Month: February 2021

The Toronto Raptors went through Friday night’s game without Pascal Siakam, head coach Nick Nurse, and five other members of their coaching staff due to the NBA’s Health and Safety protocol. The team was able to pick up a win, a 122-111 victory over the Houston Rockets, and if they are going to win their next handful of games before the All-Star break, they’ll have to do it without the services of their standout forward.

According to Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, Siakam is expected to be out until after the league starts back up following next Sunday’s game. This means that the 2020 All-Star Game selection will miss a trio of tilts against squads below Toronto in the Eastern Conference standings.

It’s unclear whether this will also apply to the myriad of coaches who are away from the team due to the protocol — assistant Sergio Scariolo was in charge on Friday night. This season, Siakam has averaged 20.1 points, 7.5 rebounds, 4.8 assists, 1.2 steals, and 0.7 blocks in 35.8 minutes a night for the Raptors, which started the year slow but have won nine of the 14 games they’ve played in February. Should he be cleared to return to action immediately after the All-Star break, Siakam would take the floor on March 11 for Toronto’s tilt against the Atlanta Hawks.

One of the perks of being the head coach of the best team in a conference is it gives you the opportunity to coach an All-Star team. Sure, there are obvious drawbacks to getting this nod, namely that even beyond the weirdness of this particular All-Star Game, not having the extra time to relax during the break kind of stinks.

Another drawback: NBA coaches are ultra-competitive by nature, and there has to be something kind of odd about coaching a basketball game in which your only jobs are to make sure everyone plays and no one gets hurt. This doubly applies to Quin Snyder, who as the head coach of the league-best Utah Jazz will be at the helm of LeBron James’ team next week.

Snyder is among the best tacticians in the league, which is a big reason why the Jazz are as good as they are, and one of the brightest spots on the roster thinks that he won’t be able to tamp down his enthusiasm for a gigantic exhibition.

Just once, I would like to see an All-Star head coach lean way too far into the fact that they’re inherently really competitive and try to put together a detailed, intricate gameplan for the event. It would get tossed out after about 10 seconds, but hey, it’d be fun.

Back in October, City Girls’ JT and Yung Miami joined DaBaby for a sizzling remix of Moneybagg Yo’s “Said Sum” remix. The song would birth one of JT’s most popular verses, as well as one of the most popular verses of 2020. Kash Doll is definitely a fan of the verse as she recently tweeted a lyric from the line with a slight change, writing, “All these n****s wanna f*ck KD.”

While it’s clear Kash was referring to herself as “KD,” there’s already a celebrity who goes by KD, and that would be Brooklyn Nets forward Kevin Durant. As a result, one fan replied with a meme of what Durant’s reaction to the tweet might be.

Kash held her ground and responded to them saying, “We argue all the time…. he know I’m the REAL KD.” Durant eventually caught wind of the tweet and issued a light-hearted warning to the rapper.

“You did not have to use those initials to get this tweet off,” he said. “U have to relax with the KD talk, your name is KASHDOLL.” The Detroit rapper seemed uninterested in Durant’s complaints as she replied, “I’m the real KD…. your name Kevin Durant act accordingly (red heart).”

Fans of both Kash and Durant caught wind of the exchange and shared a bunch of hilarious responses to it. You can read some of them below.

This week a documentary on Billie Eilish officially dropped and is opening in theaters, for those who are still going out into the world to see movies. Directed and shot by R.J. Cutler, of The September Issue fame, The World’s A Little Blurry is a strikingly candid look at the inner workings of the young singer and her family. That’s partially credit to Cutler, of course, but also to the O’Connells for allowing cameras to infiltrate their lives for 10-15 days a month for a year, from 2018 through 2019, and being totally themselves and open during the process.

Well, through the course of shooting for over a year, Cutler told IndieWire he ended up with hundreds of hours of footage. So much so, that the first assembly cut for the film was 27 hours long (!) and the next cut got it down to 17 hours.

“The first assembly cut was 27 hours, Cutler said. “The first cut was, I think, 17 hours. There’s certainly deleted scenes, but this is the director’s cut. At that first meeting, one of the things we talked about was that I’d have to have final cut, and Billie and everybody got it. They understood. This is the film, in every way, that I wanted to make and to finish. You’ve got to cut some scenes, but that’s because they don’t belong. But it’s a full feast, as you say, with intermission, and I love that. It’s a full journey.”

The film ended up being about two and a half hours, which is long for a documentary but it flows very seamlessly. Check out our review of the film here.

Tekashi 69 has been involved in a decent amount of controversy over the past couple of weeks, but the latest report finds the rapper in some legal trouble. According to TMZ, he was recently sued for aggravated battery by a Miami stripper following a club fight on February 20.

