The Chicago Bulls’ second NBA championship came in 1992, when they beat the Portland Trail Blazers in six games, as Michael Jordan further asserted himself as the most dominant force in basketball.

In that series, Jordan squared off with Clyde Drexler, who was coming off a sensational season of his own, but the comparisons between the two irked Jordan, as he and Magic Johnson explained in Episode 5 of The Last Dance. As Jordan put it, “Clyde was a threat. I’m not saying he wasn’t a threat, but me being compared to him, I took offense to that.” The result was a legendary Finals performance in Game 1, now known as The Shrug Game, as Jordan went ballistic for 35 first half points, including six three pointers in a blowout win for the Bulls.

Magic was on color commentary for those Finals for NBC, and he recalled Jordan predicting the night before Game 1 — while the two played cards at Jordan’s house — that he was going to go off in the opener.

“I’m working for NBC, I’m covering the Finals, so the night before Game 1 we’re at Michael’s house playing cards and he says, ‘You know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I’m gonna give it to this dude,’” Johnson recalled. “So he hit that first three, and then here comes the second one. The third one. Michael didn’t want anybody to have nothing. And every time he’d hit a three, he’d glance over at me at the NBC table. And he was like [imitates the shrug], ‘I’m killin this dude.’”

There may not be a better, more entertaining story-teller in the NBA than Magic Johnson, and he is, happily, prominently featured in episode five doing just that about the ’92 Finals and the Dream Team. It’s also extremely on brand for Jordan to be having a card game the night before Game 1 of the NBA Finals in which he confidently predicts that he’s going to destroy poor Clyde Drexler, and then proceeds to set Finals records for points and threes in a half, making good on that promise.

Madison Square Garden has a habit of bringing out the best in the greatest basketball players on earth. One such guy who relished the chance to play at the home of the New York Knicks was Michael Jordan, and as we learned in episode five of The Last Dance, he decided to bust out a pair of special footwear for his final game at “my favorite place to play.”

Jordan rocked a pair of Jordan 1s for the occasion in the classic red-white-black colorway that are some of the most iconic and highly sought after kicks of all time.

“I went back and grabbed an old pair of Jordan 1s,” Jordan said. “The first shoe I wore at the Garden, so this was gonna be the last shoe, being that this was gonna be the last time I play in the Garden.”

There was only one problem: Jordan did not grab a pair of shoes that were the right size. These were a bit too small, and as a result, Jordan’s feet were killing him. In fact, when he went back into the locker room at halftime and looked at his feet, he saw they were bleeding.

This is Michael Jordan we’re talking about here, though, and he was in the midst of a good game. As such, he just wore the wrong-sized, old shoes the entire time, and when he got back into the locker room at the conclusion of the game, he rushed to take his kicks off for good.

“I couldn’t take those shoes off fast enough,” Jordan said. “When I took the shoes off, my sock was soaked in blood.”

Jordan finished the game with 42 points, eight rebounds, six assists, and three steals in a 102-89 Bulls win. He would, of course return to MSG as a member of the Washington Wizards, but his final game in the Garden as a Bull was one he’ll never forget, even if those memories probably lead to him really wanting to stick his feet in an ice bath.

The fifth episode of The Last Dance explores the path Jordan took to becoming the most famous athlete (and arguably human) on the planet, becoming a ubiquitous presence in ad campaigns and the most coveted brand ambassador in the world.

That journey all began with his sneaker deal, which was the first endorsement deal he signed as a rookie. After David Falk signed Jordan, his first goal was to find him a deal that would get him his own signature shoe, following the model of the various tennis stars his agency had as clients. Converse, at the time, was the biggest basketball sneaker brand, and as Jordan recalled, they made it very clear where he would’ve stood on the totem pole as a rookie.

“Converse had big players, and told me, ‘We can not envision you being put ahead of them,’” Jordan said. “OK, fine. I was adidas.”

