Category: News

The greatest moment of Deandre Ayton’s young NBA career occurred on Wednesday night. The Phoenix Suns won Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals against the Los Angeles Clippers, 104-103, thanks to an alley-oop with fractions of a second left by their former No. 1 overall pick. As a result, Phoenix is up in the series, 2-0, with both wins coming despite Chris Paul being sidelined due to the league’s health and safety protocols.

Much of the game was defined by two things: Cameron Payne and Ayton looking like they were going to win this for Phoenix, and Los Angeles just not letting them do that. Having said that, both Payne and Ayton were magnificent all game — the former led the game with 29 points and pitched in nine assists, while the latter had 24 points and 14 rebounds, along with one moment that no one in Phoenix will forget any time soon.

But despite this, the Suns just could not put the Clippers away. L.A. always seemed to have this within a few points, thanks in part to players like Luke Kennard coming in off the bench and hitting just enough shots to stem the tide — Kennard, in particular, scored all 10 of his points in the fourth quarter.

And then, down the stretch, it became the Paul George vs. Devin Booker show. After a Kennard jumper with just under 90 seconds left, the Suns went down and gave the ball to Booker. A controversial offensive foul call in which Booker raised his arm and Patrick Beverley appeared to embellish gave it back to Los Angeles, George hit a pair of free throws on the ensuing possession, the Suns got nothing, and then, George did this.

Booker went right back down after that bucket and wasted no time, pulling up over Beverley and putting Phoenix back ahead.

George, once again, had an answer. The Clippers got the ball into the hands of their star man and he rewarded their faith, hitting a jumper over Jae Crowder.

While Booker turned the ball over on the next possession — the ball was poked away by Beverley and it grazed the Suns’ star’s hand on the way out — George left the door open by missing a pair of free throws.

Mikal Bridges missed a wide open corner jumper the next time down, but the ball went out of bounds and there was just enough time left. And then, Ayton made magic happen off the ensuing inbounds play, as Crowder threw a picture-perfect lob and the big man did the rest.

After much confusion due to the constant need for the referees to remind us they are, indeed, on the floor during basketball game, 0.7 seconds were put back on the clock. George caught the full-court inbounds pass, but was unable to get a shot off before regulation expired.

Beyond the huge games by Payne and Ayton, Booker dropped 20 with five rebounds and four assists, while Cam Johnson and Dario Saric both pitched in 11 off the bench. For Los Angeles, George was the man of the evening with 26 points, six rebounds, and six assists, with Jackson pitching in 19 points, Ivica Zubac having 14 points and 11 rebounds, and Kennard throwing in 10 off the bench.

Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals takes place on Thursday evening at 9 p.m. EST from Staples Center.

Conan O’Brien is in the final week of his TBS late night show, and just as he turned the last lap of his Tonight Show stint back in 2010 into a “f*ck it” free-for-all, so is he going mad with this one. On Monday night’s show, he bid a proper, tuxedo-clad adieu to Paul Rudd’s long-running Mac and Me joke. (Perhaps that, too, will return, in some fashion, for O’Brien’s forthcoming HBO Max show.) How to top it?

By getting high with Seth Rogen.

On Tuesday night’s Conan, the actor-turned-filmmaker-turned-author did what looked like a pre-rehearsed bit. Rogen asked him what he planned to do with his downtime before he returns. He then proceeded to whip out a joint. But when O’Brien tried to light up right there, with the cameras rolling, he got a talking to.

“Don’t smoke that now!” Rogen warned him. “Or do, this will be a great, weird show for all of us.” His guest then advised him to keep it to “one hit.”

“This is the kind of thing you do when you know it’s over for you,” O’Brien joked, as he fumbled with the joint. “I really don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” he said, which didn’t appear to be a joke.

O’Brien still has some episodes left, and now that he’s crossed “get high in front of cameras like Elon Musk once did with Joe Rogen” off his Bucket List, what’s next?

