Ever dreamed of buying a defending Super Bowl champion franchise?

Well, now you can — if you have a few billion dollars lying around. 

The Estate of Paul G. Allen announced it had “commenced a formal sale process” of the Seahawks just 10 days after the franchise captured its second Super Bowl title with a 29-13 win over the Patriots at Levi’s Stadium. 

In a statement announcing the news, the Allen estate said the sale of the Seahawks is “consistent with Allen’s directive to eventually sell his sports holdings and direct all Estate proceeds to philanthropy.”

“The Estate has selected investment bank Allen & Company and law firm Latham & Watkins to lead the sale process, which is estimated to continue through the 2026 off-season.

NFL owners must then ratify a final purchase agreement,” the statement continued. 

Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, purchased the Seahawks in 1997 for around $200 million. 

The team’s current home, Lumen Field, was built, and Seattle won its first Super Bowl (2014) during his tenure and made another Big Game appearance the following season.

Allen died in 2018, and his younger sister, Jody Allen, has been the chair of the franchise since. 

At the time of his death, Allen owned the Seahawks, Trail Blazers and a 25 percent stake in the Sounders.

As part of his will, Allen directed his sister to eventually sell off his sports holdings and use the proceeds for charity. 

The Seahawks were valued at an estimated $6.59 billion last year by Sportico. Forbes valued the team at $6.7 billion. 

The sale of the Seahawks is expected to set a new NFL record, with some suggesting they could sell for as much as $8 billion. 

MILAN – Jordan Binnington arrived in Italy as a major question mark in Canada’s crease.

Whether the St. Louis Blues netminder — amid a miserable NHL season — was the right man for the Olympic job was already a national debate before the hockey powerhouse teetered on the brink of a catastrophic early exit.

Those doubts never crept into the dressing room. And on Wednesday night, he justified that belief.

Before Mitch Marner played overtime hero in a nerve-racking 4-3 quarterfinal win over Czechia at the Milan Cortina Games, Binnington stepped up for his country — again — with crucial saves to keep Canada breathing.

“That’s Binner for you,” said defenceman Drew Doughty. “Big saves, big times.”

Moments after Nick Suzuki equalized with a country-rocking deflection late in the third period, Binnington stood his ground as speedy Czech forward Martin Necas barrelled down on a breakaway with just over one minute remaining in regulation. Canadian fans — at Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena and back home — breathed a sigh of relief.

In overtime, he jumped out of his crease to cut the angle and thwart a slot-shot from Radim Simek after a defensive breakdown. Twenty seconds and a line change later, Marner danced through a cluster of Czech players and shovelled a backhand over Lukas Dostal’s shoulder.

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“So many moments in that game that were huge for our team,” Marner said. “Nick’s game-tying goal, Binnington’s save on Necas there late … some big plays in that game, and lucky enough, I was able to just make one that finished it.”

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Binnington said the quarterfinal scare after Canada cruised through the preliminary round could only help them moving forward.

“Hard-fought game,” he said. “They were ready and gave us a very tough game. It’s good for us to experience this at this point in the tournament.”

Binnington proved his might in big moments when he backstopped the Blues to a Stanley Cup in 2019.

The 32-year-old from Richmond Hill, Ont., did it again at last February’s 4 Nations Face-Off, denying American captain Auston Matthews with a desperation glove save before Connor McDavid sealed Canada’s victory in the Olympic appetizer. He also opened the Olympic tournament with a shutout in Canada’s 5-0 round-robin win over Czechia.

His play in the NHL this season, however, has made headlines for all the wrong reasons on a Blues team dwelling near the league’s basement.

Binnington has an 8-17-6 record with a 3.65 goals-against average and a .864 save percentage, ranking 67th out of 70 among goalies with at least 10 games played.

Logan Thompson, who stopped 24 of 25 in Canada’s 5-1 preliminary-round win over Switzerland, boasts a .912 save percentage. Third-stringer Darcy Kuemper, meanwhile, sits at .900.

But head coach Jon Cooper made his decision a year ago that Binnington — and his big-game chops — would have the opportunity to start between the pipes come puck drop in Italy.

“When the game got tight, and especially when they took the lead, he shut the door,” Cooper said. “He gave us a chance to come back. And so that’s what winners do. They give you that chance.”

His teammates also didn’t do him any favours on Wednesday.

Mark Stone’s ill-advised turnover led to Czechia’s opening goal from Lukas Sedlak. David Pastrnak then gave Czechia a 2-1 lead with a power-play rocket after Macklin Celebrini’s unnecessary interference penalty.

