For the past six weeks, the music industry has made a strong effort to support the healthcare workers who are sacrificing their lives to help people during the coronavirus outbreak. With his recent dance-a-thons, Diddy raised over $3 million dollars for workers and thanks to her World Health Organization and Global Citizen collaboration. Lady Gaga helped raise over $125 million for workers with the One World: Together At Home festival. Future, Jay-Z and Rihanna, Eminem, and more have also made donations towards healthcare workers and visiting hospitals in his hometown of Chicago Saturday. And now Lil Durk is doing the same.
Lil Durk is hand-delivering hot meals to frontline workers at Chicago’s Rush Hospital. The meals were prepared by workers at PHLAVS Restaurant, which is owned by Durk’s manager, Dilla. Durk and the restaurant will also help distribute an additional 100 meals to other healthcare workers Saturday evening. In a press release about the donations, Durk said:
I been living down in Atlanta, but everyone back home has been in my thoughts, especially those doing something for the community and all the neighborhood heroes. I thought about all the first responders putting their lives on the line to help out and it inspired me, so I took a jet back to Chicago to show my thanks. We partnered up with PHLAVZ and bought 100 meals to donate to the Rush University Medical Center to show love and inspire our community to be strong and help one another out through these times.
The donations come after Durk shared collaborations with G Herbo and Lil Skies last month.
The beat battle between Timbaland and Swizz Beatz last month went so well they turned it into an Instagram Live series. Dubbed Versuz, it brings some of our favorite singers, songwriters, and producers to our screens, giving us battles between Ne-Yo and Johnta Austin, Lil Jon and T-Pain, and, more recently, between Babyface and Teddy Riley. Through the course of the Versuz series, fans have been calling for a duel between someone of music’s most legendary producers, and it looks like one particular hoped-for fight will go down in the near future.
Joining Fat Joe for an Instagram Live conversation as a part of his Fat Joe Show series, Diddy announced that a Versuz battle will take place between him and Dr. Dre. Answering Fat Joe’s question on whether there were talks “or whispers” for a Versuz battle with Dr. Dre, Diddy said, “Yeah we definitely talking about it, you heard it here, you heard it here on the show.”
The announcement arrived after Diddy helped raise over $3 million for healthcare workers thanks to a dance-a-thon he held on his Instagram Live with help from LeBron James, Drake, Lizzo, and more. During his conversation, Diddy also recounted the days leading up to Notorious B.I.G.’s death following the 1997 Soul Train Awards.
Watch the video above to hear Diddy make the announcement.
It seemed a little too on-the-nose when two of the first celebrities to test positive for COVID-19 were Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson — that the coronavrius would even dare think about taking our era’s very own Jimmy Stewart and his kindly wife. But the two were able to get through the ordeal, and have since used their experience to inspire others to take the pandemic seriously. Now the future has come up with another stranger-than-fiction twist: They may wind up becoming humanity’s saviors.
As per MSN, Hanks and Wilson have donated their blood to the medical researchers currently hard at work on developing a vaccine. Upon returning home to Los Angeles after testing positive in Australia, the two enrolled in a medical study to see if their antibodies would be useful. And wouldn’t you know, they sure do.
Hanks revealed the news while appearing on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, telling his hosts, that, not only does their blood contain the necessary antibodies but that he’s dubbed the hoped-for miracle cure the “Hank-ccine.”
Last week, the two-time Oscar-winner went into detail about his and Wilson’s experiences overcoming COVID-19, saying he felt “nauseous” and exhausted, but that his wife had it worse. “She had a much higher fever,” he said. “She had lost her sense of taste and sense of smell. She got absolutely no joy from food for a better part of three weeks.”
Luckily the two received a well-earned happy ending, and so maybe we will, too. Thanks, Hanks. THanks.
In a recording, the young mechanic’s boss can be heard telling her the OnlyFans account “might encourage [her coworkers] to approach you with unwanted sexual conduct or comments.”
On Friday night, Lil Wayne launched a new form of communication with the world: his Beats 1 radio show, Young Money Radio. According to Billboard, Weezy promised the show would include “heavyweights calling in discussing sports, music, comedy, everything.” Based on the first episode, he delivered on that promise.
The show’s maiden voyage included plenty of celebrity appearances, as well as the announcement that a deluxe edition of Funeral would arrive “soon.” Wayne teased two new songs, one with Tory Lanez and the other Jessie Reyez. While speaking about the Jessie Reyez-featured track, Wayne called the Canadian singer onto the show and gave her a warm welcome before discussing the song.
