Category: News

After he and the Rockets agreed he would leave the team while they searched for a trade partner, P.J. Tucker reportedly is drawing interest from the Lakers and Nets, among other contending teams, according to Adrian Wojnarowski and Tim MacMahon of ESPN.

While Houston head coach Stephen Silas indicated he believed Tucker would play on Thursday in the first game out of the All-Star break, Silas agreed it was “a good idea” for Tucker to move on if his heart was not in it. Tucker traveled to Sacramento for the road game, warmed up with the team, and was not on the injury report, but ultimately decided not to play, according to ESPN.

The report also lists the Bucks and Heat as teams that have demonstrated interest in Tucker as a trade candidate. At age 35, Tucker is likely to enter a new phase of his career, perhaps not the heavy-minute small-ball center he was a few years back but still serviceable as a versatile 3-and-D role player.

That type of player should help any team looking to compete for an NBA championship. Milwaukee, for instance, has gone smaller in 2021 and tried to diversify their defense, something Tucker would surely help them do. Miami is looking for a replacement for Jae Crowder and could theoretically find it in Tucker.

Finding a trade shouldn’t be hard thanks to Tucker’s reasonable $8 million salary, so a deal will more likely be contingent upon finding a team that can give the rebuilding Rockets the assets they desire.

Draymond Green is an easy person to talk to, but one aspect of conversing with him is difficult: you have to consistently fight the urge to ask him about everything. Green is among the most thoughtful and passionate players in all of basketball, someone who can’t help but take natural pauses in his speech as he considers the weight of every word that will he will say in response to a question.

Of course, this hyper-meticulous nature is what has made Green go from a decorated college player at Michigan State, to a little-used second-round NBA Draft selection, to one of the most uniquely talented players in all of basketball, a two-way maestro who can score four points and find a way to make more winning plays than anyone else on the court. And if you’ve ever seen him speak, or tweet, or do just about anything, you know that Green cannot help but say exactly what he means in a kind of blunt, straightforward way that can be refreshing if you’re used to talking to people who talk around what they want to say.

Before the Golden State Warriors got the second half of the season underway, Dime caught up with Green on behalf of Subway (his sub has steak) to discuss the first half of the year, some of the young guys on the team’s roster, what he wants the media to understand about NBA players, and more.

Just in general, could you take me through this Warriors season so far? Where you’re happy, where you want to see improvement, whatever comes to mind when you hear that question.

I wouldn’t necessarily say we’re happy we’re 19-18, and feel like we have definitely let some games get away that shouldn’t have. So I wouldn’t necessarily say happy, but what I would say is, from who this team is today and who we were two and a half months ago is complete night and day. And that is exciting, and understanding the potential of this team. We’re a very young team, not a lot of experience, and even less experience together.

I think when you look at the young talent that we have along with myself, Steph, Looney who’s been here a while, I think we haven’t gotten near reaching out potential yet. I think this team has the makeup and the pieces to be a great defensive team, and I think at times, we’ve shown that. I also think due to inexperience at times, you watch a game and the defense is non-existent. But that’s usually what comes with a very young team.

Going into the second half of the season, right on the outside of the playoffs looking in, I think we’re in a great spot and go ahead and continue to grow and make this push and try and get into the playoffs and make some noise, which I have no doubt we will.

I actually wanted to ask about a collection of those young guys, the first would be James [Wiseman]. I think any time I watch you two play, one thing that really sticks out is how much you personally are putting into his development. What is it about him that makes you go “all this work is going to be worth it”?

Number one, the kid has an insane amount of talent. Doesn’t even understand the amount of talent that he has. And as someone who’s been in this league for, now, nine years, you can see when someone’s got it, and he’s got it. And so that is exciting for me.

Another thing that’s very exciting, for me, as someone who likes to mentor, who likes to show younger guys, younger kids, the way. And I don’t just mean in basketball, I mean in life as well. But as someone who enjoys that side of things, I’ve never, because of the success that this team has had, I have never played with someone 19 years old with the potential that James has. And you know, nowadays you get a lot of 19 year olds with that type of potential that’s been on social media kind of taking all of the fake praise in, heads blowing up this big, and don’t quite listen. This kid is extremely grounded, his mom did an incredible job raising him, he’s so thirsty for information — he wants to know, he’s asking questions non-stop.

And so it’s just refreshing to see someone like that, with that skill level, that grounded. I understand that he can be a perennial All-Star in this league, he can be a real game-changer in this league, and just want to pour into him all that I can to give him the best chance to be successful as someone who’s a product of great vets — Jarrett Jack, David West, Jermaine O’Neal, Carl Landry, David Lee, [Andrew] Bogut, Richard Jefferson. As someone who’s a product of great veterans, I think I owe it to the game of basketball, I owe it to my career, to give it back to the next young guys.

I’m glad you mentioned that, because I wanted to ask about a group of guys who got a ton of run last year — Eric [Paschall], Juan [Toscano-Anderson], Mychal [Mulder]. Obviously last year was a rough year with injuries, but how does going through something like that help those guys get to a point where, now, they are part of the rotation of a team that is going to have championship aspirations?

I think it’s great for them. EP had a great rookie year, I think he was first-team All-Rookie. Fantastic to watch, second-round pick and to come out and have the season that he had I think was amazing, you quickly saw the potential who he could be, and that’s been great.