You can watch the segment in the video above.

If there’s anything active social media users know, it’s the powerful presence of Beyonce’s biggest fans. The Beyhive, as they’re known, will rush to the singer’s defense whenever they deem it’s been slandered. So it’s no surprise that Trick Daddy felt their wrath after he questioned her singing abilities. “Beyoncé ain’t trying to give back to music and Beyoncé don’t write music,” he said during a conversation on Clubhouse. “Beyoncé can’t sing.”

The Beyhive quickly pounced, but others chose to handle it a bit differently.

On Tuesday, Trick Daddy’s restaurant, Sunday’s Eatery, was hit with a number of one-star reviews that seemed to be written by Beyonce’s fans. “The food was appalling!!” one person named Corey Goodman wrote. He added, “I’ve never in my life tasted such filth. The Lemonade, on the other hand, was divine” — a reference to Beyonce’s 2016 album.

One person wrote, “Disgusting food. Seriously though. The service was so subpar. Definitely do not recommend this restaurant, they can’t even sing.” Another added, “The food was undercooked but tasted overcook the restaurant smelled like wet dog, but there was a delightful bee’s nest outside waiting.” The reviewers also made sure to show their allegiance to the singer by adding a bee emoji to the end of their comments. In the end, they brought the restaurant’s rating down to a 2.6 out of 5 on Google.

Once upon a time, Subway was considered the healthy fast food option. It even had a weight-shedding mascot (who later, uh, fell on hard times). It still mostly is, if only but only because the bar for health at quick-turnaround eateries remains so low. To say the chain has fallen on hard times would be too much; they remain the world’s largest sandwich purveyor. But since 2015 the total number of locations has been in decline. And a new investigative piece by The New York Times — which calls into question the veracity of what they sell as tuna — may not help.

The piece is a response to a class action lawsuit first reported in January, which claims Subway’s popular tuna sandwiches “are completely bereft of tuna as an ingredient.” The company’s brass has categorically denied the allegations, but the Times decided to send away samples from the chain to a lab, to see if they could get a read on the mystery meat. And — in a piece that, incidentally, doubles as a fascinating look at how canned tuna became a staple of American pantries — they got their answer. Sort of.

“No amplifiable tuna DNA was present in the sample and so we obtained no amplification products from the DNA,” the lab’s answer read. “Therefore, we cannot identify the species.”

Mind you, this doesn’t mean Subway’s tuna isn’t tuna. For one, the reporter explains that getting a pure sample of the meat, even after only requesting only tuna, wasn’t easy. The tuna that arrives in a Subway tuna sandwich has been mixed with, among other things, mayonnaise. Moreover, after tuna is cooked, as it is before being placed in a can, the meat becomes “denatured” — that, as the Times puts it, “the fish’s characteristic properties have likely been destroyed, making it difficult, if not impossible, to identify.”

There are other caveats:

The spokesman from the lab offered a bit of analysis. “There’s two conclusions,” he said. “One, it’s so heavily processed that whatever we could pull out, we couldn’t make an identification. Or we got some and there’s just nothing there that’s tuna.”

Furthermore, Inside Edition tried the same thing, and the lab they dealt with deemed the specimens to be indeed tuna. On top of that, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit softened their original claims in June, worried instead that it wasn’t “100% sustainably caught skipjack and yellowfin tuna.”

One other thing to consider: Among the people interviewed in the NYT piece is a former Subway “sandwich artist,” who had this fairly convincing piece of testimony in defense of the chain:

“I dealt with the tuna all the time,” Jen said. “The ingredients are right on the package and tuna is a relatively cheap meat. There would be no point to making replacement tuna to make it cheaper.”

And as an occasional consumer of Subway’s tuna, Jen said she’s confident it’s fish.

“I personally have a really weak stomach to fish, which is how we know the tuna is real,” she said. “Last time I ate it, I puked my guts out.”