“I want to speak on some artists that is involved with the deluxe, and they’re also artists that I have a lot of respect for and I think they’re dope,” he said as he introduced Reyez. “Reason I bring it up like that is cause maybe y’all didn’t know too much about me knowing these artists.” The two then discussed their quarantine habits, which included meditation and vocal warm-ups. Following his call with Reyez, Wayne previewed his collaboration with Tory Lanez, entitled “Help.”
As for the rest of the show, Wayne was joined by Deion Sanders and New Orleans mayor LaToya Cantrell, and he made additional calls to Lil Baby, Travis Scott, and Babyface. Lastly, Wayne shared with Babyface the story of how the legendary R&B singer, Betty Wright, influenced him to play guitar: “She actually told me to come see her, she said she got these four strings she wanna show me, and she said ‘with these four strings, you’re gonna be able to play every song and any song’ so I cannot wait to see her.”
Check out the videos above to hear previews from the deluxe edition of Funeral.
A cool addition to ESPN’s blitz of “The Last Dance” across all its platforms came this week in a Phil Jackson-narrated episode of “Detail,” in which Jackson breaks down his cherished Triangle offense. The episode is available along with the entire series, which began with Kobe Bryant as host and continued on with people like Geno Auriemma, Nick Saban and Peyton Manning, on ESPN+.
Jackson breaks down Game 3 of the 1998 NBA Finals. While it was hardly the most competitive game that Michael Jordan’s Bulls ever played, the offense was clearly churning. Chicago won the game, 96-54, behind Jordan’s 24 points, and Jackson is able to show how so many of the plays Jordan made look so effortless actually materialized.
If you’re a basketball nerd, you’ve already read some description or explanation of the Triangle before, maybe even in Jackson’s book, “11 Rings.” Yet Jackson does it more simply in the “Detail” than an interview or essay could ever do justice.
The tenets Jackson lays out are pretty plain:
Use the Triangle at the beginning of the game to feel out the opponent’s defensive coverages
Screen and move to get players into open space, and aggressively rotate the ball from one side of the floor to the other to find good shots
Fungible pieces are needed to make it all work, which is why Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Toni Kukoc executed the system so well
Spacing is less of a focus than it is now. Instead, cutting and passing are what creates open shots, not stationing players in one spot to pull defenders away from the floor.
Jackson explains the Triangle in a way that makes it seem far more modern and digestible, rather than just a hallowed code name that unlocked a dynasty. NBA analyst Nate Duncan cut a video of a simple split cut while Kukoc is in the post, for example, that you could find in many Warriors games over the past several years.
This should look familiar to Warriors fans. No wonder Kerr implemented the split cut, Phil Jackson ran it for him all the time. (From the recent ESPN+ Detail episode) pic.twitter.com/ougzQDvl1b
On the other hand, some of the principles seem downright ancient in hindsight. Most of the pick-and-roll happens at the elbow for the Bulls, using Pippen and Jordan’s midrange gifts rather than using the added value of the three-point shot like we see Damian Lillard and Steph Curry do these days. Much of the offense also runs out of the post, specifically with the ball in the hands of Kukoc or Jordan. Post-ups are last-ditch bailouts in an entirely spaced-out court, but for the Bulls, it was a playmaking weapon.
This is a play that caused Jackson to say “Toni really has a lot of space right here.” Take a look:
That is the opposite of a lot of space by today’s standards.
The Triangle was the offense used by the best teams in the NBA for basically two decades, from Jordan’s first championship in 1991 to the Lakers’ last title in 2010. Watching Jackson break it down, I realized it effectively was a bridge from the post- and iso-heavy 1970s and 80s to the screen-and-move brilliance of the Seven Seconds or Less Suns and Light Years Warriors.
Of course, the defining characteristic of those Bulls was not the Triangle. With Jordan, a set could fail and still result in a high-percentage shot. And Jackson, to his credit, was always open to giving great players the freedom to make mistakes and play their game. As long as they adhered to the general principles he taught and respected their teammates and the game, they could freelance.
“If guys took a three-point shot out of sequence, they got a ‘silly fine,’” Jackson says in “Detail.” “Offense not run correctly or aborted, we had reprimands. Not a fine, but we wanted guys to honor the game. That basically was the theory behind how we wanted to play.”
Still, Jackson talks through a poorly run post-up by Jordan that ends in a turnover as if it’s just part of the deal. Pippen clanks a midrange jumper when he should have driven to the middle and Jackson still calls it a “good shot.” They earned the benefit of the doubt and Jackson’s trust over time, and were able to subsume the Triangle in many ways.
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