Our Longest Summer series will look at the eight teams whose seasons are now officially over, and will have to wait until mid-October to make decisions on what’s next and how to proceed after falling short of the cut-off for a continued 2019-20 campaign.

The 2019-20 NBA season was quite a ride for the Minnesota Timberwolves. The Wolves deployed Andrew Wiggins, Robert Covington and Jeff Teague at various points during the campaign, with all three fixtures exiled by the end of the run. From there, Minnesota made a big bet on D’Angelo Russell, an intriguing wager on Malik Beasley, and struggled mightily when it came to on-court success.

By the time the hiatus arrived, the Wolves were in a wildly interesting place organizationally, with a disappointing 19-45 record that even detractors didn’t foresee at the outset. As the extended offseason arrives, Minnesota is a team of great intrigue and there are numerous factors in play.

2020 Free Agents

Malik Beasley (RFA), Juancho Hernangomez (RFA), Evan Turner (UFA), James Johnson (player option)

2020 Projected salary cap space (assuming $115 million salary cap)

None, per Early Bird Rights

Areas of Strength

It helps to have a legitimate franchise player, and the Wolves have one in Karl-Anthony Towns. The uber-talented big man appeared in only 35 games this season but, when he played, Minnesota was notably better than when he was on the bench, including an offensive rating (113.9) that rivals the best teams in the NBA. Towns is one of the most talented offensive big men in NBA history and perhaps the greatest shooting pure center of all-time. That may seem hyperbolic but, well, it really isn’t when considering his accuracy and volume from beyond the arc. Towns is in a tier of his own when it comes to Minnesota’s valuable assets, but the Wolves also have another talented initiator in Russell, as well as a budding contributor in 2019 lottery pick Jarrett Culver.

Areas of Need

For all of the advantages provided by a rebuilding team having its centerpiece already in the mix, there is a lot to fix in Minnesota. Aside from Culver and potentially Beasley, there isn’t a lot entrenched at the 2 through 4 positions and, considering the difficulty of luring talent at those high-profile spots, challenges await. More specifically, the Wolves desperately need contributors that can be game-changing on the defensive end because, to put it bluntly, the combination of Towns and Russell makes life difficult on that end of the floor.

Biggest Decisions

Because Minnesota is likely to operate over the salary cap this offseason, they have a different outlook than teams like Atlanta and Charlotte. The Wolves enter the lottery with the third-best odds and, when remembering that the team shipped its 2021 first-rounder to Golden State, it is wildly important that Minnesota turns their 2020 first-round selection into a strong asset for the future. Aside from that, the Wolves will have their full mid-level exception to utilize in an attempt to find a quality supporting piece, and Minnesota will need to decide what the breaking point is when considering a contract (or an offer sheet to match) for Beasley.

Overall Offseason Focus

Broadly speaking, the Wolves are charged with figuring out how to build a playoff-caliber roster around Towns, Russell, Culver and (perhaps) Beasley as core pieces. Acquiring defense-first players would be an obvious way to make things palatable but, on the other end, Minnesota could conceivably eschew defense almost entirely in an attempt to build the league’s best offense, other factors be damned. The team’s upcoming draft pick needs to be a “hit” but, other than that, the Wolves are in a strange place where they are locked in to a couple of pieces without proof that the formula works.

One of the more baffling criticisms thrown at HBO’s Watchmen (our third favorite series of 2019) was that it was pro-cop. That’s like watching The Wolf of Wall Street and thinking, “I want to grow up and be like Jordan Belfort,” or believing Rorschach is actually the hero in the Watchmen movie. You’re missing the point.

In an interview with Rolling Stone‘s Alan Sepinwall, Watchmen writer Cord Jefferson answered whether it surprises him that people still the show as being “copaganda.” “It does. I think if you only watched the pilot, you might. But I don’t think there’s any way you watch episode six [“This Extraordinary Being”] and go, ‘That show is pro-cop,’” Jefferson said. He was also asked about how other TV shows portray police officers.

“I don’t think shows like Law & Order and Brooklyn Nine-Nine need to go away, but I think that what we need is more shows like The Wire. More shows that offer a more nuanced perspective of policing,” Jefferson, who’s also worked on Succession, The Good Place, and Master of None (pretty good!), responded. “If more shows like The Wire existed, then it wouldn’t seem like Hollywood was so in the pocket of policing in the way that a lot of people are saying that it is.” Also, no more cop musicals.

We tried that, and it failed. Never again.