Ondrej Palat’s goal to put the underdogs up 3-2 in the third period, meanwhile, put the finishing touch on a well-executed 3-on-2. Czechia also had six players on the ice at the time, going unnoticed by the officials.

“Binner gave us a chance to win the game,” Cooper said. “I haven’t digested all the goals, but I will sit here and say they were more on guys in front of him than on him. This wasn’t ones that leaked through him; that was on us.”

Binnington struggled with rebound control at times. But he was there when it counted.

“That’s when we needed (the saves),” Celebrini said. “We needed him to make those saves and be there for us when we needed them. He did an outstanding job being the brick wall.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 18, 2026.

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LIVIGNO – Canadian snowboarder Laurie Blouin took some solace in finishing fifth on a difficult day in women’s slopestyle at the Milan Cortina Olympics on Wednesday.

The 29-year-old from Quebec City, a two-time world champion (slopestyle in 2017 and big air in 2021) and slopestyle silver medallist at the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang, fell on her first two runs before landing her third run.

Changing conditions reduced the riders’ speed on the Livigno Snow Park course, making jumps difficult on the day.

“Honestly it was a hard day for everyone,” said Blouin. “The speed wasn’t there … I’m just happy I landed a run. It was not the cleanest one. I had to adjust after my second jump on my third run, I was going so slow.”

Japan’s Mari Fukada won the gold, improving on her second run score of 85.70 with a third run of 87.83. Defending champion Zoi Sadowski-Synnott of New Zealand moved into second with the final run of the day, scoring 87.48.

That knocked Japan’s Kokomo Murase down to bronze at 85.80 and Germany’s Annika Morgan off the podium at 78.78.

Murase won gold in big air earlier in the games while Sadowski-Synnott took silver.

Blouin’s third-run score left her fifth at 68.60.

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“At least it’s not fourth, honestly. I’ve had too many fourths in my career,” Blouin said with a giggle. “I’m just happy I had fun.”

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Blouin was fourth in Beijing four years ago. She has also placed fourth at the world championships (in big air in 2023) and at the Winter X Games (in slopestyle in 2025, and big air in 2021 and 2019).

Blouin says she has yet to decide whether she will be back for a fourth Olympics.

“I’m going to go year by year,” she said. “I want to still keep competing because I love competing and I still have the tricks and my body feels good.”

Blouin said she will choose what competitions to enter and also wants to continue making her own snowboarding videos.

“So I’m going to try to and balance everything,” she said. “But I want to still compete. I’m not done.”

Juliette Pelchat finished ninth. The 21-year-old from Whistler, B.C., in her first Olympics, had trouble with a rail on her first run and fell on her second before recording a final run score of 51.76.

“Honestly I had a lot of fun and I really tried my hardest to get speed. But that was definitely the biggest issue,” said Pelchat.

In the earlier men’s final, an emotional Mark McMorris fell on his third and final run in a bid to keep his run of Olympic medals going. The 32-year-old from Regina, who won bronze in Sochi, Pyeongchang and Beijing, finished eighth in the field of 12 after going down hard.

Cameron Spalding of Havelock, Ont., was 10th with Yiming Su winning to collect China’s first gold of the games.

Pelchat’s first run was a throwaway Wednesday as she fell coming off the rocket rail while Blouin missed the landing on her second jump.

Pelchat looked to have completed her second run but couldn’t hold the landing on her third and final jump. Blouin also had issues, coming off a top rail early before failing to land her second jump.

Australian Ally Hickman crashed hard on her second run, hitting the snow face first after coming off the top rail. She kept competing and finished seventh.

Blouin had qualified ninth for the final with Pelchat 12th. Sadowski Synnott topped qualifying as she did four years ago in Beijing.

The 24-year-old Kiwi, who only returned to competition last month after being sidelined by bone bruising, earned her fifth Olympic medal, having also won big air bronze in 2018 in Pyeongchang and silver in big air in 2022 in Beijing.

Her slopestyle win in Beijing marked New Zealand’s first-ever Winter Olympic gold medal.

Canada can take a small piece of the credit. According to the New Zealand Olympic team, a family Christmas holiday in Whistler, B.C., is Sadowski-Synnott’s earliest memory of snow and “probably where her love of sliding began.”

The 650-metre slopestyle course at Livigno Snow Park, which featured a vertical drop of 165 metres, features rail and jumps with riders judged on the breadth, originality, and quality of their tricks. Fifty percent of the marks come from the rails.

—

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 18, 2026.

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Natalie Spooner isn’t just at the Milan Cortina Olympics to bring home another medal.