Juan T., I love Juan, man. A guy who got out the mud, who played in Mexico and played overseas. I think Juan, his senior year of college, maybe averaged six or seven points, and now he’s in the NBA contributing on an NBA team. The doubt that he’s faced his entire career, even coming into this season, he signed a two-way contract, he didn’t sign a standard NBA contract. He signed a two-way contract, but has that Oakland mentality — blue collar, gonna do whatever it takes to get it, as we say, get it out the mud. So I love that about Juan.

Mikey, same thing. A guy who came to our team on a 10-day last year and has played well, but more importantly, is a true professional. It’s been a pleasure having him around, his contract, I think, just got guaranteed a week or so ago. So to see those guys … JP, Jordan, who’s just coming up from his stint in the G League and went down there and dominated the G League Bubble. So just to see these young guys growing, it’s always fun to watch, and I know what that growth could mean for their livelihood. So trying to help in any way I can, I get a lot of pleasure out of it.

While you were going through all that, I was thinking about what you said last year about Marquese — “No one ever blames the situation, though. It’s always the kid. No one ever blames these sh*tty franchises. They always want to blame the kid. It’s not always the kid’s fault.” It seems to me like you take a lot of pride in the Warriors not being the kind of franchise that isn’t putting everything possible into helping these guys succeed.

Yeah, obviously the Warriors are a great organization, one of the top organizations in this league, and you can’t say every organization in this league is great. As much as we all want to believe that, that’s garbage. Every organization in this league is not great. And like you said, as you just spoke to about Marquese, no one ever comes out and blames the team. No one ever says, “That team, that organization, screwed up XYZ,” or, “That organization is not good at said area,” and that effects this kid.

It’s always just the kid. The kid can go, and we’ll get someone else, because there’s thousands, hundreds of thousands of us. There’s only 30 teams. So you can’t replace one of the 30, but you can replace the kid like nobody’s tomorrow. So that’s just kind of the nature of the business that we’re in, but no one ever tells that story. It’s like people in the media are afraid of these teams or access that they’ll get if they were to call organizations out and that’s ridiculous.

I respect how you want us in the media to be responsible in our role in the basketball discourse ecosystem. What is the big thing you think we as the media need to understand from the perspective of a player?

I think, number one, it’s understanding just the player side of things. The player side of things and the team side of things are two completely different things. But, in my opinion, media will always side with the teams, because that’s where their direct access comes from. And so, no one is ever going to bite the hand that feeds them.

But the reality is, is what I think media needs to understand most importantly is, your content comes from the players. And so, when you look at where your content comes from, everyone always sides with the team, but we live in a day and age now where I can create my own content just like that. I can go do my own thing and tell my own story just like that.

And so where there once was a day and age where, “team this, team that, protect the organizations, do this, protect the shield, protect the league, protect all of these things,” that day and age is coming to an end, because people like Maverick Carter and LeBron James step up and create an Uninterrupted where guys can tell their own stories. That day and age is coming to an end, and don’t get caught on the wrong side of it, because, the reality is, no one’s covering every move said organization makes on the business side of things, but everyone’s covering every move that said organization makes on the basketball side of things. Said organization’s basketball runs off the performance of the players, and we have this situation of where media comes down pretty hard on players nowadays. But understand that the side is changing and don’t get caught on the wrong side of it.

What do you have going on with Subway?

So Subway, I’m partnering with Subway, it’s been a restaurant that I’ve been fond of since I was a kid. I had my first sub at age 11, and I’ve been loving Subway ever since. Couldn’t really afford it, to get Subway often as a kid, so any time I would get Subway was like a big deal for me. When I got my first job, it was actually right behind a Subway, and so for lunch, I would take my little checks and I would get lunch every day at Subway. It was amazing.

And so to have the opportunity to partner with Subway, a restaurant that I’ve loved since childhood, it’s like a full circle moment for me. And understanding that I was the kid who couldn’t afford Subway as much as I wanted Subway, and Subway doing the promotion where if you use the code BOGO50, you get 50 percent off your second sandwich, I understand, coming from families, that that 50 percent off makes a big difference in everyone eating. I understand that thoroughly.

And so to partner with someone who’s taking those things into consideration, to have my own sandwich, it’s a dream come true for me, because it’s something that has meant a lot to me since I was a child. And I’m very appreciative of the partnership and the opportunity to have my own sandwich for that young kid that is at Subway with his mom and he knows he may not have this Subway again for a long time because they can’t quite afford it. For that young Draymond Green, I am very appreciative of this partnership.

At this point, we’ve all seen the down-on-his-luck schlub meet a mysterious, bubbly stranger who brings love into his life and changes everything. The beauty of Long Weekend, written and directed by Community and The Goldbergs writer Stephen Basilone, is that Basilone knows we’ve all seen that movie. Long Weekend acknowledges those expectations just enough to subvert them, and thanks to great performances and sharp writing, he creates created this weird, charming little rom-com just different enough from the norm to be intriguing while retaining the best of the genre. It’s like Eternal Sunshine in a snow globe.

I went into Long Weekend, opening in theaters this week, with the lowest of expectations. The poster is one of the worst I’ve seen (for the love of God, no more open-mouthed laughing!), and lead Finn Wittrock looks like the stock image that comes up when you search “white guy.” “Finn Wittrock” even sounds like an AI bot tried to name a cute white actor. He has outsized yet finely hewn features, like an early 20th-century cartoonist tried to draw a matinee idol with the fewest lines possible and it came out looking somehow both twinkish and cro-magnon.

