 from the 3-point line in the first half.

The second half wasn't much different, as Michigan built a 42-point lead on Burnett's triple that made it 76-34 with 14:40 remaining.

The Wolverines reached the 100-point mark with 3:23 left when a 3-pointer by Will Tschetter gave Michigan a 100-59 lead.

It was the eighth time this year that Michigan has scored at least 100 points in a game.

Michigan left little doubt from the start, opening the game on a 15-2 run and going up 26-10 with 8:50 remaining in the first half.

The Wolverines later went on a 9-2 run to grab a 44-18 lead with 3:38 until halftime.

--Field Level Media