The piece has made waves, though some of the reactions involve shock that people are trying to eat relatively healthy at a Subway.

There were also Soylent Green jokes.

And other jokey speculations.

Bottom line: It’s inconclusive whether the Subway tuna isn’t tuna, though surely eating whatever it is is healthier than their other offerings, such as the Chicken & Bacon Ranch Melt.

(Via NYT)

The Phoenix Suns entered Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals with a 1-0 series lead over the Los Angeles Clippers. Early in the third quarter, the Suns appeared to be in a favorable position to garner a second straight win, riding considerable contributions from both Cam Payne and Deandre Ayton to a lead. When the score was 69-62, Suns star Devin Booker and Clippers guard Patrick Beverley collided in a two-way headbutt, and blood quickly came to the surface.

https://twitter.com/gifdsports/status/1407532440420294659

Both Booker and Beverley went to the locker room after immediately leaving the floor while bloodied.

Booker, who produced his first career triple-double in a dominant Game 1 performance, exited with 11 points and five assists in his first 29 minutes. Beverley picked up four fouls in 17 minutes while applying his trademark ball pressure.

In this instance, no flagrant foul was assessed to Beverley, as the play was presumably viewed to be accidental. At the same time, Beverley often finds himself in compromising positions due to his all-out aggressiveness, and this particular moment yielded damage to both players. It will be interesting to see if there is any fallout for the rest of the game or series, though Beverley returned to the bench in relatively short order.

Cade Cunningham, the odds-on favorite to be the No. 1 pick in the 2021 NBA Draft, will only be visiting with one team: the Detroit Pistons. The Pistons, of course, have the No. 1 overall pick after winning the draft lottery on Tuesday. The news was reported by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski:

This makes all the sense in the world. The 6’7, 220-pound Cunningham is going to the No. 1 pick in the Draft. He’s going to be the kind of big wing creator that the Pistons need and can be the lead of a young core that includes Killian Hayes, Isaiah Stewart, and Saddiq Bey. There’s not really a case for the Pistons to take anyone else.

This also feels important because it suggests that Cunningham isn’t going to try and dictate himself away from the Pistons. If he wasn’t interested in playing there for whatever reason, the immediate leak wouldn’t have been “he’ll only take meeting there.” It would have been anything and everything that his camp would have tried to push as a reason for the Pistons to not take him so he can end up somewhere else.

Ultimately, this is good. Cunningham in Detroit means there’s another relevant team in the NBA and the league needs as many relevant teams as possible. The Pistons are also an interesting fit for Cunningham. About a month from now, it’ll become reality.

While we await his sophomore album, Buddy is deep into a strong guest feature run. The Compton-bred act continues his streak by standing alongside Toronto rapper Jazz Cartier in a video for their track “Two Of Em.” The stylish duo kicks things off with a game of chess before moving off to detail their greedy ways. From money to women, Jazz and Buddy insist on receiving double the normal amount for their favorite things.

On Jazz’s end, the video arrives after a two-year break, which he used to recenter himself after a move from his hometown of Toronto to Los Angeles. The new single also comes ahead of his upcoming project, Fleur Print Vol. 2, which is set to arrive on July 23. The full-length effort will also feature “Nothing 2 Me” with Cousin Stizz, a song he released earlier this year.

As for Buddy, the Compton rapper is hard at work on his sophomore album and follow-up to his 2018 effort Harlon & Alondra. Since then, the rapper has been consistent with periodic releases, most of them coming in the form of guest features. He teamed with Lucky Daye for “Faces” and Tinashe on two separate occasions for “Glitch” and “Pasadena.” He also appeared with Guapdad 4000 on “PlayStation” as well as D Smoke and Jac Ross for “It’s OK To Be Black 2.0.”

You can watch the video for “Two Of Em” above.