I sound like I’m digging in here but part of the charm of Wittrock, and of Long Weekend in general, is that it comes to us in the shape of something far more generic than it actually is. It reveals its true form patiently and deliberately, offering the thrill of discovery and something approaching suspense. I feel for the marketing department trying to sell this without spoiling it. The same qualities that make it a tough sell — that it’s a tricky shapeshifter, that it doesn’t reveal itself all at once — are basically the same ones that make it a compelling watch. (Acknowledging the difficulty of the task, it still must be said, this trailer is pure nausea fuel).

Wittrock plays Bart, who we meet as he’s moving out of the apartment that he shared with an unseen ex-fiancé, Whit. His phone is full of voice messages, from his psychiatrist and his ex, all trying to make sure he’s okay. An out-of-work writer, he’s moving into his friend’s garage — a friend named Doug, played by Damon Wayans Jr., who is married to Rachel, played by Casey Wilson. We get all the standard jokes you’d expect from the kooky friend/new parent characters, with the only difference being that these actors are actually good, and the dialogue is sharp and well-written. On a conceptual level, Long Weekend isn’t drastically different from any rom-com you’ve seen, it just doesn’t have the shrill neediness or practiced twee that ruins so many of them.

One day while drinking a whole bottle of whiskey at a retro movie theater, Bart meets Vienna (Zoe Chao) a bubbly, cute polyethnic-looking girl (this will become a plot point) who’s so damn charming that she actually pulls off those brutalist art school bangs. Vienna is oddly upbeat and apparently up for anything, and conveniently for broke unemployed Bart, she also has a backpack full of cash. There are other odd things about her, like that she doesn’t have an ID, is staying at a motel, and claims to have never seen a sparkler before. Other than that she’s perfect — adorable, outgoing, a great conversationalist, and, like Bart, doesn’t seem to have anywhere to be, other than present.

Right off the bat, Bart wants to know the same thing that we want to know: is Vienna some manic pixie dream girl? Vienna laughs it off and assures him that she isn’t, but it’s the question of what she actually is that we spend the rest of the movie trying to figure out. Her quirky qualities are especially a red flag for Bart, a guy with an already tenuous grasp on reality whose buddy Doug has already had to pull him out of one mental breakdown. That this all maybe feels slightly like a hokey rom-com is deliberate; we’re living in Bart’s state of mind as he tries to divine what is real and what is in his overcooked, movie-fried imagination.

Long Weekend certainly isn’t the first indie rom-com to incorporate elements of the fantastic (a genre forever and rightly in the shadow of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind). The difficulty for any movie attempting to pull off this kind of sci-fi/metaphysical element is doing it without either going full magical realist or killing the ghost in the machine. The classic example of the latter is The Village, in which M. Night Shyamalan created this whole universe of the fantastic only to murder it in the last scene by giving it all a mundane explanation. The Village is basically the Sixth Sense in reverse, and there’s a reason Sixth Sense is a classic and The Village isn’t. It’s much better to leave a movie seeing the world with a whole new sense of possibility than to have your magical thinking studiously fact-checked and refuted.

It’s incredibly difficult to pull off, this delicate dance between grounded enough but not mundane, yet Long Weekend, the unlikeliest of movies, does it shockingly well. The ending is satisfying but ambiguous enough to dream, ultimately ephemeral but with an enduring sense of memory. Can one little fling change your life? Maybe it can.

‘Long Weekend’ hits theaters March 12th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

Before the Brooklyn Nets transformed into the three-headed monster that looked poised to be a perennial threat in the East for years to come, there were a modest and up-and-coming team that featured one of the league’s most intriguing young players in Caris LeVert.

But things change quickly in the NBA, and when the Nets had a chance to add James Harden to the already loaded lineup that included Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant, LeVert became a casualty of circumstance and found himself as part of the trade package that made the deal happen.

As it turned out, it may have just saved his life. During the physical for his new team in Indiana, doctors discovered a cancerous mass on his kidney. LeVert underwent successful surgery for it in January and has been out ever since. But now it looks like he’ll make his debut for the Pacers this Saturday when they face the Suns, according to reports.

After undergoing surgery to remove a small mass on his left kidney in late January, guard Caris LeVert will make his Indiana Pacers debut vs. Phoenix on Saturday, sources tell ESPN.

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) March 12, 2021

Pacers coach Nate Bjorkgren was a little more reserved, but made clear that he thinks LeVert’s debut is around the corner.

The Pacers have struggled since the blockbuster deal that sent Victor Oladipo to the Rockets and have plummeted to 10th place in the East. LeVert adds a much-needed scorer and play-maker to the mix, though it will likely take some time for him to find his rhythm again. LeVert was averaging 18 points and six assists for the Nets before the trade.

Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert has once again stepped into controversy by releasing a new video demanding that Nancy Pelosi remove the protective fencing around the U.S. Capitol building that was erected after the January 6 insurrection attack. Considering the assault on the Capitol was the direct result of former President Donald Trump and other Republicans inciting right-wing violence by pushing the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, Boebert doesn’t help her case by ending the video with audio of two gunshots and the sound of a shotgun reloading. Alluding to violence to demand the removal of fence built to stop right-wing violence is the kind of bizarre argument that only further cements Boebert’s reputation as “Sarah Palin 2.0.”

The video received swift condemnation from Boebert’s fellow Colorado congressman Jason Crow, who has voiced his concerns with the new brand of “depraved” GOP politicians like Boebert and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Via Mediaite:

“What we have seen over the last three years, and certainly on January 6th, is that words have consequences, especially if you’re an elected official. People listen to you and they act on what you say, and very real people are getting hurt and getting killed, because some people don’t understand that. That’s a leadership failure and we can’t tolerate it.”

