Category: News

The Eastern Conference Finals has been an incredibly strange seven-game series in that most of the games weren’t competitive, and yet the Celtics and Heat both managed to pick up three wins to force a winner take all showdown in Miami on Sunday night.

Early on, it looked like we were headed for yet another blowout as the Celtics darted out to a big lead, thanks in large part to smothering defense sparking their offense in transition. Twice in the first quarter, Al Horford produced a turnover via a great closeout that led to a Jaylen Brown bucket on the other end as Miami struggled to meet the intensity of Boston early on.

Brown capped off a strong opening quarter with a step-through runner that helped push the Celtics out to a 15-point advantage going into the second quarter, as Miami looked discombobulated on both ends.

Boston would maintain that advantage for most of the second quarter, leading by 16 with just under five minutes to play before Jimmy Butler took over to pull the Heat back to within six, somehow, at the halftime break.

Butler finished the half with 24 points, as he and Bam Adebayo (11 first half points) were just about the only bright spots for Miami and kept the Heat within striking distance of Boston. The Celtics likewise got big first halves from their stars, as Brown had 15 and Jayson Tatum had 13 in the first 24 minutes, but the difference early was the contribution of the “others” as Marcus Smart and Derrick White combined for 17 to give the Celtics a needed lift from the backcourt. For Miami, their “others” had just 14 points on 3-of-17 shooting, and it was clear that for the Heat to close the gap completely in the second half that had to change.

After a good start, Miami suddenly found itself down 14 again midway through the quarter as Marcus Smart got it going for Boston, knocking down a pair of triples off Brown assists that (coupled with a Max Strus three that got wiped off the board for stepping out of bounds) further extended Boston’s advantage in role player production.

However, as quickly as Boston opened things up, the Heat closed it back down to a couple of possessions with a 7-0 run of their own, capped off by the welcome sight for the Miami faithful of a Victor Oladipo three.

Miami opened the fourth quarter on a quick 5-0 run to cut the deficit to just three points and suddenly it felt like the Heat might actually pull things even as the building was rocking after a Bam Adebayo lob finish.

Boston would reestablish order thanks to some tremendous shot-making by Tatum that pushed the lead back to double digits and, seemingly, it looked like they had taken the best punch of the Heat.

However, Miami would again make a run, pushing their way to within two after big buckets by Lowry and Max Strus.

After a Marcus Smart runner missed, the Heat had the ball with 20 seconds to play and a chance to tie or take the lead. Jimmy Butler decided to take a pullup three rather than attack the rim in transition or pull it out for one final play, and after a sensational 35-point game where he never sat, he couldn’t muster anything more than the front rim.

Two Smart free throws put Boston up 100-96 with 11 seconds to play, and Miami saw Strus miss a pair of desperation threes (with a foul on a rebound in between), with the clock eventually running out on Miami’s comeback bid.

It was a valiant effort from a clearly banged up Heat team, led by Butler’s 35 points and nine rebounds, with Bam Adebayo showing up when they needed him with 25 points and 11 boards. However, the Heat could not overcome a 6-for-30 night from three-point range despite their best efforts, as long droughts (including a four minute stretch in the fourth without a bucket) plagued them throughout the series.

For Boston, Brown (24 points, six rebounds, six assists) got things started and Tatum (26 points, 10 rebounds, and six assists) closed things out, with a big lift from Smart (24 points, nine rebounds, five assists) to push them over the line. They’ll now have three days to rest and get ready for the Golden State Warriors who have been sitting at home since Thursday, with Draymond Green’s proclamation they’d face Boston coming true (maybe two days later than anticipated).

The Coca-Cola 600 is not considered one of NASCAR’s more exciting races, as the longest race of the season is often a war of attrition and track position. However, this year with the new car, that changed fairly dramatically, as Charlotte Motor Speedway gave drivers fits as there were a number of wrecks on Sunday night as NASCAR’s best tried to make their way through 400 laps at the mile-and-a-half track.

Some of those were single car spins, but there were also some “big ones” that are usually reserved for superspeedway racing after restarts when the cars were bunched up in packs. One of those came with 55 laps to go when Daniel Suarez got spun by Chase Briscoe and found himself spinning through the middle of the track with some cars unable to avoid him, including Chris Buescher who slammed into Suarez and got sent into the new turf infield (that is no longer grass).

There, Buescher hit something that popped the front of his car up in the air and caused him to flip over violently multiple times before coming to rest on his roof.

