Month: July 2023

A shoulder injury will sideline Scoot Henderson for perhaps the most highly-anticipated game of this year’s Las Vegas Summer League. Henderson hurt his shoulder on Friday night during the Portland Trail Blazers’ Summer League matchup with the Houston Rockets, and despite initial optimism that he’d be able to go on Sunday, Chris Haynes of Bleacher Report brings word that Henderson will miss the showdown with Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs.

Henderson impressed in his Summer League debut prior to leaving the game due to the injury. The former G League Ignite guard scored 15 points on 5-for-13 shooting while dishing out six assists and reeling in five rebounds in 21 minutes of work. The Rockets would end up getting the best of the Blazers, 100-99, thanks to a Jabari Smith Jr. game-winning buzzer-beater.

This is the second time that an injury to Henderson has put a damper on a high-profile showdown with Wembanyama in Las Vegas. Last season, Henderson and the G League Ignite played a pair of games against Wembanyama and Metropolitans 92, and while the two battled in the first matchup, Henderson and Wembanyama bumped knees in the first quarter of the second game, which led to Henderson getting sidelined for the rest of the afternoon.

Adam Silver‘s longtime passion project is coming to the NBA next season. On Saturday night, the league finally unveiled the details for the In-Season Tournament, which will officially begin next season.

While the general format for the In-Season Tournament has been out there for some time — group play before a certain number of teams move on to a single-elimination knockout stage — we finally learned the specifics. The knockouts will consist of eight teams, with the quarterfinals taking place in home gyms. Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN already reported that the semifinals and finals will take place in Las Vegas. The quarters will occur on Dec. 4-5, the semis will happen on Dec. 7, and the championship game will occur on Dec. 9, with the winning team lifting a new trophy, the NBA Cup.

The bigger question for many fans in the lead-up to the announcement is how everything would work before that. While group play similar to European cup competitions has been referenced, it was unclear exactly how the league would get that all sorted out. As the league announced on Saturday, all 30 teams will participate and get drawn into six groups of five teams that are split up by conference. The teams with the three-best records in the previous season will be put into the first pot, with each subsequent grouping of three teams put into another pot.

Once the groups are all sorted out, the teams will play one another on Tuesdays and Fridays from Nov. 3-28 as part of group play. These will be called “Tournament Nights,” and each team will play four group games in all, with two coming at home and another two on the road. ESPN unveiled the groups on Saturday night, and you can see them right here.

According to the NBA, all of the specifics of group play, which includes which games are going to be broadcast on national television, will come in August.

The NBA officially announced the long-anticipated In-Season Tournament on Saturday night in Las Vegas. As Adam Silver explained on ESPN while introducing the tournament, the idea has been going around for years, and starting in 2023, it’ll finally become part of the NBA calendar.

It’s not the first major tournament-style addition to the league in recent years — the NBA introduced the Play-In Tournament to determine the 7 and 8 seeds in the Eastern and Western Conferences in 2021 — but this is easily the most ambitious project that the league has adopted in some time. As part of the announcement, the league had some help from a collection of players and coaches to introduce the groups, which break down like this:

West Group A: Memphis Grizzlies, Phoenix Suns, Los Angeles Lakers, Utah Jazz, Portland Trail Blazers

West Group B: Denver Nuggets, Los Angeles Clippers, New Orleans Pelicans, Dallas Mavericks, Houston Rockets

West Group C: Sacramento Kings, Golden State Warriors, Minnesota Timberwolves, Oklahoma City Thunder, San Antonio Spurs

East Group A: Philadelphia 76ers, Cleveland Cavaliers, Atlanta Hawks, Indiana Pacers, Detroit Pistons

East Group B: Milwaukee Bucks, New York Knicks, Miami Heat, Washington Wizards, Charlotte Hornets

East Group C: Boston Celtics, Brooklyn Nets, Toronto Raptors, Chicago Bulls, Orlando Magic

Group play in the In-Season Tournament will take place on Tuesdays and Fridays from Nov. 3-28. For details on how the tournament will work, you can read up on that right here.

One of the greatest coaches in NBA history is not going anywhere. The San Antonio Spurs announced on Saturday evening that Gregg Popovich, who has been at the helm since 1996, signed a 5-year contract to stay on board as the team’s head coach.