(Via Rolling Stone)

For much of his nascent career, breakout star Lil Nas X has denied or avoided questions about his alleged Nicki Minaj stan account, @NasMaraj. Although many of his fans have assumed and accepted that before he was Lil Nas X, creator of “Old Town Road,” he was @NasMaraj, Nicki Minaj superfan. Nas himself has always played coy though — and today, he finally revealed why.

On Tuesday evening, after Nas sent Nicki Minaj a tweet requesting a feature verse, one of her fans asked him, “How come you never claimed her when people asked if you were a Barb? We all knew who you were.” The question seemed fair enough; after all, the question has been pretty thoroughly researched and once even got Nas in hot water for collaborating with Cardi B, Nicki’s assumed rival. There have also been some questionable tweets, which Nas has since apologized for.

Nas explained that he hid his past because, “I didn’t want people to know I was gay.” When the fan responded again to interrogate that claim, Nas pointed out the way fans online jump to conclusions and the hostile climate against gay men within hip-hop. “People will assume if you had an entire fan page dedicated to Nicki you are gay,” he said. “And the rap/music industry ain’t exactly built or accepting of gay men yet.”

However, since Nas and other prominent performers such as Tyler The Creator and Kevin Abstract have come out, it’s probably fair to say that this is changing. As rap and the music industry become more accepting, the narrative can change, and fewer young people may feel the need to hide parts of themselves.

Check out Nas’ tweets above.

“Black Effect,” one of the songs from Beyonce and Jay-Z’s collaborative album The Carters, begins with a recording of a woman speaking about love. That woman is Jamaican dancer, choreographer, and artist Dr. L’Antoinette Stines, and it would seem she is not thrilled about her inclusion on the song: TMZ reports Stines is suing Jay-Z and Beyonce over the track.

According to the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court on Tuesday, Stines was contacted by the famous couple in March 2018 to provide dancers for a promotional video for their then-upcoming tour. After getting the dancers, Stines was asked to be recorded speaking about her thoughts on love, and she was apparently told the conversation would be used “for promotional purposes” only, not in a song.

A contract was allegedly only given to Stines the day of the shoot, and she apparently signed without having the paperwork reviewed by her lawyer. She also claims she hasn’t been paid for her vocal work. Stines was surprised to hear her voice on “Black Effect,” and the suit said she felt “artistically raped.”

Stines is suing Beyonce and Jay-Z for copyright infringement and violation of her right to publicity. She is seeking damages and a writing credit on the song.

Neither Beyonce nor Jay-Z have publicly responded to the lawsuit.

David Fincher comes by his reputation for intense perfectionism honestly. Brad Pitt swears that the director’s also a funny dude, but Fincher’s body of work — Seven, Zodiac, Gone Girl, Mindhunter, Fight Club, and so on — more than suggests that he at least projects a certain air on set. Amanda Seyfried, who stars in the upcoming Fincher-directed Netflix movie, Mank, is revealing that working with The Social Network helmer is definitely a process, one that sounds both exhausting and invigorating.

During an interview with Collider, Seyfried discussed how Mank, in which she portrays actress Marion Davies (the movie is about the clashes between screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz and Orson Welles during the making of Citizen Kane), was the hardest job she’s done. She also describes the experience as extremely rewarding, but it’s miraculous that the film wrapped just prior to pandemic shutdowns because Seyfried says that she filmed one scene for an entire week:

I can’t tell you how many takes we did, but I would guess 200, maybe I could be wrong and could be way off. Um, I could be underestimating by five days of one scene when I didn’t have one line… ‘You think I can just relax?’ No, because there are probably about nine or 10 different camera angles that had been on me at one point.

Mank is projected to arrive on Netflix this fall and will hopefully stir up some Oscar fuss. The tussles between the streaming giant and Academy are also growing more intense with every passing year (The Irishman was profusely nominated in 2020 but still ultimately shut out from wins), and given that theaters will have taken a six-month-or-so forced break, and Spike Lee’s latest joint will also be a contender, the delayed ceremony should be a memorable one.

(Via Collider)

Among Samuel L. Jackson’s many iconic movie quotes (“I have had it with these motherf*cking snakes on this motherf*cking plane,” “And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee,” “First, we’re gonna seal off this pool…”), his most iconic might be “hold onto your butts.” That line, spoken by Ray Arnold in 1993’s Jurassic Park, is the one that screenwriter David Koepp hears “quoted most out in public,” so I can only imagine how often Jackson has some stranger yelling it at him. But where does it come from, as it’s not in Michael Crichton’s novel. According to Koepp, “hold onto your butts” actually comes from Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis.

