Since the beginning of Coldplay, the band’s lineup has been set: Chris Martin, Jonny Buckland, Guy Berryman, and Will Champion (as well as creative director Phil Harvey, who the band officially considers their fifth member). There was a shift at one point, though, as early in the band’s life, Champion was kicked out of the group (before being invited back just a few days later). Now, Champion has reflected on how he felt at that time.
He was asked about his dismissal from the group in a Twitter Q&A today and he wrote in response, “It was a very difficult period for us as a band and needless to say it was very upsetting. But it was important that we dealt with our issues early on in our career. It left us in a stronger place to move forward together.”
It was a very difficult period for us as a band and needless to say it was very upsetting. But it was important that we dealt with our issues early on in our career. It left us in a stronger place to move forward together. Will https://t.co/BRWyCNyfjZ
Martin discussed booting Champion from the band in a 2009 interview, saying that incident kicked off a tradition of drinking too much vodka as a form of self-punishment: “It started when I had to ask forgiveness for sacking our drummer Will Champion ten years ago. Three days later, the rest of us were feeling miserable and we asked Will to meet me and our bassist Guy Berryman in Monkey Chews in Camden, where we asked him to come back. They made me have lots of vodka and cranberry juice in remembrance of what a nasty piece of work I was being. Now if I find myself making a big mistake, I have to force myself to drink that stuff to remind me not to be such an idiot!”
Berryman also answered some Twitter questions today, including one asking if he thinks the band would be successful if they stuck with one of their early names, Starfish. He said, “Whereas it’s definitely not a great name, I hope that the strength of our band is based on the music we make rather what we’re called. And Coldplay is almost as weird a name anyway.”
Whereas it’s definitely not a great name, I hope that the strength of our band is based on the music we make rather what we’re called. And Coldplay is almost as weird a name anyway. Guy https://t.co/7e3PCzRJ9S
Donald Trump‘s response to the coronavirus pandemic was lacking, to put it generously, and according to a new book, the former president was openly hoping the rampant virus would take out his political enemies. In a newly released excerpt from Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History by Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, Trump reportedly used to mock anyone in his orbit who caught COVID, and during one meeting, he made a remark about the virus killing former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who was planning to release a damning book about his time in the administration.
While the Bolton remark sounds like just another one of Trump’s “jokes,” the authors sources believe he was being “dead serious,” according to Axios. Here’s more:
At one meeting several months [before Trump got sick], NEC director Larry Kudlow had stifled a cough. The room had frozen.. … Trump had waved his hands in front of his face, as if to jokingly ward off any flying virus particles, and then cracked a smile. “I was just kidding,” he’d said. “Larry will never get COVID. He will defeat it with his optimism.” … “John Bolton,” he had said … “Hopefully COVID takes out John.”
While wishing for a former employee’s death is (obviously) not great, it’s just another in a long line of moments that show Trump was not the best person to be leading the country during the pandemic. (Or at all.) A previous excerpt from Nightmare Scenario revealed that one of his plans to contain the spread of COVID was to send the infected to Gitmo. Although, that idea wasn’t so much about containment as it was about keeping America’s case count low, so it looked like everything was going great heading into the 2020 election.
The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.
The feeling of pining for a faded time is embedded in the title of Lucy Dacus’ third album, Home Video. It’s fitting for a record that reflects on the 26-year-old’s youth, particularly the usual coming-of-age fodder about fumbling with outsized feelings of love, lust, and loss. “Hot blood in my pulsing veins / heavy memories weighing on my brain,” she sings on the opening track, “Hot & Heavy,” which nails the mix of nausea and nostalgia such remembrances tend to provoke.
But Home Video is also a signifier of movies, which might have been Dacus’ career path had she not emerged as one of the best songwriters of her generation. Before she was persuaded to make her 2016 debut, No Burden, by her friend and longtime collaborator Jacob Blizard — he’s still in the fold as a co-producer of Home Video — Dacus was a film school student. (She was apparently a devotee of Miranda July, among other directors.) But even as a musician, there’s a cinematic quality to her work. It’s just that she’s channeled those impulses into her songs, which tend to be highly visual narratives that unfold like tragicomic vignettes. On Home Video, these stories are grainy but tactile, in which even the fuzziest details culled from the past seem so real you can almost touch them.