Boebert’s video also faced backlash on social media for its tone-deaf gunfire:

On top of the Pelosi video, Boebert’s obsession with guns shot her the foot a second time this week. While speaking on the floor of the House on Wednesday, Boebert recounted the tale of a man who “died in a fight” outside of her restaurant. According to Boebert, the man would still be alive if he armed himself, which prompted her and her employees to start carrying while at work. It’s a story she’s told before in an effort to promote gun rights, but there’s just one small problem: The man died of an overdose.

According to the Washington Post, the subject of Boebert’s anecdote, Anthony Green, was in a minor “scuffle” where Green actually attacked another man who had a prosthetic leg. A third party stepped in, and Green fled only to be found dead the next morning. While his death was initially investigated as a homicide, the autopsy report revealed that Green had suffered only a small gash from the bar fight and died of “methamphetamine intoxication.” Contrary to Boebert’s claim, carrying a gun would have done nothing to prevent that outcome.

(Via Rep. Lauren Boebert on Twitter & Washington Post)

It’s been a while since Khalid’s last album, Free Spirit, but he’s kept busy in the interim, popping up on collaborations with Kane Brown and Swae Lee (“Be Like That“), Alicia Keys (“So Done“), Victoria Monet (“Experience“), and Justin Bieber (on “Peaches” with Daniel Caesar from the upcoming Bieber album Justice). He lends his latest vocal assist to singer-songwriter Watts, remixing Watts’ 2018 single “Feels” and releasing a trippy, 3D-contrast visualizer to bring new life to the mellow ballad.

There’s little information out there about Watts, other than his real name, Jacob Watts, and origins, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A Genius profile for Jacob Watts lists his songwriting credits: He’s got a song called “Talk About It,” another called “Right, Alright,” and a collaboration with Adam Agin titled “Quicksand Arms.” Whatever he’s been up to since 2018, it looks like he may intend to make a comeback this year, and judging from his scant discography, he’s got the chops to craft a solid career if he can turn up the consistency of his releases.

Khalid, meanwhile, plans to follow up Free Spirit this year as well, according to what he told a fan on Twitter in September.

Listen to Watts’ “Feels” featuring Khalid above.

Tucker Carlson’s takedown of female soldiers angered top military officials, and Sen. Tammy Duckworth isn’t done with the Fox News host yet. This may or may not be the cap in the feather of Tucker’s headline-making month, so let’s do a brief recap here. Today, Jon Stewart apologized to d*cks for comparing them to Tucker, and this week, Tucker patted Piers Morgan on the back over his racist bashing of Meghan Markle. This happened after Tucker made up a story about low sperm count and weed, but he actually may have gone too far when he ridiculed women in combat while declaring, “Pregnant women are going to fight our wars. It’s a mockery of the US military.”

Prominent members of the military community (including several officials and the Pentagon spokesperson) of all political persuasions came for Tucker, and Joe Walsh declared, “Every woman in the military I’ve ever met could absolutely kick Tucker Carlson’s ass.” One of the most notable pushbacks, however, came from Senator Tammy Duckworth — the retired Army National Guard lieutenant colonel, Purple Heart recipient, and Iraqi War vet who lost both legs in combat — who joined in with some justifiable profanity.

“F*ck Tucker Carlson,” Duckworth tweeted. “While he was practicing his two-step, America’s female warriors were hunting down Al Qaeda and proving the strength of America’s women.” The Asian-American senator included a frightening GIF from his Dancing With The Stars stint.

Tammy followed up with a tweet, in which she pointed people to July 2020 New York Times coverage of Tucker’s beef with her. “Tucker never learns,” the senator tweeted. “This wasn’t the first and probably won’t be the last time he goes after women who sacrifice in uniform so he doesn’t have to. But no matter how many times he insults our Armed Forces, I won’t be silent.”

It bears reminding that Duckworth previously tweeted, “Does @TuckerCarlson want to walk a mile in my legs and then tell me whether or not I love America?”

With the linked piece, Duckworth reheated her previous criticism (as detailed by the New York Times) how Tucker strenuously proclaimed his right to attack both Duckworth and Sen. Ilhan Omar because he felt “allowed to question their patriotism.” He also referred to Duckworth as a “moron” on Fox News while complaining that she wants to “tear down our statues.” He added, “Tammy Duckworth is not a child, at least not technically; she is a sitting United States senator.”

To that, the NYT previously pointed out that Duckworth’s ancestors have long served in the military, all the way back to the American Revolution. And vote Vets pushed back at Tucker, too, while describing Tammy as “tough as hell” and describing Tucker as “on a suicide mission to take her down.” It looks like Duckworth’s continuing mission against Carlson is a far more successful one.

Riz Ahmed doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would like the shape of a square.

Those four lines that box in and neatly categorize everything from talent to personality to potential in ways that not only feel uninspired but dangerously limiting often pop up, in the real world and in the fantasy Hollywood peddles on-screen. They task artists (and, in many ways, audiences) with filtering their selves through an unyielding prism. The lens of a camera can be in the shape of a square. The boxes on a customs form often are too. Squares separate and contain, but they also segregate and cheapen our individuality and unique backgrounds.

But, again … Riz Ahmed doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would like the shape of a square.

And the trajectory of his career feels like proof of that. Rather than finding one lane to spend his career coasting through, the multihyphenate has spent the better part of two decades dismantling the barriers that have gridlocked his contemporaries.

