Taking a midsummer trip to Walt Disney World in Orlando might sound like a lovely vacation, but for the players on 22 NBA teams, it will be a work trip in the league’s plan to finish the 2019-20 season. The NBA and its Players Association are still working out the details, and on Tuesday, we learned that there will be some perks to life in the bubble for some players.

Among the things revealed by media reports on Tuesday were a tiered system of determining which teams stay in which hotel while in Orlando, and what players will be allowed to do (and not do) while practicing and playing out the rest of the regular season and playoffs at the Wide World of Sports. One interesting perk, though, might be the chance to see major blockbuster movies before anyone else.

According to Yahoo’s Keith Smith, among the entertainment options like lawn games and DJs may be some movies Disney has delayed until movie theaters reopen amid the COVID-19 pandemic, such as Marvel’s Black Widow.

The standalone Black Widow movie in Marvel Cinematic Universe starring one of the most popular Avengers was originally scheduled for a May 1 release, but as the world was essentially put on pause in mid-March the movie was pushed back to release on November 6. The film is done, though, and while movie theaters will likely be open in parts of the country once the NBA’s proposed bubble league starts, those players will be unable to actually go to them while they hopefully avoid coronavirus and successfully finish out the season.

Screening Black Widow months before it hits theaters would be an intriguing perk for NBA players, but it also reveals an interesting set of questions about what happens after they see the film. Will players have to sign NDAs about its details? Will LeBron James and the rest of the league essentially agree to an embargo and Disney just hopes they don’t spoil the film for anyone else in the months before it actually gains wide release?

It would be something else if an NBA player were to accidentally spoil one of the most anticipated blockbusters of 2020, especially in what’s been a movie-starved year given the few titles that have come out on demand amid an industry that’s been shuttered for months. Pulling off a bubble league in Orlando is proving to be a lofty challenge even before the games have started. Adding in the potential to play movie spoiler, at this point, is just making things even more complicated.

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If you still haven’t snagged a copy of NBA 2K20 and were looking for a good deal, there’s officially one that can do a lot of good and net you an impressive amount of games to boot. The latest gaming bundle put together to raise funds for racial justice initiatives might cost a bit more than Itch.io’s bundle for racial justice, but it also comes with thousands of dollars worth of games, including the latest basketball sim from 2K Sports.

Humble Bundle’s “Racial Justice” bundle was announced this week and the deal is simple: pay $30 or more and get access to a huge library of Steam codes for some extremely good games, starting with 2K.

Proceeds from the sale benefit the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, The Bail Fund and the Race Project. Humble estimates the collection of games, comics and books is worth more than $1200 at retail, and it includes some big titles like 2K and Bioshock Remastered.

There’s an extremely wide variety of titles like Jackbox Party Pack 4 and some very clever indie titles from smaller developers. Baba Is You, for example, is a delightful little puzzle game. FTL is a fun and very addicting title, and Kerbal Space Program alone retails for $40 and is well worth the investment.

Given how successful Itch.io’s bundle was it seems likely that Humble will sell a lot of games here, and it’s certainly going to a good cause if you’re looking for something new to play.

Comedian Trevor Noah has become not only a voice of comic relief in tough times, but a voice of thoughtfulness and reason on social issues, as well. As an immigrant to the U.S. from South Africa, Noah brings a unique perspective to the table, but it’s his ability to zero in on the truth at the heart of an issue that brings people to hear his social commentary.

This week, Noah posted a video with some thoughts on the police killing of Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Atlanta man who fell asleep while drunk in his car in a Wendy’s drive-thru. According to CBS News, Brooks resisted arrest and took an officer’s Taser. As he was running away, police shot him twice in the back. One officer in the incident has been fired and another placed on administrative duty.

Noah described what surveillance video showed. He explained: “In the beginning, it seems like everything is going to be fine. The cops are talking to him like a person. They’re not being aggro, they’re not being disrespectful, they’re not being mean or anything. He’s being respectful. He’s calling them ‘sir’, he’s not cussing them out, he’s offering to walk home. Everything is going well…”

He continued, “And then in one moment, in just a few seconds, every part of that normal story turns into the abnormal ending that we’ve come to know as interactions with police and black people.”

Noah pointed out that the encounter never needed to get to that point. Despite the fact that the story is messy—Brooks was drunk, and he did resist arrest and took the police officer’s taser—the question remains, Why do we call on armed police in a situation like this in the first place?

“Why are armed police dealing with a man who’s sleeping in his car?” Noah asked. “These are the questions we need to ask: why, why, why, why, why, why? Why are armed police the first people who have to go and respond to somebody who’s sleeping in their car, who’s drunk?”