Take the song “Thumbs,” which was legendary among Dacus’ fanbase as a concert staple long before it was slated for Home Video. The first-person lyric describes a friend who has just been contacted by her wayward father. The narrator tries to dissuade her from seeing this man, but when that fails she decides to tag along to their meeting instead.
So we meet him at a bar. You were holding my hand hard. He ordered rum and coke. I can’t drink either anymore. He hadn’t seen you since the fifth grade. Now you’re nineteen and you’re 5’8”. He said, “Honey, you sure look great. Do you get the checks I send on your birthday?”
The money line (“I would kill him / if you let me”) comes next, but the power of “Thumbs” is that the threat feels almost unnecessary. It’s the details that Dacus carefully weaves together that makes the listener want to murder this guy. The bar rendezvous, the drink order, the glib question about the checks he sent on her birthday — you can picture exactly who the dad is based entirely on how Dacus chooses to describe him. It’s a perfect little film projecting inside your skull.
To use the parlance of her band Boygenius, Dacus is more low-key than Julien Baker, though that has less to do with her writing style than her voice, a smokey purr that has always sounded out of time, like a throwback to the torch singers of the early 20th century. She’s also less oblique than Phoebe Bridgers, whose penchant for droll one-liners and unexpected barbs tends to muddy rather than clarify the nutgrafs of her songs.
Dacus simply is the most natural and gifted storyteller of her cohort. Like any great writer, she hooks you with a grabby opening line. (From “VBS,” a sly depiction of her religious upbringing at vacation Bible school: “In the summer of ’07 / I was sure I’d go to heaven, but I was hedging my bets at VBS.”) And then, with a combination of naturalistic dialogue and some well-chosen details that build a small world, she manages to tell what feels like a complete narrative, even as she leaves enough unsaid to create the ambiguity required for infinite relistens.
This is the sort of songwriting that people like Bruce Springsteen, John Prine, Lucinda Williams, and Jason Isbell specialize in. Lucy Dacus is the latest to master it.
If her album titles are any indication, Dacus is a self-aware self-chronicler. Her previous album, 2018’s Historian, similarly nodded at her reflexive tendencies. But while Historian was an album of songs about life in her early 20s, Home Video is an origin story. And it’s right on time for a person now on the doorstep of her late 20s, a time when you are just far enough from adolescence to romanticize it, but not so far that you can’t still access the feelings you had then.
Dacus either has a fine-tuned memory or the imagination to fill in the blanks with authentic inventions. Either way, her songs come alive with vividly drawn scenes. Or, should I say, vividly drawn mundane scenes. What Home Video captures best about being teenager is how life-changing events can occur amid the extreme boredom of being stuck in an unglamorous town just because you happen to be young and experiencing certain feelings and situations for the first time. It’s not so much that young people have extraordinary lives; it’s that being young makes everything seem extraordinary.
One reason Dacus has bristled at being labeled a “sad girl,” I suspect, is because it underplays how funny her songs often are. If there is a melancholy edge to Home Video, it’s a sadness that’s reminiscent of an episode of Freaks & Geeks, in which the pathos is balanced with an appreciation for the absurdity of childhood. In “Brando,” two pals skip school and proceed to have an adventure by … doing not much at all: “They play oldies in the afternoon / for the elderly and me and you / Fred and Ginger, black and white / I watch you watch ‘It’s A Wonderful Life.’” In “Going, Going, Gone,” a flirtation turns into a romance marked by “sweaty palms” and “averted eyes” and uncertainty about whether it’s an actual relationship. In “Partner In Crime,” a girl dating an older man is dropped off on the curb around the corner from her house “so nobody sees you / You drop a hint that you got a girlfriend / I try my best to take it.”
Dacus’ strengths as a lyricist have tended to outpace the music on her records, but on Home Video she has all but closed that gap. The urgent, rock-oriented arrangements use the Historian standout “Night Shift” as a starting point, tilting Dacus’ thoughtful, diaristic writing in a bolder, near-anthemic direction. But it’s the stories on Home Video that ultimately stick the most with you. As the narrator, Dacus doesn’t play these songs for cheap melodrama or gooey sentimentality. She honors the original emotional intensity that these stories had at their source, while imbuing them with the perspective of a person who has moved well beyond them toward something resembling wisdom.
Sexy Beast is a British crime drama about an ex-criminal who’s coaxed into doing One Last Job by a sociopathic gangster played by Ben Kingsley in an Oscar-nominated performance. Sexy Beasts is… not that. “Hoping to say goodbye to superficial dating, real-life singles sport elaborate makeup and prosthetics to put true blind-date chemistry to the test,” the plot summary for the Netflix dating series reads.