A north London kid and the son of Pakistani immigrants, Ahmed never really fit. He spent his youth freestyle battling on the streets of Wembley, fully-embodying what he describes as the “Brit-Asian rudeboy culture” that dominated the UK in the early 90s. But he’d trade in spitting verses on pirate radio for the posh classrooms of private schools — ones he attended with the help of scholarships — and eventually Oxford in his teen years. A childhood spent straddling disparate worlds, learning to “code-switch” and acclimate himself to circles no one else from his block moved within lent itself to a career that refused to conform.

Music was Ahmed’s first outlet. It’s what he turned to when he couldn’t find space to express himself in school.

“I felt like I was unable to relate to many people. We were different on a very basic level,” Ahmed told Skin Deep magazine about his early days at university. “And then I thought – ‘what would I like to see exist here? Why don’t I just make that happen?’”

That led Ahmed to co-found Oxford’s Hit & Run night, an event that celebrated club culture and changed the city’s underground music scene. Ahmed also spent his university run as a member of the 12-person jazz-house and electronica ensemble called Confidential Collective. He gravitated to jungle and hip-hop, injecting satirical comedy into his rhymes that made an impact on fans, even as his lyrics stirred wider controversy. In 2006, Ahmed’s social-commentary rap track entitled “Post 9/11 Blues” was leaked and then quickly banned by British radio stations for its “politically sensitive” language — he jokes about everything from chemical warfare and racial profiling to Osama Bin Laden’s cave making an appearance on MTV’s Cribs on the track. Ahmed quickly created an independent record label to release more music, eventually playing at Glastonbury and the Royal Festival Hall and being named the “Emerging Artist in Residence” at the Southbank Centre in London. He dropped his debut album Microscope under the moniker Riz MC, became one-half of the hip-hop group known as the Swet Shop Boys a few years later, and released a scathing mixtape titled Englistan in 2016 — one that saw Ahmed donning the persona of a fake EDL rapper to confront racism and xenophobia in the UK.

“Englistan, as a mixtape, is about stretching the flag so that it’s big enough for all of us,” Ahmed told Dazed when the record was released. “It’s about identity – from what it means to be English today, to what it’s like growing up living a double life, or feeling like you don’t fit in.”

But it’s that same restless energy and relentless drive to build the world he wishes to see that pushed Ahmed to expand his own borders creatively.

Acting had been just another outlet when Ahmed was young — a suggestion from a school teacher, a way to avoid violent confrontations on the streets of Wembley. He pursued drama at Oxford, and after, but found, like with his music, if he wanted to see representation, he’d have to fuel that himself on-screen and on-stage.

“Depending on how you look at it, not seeing yourself within the culture can be seen as an invitation for you to insert yourself within that landscape because really, there is something not being voiced there,” Ahmed explained. “I think that you’ve got to be prepared to try and at least be part of the engine for change, rather than just kind of riding the bus to where you want to get to.”

So, as Britain’s entertainment industry and drama programs focused on period pieces that had no room for actors who looked like Ahmed, he began directing, producing, and acting in non-traditional projects — plays like “The Colour of Justice” and Stephen Adly Guirgis’ “Jesus Hopped the A Train.” He starred in films like Michael Winterbottom’s award-winning The Road to Guantanamo which tells the story of three British citizens unlawfully detained for years by the U.S. government in Guantanamo Bay. Ahmed and his co-stars were infamously detained at London’s Lufton airport after premiering the project at the Berlin Film Festival where Ahmed was questioned not only about potential ties to terrorism but about how he intended to use his film career to spread certain political ideologies.

That incident wouldn’t be the last time Ahmed was racially profiled thanks, in part, to his burgeoning acting career. In an essay he wrote, Ahmed detailed how he experienced the same demeaning treatment when he came to the U.S. looking for work, where his passport — stamped with Middle Eastern countries thanks to some of his filming schedule — and his skin color subjected him to the kind of interrogation tactics that terrify so many minorities. After landing the role of Bodhi Rook in Star Wars: Rogue One, Ahmed was forced to miss the film’s premiere because he had been detained by Homeland Security while trying to board a flight.

But, instead of internalizing the boxes that kept creeping into the peripheral of his budding career, Ahmed pivoted again by pursuing projects that forced audiences to see Muslims and minorities in a different light. He humanized the struggles of those who are homeless in Dan Gilroy’s thriller Nightcrawler. He forced us to question our own ingrained prejudices by portraying a college-student-turned-accused-murderer in HBO’s The Night Of. He brought the journey of an emotionally-tortured, addiction-plagued deaf musician to life in The Sound of Metal. He made history, becoming the first Muslim and the first South Asian man to win a lead acting Emmy. He’s earned Golden Globe and SAG nominations, taken home VMAs for Hamilton mixtapes and even had a diversity test that aims to draw attention to how Muslims are portrayed in movies and on TV named after him.

But because Riz Ahmed is the kind of artist who hates boxes, he’s not done yet.

Recently, Ahmed launched his own production company, entering into a deal with Amazon Studios to produce content for the streaming platform that will “nurture under-served audiences” and “stretch culture” to include rising talent and inventive new voices within the industry. He’s started funding, writing, and directing projects that speak to his own lived experiences — like his most recent drama Mogul Mowgli — while lifting up other creatives looking for spaces where they too can avoid being labeled, limited, and typecast.