Thankfully, Buescher was able to exit the car under his own power and NASCAR announced shortly after the wreck that he had already been evaluated and released from the care center.

That is a testament to the new car’s safety mechanisms, but there’s certainly some questions to be asked about what led to the car jumping up like that and flipping. The turf was added to keep cars from digging into the ground and getting torn up, which was successful, but they’ll need to take a look at the drains or whatever caused this in the future to avoid a repeat of this scary scene that luckily everyone emerged from unscathed.

There’s no doubt that Harry Styles is a superstar. He made that very clear with the release of his sophomore album Fine Line which, at the time, made for his third consecutive chart-topping album. It also made for the biggest first week by a male pop singer since Justin Bieber’s Purpose in 2015. With all of that in mind, it was expected that Harry was going to have another huge first week when he announced his third album Harry’s House back in March. Now that the album is here, we can confirm that Harry’s House indeed had a massive debut and the biggest of 2022 so far.

For the Billboard 200 chart dated June 4, 2022, Harry Styles’ Harry’s House debuted at No. 1 thanks to 521,500 album units sold in its first week. That number is comprised of 189,000 streaming equivalent album units thanks to 246.96 million on-demand official streams of the album’s songs. Harry’s House also registered a whopping 330,000 in pure album sales thanks to 182,000 vinyl sales which also gives Harry’s House the largest week for an album on vinyl since 1991. It beat out the previous record of 114,000 that was previously set by Taylor Swift’s Red (Taylor’s Version).

With its first-week total of 521,500 album units sold, Harry’s House becomes the fourth album in the last 18 months. It joins Adele’s 30 (839,000), Swift’s Red (Taylor’s Version) (604,500), and Drake’s Certified Lover Boy (612,500).

With its first week total, Harry’s House now has the biggest debut by a pop singer since Justin Bieber’s Purpose in 2015. Bieber’s album went No. 1 thanks to a first week total of 649,000.

You can revisit our review of Harry’s House here.

Relegation is one of the most unique aspects of international soccer compared to American sports, as the teams the finish at the bottom of the league will be sent down to a lower league (while top teams are promoted up). Relegation can cost clubs millions (and in some extreme cases, cause them to shut down entirely) and fans who want to watch their team in the top flight are suddenly no longer offered that opportunity.

In France, the bottom two teams in Ligue 1 are automatically relegated to Ligue 2, but the 18th place team must play a two-leg playoff against the third place team from Ligue 2 for who gets to play in the top flight of French soccer next year. This year, those two teams were AS Saint-Etienne and AJ Auxerre, and Sunday saw the two teams play to a 1-1 draw for the second time in Saint-Etienne’s home stadium, leading to a tense penalty shootout. Auxerre won that shootout 5-4 to make the leap up to Ligue 1, while Saint-Etienne will spend next season in Ligue 2, and their fans were, unsurprisingly, displeased by this outcome.

Because this is European soccer, those fans were armed with flares and they stormed the pitch, chasing their own players off the field and into the tunnel, chucking lit flares at them as they scurried to safety in an absolutely insane scene.

Relegation battles produce some crazy scenes, but this is a new one with fans firing flares at players. As someone not steeped in soccer tradition, fans having flares in the stands at soccer games (and sometimes European basketball games) has always been absolutely wild to me, but particularly so if stadium security has no chance of stopping them from getting on the field.

Since the tragic gun massacre in Uvalde, Texas, which took the lives of 19 children and two adults, Republicans have been making the rounds to offer solutions. Do they support measures that would make assault rifles more difficult to obtain? No. Instead, they’ve floated practically every other solution except that, some blaming doors, not guns. And then there’s Lauren Boebert.

On Sunday, Dan Crenshaw, who’s tried to paint himself as a more sensible — or at least non-MAGA — Republican, offered his help. The Texas lawmaker went on CNN, where Dana Bash tried to glean what provisions he supports. The answer: not many. He didn’t approve of background checks, nor regulating gun shows, nor raising the gun purchase age to 21. He didn’t even like red flag laws, which would strip firearms from those deemed dangerous. What’s more, he poo-poohed the idea of a correlation between gun ownership and gun violence.

Crenshaw even rejected the depiction of AR-15-style weapons, which the Uvalde shooter legally obtained and used.