But that does not do justice to Sexy Beasts‘ WTF-ness. This does:
The beaver man’s “ass first, personality second” is the highlight of the trailer, which you can watch above, but there’s other gems in there. I’m partial to the scarecrow complimenting the dolphin’s fin, the baboon and the devil making out, and the rhino announcing, “There’s interspecies relationships happening on my grounds.” It’s like if BoJack Horseman was a live-action show (there’s a reason BoJack Horseman isn’t a live-action show…). Sexy Beasts, which is based on a British series, features makeup from prosthetic artist Kristyan Mallet, who also worked on Mission: Impossible – Fallout. If Tom Cruise wears a gopher mask in Mission: Impossible 7, now you know why:
Each episode will feature a new single who’s looking for love based purely on personality. They select from among three potential love matches, all of whom are in full prosthetic makeup. The rub, however, is that the single will see the real face of their chosen match only after they’ve made their final decision, based entirely on their personality.
After taking 2020 off, Ed Sheeran is finding his way back into the spotlight. Really, though, he should probably be staying away from light in general, since it appears he’s a vampire now: He’s been teasing a new single called “Bad Habits,” and in all the visuals, he has gone full Twilight. We haven’t gotten any extended previews of the song yet, but now we at least know when he will play it on TV for the first time: Next week, he will be a guest on The Late Late Show for the full week, and on one of those nights, he will perform the track on TV for the first time.
Corden made the announcement on the show and gave a rough idea of what the week will entail. He said, “All next week, the one, the only Mr. Ed Sheeran is going to be on the show every night next week! A full week of Ed. We’re going to do comedy, we’re going to chat, he’s going to play… Ed Sheeran’s going to be our musical guest every night of the week, plus, right here on The Late Late Show, he’s going to do the television debut of his brilliant new single ‘Bad Habits.’”
Watch Corden’s announcement above.
Ed Sheeran is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Jimmy Kimmel is rarely at a loss for words, but the comedian and talk show host truly seemed shocked to learn that he was purportedly one of the unwitting targets in a plot launched by Donald Trump to enlist the Department of Justice’s help in *checks notes* forcing late-night comedy shows to stop making jokes about him. On Tuesday night’s show, Kimmel talked about the Daily Beast story, which claimed that in early 2019, Trump spoke with advisers and lawyers about “what the Federal Communications Commission, the courts systems, and—most confusingly to some Trump lieutenants—the Department of Justice could do to probe or mitigate SNL, Jimmy Kimmel, and other late-night comedy mischief-makers.”
While the audience cheered, Kimmel made it clear that “I don’t want him probing me.” And he was clearly taken aback by the entire report—which, if true, yet again shows Trump’s desire for America to transition to a state-run media system like the ones seen in Russia and North Korea. But there was more to the report:
“The report goes on to say, ‘To those who heard it, Trump’s inquiries into what federal regulations could be used to bust the likes of Kimmel and SNL was more of a nuisance than a constitutional crisis.’ To me it feels more like a crisis than a nuisance. I don’t know. Little did I know, I’m up here goofing on him, he’s asking the feds to do who knows what.
And when he was told there was no legal case to be made—that you can’t stop comedians from making fun of you when you’re president—Trump asked, ‘Can something else be done about it?’ Basically, Trump wanted to turn the Department of Justice into… remember on the old Batman show, the Penguin had those henchman in the bowler hats and the tight black shirts? This is what Trump wanted—a Goon Squad. A bunch of tough guys to rough people up because he can’t take a joke. He can make one. In fact, he’s made several: Eric, Ivanka, Don Jr.”
For his part, Trump has denied the allegations that any of this story is true. He issued his denial the way most former presidents do: via a bizarre blog that he has otherwise abandoned (because he has been banned from the most popular social media sites for spreading wild lies and inciting violence), in which he said: “The story that I asked the Department of Justice to go after ratings-challenged (without Trump!) Saturday Night Live, and other late-night Losers, is total Fake News.”
Spoken like a totally normal 75-year-old former president who would never try to abuse the power of the White House to silence his detractors.
18-year-old Olivia Rodrigo has done things that most people her age haven’t — releasing a chart-topping single jumps out as a prime example. She has also had some more typical teenage experiences, though, like when she graduated high school recently. He also just had another high school experience, although it wasn’t exactly traditional: She surprised fans at their homes and asked them to go to prom with her.