“I was finishing Death Becomes Her when I was writing Jurassic Park, and we had an ending that was really disastrous at first from one of these horrible test screenings where they almost kill you. So we’d very quickly gone out to shoot a new ending for the movie, but there was little time before the movie came out, so we were in the dailies of the reshoots, and there was gonna be no opportunity to redo the reshoots. So this was it, this really had to work,” Koepp told the ReelBlend podcast. “We sat down in the dailies, and as the lights were going down, Bob Zemeckis said, ‘Hold onto your butts.’ I happened to be working on the script at that time, and I was like, ‘Oh, I love that.’ I went back and I typed it into the script immediately, and then Sam Jackson said it.”

Imagine being friendly enough with Samuel L. Jackson to call him “Sam Jackson.” That’s the dream. Anyway, the next time you tell someone to hold onto their butt, remember that you have Meryl Streep to thank. It’s among the many reasons to thank Meryl.

(Via CinemaBlend)

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We’re living in strange times. A pandemic. Civil unrest. Cannibal rats. Jeremy Piven’s Zoom auction. The universe seems to be testing our collective sanity so, of course, we’re turning to Netflix. To keep us entertained. To keep us distracted from the uncontrollable chaos. To keep us from falling into a deep depression where our anxiety acts as a black hole, eating up all of the Garden Salsa SunChips in our parents’ pantry before feasting on dried ramen noodles under the soft glow of a computer screen at 3 a.m. in the morning.

That last scenario is completely anecdotal. Just an example really. We’ve never done that. But we have been consuming more streaming content. Specifically, TV shows. And though it may be taboo to admit, it’s been hard to find the energy to invest in new series. To get motivated to commit any of our free time — of which there is now plenty — to shows that might. Might be great. Might be terrible. You’ll have to wait a few episodes, an entire season really, to find out. No, thank you. I want the guarantee of a good thing, which is why I’ve been revisiting Fox’s adorkable comedy series, New Girl (God, “adorkable” was such a bad marketing term to slap on this thing).

A mix between Friends (which I’ve admittedly never seen), Cheers, How I Met Your Mother, and probably every other ensemble comedy centering on a mix-gendered group of friends just trying to make it in a big city, the Liz Meriwether series stars Zooey Deschanel, Jake Johnson, Max Greenfield, Hannah Simone, Lamorne Morris, and Damon Wayans Jr.

Deschanel plays Jessica Day, a young school teacher suffering through a bad breakup who answers a Craigslist ad and finds herself living in an oversized loft with three male roommates: grouchy bartender Nick Miller (Johnson), looks-obsessed marketing exec Schmidt (Greenfield), and former pro baller Winston Bishop (Morris). The group quickly becomes a makeshift family, weathering weird hookups, awkward breakups, career mishaps, and brushes with the Mexican police. It’s their pure, unadulterated friendship that provides most of the comforting, comedic moments each episode, which is why it’s the perfect re-watch right now, but I’m not here to praise Winston’s stylish shirt-game or hype up Schmidt’s douchebag jar antics.

No, I’m here to talk about sex. Or at least, sexual tension. Because if New Girl does anything well — and it does most things well — it’s the chemistry between its leads, Deschanel’s quirky, wide-eyed optimist and Johnson’s gruff, pessimistic man-child. Slow burns, particularly in the comedy space, are notoriously tricky to pull off. You either spend too long trying to get two lovable characters to hook up (Gilmore Girls, Jane the Virgin), or you struggle to make their romance interesting after the fact (The Office, Moonlighting).

Of course, it’s even harder to infuse the necessary romantic angst that keeps these pairings from fizzling out when you’re working on a show whose main focus is on the friendships between its core cast. The dynamics on Friends suffered under the weight of Ross and Rachel’s “Were they on a break” debate. How I Met Your Mother landed like a deflated balloon with its season finale reveal. The Big Bang gang lost an intangible something when Sheldon finally got together with Amy.

When you’ve spent seasons establishing storylines and character arcs that are fueled by the chemistry and built-up friendships between a group of eclectic individuals, introducing a romantic subplot can throw the whole thing out of whack. It’s like placing a rock on a track and watching the train derail. Sex, and to a larger extent, romance, is that rock.

But not on New Girl. Early on (and we’re talking like pilot early), New Girl recognized the undeniable sexual tension between Jess and Nick. It wasn’t planned, in fact, the cast has admitted they were told to temper the heat between the two long before the series decided to lean into their prospective romance. The show put two attractive opposites into a confined space and drew out the conflict and chaos that adversarial connection provided, balancing it with a dose of sincere friendship and platonic love that eventually elevated it to something more than just a slow-burn trope.