“I don’t really classify these as weapons of war,” Crenshaw averred — only to contradict himself with the very next thing he said. “We used them, but they’re more our self-defense weapons. I would say that if a SEAL team or an infantry unit goes on offense, they’re using much, much bigger weapons that are not available to your common civilian.”

Crenshaw also added that the military uses M4 carbine rifles, which he admitted “are an AR-15-style weapon,” used “mostly for self-defense and for very close quarters type of combat.” He added that “they have capabilities that your civilian rifles do not.”

So there you have it. Crenshaw doesn’t support restricting civilian access to guns even he admits are used by the military. Even if there are deadlier weapons than the AR-15, even the inventor of that gun, his family said, did not approve of it in civilian hands.

Then there’s the fact that marines have to do annual training, lasting two weeks, to prove they’re competent enough to handle such dangerous weapons, as this former rifle and pistol coach in the marine corps once pointed out while arguing that civilians can obtain deadly weapons easier than the military:

Maybe instead of doing something to help civilians from gun violence, Crenshaw can record another amped-up video of him beating up libs as though he was Tom Cruise. After all, they are about the same height.

(Via CNN)

There’s a new documentary on HBO about George Carlin, the pioneering and highly influential stand-up, who in the ‘70s helped usher in a new and more profane style of comedy. He’s been talked about recently for other reasons, too. When it was revealed the right-leaning Supreme Court were on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade, many shared his opening salvo from 1996’s Back in Town, in which he tears into Republicans’ inconsistent and illogical hatred of abortion rights.

Nevertheless, Carlin has often been championed by those on the far right as one of their own (at least when he absolutely wasn’t). His comedy, they argue, was about freedom of speech, mistrust of authority, even against environmentalism. (Though to be fair, his lengthy bit on the latter is really about how the planet is trying to get rid of pesky humankind, not that we aren’t making it unfit for the species’ survival.) There’s one person who isn’t buying that: his own daughter.

Kelly Carlin, one of the executive producers of George Carlin’s American Dream, recently went on the podcast The New Abnormal.

“Before he died in 2008, and Hillary was running, my dad was like, ‘You know, it’ll be good. Hillary [Clinton] will get in there and she’ll get some people some jobs.’ I mean, of course he leaned that direction. My dad was a lifelong New Yorker and lifelong New Yorkers hate Donald Trump,” Carlin said. “It just always shocks me when these Trumpers wanna claim him.”

She also laid into the way today’s GOP loves to paint themselves as victims, even trying to popularize white supremacist conspiracy theories about a “great replacement.” “The far right would like to say that they’re the minority now, but [George Carlin] would roll his eyes, because we know where all the wealth and the power is,” she explained. “That was the core, the deepest, deepest core of my father’s moral center from day one of his life.”

Anyway, sorry, Republicans who think George Carlin is speaking to them, even in death. He ain’t.

(Via The Daily Beast)

There was a period, in the mid-aughts, when people turned on Tom Cruise. He started speaking openly about Scientology (and even tried to recruit Seth Rogen into the fold). He railed on psychiatry. He jumped on sofas. Suddenly films starring the biggest movie star in the world were underperforming, or worse. He’s fought hard to get back on top, in part by almost killing himself to entertain. And now, in 2022, he has the biggest opening of his career.

As per The Hollywood Reporter, Top Gun: Maverick, the belated sequel to the blockbuster that made him a megastar 36 years ago, is set to gross $151 million over the four-day Memorial Day weekend. That makes it the second highest-grosser over the same weekend, after 2007’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which Hoovered up $153 million — a mere two million more. Of that $151, $124 million of it came in the first three days, and $51.8 million are from Thursday night and Friday alone, when it was already breaking records.

Despite being Tom Cruise, the actor’s films have never opened above $100 million. By contrast, the last Mission: Impossible, 2018’s Fallout, “only” made $61.2 million in its opening weekend. In its first three days, Top Gun 2 grossed almost double what War of the Worlds made in its opening weekend back in June of 2005. (For the record, none of this is adjusted for inflation.)

For years, Cruise didn’t want to make a Top Gun sequel. In 1990, he described such a film as “irresponsible,” acknowledging critics who derided it as “a right-wing film to promote the Navy.” He also pointed out that kids “loved it,” which made him nervous. “I want kids to know that that’s not the way war is — that Top Gun was just an amusement park ride, a fun film with a PG-13 rating that was not supposed to be reality.”