Lucky fans who got visits from Rodrigo shared videos and photos of those moments online. Each time, Rodrigo showed up with a bouquet of flowers, gifts of merch, and a handmade sign that reads, “Prom would be brutal without you.”
That’s seemingly a reference to Rodrigo’s Sour opening track “Brutal,” which could suggest that Rodrigo is teasing the song as her next single. It wouldn’t be surprising to see “Brutal” released as a single, considering Rodrigo called it her favorite song from Sour in a late-April interview. She also said of it in a different conversation:
“I told everyone that I wanted to make ‘Brutal’ the first track on the record, and they were like, ‘Girl, are you sure?’ Just ’cause it’s kind of a little polarizing, I think, but I absolutely love it. It’s a really angsty song I suppose, and I sort of just talk about everything that I’m upset about in the song, to put it very plainly and broadly.
I think it’s funny that we wrote the first track on the record kind of last minute, but it’s one of my favorites … I wrote [‘Brutal’] — and most of my songs — with my producer, Dan Nigro. He’s awesome. We were in the car listening to a bunch of old ’90s songs and really liked that energy. Then he came up with this awesome riff.”
hi, i love u. @Olivia_Rodrigo ur literally so sweet ?? thank u for the merch and the hugs and the COMPLIMENTS? of course i’ll go to prom with u pic.twitter.com/aqmu1q6JKW
The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.
At least that’s what he says. Or maybe, as he later notes from the patio of his spacious new rental in the hills of Silver Lake, his worldview changes from year to year. If this sounds confusing, it’s just a reflection of what many creators and artists are dealing with coming out of a global pandemic, forced to reevaluate and recontextualize everything the know about how their art exists in the world. When pressed, the Los Angeles-based indie rock upstart is able to nail down his own personal philosophy to a certain golden-ish rule: Do no harm.
“I think I’m trying hard,” he says, pausing to give a question about his personal ethos the consideration it deserves. “I was just about to say I’m trying really hard, and then I realized that I don’t know if I’m trying really hard. My goal is to like myself enough so that I can do as little damage to the people and world at large around me as possible.”
It’s the kind of self-reflection that comes with a burgeoning career. And over the past year-and-a-half, both in the music space and in a wildly successful comedic TikTok account, a career is exactly what Petey is finding. But the Midwestern native is determined not to lose sight of how he got to where he is, and not to let these wins come at the cost they often do.
“It was a scary realization,” he says. “Once you start signing contracts and getting teams together, it’s a deep breath, late-night anxiety moment to realize, ‘Damn. I might have to hurt some people’s feelings.’ That’s a really, really, really difficult thing for me to grapple with and do. I’ve avoided a lot to avoid that… So through these last couple years, it’s been can I pursue and be successful in this space? And can I live a fulfilling life while also doing the least amount of damage as possible to people in my surroundings?”
So far, the answer has been yes. It’s not bad for a guy who moved to California based on a love of The O.C. and little else, and who is announcing his debut full-length (Lean Into Life, due September 3 on Terrible Records) today. Born Peter Martin in suburban Detroit, Petey spent his formative years in Chicago, playing in bands and forming deep connections with “10 or so artists” that remain embedded in his own creative DNA. After attending college at Loyola in New Orleans, The O.C. remained a siren song for the rudderless young man. “I had no real ambitions of doing music stuff or even art stuff,” he remembers. “My only goal when I was 21 and moved out here was just to survive and be in California.” Petey still describes himself as lacking ambition, but in these early days, he was content just to survive, and avoided anxiety about the future by simply not worrying about it. Still, he also admits to knowing deep down that artistic pursuits were likely his calling, even if he didn’t want to admit it to himself at the time. He would work as a session and touring drummer while spending his days in a mailroom job with no upward mobility, the idea of leading his own creative pursuits hardly realistic or even desirable.
But it was during a session drumming gig at Tropico Beauty recording studio that things changed. Feeling comfortable in the surroundings, Petey popped a question to the recording engineer, Phil Hartunian, to see if he could book some studio time for himself, too. Like many people who now make up his circle, the pair hit off a quick connection, with Petey booking a day of recording and laying down “California” and “Apple TV Remote” in a single session (Hartunian would go on top co-produce Petey’s album). In the winter of 2019, Petey went home to Chicago for the holidays and played the pair of songs for a friend he’d often see when he returned to town, Will Crane, the kind of friend with whom you “talk about your dreams and fantasies.”