For Riz Ahmed, changing the culture means infiltrating its subsets, carving out corners in the world of music — then acting, then writing, directing, producing, and so forth — to where he can not only innovate, but educate, inspire, and impact the people that look like him … and the people that don’t. After all, if art really has the power to affect change, why not create as much of it, in as many different genres and meaningful ways as you can?

Contact Tracing is a three-part series examining the decisions the NBA has made in a year since the 2019-20 season was suspended due to COVID-19.

Part 1: What We Can Learn From The Challenges And Pitfalls Of Remote Sports Media
Part 2: The Curious Case Of Soft Tissue Injuries In The NBA

From the night the pandemic arrived on the NBA’s doorstep, settling into an arena in Oklahoma City a year ago, the response from the league was firm, with a domino effect throughout the sports world. On March 12, 2020, the day after the Jazz-Thunder postponement that saw the 2019-20 season suspended, the NBA released a set of policies restricting players from group workouts and practice, as well as requiring them to remain in the home markets of their teams for six days. Players on teams that had played the Jazz within 10 days of March 11 were advised to self-isolate for two weeks. Another 24 hours later and the season moratorium was extended to April 10, which eventually stretched to May 1 in a statement from Adam Silver, ultimately shifting to the decision by the league’s board of governors to resume at Disney, in a Bubble, on July 30.

In those four months between stop and restart, the NBA would springboard into COVID-19 relief efforts. NBA Together, the league’s targeted pandemic response initiative, was launched eight days after games stopped and was by and large more focused on early public health messaging than many municipal U.S. governments and the Trump administration. The league urged the use of science-based information in the early and particularly anxiety ridden period of the pandemic, with the handful of players who had tested positive hosting live Q&As in an effort to share information.

By the end of April 2020, the NBA had raised nearly $80 million internally to support frontline response efforts, with a focus on vulnerable communities experiencing higher infection and fatality rates from the virus. Steph Curry interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci, Kevin Love helped shape the mental health focus of NBA Together, front offices and players donated money to offset job loss of arena workers in their markets. Even if the end goal had always been an eventual return to play, there was a collective sense of care and urgency from within, that good and actionable work could be done while waiting.

The Orlando Bubble, as meticulously made as it was to withstand the outside world (the virus and to some degree the social unrest in cities worldwide all summer) and make up for stalled revenue, still put the health and wellbeing of players at the center of its shiny, idyllic circle.

In contrast, this season has seen the NBA attempt to toe the line of normalcy and rather than continue to err on the side of concentrated caution, there’s been a perceptible shift in approach. Returning to a Bubble was deemed a non-starter by players for its psychological toll and by the league for its financial one, but returning to home markets, fans and travel signaled a shift toward assuming risks in exchange for revenue.

“The big issue, earlier in the year, was how did the owners who are largely white, overwhelmingly white, keep their players motivated?” Alison Kemper, associate professor specializing in business ethics at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management says. “And so, we saw a lot of support for Black Lives Matter, we saw a lot of support for using the stadiums as voter registration sites. A lot of messaging around Black Lives Matter. So, they could do that without risking anything really. They could become closer to their audiences and to their players, it didn’t cost them much. It was a way of staying in a different game. But how long can you own a very expensive asset, like an NBA team, without any revenue coming in?”

In October, Tim Reynolds reported that a source inside the league estimated a loss of $1.5 billion in revenue projections for the 2019-20 season. If the 2020-21 season were bumped from mid-January to December, there was potential for the NBA to generate a difference of $500 million to offset some of that loss. Game 6 of the Finals had been played little over a week before plans for a Dec. 22 start were made public, which means the conversations that informed them were likely being held well before LeBron James hoisted his first trophy as a Laker. Some players hadn’t been home with their families in as long as three months, let alone had any downtime to recoup, when next season was suddenly moved up a month.

Money wasn’t the only cause for a sense of accelerated alarm from the league; with 50,000 Americans testing positive for coronavirus each day at the beginning of October, a number that would accelerate to 75,000 by the end of the month, infection rates were on the rise. Initially, Adam Silver had cautioned that the current season’s start would “be better off getting into January” until it was clear what the impacts of a potential second wave would be, especially when it came to gameplay, fans in attendance, and the general logistics of holding a regular season out of the bubble. But when the decision was made to announce the late December start date on Nov. 10 — less than a month after Silver had admitted December was “feeling a little bit early to me” — the number of new daily cases had hit 140,000 in the U.S. and would swell to over 250,000 by tip-off, Dec. 22. The NBA didn’t wait for the second wave to crest, it got right on and rode the swell. Opting to start the season at an ill-planned sprint rather than delay to a further date that likely would have made it impossible, in terms of positive optics, to even responsibly suggest the same.

“The idea of an event or a set of events, like the basketball season, going back to normal at a time at which people are still dying in fairly large numbers, seems a little bit tone deaf, to say the least,” Chris MacDonald, ethics professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University and Senior Fellow at Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, says.

Sprints aren’t sustainable, and it turns out neither was operating as-is during the height of a pandemic’s second wave. One day after the season start, the NBA had its first postponement due to COVID-19. Three players on the Rockets returned positive or inconclusive tests while an additional four players had to quarantine due to contact tracing. In January and February, 21 and nine, respectively, games were postponed due to the league’s health and safety protocols, with COVID-19 creeping into injury reports daily in what felt like a bizarre and altogether grim exercise of normalization through continuation at all costs.