Adidas was Jordan’s preferred brand, as that’s what he played in while at North Carolina, but as Falk remembers, they weren’t in a position to give him a signature sneaker, despite being interested in signing him, which led Falk to pushing for Nike — who Jordan had no interest in.

“Adidas was real dysfunctional at the time. They told me, ‘We’d love to have Jordan, but we can’t make a shoe work at this point in time,’” David Falk said. “I wanted Michael to go with Nike, cause they were the upstart. I couldn’t even get him to get on the damn plane and go visit the campus. So I called his parents.”

Jordan and his mother both remember their conversation that led Mike to going with them to Oregon to meet with Nike, where they made an offer so good that Jordan’s father told him he couldn’t pass it up.

“My mother said, ‘You’re going to go listen. You may not like it, but you’re gonna go listen,” Jordan said. “And she made me get on that plane and go listen. I go into that meeting, not wanting to be there. Nike made this big pitch, and my father said, ‘You have to be a fool not to take this deal. It’s a great deal.’”

Jordan got $250,000 from Nike and the promise of a signature shoe line with the Air Jordan name, and the rest, as they say, was history. Jordan smashed the expectations for the first four years of his contract in his rookie season, with Falk saying they wanted $3 million sold in four years and they sold $126 million in the first. Jordans became the most popular basketball sneaker in the world and remain that to this day, making Nike not just an iconic basketball brand, but a cultural phenomenon.

It’s fascinating to think of what the sneaker industry looks like today if Jordan would’ve gotten his wish and gone with adidas, as it’s nearly impossible to think of Jordan in anything other than his signature line that is now it’s own multi-billion dollar brand.

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The fifth episode of The Last Dance opens with Michael Jordan at the 1998 All-Star Game and his interactions with — and private thoughts on — a 19-year-old Kobe Bryant, who was making his All-Star debut.

In the East locker room before the game, Bryant is the chief topic of conversation, with Jordan preparing everyone — including himself — for Kobe inevitably trying to play them 1-on-1 all game, and how he’s going to embrace that challenge.

“That little Laker boy’s gonna take everybody one-on-one,” Jordan said. “He don’t let the game come to him. He just go out there and take it. I’m gonna make this sh*t happen. I’m going to make this a one-on-one game.”

The locker room discussion on Kobe continued with someone remembering him missing his first four shots in a game they played against him and expecting him to stop shooting, with Jordan chiming in that if he were Kobe’s teammate he would’ve made him stop.

“After his first four attempts? If I was his teammate I wouldn’t pass him the f*ckin ball,” Jordan quipped. “You want this ball again, brother, you better rebound.”

Sure enough, Kobe and Jordan went at each other on the court, with MJ promising to his teammates he’s “gonna make his ass work” on the defensive end before Kobe gets his chance on defense, while Grant Hill explains that he refuses to end up on a poster by jumping with Bryant. Kobe’s remembrance of that All-Star Game was simply how much fun it was for him to be out there with his idol, going toe-to-toe and really understanding what makes Jordan great.

“I grew up watching Michael on TV, and now you got a chance to go face-to-face with him,” Bryant said. “You get a chance to really see and touch and feel strength, speed, quickness. It was fun to be out there.”

While Jordan clearly wasn’t willing to cede his throne to Kobe at the time, that didn’t mean Jordan wasn’t a willing sounding board for the young, rising star. Bryant, whose game was so clearly modeled off of Jordan, explained how helpful Mike was to him.

“It was a rough couple years for me coming into the league, cause at the time the league was so much older. It’s not as young as it is today, so nobody was really thinking much of me,” Bryant recalled. “I was a kid that shot a bunch of airballs, and at that point, Michael provided a lot of guidance for me. Like, I had a question about shooting his turnaround shot, so I asked him about it, and he gave me a great, detailed answer.”

That advice came in a game, and Jordan shared what he told a young Bryant in the postgame interview.