“He was like, ‘What do you want to do with these?’ Petey recalls. “I was like, ‘Put them on SoundCloud and fucking kill myself? I don’t know, nothing? I just like them.’ Then, I go back to LA and he calls me probably two weeks later just being like, ‘Hey! I’m here with our other friend William [Croghan].’ Can we help you, and can you not fuck this up?’ (Those two, known simply as The Wills, currently manage Petey, with Crane being the collaborator on his TikToks.)
Philip Cosores for Uproxx
Whether Petey fucks it up remains to be seen, but with a small team in place, he filmed a music video for “California” and then amassed a cool 60,000 streams on the follow-up, “Apple TV Remote.” With no interest in being just a home recording artist, Petey knew that a label deal was the next step. “I’m not a label guy,” he says. “I know nothing about them. but I do know that they give you money to make records. And that’s what I needed.” Having been told Terrible Records might be a good fit, Petey’s team reached out and a deal quickly fell into place. Petey seems both perplexed and amused when recounting this humble origin story, aware that there is almost a Forrest Gump quality of things falling into place cosmically, something that is underscored by his surprising foothold as a social media breakout.
With the pandemic hitting just as Petey was launching his music career, a secondary avenue appeared out of necessity. “The only reason why I started doing [TikTok] is because I signed this record deal, essentially starting me off on a new chapter, and then COVID happened and we couldn’t do it,” he says. “So we had to figure out something to do. I came up with a skit and we did it and it worked right away, like, super quick, almost to the point where I was like, ‘Does this just work for everyone?’ (It doesn’t.)
The TikTok content is another aspect of his personality, a little less emotionally vulnerable than his music, but in his words, “equally rooted in sadness.” Still, to the uninitiated, it feels like if the Safdie Brothers directed sketch comedy, with a number of Petey’s interacting with each other rapidly, with quick cuts and clever gags all set to the tone of absurdity. In a little over a year, he’s accumulated nearly a million followers and 100 million views, just bonkers numbers. He even managed to parlay some fake sponsored content into actual sponsored content, earning a modest living and garnering fans like Fred Durst along the way (who, no joke, did a pair of TikToks, one for each of their channels, together). “He wanted to make some funny shit. So, we did!” Petey says, referring to Durst as a “great dude” and a “sweet guy,” alluding to the possibility of future comedic collabs together.
The serendipity that has allowed Petey to record songs, build a TikTok audience, partner with like-minded people on the label and management side, and even pull in a few famous fans along the way is all predicated on the quality of his output. Citing Modest Mouse, Kanye West, Death Cab For Cutie, and Say Anything as influences, traces of each can be heard on the debut LP, which pairs a handful of previously released highlights with a spattering of new material. But the influences feel like a drop of ink in the jar of Petey, whose own idiosyncratic personality and precise taste level push the projects he works on into rare air, where humor sits comfortably next to insightful observations, and emotional, tuneful songcraft often gives way to big, cathartic climaxes. Petey’s early music is keen on keeping you aware of the details and also making sure the listener receives their due payoff.
Bits of his self pop up throughout the music, too. It’s hard not to think of his O.C.-indebted origins when he’s literally relaying the plot of the series on “Don’t Tell The Boys,” or even professing his love of his current home on “California,” which becomes surprisingly biographical when put into the context of his move here. “I’d rather be depressed in California / Oceans got the only blues I need,” he sings as the song trucks steadily forward, its internal momentum matching the artist’s personal journey.
On the title-track — a highlight of the new material — Petey somehow showcases a four-on-the-floor beat, vocal manipulation, his beloved Brock-ian yelp, drug references, and reflective moments that hit on the carefree uncertainty of youth without cluttering the tune. “One night I had a thought / What if we all did anything we want / We quit our jobs, we went outside / No one can tell us how to live our lives,” he sings, deftly balancing humor and yearning. There’s an understanding of both the sanctity and futility of life throughout, all through a revelatory lens that feels like an entirely new perspective that might wear off once the druggy haze lifts.