And yet here we are, with a nearly 40-years-later sequel that is considerably less jingoistic than the Reagan-era original, a more somber affair that reflects on its aging star’s past and future, even as it knows that he can still fly the hell out of a plane.

(Via THR)

Cardi B has been living her best life as of late. She just released a new episode of Cardi Tries with Megan Thee Stallion and it features the “WAP” collaborators showing off their football skills with help from some Los Angeles Chargers players. Days after that episode was released, Cardi and Offset were spotted on vacation, and while the couple might have expected to enjoy a regular day at the beach, things took an unexpected turn as they watched a yacht sink underwater some hundred feet away from them.

The whole thing was caught on camera thanks to a video that Cardi provided and posted on her Twitter. In the video, which she captioned, “I can’t believe I’m actually watching a yacht sink,” Cardi is clearly taken aback by what she’s witnessing. “What the f***?!!? Oh my — it’s sinking!!! Y’all see this?!!?” Cardi says as she watches the yacht slowly sink underwater. “Oh my God, they can’t do nothing about it? “There ain’t no big boat that could save it?!?” After accepting that there was nothing that could be done to save the boat, Cardi gave her farewells to the yacht. “It’s gone! It’s gone!” she said. “Bye-Bye! Bye!!”

You can view Cardi’s video of the whole ordeal above.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

One of hip-hop’s current longstanding beefs is that between The Game and 50 Cent. The two have not seen eye to eye in almost two decades as every now and then, one side pops out to take a shot at the other. It was just last month that The Game challenged Eminem to a rap battle because of 50’s refusal to spar over music. “50 can’t rap,” The Game said when he was asked about his decision to challenge Em. “So I gotta go a level up and challenge the better rapper, that’s why.” While a rap battle between Game and 50 may never come to fruition, Game will never forget his past wins.

During a recent appearance on the All The Smoke podcast, The Game claimed that 50 Cent and former Interscope CEO Jimmy Iovine gave him $1 million to stop saying “G-Unot” at the height of his beef with 50 Cent and G-Unit. “They wrote me a check, they bought it,” Game said. “I had to trademark the G-Unot. And you remember when I was going around with the rat and doing all that sh*t, that sh*t hurt—killed G-Unit.”

He continued, “You stopped seeing the candy cane tank tops and all that sh*t. The whole G-Unit/Mark Ecko, the shoes, all that sh*t died. That sh*t was a hot commodity at once, G-Unit clothing. N****s was wearing the sweats, headbands, the masks, everything.” Game added that the only way to stop him from using the “G-Unot” phrase was to buy the trademark for it.

“So they had to pay me. I should have asked for more but them n****s gave me a million,” he said. “But I’m a hood n****, a million dollars just to stop saying this word? Where’s the check? They wrote the check and I stopped saying it.”

You can watch the clip from the All The Smoke podcast in the post above.

The gun massacre in Uvalde, Texas, which took the lives of 19 children and two adults, has shocked the nation. Democrats have invariably put most of the blame on one thing: guns, and the easy availability thereof. Most Republicans have blamed everything but guns. Some even blamed doors. (Then there’s whatever Lauren Boebert is talking about.)

Then there’s Don Jr. The former president’s went on one of his unhinged, slurry, motormouthed video rants, in which he not only defend semi-automatic weapons but also put the blame on, among other things, “crazy teachers” — despite two teachers being the casualties of the tragedy in Uvalde.

The video, posted on Rumble, finds him in sarcastic mode. “It’s the gun, it’s not the sociopath wielding it, folks,” he fumed while making spastic, Showgirls-esque hand movements. “If it wasn’t for the gun, this kid would be a well-adjusted, reasonable individual, he’d be a wonderful human being, right? He’d be a wonderful human being. He wouldn’t have done the exact same thing with a bat or a bomb or some sort of improvised device or a machete, he’s a great kid, don’t judge him.”

He then tried to find the real culprit. “We can’t acknowledge what the actual causes are. It’s not a drug-addict mother and a missing father and a lack of religion, indoctrination programs in our schools, crazy teachers teaching some of the crap I’ve talking about in these videos. It’s none of those things,” he ranted. “It never ends man.”

In summing up, he said, “Our own stupidity, apathy, wokeness, laziness, that’s the problem, folks, and until we fix that, the rest is just talk and crap.”

Or maybe Don Jr. should keep recording deranged videos that erase credibility from already dodgy arguments.

(Via Raw Story)