The Toronto hockey player is determined to make the most of her time at the Olympic Village — one bite at a time.

When she’s not on the ice, the 35-year-old has made it her mission to taste-test her way through the Games and share reviews on social media of some of the things she eats, ranging from chocolate pudding to pizza topped with potatoes.

“Why is there potato on a pizza? I guess in Canada we say, ‘Does pineapple belong on pizza?’” Spooner says in one post, smiling as she takes a bite. “Here, it’s, ‘Does potato belong on pizza?’”

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Last week, the International Olympic Committee said in a press release that more than 10,800 meals are served daily across the three Olympic sites in Milan, Cortina and Predazzo. In the Milan village alone, the kitchens serve around 3,000 eggs and 450 kilograms of pasta, the IOC said.

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The food in the Olympic Village has gone viral in more ways than one. The IOC announced in October that it had created a special pasta noodle shaped like the five Olympic rings.

The limited-edition dish was later served to the athletes in the village, resulting in a flood of social media comments from fans calling for the pasta to be available for the public to buy.

But for Spooner, a self-proclaimed “chocolate monster,” the sweet treats are definitely the highlight of the Olympic Village cuisine.

“This might be the best thing yet that I’ve found,” Spooner says in one video where she tries an Italian chocolate spread with a croissant. “That’s really good.”

Another post shows Spooner trying a chocolate lava cake, something she says is “famous” around the village.

“This is what I’ve been waiting for,” she says with a smile. “It’s gooey, it’s chocolatey … this is like hitting the spot right now.”

But not every dessert gets a gold medal — in one video, Spooner tries a chocolate soufflé, which she rates three out of 10.

“I would say this is a hockey puck,” Spooner laughs.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 17, 2026.

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Some might see the three-week Olympic break and 11 days off from the ice as delaying the inevitable for the Rangers amid what has been a tough season.

A lifted roster freeze awaits when the season resumes Feb. 26, and a trade deadline of March 6 that will likely shake things up once again in New York is not too far behind.

However, the players aren’t looking that far ahead. What they needed in the short term was a break, and it was welcomed for both mental and physical rest.

“Yeah, it was definitely good,” Will Cuylle, who spent a portion of the break at home in Toronto, told The Post on Tuesday following the first team practice of non-Olympians since the start of the break. “I think in any long season, it’s good to have a break. It can be hard on your body. Eighty-two games is a lot of games. So you just try to reset and come back fresh.”

To Brennan Othmann, who split time between Florida and home in Ontario, the break provides the Rangers an opportunity to treat the remaining 25 games as a new season.

“I think it’s just been an up-and-down year for everybody,” Othmann told The Post. “At the start of the year, I don’t think anyone really figured we would be in this position, but I think it’s good just to kind of get away and reset and not worry about where we were at and everything. It’s almost like a fresh season right now and hopefully we can turn all these negatives, you want to call it, and turn them into positives after this little break.”

“I think it’s good you get that break. Even if it’s for five days, it’s nice to get away,” he added.

Heading into the shutdown, the Rangers tallied just three wins in their prior 18 games (3-13-2) and sank to the bottom of the Eastern Conference at 22-29-6.

It all ended in a 2-0 home loss to the Hurricanes, which marked their ninth shutout loss of the season and seventh on the Madison Square Garden ice.

On top of that, the Rangers also dealt leading scorer Artemi Panarin to the Kings two days ahead of the roster freeze in exchange for forward Liam Greentree (a 2024 first-round pick) and a conditional third-round pick.

The poor play came down to what Cuylle attributed to “a lot of things.”

“I feel like execution can be better, speed, playing with more passion, I feel like,” he added. “You know, we’ll see what happens. I feel like the break should help bring some of that back.”

The Rangers already have two early positives coming out of their first practice in Tarrytown.

Adam Fox and Igor Shesterkin, who both suffered lower-body injuries during a 3-2 overtime loss to Utah on Jan. 5, were on the ice and in full-contact jerseys during what Cuylle described as a “good” and “competitive” first skate.

Outside of coach Mike Sullivan, Mika Zibanejad, Vincent Trocheck and J.T. Miller being in Milan, Adam Edstrom wasn’t in attendance due to personal reasons.

“It’s nice to see some faces you haven’t seen in a while… It’s good group camaraderie seeing those guys out there on the ice,” Othmann said. “They’re important players for our team and we’re happy that they’re healthy and happy that we’re all back together.”

The Rangers resume the season against the Flyers to kick off a four-game homestand.

Brett Berard and Brendan Brisson were recalled from Hartford ahead of Tuesday’s practice.