Baseball is cracking down on pitchers using things to help them enhance their grip on the ball. It’s led to plenty of grumbling around the league — one pitcher, Tampa Bay Rays ace Tyler Glasnow, is convinced this led to him suffering a potentially season-ending injury — and on Tuesday night, we got a sense of how extremely annoyed Washington Nationals star Max Scherzer is with the whole thing.

Scherzer was on the mound against the Philadelphia Phillies. On several occasions, Phillies manager Joe Girardi called for the umpires to go check to see if Scherzer was using anything, and the pitcher wasn’t a big fan of the stoppage to take care of this.

Then, Girardi called for a third check, and Scherzer got so annoyed that he came awfully close to pulling his pants down while on the mound to get his point across.

Ultimately, though, Scherzer and the Nats got the last laugh, as the prodded Girardi to the point that he got ejected.

MLB did such an awful job of rolling this out — the crackdown on things that give pitchers more grip came midseason and was sweeping to the point that they aren’t allowed to use anything, with an automatic ejection and 10-day suspension for anyone caught using anything — that Girardi is taking advantage of this in an attempt to throw Scherzer off his game. Of course, that implies the tactic would work, and seeing as how Scherzer allowed one run in five innings before Girardi got tossed, that was not the case.

Earlier this week, the internet was shocked by an anecdote T-Pain shared during an interview for the upcoming Netflix film This Is Pop. In it, he detailed a depression-sparking conversation he had with Usher during a flight together to the 2013 BET Awards. “I was like, ‘What’s good?’” T-Pain recalled. “I thought he was about to tell me something real. He sounded real concerned. He was like, ‘Man, you kind of… you kind of f*cked up music.’” He added, “I didn’t understand. Usher was my friend. He was like, ‘Yeah man, you really f*cked up music for real singers.’”

The news T-Pain fans to rush to social media to give Usher a piece of their minds. Less than 24 hours after the clip from the upcoming This Is Pop film arrived on social media, T-Pain returned to Twitter to clarify his feelings towards Usher. “I still love and respect @Usher telling that story was in no way meant to disrespect that man,” he wrote. “Ppl talk sh*t about me 24/7 but when it comes from someone you truly respect it hits very different. I never said f*ck Ursh it was a drop in the ocean of sh*t I was already goin through.”

On Tuesday, what everyone, including Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, said would happen happened: the Senate GOP stalled the For the People Act. How did they do this? They used the filibuster, whose removal is opposed by Democratic senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. And though what happened has been seen as a foregone conclusion, after it did happen, people on social media were pissed.

The bill was intended to expand voting rights, which have been under attack for months by Republicans nationwide. Among its aims include banning partisan gerrymandering, forcing super PACs to disclose big donors, and reform the public campaign financing system. Democrats took control of all three houses of government, and this could have been their first ambitious piece of legislation.

But for now it’s stalled, perhaps indefinitely. As per The New York Times, there remains no clear path forward for the bill. A watered-down version introduced by Manchin, dubbed the John Lewis Voting Rights Act — named after the late Democratic representative and civil rights icon — appears to be gaining no traction with Republicans.

The only course of action that could work remains ending the filibuster, which critics argue has long been abused by Republicans to kill Democratic legislation. But again, Sinema and Manchin stand in the way, despite being slammed for their attempts at defending their actions.

So with little hope for recourse, people took to Twitter to vent. Some focused on Manchin, who claimed he could find 10 Republicans to support the bill. He was off by 10.

Some pointed out that maybe something’s wrong with the country when the party that controls the House and Senate and the White House can’t stop a minority party from creating legislation to put them back in power.

Others the GOP, who keep blocking key pieces of legislation.

Others came for Sinema.

Others theorized, in an epic thread, that McConnell will probably wind up killing the filibuster when the GOP takes over, possibly in 2022.

Many said this was the final proof that the filibuster must be destroyed.

And while they’re at it, maybe end a few other weapons Republicans love to have in their arsenal.

(Via NYT)