Noah laid out the way the story could have or should have played out, especially considering the fact that the man was drunk. The sober people in the situation are supposed to be the ones who can handle the situation responsibly. He also addressed the inevitable “ifs” that come up anytime people talk about an incident of police brutality.

“If you didn’t resist arrest, then you’d still be alive. Or if you didn’t run away from the cops, you’d still be alive. Well, if you didn’t have a toy gun and were 12 years old in the middle of a park, then you would have still been alive. Well, you know what, if you weren’t wearing a hoodie, then you would have still been alive. If you didn’t talk back to the cops, you would have been still been alive. If you weren’t sleeping in your bed as a black woman, you would have still been alive.

“There’s one common thread beyond all the ‘ifs’.” he concluded. Watch the video here:

Why Did Rayshard Brooks Have to Lose His Life? | The Daily Social Distancing Show

www.youtube.com

Noah’s questions are worth exploring. At what point do we fundamentally examine what the purpose of policing really is and whether or not the way we currently do it fulfils that purpose?

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A sensational skillet scraper, foaming garbage disposal cleaner, and multiple multi-surface cleaners to get every dang corner of your kitchen looking and smelling its best.

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Bong Soon and Min Hyuk are serious couple goals!

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“I can’t help but feel like a horrible person now.”

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Kyrie Irving has stepped up over the last week to be the leading voice pushing back against the NBA’s planned restart in the Disney bubble. His chief concern is whether playing basketball and resuming the season would distract from players efforts in social activism amid nationwide protests of racism and police brutality.

The NBA issued a memo to teams noting that they are committed to “create meaningful and generational change” with its restart and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement by working with the NBPA to figure out the best ways to do so. It’s a nice statement, but until a firm plan of action is in place, many will remain understandably skeptical of how significant the league’s contribution will be, whether that’s by a monetary investment that goes towards creating programs both internally and in the community, or in offering its massive platforms to allow players to make the statements they feel are necessary.

Avery Bradley issued a plan he’d like to see the league enact as part of a coalition with Irving before players agree to join the bubble (with a June 24 deadline to do so), but Kyrie seems to be moving full steam ahead on trying to convince players. According to Stefon Bondy of the New York Daily News, Irving “urged” his Nets teammates to skip the bubble in a group chat and also — and this is the part you’ll see discussed for days and weeks — threw out there that the players could leave the NBA and start their own league.

Irving not only led a discussion with close to 100 union members in a conference call, he also urged Nets players to skip the bubble recently in a separate group chat, the Daily News has learned. In that chat, Irving proposed that players could start their own league, according to a source.

As Russ Bengston noted, this isn’t unprecedented talk from a player, as there were whispers of such discussions when the NBA was in a lockout in 1998, but the difference there, of course, is that without a CBA, there are no contracts and, as such, there’s not as much difficulty in breaking them to set off on their own. Right now, there would be a logistical nightmare in doing so, beyond the other issues of creating the infrastructure of a new league and finding places to play and TV deals.

Still, it’d be fascinating to see what a players-led league would look like, even just in how they would structure things, from roster sizes to games played and more. Irving’s proposal, which may have just been a throwaway line in a group text for all we know, will end up being joked about for some time, but the overall point that I think he’s trying to make is that the players have more power in this situation than they may recognize. While I doubt he’s fully thought through the finer points of the difficulties of starting their own league, the reason the NBA is a multi-billion dollar business is because of the players and in this situation, they need to ensure they get the most out of the league on an issue in systemic racism that entities like the NBA often make nice statements about, create a diversity initiative, and donate money before moving on mostly with the status quo intact.

Players need to push for more this time, and Bradley’s plan — which includes calls for better hiring practices to get more Black coaches and executives into the sport as well as the league partnering with more Black-owned business — tries to address those things, along with securing financial commitments for organizations working for the movement.

NBA players have raised a number of questions about the league’s plan to restart the 2019-20 season in Orlando. One of the main questions has been how can players use a potential restart in order to spark social change amid nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism, with some arguing that the best approach may be to just not play at all and keep the focus on the current moment.

It’s an important conversation to have, and a number of players are doing what they can to get the league to have this conversation with them. As a result, Shams Charania of The Athletic reports that the league sent a memo to all 30 teams in which it made a commitment to making sure its restart is done in such away that the NBA can “drive action and create meaningful and generational change.”

Of course, there is a big difference between a statement in which a commitment is made and actually acting on it, and we’ll have to wait and see what the league would have in store to take on such a gigantic task. This will assuredly be something that gets ironed out over days, if not weeks, worth of conversations in the lead-up to Orlando, but at the very least, the NBA is making it clear that it hears players and will try to do right by them.