Which is why, as much as the NBA has tried to hang on some unraveling thread of stoicism at withstanding a tumult of wholly external forces, it had never been an outside, creeping nefariousness affecting the league, this was always a rupture from within. When the reality of the wider world broke through the league’s veneer of diversion, we were made aware of how uncomfortable and unnecessary it all was.

“I think sports leagues, and I’m frankly only starting to understand this, sports leagues are really odd kinds of entities,” MacDonald admits when asked about the public persona of a brand like the NBA, built around a progressive set of moral characteristics.

The NBA has long relied on a sense of corporate personhood, an identity that tries to balance business interests with a progressive persona. At best it can be an awkward if affable dance, at worst a stark and unsettling reminder that like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the pointed teeth still work to rend when they need to. When pressed, as we’ve seen in the past, the straightforward if cold calculations of the league’s business interests tend to win out. With revenue losses looming for its billionaire owners, and broadcast partners and sponsors to appease, the NBA expedited the product. The result was a pre-Christmas start date, an overpacked and hastily planned All-Star Game, and a condensed 72-game season to appease corporate obligations while ending early enough as to not compete with viewership for the Olympics.

“These contracts are long-term and they’re very, very big,” Kemper says on the pressure felt from the league’s broadcast partners. “And so it’s not just the NBA owners or the league. It’s also the broadcasters that are part of the moral matrix here.”

There was a sense that once the whole, strange machine was put in motion there would be no stopping it. Watching the lurching mechanics as teams with outbreaks that overtook half their rosters attempted to cobble together lineups made it clear that it wasn’t just that the machine couldn’t stop, but that it was never designed with brakes. The league had told teams to push through even in times where the better answer was to pull back, and with make-up games and postseason pressure ramping up, the downhill slope is even steeper.

“There’s an old quote that said in an avalanche, no snowflake feels responsible,” MacDonald says. “All of our decisions go into this net pattern, but when it’s a corporate entity none of us may feel responsible. Or we may be able to rationalize, ‘Look, I’m not the one telling that player to go out onto the court before they’re ready. I’m just the finance guy who said if we don’t get games rolling by this date, we’re not going to make our financial targets.’”

Whether writ large in an exhaustive schedule riddled with back-to-backs (the second half of this season has some teams playing as many as 11), shifting health and safety measures, emotional and physical burnout, the long-term effects of the league’s insistence in pressing on can be measured on the bodies of its players, too. Jayson Tatum, who tested positive for coronavirus in January, has said he’s felt lingering longterm effects of the virus “from time to time.”

“It messes with your breathing a bit,” Tatum said. “I have experienced some games where, I don’t want to say struggling to breathe but, you get fatigued a lot quicker than normal.”

Mo Bamba, who tested positive in June, played a total of ten minutes in the entire duration of the Bubble. This season, and six months post-diagnosis, Bamba’s only played 16 games for the Magic, spending most of his time out of rotation.

“There’s no real timetable for him to be able to come back and fully participate,” Magic head coach Steve Clifford said. “I think that he’ll be able to do some things that are more organizational and everything. But he’s a ways away, and there’s no timetable on his return.”

For a virus so new in our understanding of its impact on the general population, there’s less data to show the specific longterm effects COVID-19 could have on elite athletes. Among all athlete groups, basketball players face the highest incidence of sports-related sudden cardiac death in the U.S., and while early studies have shown no increase of lingering heart issues in players who previously tested positive for coronavirus, the reality is that it is too soon to have a full or clear understanding of what the longterm physical effects on players could be. This reason alone seems enough to be cautionary, to not leverage the sustainability of a single season against a player’s future career and personal livelihood.

“The thing that makes it additionally unclear, is that these players, mostly we’re talking about young men, I think the common perception is they’re out there risking their health all the time anyway,” MacDonald says. “They’re running down a court to put a ball in the net, and some other guys nearly seven feet tall, 240 pounds, is trying to stop them. That’s dangerous.”

It comes down to that “ball is life” mentality, especially when there’s livelihood involved.

“From an ethics point of view,” MacDonald explains. “it’s what we call an autonomous or a free choice to engage in a risky behavior, because you love the game, and because you’re going to make money. Of course we know there’s all kinds of other things, pressure from coaches, pressure from family,” he adds, “the pressure of knowing that once you retire, who the hell knows what you’re going to do in life. From one perspective, COVID is just another risk, but it’s unlike tearing your ACL, a torn ACL isn’t something you can give your partner.”

The league’s haste to put together this season has also been evident in confusion about protocols. By not providing teams with specific personnel to enact and enforce protocols, but instead mandating teams designate “protocol compliance officers” out of their existing staff pool, the constantly shifting rules fall to already exhausted athletic trainers to make sense of. In this way, sickness and strife become contractual obligations for someone else to uphold, and the somewhat foreseeable pitfalls in that plan of stretching existing staff thin is laid publicly and painfully bare.

When Kevin Durant, initially held out of a Feb. 5 game against Toronto when a test result for a Nets staffer he’d been with earlier that day came back inconclusive, was cleared to play only to be pulled in the third quarter when the test was then deemed positive, the issues the league has had in consistent contract tracing practices appeared to trip itself up out in the open enough that real questions around the dangers of pretending could be leveled. Instead, Nick Nurse and Steve Nash, head coaches on court that night, lamented at the disruption to gameplay.