While the team did not announce the terms of the deal, Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN reports that Popovich is in line to make $80 million over the life of the contract.

Popovich, who will turn 75 next season, has done just about everything there is to do in the NBA, as he’s led the Spurs to five championships over the course of his career — only Phil Jackson (11) and Red Auerbach (nine) have won more. While San Antonio has fallen on hard times in recent years and have not made it to the NBA playoffs since 2019, the team was able to select Victor Wembanyama with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2023 NBA Draft. Plenty of former Spurs players have expressed their excitement over Wembanyama ending up with the team, while Wembanyama expressed his belief that basketball fans in France wanted him to end up in San Antonio.

Over the course of his head coaching career, Popovich has accrued a 1366-761 record. In addition to his work with the Spurs, Popovich — who was technically out of contract following the 2022-23 season — is the head coach of the United States men’s basketball team.

Elly De La Cruz very well may be the coolest baseball player on the planet right now. Ever since getting called up to the majors back in June, De La Cruz has been nothing short of electric for the Cincinnati Reds, and has been a big reason why the team finds itself at 49-40 and in first place in the NL Central entering Saturday.

The thing that makes De La Cruz so remarkable is he’s good at basically everything, and when he steps up to the plate, odds are he’s going to do something spectacular. That happened in the seventh inning of the Reds’ game against the Milwaukee Brewers, as De La Cruz singled to drive in T.J. Friedl to give Cincinnati a 6-5 lead. But he was not satisfied with that, so De La Cruz stole second to get into scoring position. On the very next pitch, De La Cruz stole third … and then, while the Brewers weren’t paying attention, he stole home.

Stealing all three bases like this is nothing short of amazing, and to do it the way he did — namely by catching everyone off-guard and stealing home — is the sort of thing that has immediately made him one of baseball’s most promising young stars.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Season 2 of The Bear, so look out.

The second season of The Bear was longer than the first, with 10 episodes instead of eight. One of them was even its own little movie, running just over an hour. That one wasn’t just super-sized; it also packed in one famous face after another. Bob Odenkirk! John Mulaney! Gillian Jacobs! Sarah Paulson! For the chaotic mom of the Berzatto siblings, they went with someone huge: recent Oscar-winner Jamie Lee Curtis. But the show almost went with an equally awesome actress.

Vulture spoke with the FX show’s casting director Jeanie Bacharach, who told them (in a bit caught by The AV Club) that before they sought out Curtis, they actually first asked no less than Michelle Pfeiffer. They almost got her, too. Pfeiffer “was a huge fan of the show and really, really considered it,” Bacharach explained. But it was not to be. “We went back and forth and back and forth, and ultimately her schedule didn’t allow for it.”

Apart from her early, pre-fame days, when she appeared on episodes of Fantasy Island, CHiPs, and the short-lived Animal House spinoff Delta House, Pfeiffer hasn’t done a ton of TV. (Although she has done The Simpsons not once but twice.) Her only semi-recent small screen credits have been the Bernie Madoff HBO movie The Wizard of Lies and playing Betty Ford on last year’s The First Lady.

How would Pfeiffer have been as Donna Berzatto, who has a nuclear meltdown over the course of Season 2, Episode 6? Probably amazing! She’s an incredible actress with huge range, able to play Edith Wharton heroines and Catwoman and do both with equal aplomb. Curtis did knock it out of the park, though, so it’s not worth brooding over what could have been.

(Via Vulture and The AV Club)

The Mission: Impossible film series started out relatively short. The 1996 original runs a tight 110 minutes. Over a quarter century later, much has changed. Hollywood blockbusters are real, real long these days — nearly as long as its various Indian counterparts, whose films (like last year’s delightful RRR) routinely run in the three, even four hour range. Even John Wick entries now take forever to watch.

But back to the Mission: Impossible films, that series has seen ballooning runtimes over the last 27 years — creeping over two hours with number two, inching past that with number three, and so on. By 2017, entry number six, Fallout, had grown so long that it was a mere two minutes shorter than Goodfellas (with epic modern end credits, of course).