Coming out of the pandemic, Petey will surely have to get out of his comfort zone — he notes that live shows still intimidate him — and make adjustments to evolving expectations. He quit drinking and smoking during Covid times, but notes with a chuckle that he’s currently back on both. He’s appreciated the time to hone his craft in relative solitude, but he’s also a social person that’s looking forward to reemerging in the world. Most importantly, his music and his comedy have to remain on his own terms. It’s the best-case scenario for an artist still perfecting his own voice and adjusting his worldview in real-time. Still, Petey knows to trust his own instincts, willing to see just how far they will take him.
“I think that I’m really strange,” he says, “I think that I’m really strange and a lot of people close to me tell me that I’m really strange. And I think that the music that I make is strange. Strange and not strange. And even the not strange, sometimes it’s strange how not strange it is. And with the TikTok too, because like I said, it’s just sort of all in the same bubble for me, I just sort of dive into what’s authentic about me, what I think makes me super weird. I realize how many people that resonates with and how many people are also super weird in the way that I think I’m super weird, which is why this is awesome and why this feels really good.”
Lean Into Life is due September 3 via Terrible Records. Get it here.
This is Conan O’Brien’s final week as the host of Conan, and he’s in complete “f*ck it” mode. He didn’t bring back the Bugatti Veyron Mouse or play the master recording of “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, but he did smoke weed during a live taping. Not just anyone’s weed either, but Seth Rogen’s weed. That’s like catching a touchdown from Tom Brady, or masturbating with the Masturbating Bear. A once in a lifetime opportunity.
“You seem like a guy who’s relaxed, centered, like you know who you are,” Conan observed about Rogen. “I’m going to have a lot of free time on my hands now for a while. We’re going to start something else up, but I’m going to have some downtime, and honestly, I’m not even kidding, I don’t really know what to do with downtime.” The Pineapple Express star offered a predictable suggestion on how to pass the hours. “I would suggest — this is going to be hilariously on-brand — try smoking a lot of weed for a long time,” he said. Conan doesn’t smoke pot, which you can tell by him calling marijuana a “fine herb,” but “the couple of times I’ve tried, nothing really happened.”
Rogen saw this as a challenge.
TBS
“This is the kind of thing you do when you know it’s over for you,” Conan said before taking a hit from the joint (he initially held the joint the wrong way), delighting Rogen to no end. “I’m so happy with what just happened,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting any of this.”
Before the 2021 NBA Playoffs began, few would have projected an Eastern Conference Finals matchup between the Atlanta Hawks and the Milwaukee Bucks. Both teams were betting underdogs in at least one series, and both needed seven games to topple opponents perceived to be superior in the second round. However, the Bucks and Hawks begin their best-of-seven clash on Wednesday at Fiserv Forum, with a berth in the 2021 NBA Finals on the line.
The Hawks enter the series as the underdogs, which is a role Nate McMillan’s team is familiar with at this juncture. Trae Young is enjoying a fantastic playoff run, averaging 29.1 points and 10.4 assists per game, and Atlanta has done just enough to get by offensively. Still, it is the defensive effort from the Hawks that is at least partially responsible for their run, as Atlanta is allowing only 107.7 points per 100 possessions through two series. They will have a challenge in the series against a talented Bucks team, but McMillan has found success with a jumbo lineup featuring Danilo Gallinari, John Collins and Clint Capela playing together. That group is +27 in 55 minutes and, if Bogdan Bogdanovic continues to operate in a limited capacity, Atlanta may be forced to lean on their size.
Milwaukee’s defense has also carried its water to this point, with the Bucks leading the playoffs in allowing only 1.02 points per possession. That is a staggering figure when remembering the Bucks faced the Nets in the previous round, and Milwaukee leads the postseason in defensive rebound rate, free throw rate allowed and points allowed in the paint. Beyond the numbers, the Bucks seemingly have the overall talent advantage, particularly if Giannis Antetokounmpo can play at his optimal level. The Hawks do have options to slow him down, but Atlanta doesn’t have perfect defenders to deploy against Khris Middleton, and Milwaukee could find success against a more traditional defensive scheme after scuffling against Brooklyn’s switch-based attack.
Game 1 TV Info
Tip Time: Wednesday, June 23; 8:30 p.m. ET TV Network: TNT
Game 1 Betting Lines (via DraftKings Sportsbook)
Series Prices: Bucks (-480), Hawks (+350) Spread: Bucks -8 (-110), Hawks +8 (-110) Total: Over 225.5 (-113), Under 225.5 (-109) Money Line: Bucks (-360), Hawks (+285)
Game 1 Player Scoring Props (via DraftKings Sportsbook)
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