FRISCO, Texas (AP) — Dallas Stars defenseman Nils Lundkvist walked into the room Monday without even a bandage covering the deep cut he has from taking a skate to the left side of his face during their playoff series against Minnesota.
“It looked way worse than it is. I got not too many stitches, just deep cut,” Lundkvist said when speaking to reporters for the first time since the scary bloody scene in Game 4 nine days earlier. “I was pretty lucky in an unlucky moment.”
Lundkvist spoke during the Stars' season-ending availability, when top-line center Roope Hintz revealed that he tore his left hamstring in two places. Hintz hadn't played since getting hurt March 6, his only game for the Stars since the Olympics.
Mikko Rantanen didn't want to get into details of the lower-body injury he sustained during the Olympics, where he played with Hintz for bronze medal-winning Finland. But Rantanen did get back for 10 games at the end of the regular season and the playoffs, when he had one goal and six assists against Minnesota.
This is the first time in four seasons that the Stars didn't advance to the Western Conference final. They were instead done after one round, eliminated after a Game 6 loss in Minnesot a last Thursday.
Lundkvist still has a visible small gash near his temple not far from his left ear.
On the play where he got hurt in that loss April 25, Lundkvist was called for a tripping penalty. As Michael McCarron tumbled over, the Wild forward’s skate inadvertently caught Lundkvist in the face, and he was bleeding badly when going off the ice.
The Stars just before the start of the playoffs announced a two-year, $3.5 million contract for Lundkvist through the 2027-28 season.
Hintz tore his hamstring when he got tangled up with Colorado’s Nathan MacKinnon along the boards during that game March 6. Hintz had missed the Stars' first four games after the Olympics because of illness before returning to the lineup that night.
While Hintz was getting closer to playing again, he and coach Glen Gulutzan both indicated the center wouldn’t have been ready for the start of the second round had the Stars advanced.
“I was getting there," Hintz said. “It was a lot of rehabbing and stuff like that, and then I was getting close, and I kind of re-injured it again a little bit.”
As for the play on which he injured the hamstring, Hintz described it as a battle for the puck when he “kind of overstretched it or something, and then it just popped. I don't know what really happened there.”
Hintz had reached at the back of his left leg and put no weight on his leg while being helped off the ice.
Rantanen missed the Stars' first 15 games after the Olympics before returning March 28.
“It's unfortunate because I was feeling really good before the Olympics. ... Coming back at the end of regular season, I didn’t feel like I got to the level where I was probably before Olympics," Rantanen said.
“He was injured for a long, long period of time and it’s hard to get on a moving train,” Gulutzan said. “He had a significant injury. Was he healthy? Yep, he worked hard to get back earlier than expected. ... Medically, yeah, he was healthy, but he was playing catch-up.”
Veteran forward Tyler Seguin played only 27 games before surgery in December to repair the ACL in his right knee. That was after the 34-year-old Seguin had missed the majority of the 2024-25 season because of hip surgery before returning for their playoff run last season.
Seguin said Monday that the nine-month timeline he was given for his ACL recovery would be right around the start of training camp.
“So that's my goal,” he said. “I feel deep down I’ll be as strong as ever.”
AP NHL playoffs: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnews.com/hub/nhl
Dallas Stars right wing Mikko Rantanen (96) looks on after Minnesota Wild left wing Matt Boldy scored during the third period of Game 6 in the first round of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup playoff series Thursday, April 30, 2026, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Bailey Hillesheim)
Dallas Stars defenseman Nils Lundkvist (5) celebrates after getting an assist on a goal scored by Jason Robertson in the third period of Game 2 of a first-round NHL Stanley Cup playoffs hockey series against the Minnesota Wild Monday, April 20, 2026, in Dallas. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)un
Dallas Stars defenseman Nils Lundkvist speaks during media availability Monday, May 4, 2026, in Frisco, Texas. (AP Photo/LM Otero)
NEW YORK (AP) — Ted Turner, a brash and outspoken television pioneer who raced yachts, owned huge chunks of the American West and transformed the news business by launching CNN in 1980, has died at age 87.
The network reported Turner died Wednesday, citing a news release from Turner Enterprises.
Turner owned professional sports teams in Atlanta, defended the America’s Cup in yachting in 1977 and donated a stunning $1 billion to United Nations charities. He married three women — most famously actor Jane Fonda — and earned the nicknames “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth of the South.”