As cheesy as it sounds, Nick and Jess worked so well because they were friends before lovers. Sure, he sometimes served as her emotional fluffer when she needed the motivation to keep things strictly physical with certain paramours and she tried to fight against her reputation as his “cooler” by getting him laid with impromptu games of True American, but the show made a conscious choice to let their desire live alongside their growing bro-ship. They acknowledged those feelings, joked about them, questioned how they were influencing the overall mood of the loft, and then instead of mining them for seasons-worth of melodrama or completely ignoring them and frustrating fans, they simply let the romance develop organically.

It was real. It was messy. It was Nick refusing to smooch Jess during a game of True American before yanking her into an electric make-out session later when the two were alone. It was Jess getting hot-and-bothered by Nick’s newly-embraced responsibility at work and his excitement over doing laundry for the first time only to get pummeled with a two-by-four at a hardware store and shatter a Bond villain-sized fish tank after an angry hookup with her infuriating crush.

And it stalled in ways that felt plausible too, with confessions that, on any other show would signal the development of a new ship, but on New Girl, just hung in the air, acknowledged and ignored and then acted upon and then tucked away again. When Jess admitted things couldn’t return to normal during a fight over a coveted parking spot because Nick “nailed her mouth hard.” When neither could settle on whether they were on a date only to be goaded by Jess’s older ex who called out their childish antics. When finger guns were an “I love you too,” and terribly planned birthday parties worked out and a spontaneous trip to Mexico distracted the pair from putting a label on their connection.

Even when a survivalist Thanksgiving ended with Jess eating putrid fish and falling into a pit, these two managed to make light of the disasters that accompanied their romance. That’s something the show never shied away from: the idea that just because their love was complicated and hard didn’t t mean it wasn’t worth it. And as immature as both characters could be — Jess with her constant need to fix everyone and Nick with his refusal to do something, anything with his life — they helped each other to grow up. They fought, they broke up, but they still loved each other. Their bond didn’t rest solely on their sexual chemistry, which might have been the secret sauce all along.

So, if you’ve got time (and hell, who doesn’t these days?), invest in one of TV’s best slow-burns. And maybe together, we can make sex mugs a thing.

J. Cole dropped a surprise new track called “Snow On Tha Bluff” last night, and in it, he discusses his struggles with activism. He also begins the track by addressing somebody who many have assumed is Noname. Noname offered a response to the track, and now Cole has taken some time this morning to elaborate on the song.

In a series of tweets, Cole wrote that he stands behind the song, and while he doesn’t directly and explicitly confirm the track is about Noname, he does mention her. He implored his fans to follow her and praised her as an informed leader, something Cole feels he feels he is not. Cole wrote:

“Morning. I stand behind every word of the song that dropped last night. Right or wrong I can’t say, but I can say it was honest. Some assume to know who the song is about. That’s fine with me, it’s not my job to tell anybody what to think or feel about the work. I accept all conversation and criticisms.

But let me use this moment to say this: Follow @noname. I love and honor her as a leader in these times. She has done and is doing the reading and the listening and the learning on the path that she truly believes is the correct one for our people. Meanwhile a n**** like me just be rapping.

I haven’t done a lot of reading and I don’t feel well equipped as a leader in these times. But I do a lot of thinking. And I appreciate her and others like her because they challenge my beliefs and I feel that in these times that’s important. We may not agree with each other but we gotta be gentle with each other.”

Find Cole’s tweets below.

The music world listens when J. Cole speaks, and he did so last night by dropping a new song, “Snow On Tha Bluff.” After listening, many have come to believe that Cole wrote the song about Noname, as he addresses “a young lady out there” who is “way smarter than” he is and discusses social issues. On the song, Cole criticizes this person’s approach to sharing thoughts on these issues, saying at one point, “It’s something about the queen tone that’s botherin’ me.”

After the song dropped, Noname offered a response via a quick tweet referencing the aforementioned line, writing simply, “QUEEN TONE!!!!!!” That tweet has since been deleted.

Cole’s track also drew a reaction from Dreamville artist Ari Lennox, who shared a photo of Noname on Instagram and wrote, “Thank you QUEEN for giving af about us constantly and endlessly. I feel and appreciate everything you put out to the world. Almost everything you tweet moves me. I need and I am moved by so much you stand for. @nonamehiding thank you for enlightening us queen. I pray more folks will appreciate and understand!!!”

Meanwhile, Noname previously declared her intentions to release a new album, Factory Baby, this year, although it may be her final album.