Kobe continued on, noting Jordan was like a big brother to him and said it always made him uncomfortable when fans would ask him things like who would win in a game of 1-on-1.

“But on top of that he said, ‘If you ever need anything, give me a call,’” Bryant remembered. “He’s like my big brother. I truly hate having discussions about who would win one-on-one. You hear fans saying, ‘Yo, Kobe, you’d beat Michael one-on-one.’ I’m like, yo, what you get from me is from him. I don’t get five championships here without him, because he guided me so much and gave me so much great advice.”

Jordan’s relationship with Bryant occurred mostly behind closed doors, but we got a glimpse into that relationship during his speech at Kobe’s memorial service, when he called him a “little brother” and offered a tearful tribute to his legacy on and off the court.

Even though everything’s been locked down for a month-and-a-half, we’ve been seeing a lot of celebrities during the quarantine. Tom Hanks has been particularly ubiquitous. He and his wife Rita Wilson were among the first famous people who tested positive for Covid-19, and after recovering he’s made appearances on SNL At Home and done virtual chat shows, in which he’s opened up about his difficulties battling the virus. Now he’s gone and surprised a class of graduating collegiate with an inspiring speech.

As per Entertainment Weekly, the two-time Oscar-winner surprised the graduating class of Wright State University in Ohio, who, like many students, have had to finish their semester remotely. That includes their commencement, but at the very least they received a message from one of the country’s most popular entertainers, who was honored there in 2016 by having a school named after him, namely The Tom Hanks Center for Motion Pictures.

“You are the chosen ones because of a fate unimagined when you began your Wright State adventures,” Hanks told the class. “You started in the olden times, in a world back before the Great Pandemic of 2020. You will talk of those earlier years in your lives in just that way.”

He continued: “Part of your lives will forever be identified as ‘before’ … In the same way other generations tell time like ‘that was before the war,’ or ‘that was before the internet,’ or ‘that was before Beyoncé.’ The word ‘before’ is going to carry great weight with you.”

Hanks called this era “the great reboot,” adding, “You’ll reference these past weeks for how many other weeks there are yet to come as ‘during the pandemic.’ ‘During the COVID-19, during the lockdown, the quarantine, during the shelter-in-place.”

Throughout he tried to stay positive. “You will be enlightened in ways your degree from Wright State never held in promise,” he told them. “You will have made it through a time of great sacrifice and great need. And no one will be more fresh to the task of restarting our normalcy than you — our chosen ones.”

You can watch Hanks’ full speech in the tweet embed above.

(Via EW)

Keeping up with new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best music released in the last week.

This week saw a surprise Drake release, and Megan Thee Stallion realizing a big-time dream thanks to a special collaborator. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.

Drake — Dark Lane Demo Tapes

Drake can decide to own any given week, and he proved that a few days ago when his surprise Dark Lane Demo Tapes project dominated the hip-hop conversation. Additionally, the Future- and Young Thug-featuring project will be followed by a legitimate album this summer.

Megan Thee Stallion — “Savage (Remix)” Feat. Beyonce

Beyonce became the idol of aspiring Texas musicians since her rise in Destiny’s Child, and that included Megan Thee Stallion. The fellow Houston native’s musical dreams came true last week when Beyonce hopped on a “Savage” remix (OnlyFans was pretty happy about it, too).

Lil Baby — My Turn (Deluxe)

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Car Seat Headrest — Making A Door Less Open

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Kehlani — “F&MU”

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Doja Cat — “Say So (Remix)” Feat. Nicki Minaj

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Haim — “I Know Alone”

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Khalid — “Eleven (Remix)” Feat. Summer Walker

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Lil Tjay — “Ice Cold”

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Big Thief — “Love In Mine”

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We just want our homemade bread to stay fresh for a little longer.

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“The Rachel” was actually horrible, and it’s time to stop pretending it wasn’t.

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