The victim, Alexis Salaberrios, and her lawyer David M. Tarlow told the publication that an altercation at the city’s Gold Rush Cabaret began after someone called the rapper out for snitching. During the ensuing fight, he tried to throw a champagne bottle at the individual, but he unfortunately missed and struck the stripper in the head.

Salaberrios reveals that the incident forced her to go to the ER where she received several staples to close a cut on her head. In the suit, she claims he threw the “deadly object with intent to commit serious bodily injury.” In addition to the rapper, Salaberrios is also suing the club for their lack of security around Tekashi despite knowing he has a “propensity for violence.” She claims that club employees removed him from the club after she was hit with the bottle and tried to convince her to not call the police. Tarlow says she refused their request and reported the incident to officers.

The rapper’s attorney, Lance Lazzaro, said his client was not involved in the club fight. “There are video cameras in the establishment. It’s an attempt to shake him down,” he said. “If he is served properly, we will immediately move to have it dismissed.”

As 2020 came to a close, Drake fans believed they would start the new year with the rapper’s highly-anticipated sixth album, Certified Lover Boy. That’s because last October, Drake announced it would arrive at some point in January. Unfortunately, the album was not released last month as he was forced to push it back due to the time and energy he spent repairing and rehabbing his injured knee. The delay did not come with a new release date, so fans were left to continue the wait and hope it would drop sooner than later.

However, thanks to a recent report from YouTube and media personality Akademiks, fans can now expect Certified Lover Boy to drop within the coming months. “‘CLB’ update. I’ve seen some people say, ‘Oh, it was supposed to drop tonight’, as in Thursday night. No. No, it’s not dropping then,” he said while hosting a livestream earlier this week. “Drake told me that it’s going to be dropping before April so he’s not waiting until summer to drop his sh*t. I don’t wanna say before April… April or before.” He added that the rapper wouldn’t make Certified Lover Boy a surprise release because “he’s spent so much time on this project.”

As the wait for his sixth album continues, fans can enjoy new music from Drake thanks to his “Talk To Me” collaboration with Drakeo The Ruler.

You can listen to Akademiks’ comments here.

NBA Top Shot has seen explosive growth in recent weeks, but with that influx of collectors has come a variety of growing pains for Dapper Labs. Its collector base for the blockchain-based digital highlights is soaring, with packs selling out faster than ever and a bustling marketplace in constant flux. But with more and more people — including several NBA players — getting interested in Top Shot, the company may have figured out a way to get everyone what they want first and foremost: packs.

Top Shot announced plans early Saturday for a massive pack drop preorder in an effort to get everyone interested in the collectable a base pack of Moments. The drop, which is scheduled for Saturday starting at 10 am PST, will allow collectors to queue up over a four-hour period before Top Shot will let them all preorder a $9 pack of common Moments from its Series 2 collection.

“Given the growth that the NBA Top Shot community has shown of late, copping packs through drops has been all kinds of tough,” Dapper said in a release early Saturday. “To address this, our team has designed a pre-ordering system that will allow each collector to reserve themselves a new Release 21 Base Set pack without having to rely on good fortune in the random queue generator.”

This process could take a while and it’s another change to the way Top Shot sells its base packs, but one that makes sense given the demand the company has seen. In recent weeks, a queue would open up for collectors to join that randomly assigns them a place in line at a set time. Once the supply of packs is out, though, anyone too far back in the line would simply be out of luck. For some “stress tests,” that pack supply could be as small as 5,000 packs. But the demand has far outpaced the supply to say the least.

A release of a rare pack drop earlier this week, for example, was delayed a day because of what Dapper called suspicious bot activity — basically people writing programs to game the system and act as several humans in line in order to secure multiple packs. When the drop happened on Friday, Dapper saw more than 200,000 people lining up for what amounted to a little over 10,000 packs that cost $99 each. It’s an enormous demand for a fast-growing product, but it’s also left a lot of collectors disappointed and caused complaints for many people who are still trying to just get their first base back and start collecting.

Saturday’s drop a smart way to get that base of people excited about Top Shot and more immediately involved in the ecosystem, especially at a lower cost. A $9 pack of three moments is much more affordable than buying on the market right now: as of Saturday morning, the most affordable Moment there was an Ish Smith assist for $17.

And there is some upside to the deal: the packs Top Shot is promising in this preorder contains 52 new moments in the Series 2 base set, including some rookies that will have just 4,000 minted. The full list is here, and includes Moments like a LeBron James assist, a Giannis Antetokounmpo block, and other highlights from stars that are likely to be in high demand once packs actually arrive.