But what of Dead Reckoning Part One, the first part of the series’ (alleged) final bow? How long will it take to watch that?

Surprise surprise! It runs a gargantuan 163 minutes, or two hours and 43 minutes. (Again, with epic modern end credits). For some context, that’s four minutes shorter than John Wick 4. And it finds the franchise crossing the Goodfellas Rubicon, running 17 minutes longer than Martin Scorsese’s very long, very filling modern gangster classic. (Also worth noting: M:I 7 is nearly a half hour longer than the exceedingly popular Top Gun: Maverick.)

Can you withstand watching nearly three hours of Tom Cruise nearly killing himself to entertain us? Find out when Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One hits theaters on July 12.

The Houston Rockets will go through the remainder of Las Vegas Summer League without the services of the No. 4 overall pick in the 2023 NBA Draft. According to Marc Spears of ESPN, Amen Thompson suffered a sprained ankle during the Rockets’ Summer League opener against the Portland Trail Blazers on Friday night, and as a result, he’s getting his foot put in a boot and will miss the next 2-3 weeks.

Per Spears, the expectation is that the injury will prevent Thompson from taking the floor again during his time in the desert.

Thompson suffered the injury while both teams were trying to corral a loose ball. After hitting the deck, Blazers forward Jabari Walker went to grab the ball, fell, and landed right on Thompson’s feet, which left him in considerable pain. Here’s a video of the incident.

It was a freak accident that, unfortunately, will probably keep one of the brightest young stars in Las Vegas from taking the floor again. Prior to getting hurt, Thompson impressed in what ended up being a 100-99 win for the Rockets, as he showcased the athleticism and feel for the game that made him such a promising prospect out of Overtime Elite. In just over 28 minutes of work, Thompson scored 16 points on 6-for-13 shooting with five assists, four rebounds, four blocks, and three steals.

In the second season of HBO’s hit teen drama, Euphoria, Elliott (Dominic Fike) is intrigued by Jules (Hunter Schafer). The two begin a brief fling, against the knowledge of Jules’ then-girlfriend, Rue (Zendaya).

In real life, Fike, who just released his third album Sunburn, and Schafer had an actual showmance, however, in an interview with Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe, he revealed that they are no longer together.

While Fike didn’t directly name Schafer, he noted that he is taking a break from dating.

“I’m just done being in relationships right now, and I’ve always been in these public relationships, dude,” Fike said. “Have you noticed that? Jesus f*cking Christ. Can I give it a break? It’s not that hard to not date a f*cking other famous person… I’m always folding on that because every time I go through a breakup, now it’s like I got to see somebody on a damn billboard.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Fike revealed that he was under the influence of drugs throughout much of the filming of season 2 of Euphoria. But now that he’s sober, he admits that he has a “better dynamic” with “almost everybody” involved in the show.

Fike, however, doesn’t anticipate that his and Schafer’s breakup will make things awkward on set as they return to film season 3.

“I think it’ll be fine,” said Fike. “We’re all adults. I’m trying.”

You can watch the interview above.

Sunburn is out now via Columbia Records. Find more information here.

The Atlanta Hawks have been busy this offseason, as the team pulled off a trade with the Utah Jazz that finally saw the John Collins era come to an end in exchange for Rudy Gay and a future second-round pick. Not long after that, there was yet another trade, this time with the Houston Rockets that got them a pair of young players (TyTy Washington and Usman Garuba) along with a pair of second-round picks in exchange for the draft rights to Alpha Kaba.

Now, all of those players are going somewhere else. According to Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, Atlanta is taking the trio of Gay, Garuba, and Washington and sending them to Oklahoma City for Patty Mills, whom the Thunder acquired from the Rockets, which got him from the Brooklyn Nets in a deal earlier in the offseason. To sweeten the pot and help the Thunder in their apparent quest to have every draft pick in the league, the Hawks are throwing in a future second.

It’s unclear how the Thunder plan to deal with the NBA’s most bloated roster, as the team has 21 players after this deal. If they were to stay, Washington and Garuba are both buy-low talents, while Gay brings a veteran presence to have around the team’s young core. As for the Hawks, Mills is a useful veteran guard who — if he sticks around — should serve as a backup to Trae Young and the recently extended Dejounte Murray.