He once bragged: “If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect.”
He was slowed in later years by Lewy Body Dementia. Long since out of the television business, he concentrated on philanthropy and his more than 2 million acres of property, including the nation’s largest bison herd.
His garrulous personality sometimes overshadowed a driven, risk-taking business acumen. By the time he sold his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc. in a 1996 media megadeal, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard company into a global conglomerate that included seven major cable networks, three professional sports teams and a pair of hit movie studios.
Turner’s signature achievement was creating CNN, the first 24-hour, all-news television network in 1980. At a time news is instantly available at anyone’s fingertips, it’s hard to recall that the idea of letting consumers decide when they choose to learn what’s going on in the world was once revolutionary.
In part, Turner’s own frustration with television news was the instigator. He often worked past 8 p.m., after the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts had already gone off the air, and was in bed by the time his local stations did their own newscasts at 11 p.m.
He took a chance by starting the operation sometimes derided as the “chicken noodle network” in the early days of cable television, living in an apartment above its Atlanta office.
“I was going to have to hit hard and move incredibly fast and that’s what we did — move so fast that the (broadcast) networks wouldn’t have the time to respond, because they should have done this, not me,” Turner recalled in a 2016 interview with the Academy of Achievement. “But they didn’t have the imagination.”
CNN’s breakthrough moment came during the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most television journalists had fled Baghdad, warned of an imminent American attack. CNN stayed, capturing arresting images of a war’s outbreak, with anti-aircraft tracers streaking across the sky and correspondents flinching from the concussion of bombs.
Turner was promised a continued role in CNN after his company’s sale to Time Warner for $7.3 billion in stock, but was gradually pushed out, much to his regret.
“I made a mistake,” he later said. “The mistake I made was losing control of the company.”
That same year — 1996 — saw the birth of Fox News Channel and arrival of a new dominant mogul in cable news, Rupert Murdoch. Political opinion became the stock in trade of networks like Fox News and MSNBC. Even though CNN built a worldwide news organizations particularly strong online, it struggles to this day with a diminished desire for straighter TV newscasts.
Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. When he was 9, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he grew up. After being expelled from Brown University for sneaking a coed into his room, Turner came to Atlanta to work as an account executive for his domineering father’s billboard company, Turner Advertising.
After his father’s 1963 suicide, Turner took over the company. In 1970, he bought an independent UHF station with a weak signal that didn’t even cover Atlanta.
On Dec. 17, 1976, he began transmitting the station to cable systems around the country via satellite. It became the TBS SuperStation. “It was the start of something bigger than we ever imagined,” Turner said in 1996.
TBS’ motley collection of old movies and “The Andy Griffith Show” reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves. Perennial doormats, the Braves slowly attracted fans across the nation through their superstation exposure and in the 1980s began declaring themselves “America’s Team.”
Turner, who early on donned a uniform and managed one game, helped open baseball’s free-agent price wars by signing pitcher Andy Messersmith.
In the 1980s, Turner went deeply into debt to buy MGM, a move again greeted with skepticism.
But the acquisition gave his company a huge library of vintage movies that eventually were parlayed into the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks. His devotion to older movies earned Turner a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004. He was also criticized for adding color to classic movies like “Casablanca,” which he said he did to make them appealing to a younger audience.
TBS also acquired the Hanna-Barbera animation library, which led to the launch of the Cartoon Network.
“He sees the obvious before most people do,” Bob Wright, former president and CEO of NBC, told The New Yorker in 2001. “We all look at the same picture, but Ted sees what you don’t see. And after he sees it, it becomes obvious to everybody.”
He revealed his ambitions as a younger man: “I used to tell people I wanted to become the world’s greatest sailor, businessman and lover all at the same time.”
Asked to share the secret to his success, he said: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.”
For much of his life a partying roustabout who wooed beautiful women with a roguish charm, the lean, mustachioed sportsman married three times. He was married to Fonda from 1991 to 2001. She quit acting while married to Turner, but tired of his philandering and divorced him, although they remained friends.
“He was sexy. He was brilliant. He had 2 million acres by the time I left. It would have been easy to stay,” Fonda said of her relationship with Turner.