When Karl Anthony-Towns, who has lost seven members of his family to COVID-19 since his mother died from complications from the virus in April, shared in early January he’d tested positive, the league announced new in-game protocols for players, including “cool down chairs” and calling on team security staff to limit postgame contact between teams to quick fist-bumps instead of hugs and conversations. The timing of Towns testing positive and new ambiguous in-game half-measures were unrelated — it was the increase in postponed games that pushed the NBA into the strange, winking concessions, and that’s the problem. It seems a convenient ruthlessness that methods meant to streamline play, to remove entirely the small comforts of contact that were left as buffers between games, be facilitated in a time where the toll of a virus the league has worked so diligently to evade its season succumbing to has diminished so entirely one of its brightest stars.

“One of the things that people worry about in large organizations is what we would call the diffusion of responsibility,” MacDonald explains. “So if you say, well, the league did it. What are you going to do? Word came down from the league. I don’t have quotes but I can imagine a coach saying look, the league just decided. Well, in that sense, it may well be true that the league decided, but it also means that a bunch of people got together and made a decision, and those people need to be accountable for their decisions.”

The onus being on someone else was also evident in the way the league approached fans in stadiums. Silver said the NBA had been studying the practices of other pro leagues to inform its decisions upon return, but the glaring omission was that the NFL, MLB, MLS, most of these game are played outdoors, in open-air arenas. In the markets where state laws would allow fans in attendance, they were to be 30ft back from the court, leaving a clear delineation between active players and fans. The distance was for players, not the safety of fans.

“They’re saying that you can go into the game and you don’t need a test unless you are within 30 feet of the court, which seems to me to be related to how close you are to the players and the safety of the players,” Dr. Abraar Karan, an internal medicine doctor at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School said in a Nov. 2020 interview with Slate.

Considering the care the NBA took in supporting hard-hit communities last spring, there is little consideration now for the league’s role in the broader communities in markets supporting its teams. It’s why All-Star, denounced by the Mayor of Atlanta, optically seemed like nothing but a convenient cash grab to appease a large stake of the NBA’s broadcasting commitments. The monetary support of HBCUs won by players throughout the night, while undeniably impactful, used as a kind of too-late leverage considering the city never wanted it and will deal with whatever deeper, public health fallout settles past the event’s whirlwind 24 hours.

“I think they’re not different from almost any other corporation in that, you can be moral as long as the revenues keep coming in,” Kemper says. “It’s not a shocker that this has happened to the NBA. They are not structured in a way to act in the best interest of their cities.”

This season, the NBA has taken full advantage of the broad interpretations of coronavirus protocol within the states of its team markets, as well as the murky middle-ground between what is socially permissive and not in order to slip from the fixed constraints of integrity.

“The NBA, with the exception of the Raptors, is an American operation,” Kemper says from her home in Toronto. “And although our public health institutions here are weakened over time, theirs have been decimated. And so there’s no easy way for local authorities to say, this is too dangerous. There’s no center of gravity for public health in almost any part of the U.S.”

Even as the careworn mantle of practiced corporate personhood slips from the league’s shoulders and shows it testing what boundaries it can push, an exhausted, pandemic weary public can’t bring itself to care.

“Corporations want to push the risk outside the company and bring the games, the profits, inside the company,” Kemper says. “So by creating a season that puts cities at risk, that put players at risk, that put future seasons at risk because of the health of the players, they did what companies normally do, which is exogenize risk and bring all the gains on board.”

Silver has drawn wobbly parallels to what the league is doing, in its insistence on sustaining itself, its season, as something directly beneficial to the broader economy. And it’s true, there are thousands of people, beyond players, whose livelihoods are directly tied to the league, but the league and its owners are also economically insulated enough to withstand far more than the general population Silver was speaking about.

It should not be such an aspirational ask to want the NBA to operate within the same moral and ethical bounds it assigns itself as an entity of importance and leverage. So much of what the league is attempting to do in playing through is to prove this season isn’t an exception and doesn’t require better, more exceptional ways of operating. In straining to maintain the bare minimum the NBA, so often a progressive force, has not just fallen several staggering steps behind but come close to regression, at odds with a world longing to move forward.

Elton John recently interviewed Phoebe Bridgers for his Apple Music 1 show Elton John’s Rocket Hour, and that episode is set to air tomorrow. Ahead of then, though, some quotes from the show have been shared, including the two discussing Billie Eilish.

John asked Bridgers how she feels about both her and Eilish being up for four Grammys this year and she responded, “I feel great. I’m obsessed with Billie. I think she’s a genius. I think whatever she’s doing behind the scenes, industry-wise, just the fact that her team trusted her completely and was just like: ‘You know what we should do is listen to this 15-year-old, because we don’t know what’s cool.’”

John then asked if she had seen the film yet and Bridgers said she hasn’t. John continued, “Oh, it’s fantastic. It’s fantastic. It’s just wonderful… We watched the Britney Spears documentary [Framing Britney Spears], which is so upsetting. And then we watched the Billie Eilish documentary and it’s like, one is how not to be a parent, and one is how to be a parent and a brother and a sibling that Finneas is to her. And it’s a great documentation of everything she did from the age of 15.”

Bridgers then noted that she has heard about Eilish’s father Patrick O’Connell wearing multiple of Bridgers’ merch t-shirts in the documentary, saying, “Although I have to say her dad wears two separate Phoebe Bridgers shirts in that documentary, which I’ve been tagged in a couple of times. And it just, it makes me so happy. He has the coolest ones, too. I made this fake Insane Clown Posse shirt that he has. It just lit me up with joy. Yeah, Patrick’s awesome.”

The episode premieres on March 13 at noon ET, so when it’s available, check it out here.