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO – When Canadian curling coach Scott Pfeifer was a member of the Ferbey Four, the curling team would use the large group of reporters at big bonspiels to fuel rivalries and hype the players and the sport.

“(We’d be) lobbing bombs across the alley to the other teams,” Pfeifer said with a laugh. “I don’t think you see that as much anymore.”

That’s an understatement.

The Canadian media contingent is not what it used to be at the curling rink or at the Winter Games. It’s even more noticeable this year with the Milan Cortina Games the most spread out in Olympic history.

A thinning journalist presence at major sports events has been a media storyline for years due to shrinking newsroom budgets. The global pandemic made remote coverage the norm and not everyone returned to on-site coverage when the sports world got back to normal.

In addition to impacting the depth and quality of reporting, fewer on-site journalists means many amateur athletes are unable to share their stories.

“They’re just not going to get that coverage that they got in previous Olympics and that is sad,” USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan said Tuesday from Milan. “That’s sad because this is their moment.”

There are about 40 accredited Canadian journalists covering the Games across Italy, a Canadian Olympic Committee spokesman said in a direct message.

That’s up slightly from the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, which was an outlier due to the pandemic. Media numbers from the 2018 Pyeongchang Games in South Korea were not available, the COC said.

Brennan, who is covering the Olympics for the 22nd consecutive time, recalls how difficult it was to get near athletes in the mixed zone at previous Games over her career.

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“The interview area would just be packed,” she said. “I mean, you’d have to elbow your way in.

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“Well there’s none of that here. There’s plenty of room for all of us. And so that is certainly noticeable. That’s a big change.”

Rather than cover the Games in person, some outlets have reporters write stories after watching the competition remotely.

“It’s absolutely essential to be on site,” Brennan said. “Certainly that trend of sports sections and news organizations to have people cover events off TV is incredibly troubling. Although I understand the financial constraints.”

Brennan cited an example from the figure skating last week. When American star Ilia Malinin was preparing to begin his skate, she noticed from her seat in the media tribune how “shockingly nervous” he appeared.

She was able to observe some of the interaction with his coaches that wasn’t shown on the broadcast, she said, adding there was lots of colour to be gathered from the scene after his disappointing performance.

“There’s no way I could have reported on it and given my commentary and my opinions on it had I not been in the arena,” she said.

Rather than traditional media, many competitors instead use social media to build their brand or share their stories. Younger competitors have grown up in the social media age and many use those options to their benefit.

“Everybody is a storyteller,” said Canadian Secretary of Sport Adam van Koeverden, a four-time Olympian who won kayaking gold in 2004. “I had a blog in 2008 but I don’t think anybody read it though. It wasn’t a viral story. It was like, if I got 25 readers, I think I’d be thrilled.

“Now if you put something on social media, you might get 2,000 likes and 20,000 people looking at it, or more if you’re (freestyle skiing star) Eileen Gu. That media landscape has changed significantly.”

There are great stories to be had all around the Games, but many go untold simply because there are fewer options available to tell them. Another hurdle is travel, since most reporters aren’t moving between hubs due to the long distance.

“Athletes in other years would have received coverage,” Brennan said. “The athletes who are lesser known, are not receiving that coverage now.”

About a four-hour drive northeast of Milan, Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium has been a beehive of activity for the last fortnight with Canada at the centre of the action.

However, there are usually only three Canadian reporters in the press interview area. On some days, one-on-one sessions are available — a rarity at the Games.

“It would be nice to see a lot more in-person coverage rather than just seeing what you see online or what’s conveyed by certain people,” Pfeifer said in a recent interview. “It’s always good to have more people out there giving a more balanced perspective.”

COC chief executive officer David Shoemaker was asked about the changing media presence at the start of the Games.

“I wish there were more media here in Milan Cortina,” he told reporters. “It’s sort of why I started my remarks by acknowledging the challenges that each of you face, and frankly thanking you for your honest coverage of what we’re doing and what we are trying to do.”

Van Koeverden was a contributor for the CBC at the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia and the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

He recalled simply hopping on buses to cover athletes at a wide array of competitions.

“We would plan our day based on where the medal hopefuls were and where the Canadians were,” he said in a recent sit-down chat in Cortina. “But you just can’t hop on a bus and go from Milan to Cortina, or Milan to Val di Fiemme, or over to Livigno.

“I guess that comes with the territory with a more environmentally sustainable Games and a more affordable Games for the organizer. So it’s a lot of changes.”

With files from Canadian Press sports reporter Donna Spencer.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 17, 2026.

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