Turner had an unexpected friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, bonding over hunting and arguments about politics over rum and cigars. A once bitter rival who compared Fox’s Murdoch to Adolf Hitler, they later reconciled over a mutual concern over the environment.
Turner built a sports empire, at one point owning professional baseball, basketball and hockey teams in Atlanta. He was best remembered at the helm of the Atlanta Braves, turning the doormats into postseason regulars by the 1990s. Their stadium, built for the 1996 Olympics, was named Ted Turner Field. The Braves replaced it in 2016 with a newer stadium north of Atlanta.
Perhaps Turner’s greatest love was for the land. He acquired millions of acres in ranches complete with roaming buffalo and was Nebraska’s largest private landholder. He spoke often of reviving the West’s bison herds, and in 2002 started a restaurant chain serving bison burgers, Ted’s Montana Grill. Researchers at Texas A&M University credited his donation of a few bulls in 2005 with helping increase the genetic diversity of the last herd of southern Plains bison.
He had a net worth of $2.5 billion in 2023, but had dropped off Forbes magazine’s ranking of the 400 richest Americans in 2021.
During a stock market bust, Turner’s net worth went from nearly $10 billion to about $2 billion in two-and-a-half years.
“To put this in perspective, I lost nearly $8 billion in 30 months,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Call Me Ted,” in 2008. “That means that, on average, my net worth dropped by about $67 million “per week,” or nearly $10 million “per day, every day, for two and a half years.”
He had enough time, and money, to devote to such lofty goals as promoting world peace and protecting the environment.
“See, my life is more an adventure than a quest to make money. Adventure is going out and doing something for the pure hell of it,” Turner once said. “You just want to see if you can do it, period. There’s no thought of gain other than your own satisfaction.”
Through the years, Turner’s antics occasionally overshadowed his business activities.
Fresh from skippering his boat “Courageous” to the America’s Cup title in 1977, a very inebriated Turner was captured by TV cameras stretched out on the floor at the victory celebration.
Turner managed to insult many with his shoot-from-the-lip style. An atheist since his only sister died of lupus at age 17, he called Christians “losers” and “Jesus-freaks,” later apologizing for both remarks.
He once suggested in a speech that unemployed Black people be used to haul mobile missiles with ropes “like the Egyptians building the pyramids.” After civil rights leaders demanded an apology, he said he was just joking.
Other times, his humor saved him from potentially awkward situations, like when he talked to an audience in Berlin in 1999. “You know, you Germans had a bad century,” Turner said, according to The New Yorker. “You were on the wrong side of two wars. You were the losers. I know what that’s like. When I bought the Atlanta Braves, we couldn’t win, either. You guys can turn it around. You can start making the right choices. If the Atlanta Braves could do it, then Germany can do it.”
Turner, father of five children, grabbed a leadership role in American philanthropy with his Sept. 18, 1997, pledge to give $1 billion, or $100 million a year for 10 years, to United Nations charities. Even as Turner’s fortune shrank after the AOL Time Warner merger, he continued giving money to the U.N., calling it the best hope for peace.
He promoted a range of humanitarian causes. Turner joined former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn to start the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to reducing the threat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Turner fretted publicly about the world’s problems.
“If I had to predict, the way things are going, I’d say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct in 50 years,” Turner said in 2003. “Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me.”
As he poured millions into nonprofits on a global scale, Turner was also fond of spreading his wealth in small ways. He once gave $500 to a volunteer fire department that helped extinguish a blaze on one of his ranches. Another time he lent personal paintings for an exhibit at a Bozeman, Montana, museum.
Former Associated Press correspondent Ryan Nakashima contributed to this report.
FILE - Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner holds up the World Series trophy on the field at Atlanta Fulton County Stadium after the Braves won the 1995 World Series, Oct. 28, 1995, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)
FILE - Actress and political activist Jane Fonda and media mogul Ted Turner arrive at a party in support of Proposition 128 in Los Angeles on Nov. 6, 1990. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon, File)
FILE - Actress Jane Fonda and CNN founder Ted Turner pose together at the United Nations Foundation Global Leadership Dinner, Nov. 6, 2013, in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, File)
FILE - Ted Turner is seen at his desk inside the CNN Center in 1982. (Nancy Mangiafico/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)
FILE - Ted Turner speaks during the CNN World Report Contributors banquet in Atlanta on May 4, 1995. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)