That is the catch, however: the packs won’t be released until sometime in March. Dapper promised an update for people by March 6 on their status so Saturday’s drop, while likely to be in the hundreds of thousands of packs, won’t actually hit collections for a few weeks. Top Shot acknowledged that this method “won’t come close” to meeting overall demand for Moments, but they’re carefully tweaking the market and its supply while trying to account for growth. And, depending on how it goes Saturday, it could be the model for its Common drops moving forward.

If you’re on the fence about giving Top Shot a chance, Saturday might be your best (and most affordable) opportunity to get involved in the community. You’ll just have to be patient, both in what’s likely to be a lengthy queue and a long wait to actually get your pack in a fortnight or so.

The Lakers and Blazers squared off tonight in Los Angeles, with each team entering the contest on a losing skid and hoping to regain some traction as they head toward the All-Star break. Ultimately, it was the Lakers who would come away with the relatively easy 103-92 win, despite a 35-point night from Damian Lillard.

LeBron was even better, finishing with 28 points, 11 rebounds, seven assists, four steals, and three blocks on the night to snap the Lakers’ four-game slide and extend Portland’s losing streak to five. But after the game, the conversation once again turned to comments made earlier in the day by soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimović, who criticized LeBron for being politically outspoken.

LeBron, with his usual poise, responded by saying he refuses to stay silent about injustice and proceeded to list some of the many social causes that he’s involved with and has invested so much of his time, money, and energy into, not just in the past year with the Black Lives Matter movement and the presidential election, but throughout his career.

“I have 300+ kids at my school who need a voice and I’m their voice…I’m the wrong guy to go at, I do my homework.” @KingJames weighs in on the recent comments made by soccer superstar @Ibra_official that people should “do what they’re good at” and “stay out of politics”. pic.twitter.com/Scfp6HhnP2

— Spectrum SportsNet (@SpectrumSN) February 27, 2021

Zlatan’s comments echoed so many on the political right over the years who have told LeBron to “shut up and dribble” in one way or another, which LeBron has consistently ignored and instead continued to bring greater awareness to causes he cares about and believes in.

Jessie Ware released her dancefloor-ready album What’s Your Pleasure? last June, one of several disco revival LPs that debuted in 2020. Now following up on the project, Ware taps her doppelganger, actor Gemma Arterton, to star in a cathartic video alongside the What’s Your Pleasure? album closer “Remember Where You Are.”

The visual, shot on Valentine’s Day in London, depicts Arterton roaming around the empty streets of London. Speaking about the concept behind the visual, Gemma Arterton told BBC that inspiration stuck while walking in the park:

“I was walking around listening to it in the park, and I thought about how amazing is that in London, at the moment, there’s no-one around, especially at night-time, and how unique that is in the history of London. I don’t think there’s ever been a time where there’s been no cars, no buses, no people – even during the wars. I thought, we’ll never have this opportunity to shoot this again. And although the song wasn’t written specifically about the pandemic, it serendipitously felt like an anthem of hope in the middle of the third lockdown.”

“I didn’t really know what to expect because I hadn’t been in central London during the night-time for about a year,” Arterton continued. “And it was really sad but at the same time, kind of beautiful to see these iconic streets that have always been so populated – Carnaby Street and Regent Street – just having literally nothing and nobody on them. Also we shot the video on Valentine’s Day, which is the night when usually people go out for dinner and people are everywhere. It was kind of poignant, yet so beautiful, and hopefully it’s a bit of a love letter to our city.”

Watch Ware’s “Remember Where You Are” video above.

What’s Your Pleasure? is out now via Virgin. Get it here.

Earlier this week, the unthinkable happened to Lady Gaga. While her assistant, Ryan Fischer, was out on a walk with her beloved French bulldogs, a gunman shot him and made off with two of the three pups. The whole scene was caught on tape by a neighbor’s surveillance camera and Gaga, who is currently in Rome filming a movie, offered a $500,000 reward for their return. After two long days, Gaga’s furry friends, named Koji and Gustav, have finally been returned to her safely.

AP News reports that a woman brought the two dogs into the LAPD’s Olympic Community Police Station on Friday evening. Police Captain Jonathan Tippett, commanding officer of the elite Robbery-Homicide Division, claimed that the woman appeared to be “uninvolved and unassociated” with the initial attack, though it was unclear how she obtained the dogs.

Fischer was taken to the hospital after being shot by the thief and is thankfully expected to make a full recovery. In a statement, his family thanked Gaga for showing him love and support. “Ryan is receiving extraordinary care in the hospital right now and his doctors expect him to make a full recovery,” Fischer’s family wrote. “We cannot possibly say enough to thank all of the first responders, nurses and doctors who have worked so tirelessly to care for Ryan. Of course, we also want to thank Lady Gaga who has shown nothing but non-stop love and concern for Ryan and our family right from the outset. Ryan loves Gustavo and Koji as much as Lady Gaga does; so we join in her plea for their safe return.”