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Donald Trump Jr. seemed pretty fired up over the weekend as he tweeted about the suspected cocaine found at the White House while President Biden and fam were not on the premises. As it turns out, however, the eldest boy was actually supposed to be traveling to Australia for a three-city Down Under tour due to begin on Sunday. What happened?

There has been no official reason yet, only vagaries, but a few weeks ago, word began circulating that Turning Point Australia would host Don Jr. and Brexit mastermind Nigel Farage in “Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane” for speaking engagements. However, a fair amount of Aussies signed an activist petition that protested the tour while claiming, “Donald Trump Jr is an illegal [redacted] bigoted person who should not be allowed to enter Australia for the purpose of earning himself and possibly his father any ‘Campaign Contributions.’”

As the HuffPost now notes, Turning Point announced that the tour has been “postponed.” No crystal clear explanation was given on the promotional website, other than that “unforeseen circumstances” were to blame. The organization then elaborated a bit more on Facebook with a “#CancelCulture” hashtag and more:

“It seems America isn’t the only country that makes it difficult for the Trumps…
Announcement & more info coming soon about the postponement of the tour.
Hold onto your tickets, this is a short delay nothing more. #CancelCulture
The dates will be changing for all shows to a later date.”

Could there possibly have been a visa SNAFU? There’s no telling, but Don Jr. hasn’t tweeted about whatever mysterious incident caused the delay. Maybe he shall unleash one of his rants sooner or later. Previously as well, Newsweek reported that Don Jr. claimed to have a “huge fan base in Australia.”

(Via HuffPost)

This fall, U2 will play a series of concerts inside of a giant bowling ball in Las Vegas. Dubbed The Sphere, the bowling ball costs an estimated $2 billion and has been dubbed the “world’s largest spherical structure,” which suggests that it is even larger than Joe Rogan’s skull. Actually, The Sphere is much larger than Joe Rogan’s skull — it is 26 stories tall and 37 stories wide, which is big enough to fit 164,000 speakers and around 18,000 people.

Because this story involves 1) a giant bowling ball in Las Vegas and 2) the internationally famous rock band U2, people naturally goofed on the residency when it was originally teased during the Super Bowl in February. But as The Edge explained to Rolling Stone, “We’re always on the lookout for emerging technologies in the world of concerts and audio.” That is absolutely true, particularly as it pertains to U2’s most famous concert experience, The Zoo TV Tour of the early ’90s, which utilized a barrage of video screens to create a multi-media experience that simultaneously harnessed and satirized the seductive qualities of television. The Sphere run is directly linked to Zoo TV by branding that centers on U2’s landmark 1991 album Achtung Baby, which will be the focal point of the shows.

But when I ponder the reality of a giant, state-of-the-art bowling ball in Las Vegas, the U2 album that feels more appropriate for this gaudy/campy sci-fi scenario isn’t the one that opened Zoo TV, but rather the one that concluded it. I refer to the seventh U2 LP, Zooropa, which was released 30 years ago today.

On that record, U2 dared to imagine something that in the present moment seems to be of little common interest: the future. When I say “the future,” I don’t mean the future as we have come to understand it, which is a slightly removed version of the present that’s scarcely different save for some incremental iPhone updates and steadily worse weather. I mean the future as it stood in the ’90s, when people looked beyond the 20th century and envisioned a radically different world emerging from a period of political and cultural uncertainty. Zooropa came out of that moment, and its version of the future makes a lot more sense in 2023 than it did in 1993.

I’ll give you an example: On the back half of the Zoo TV tour, Bono adopted a devilish persona he called MacPhisto. When playing this character, he applied white facepaint and lipstick in a manner that recalled Joel Grey’s emcee character from the 1972 Nazi musical Cabaret, and affected a mock British accent that resembled David Bowie at his most gacked-out. He wore a golden leisure suit, a puffy red shirt, and devil horns, as if he were a lounge singer from Hell (or Las Vegas). In 1993, this confounded a lot of U2 fans, because Bono was acting like the singer of a band who might one day play inside of the world’s largest bowling ball. Now we know he was just foreshadowing.

Of course, I understand why Zooropa is not the focus of a Las Vegas residency for which U2 will be paid $10 million on top of taking 90 percent of the gate at every gig. Achtung Baby is one of U2’s best-selling and most critically acclaimed records, and Zooropa … is not. At the time, it was their worst-selling record since their second, 1981’s pre-fame October, and was widely perceived as an inessential tangent from its predecessor. (Their next album, 1997’s Pop, sold even worse.)

Even the members of U2 have classified Zooropa as an arty indulgence that came in the midst of their least accessible era. (1995’s Original Soundtracks 1 by the Brian Eno-assisted side project Passengers took this experimentation to its furthest extreme.) By the dawn of the 21st century, U2 ceased reimagining the future and re-embraced its past, and immediately revitalized itself as one of the world’s top stadium-rock attractions.

More than any other U2 album, Zooropa has a muddled legacy. It has inspired thoughtful reappraisals, and it has also been called the U2 record that “almost killed their career.” But what fans and detractors agree on is that Zooropa ranks as the riskiest record U2 ever made, and that’s due entirely to the period from which it came. The process of making Zooropa began in early 1993 between legs of the Zoo TV Tour. Originally conceived as an EP, the album’s amalgam of sardonic media commentary and dead-serious spiritual crisis reflected the tone of the Zoo TV shows. On stage, U2 mixed cheeky pranksterism (like ordering 10,000 pizzas from a local pie shop in Detroit) with post-modern quasi-journalism (like the live remotes from Sarajevo with war-scarred locals during the tour’s European leg). Off stage, the band was shuttling around the world in their own “Zoo Plane” private jet and blasting ABBA songs nonstop. Their collective head space was not, as they say, normal.

The outside world was also in a state of flux. “The old ideologies have fallen away,” The Edge opined to Rolling Stone in a 1993 cover story. “Capitalism won out. You can’t even say it was democracy, because ultimately the ground upon which the battle was fought was economics — it was about money. And the West’s economy won, and communism is pretty much over.”

In the story’s next paragraph, The Edge — who was credited as Zooropa‘s co-producer, which nodded to his commanding role in guiding the music and even collaborating on the lyrics — essentially articulates the album’s central theme. “People are perplexed. Maybe the stability that the Cold War created was the foundation of the West’s movement forward, and now that that’s gone and we have the resurgence of radical nationalism, people in Europe don’t know who they are trying to be. Not only do they not know who they are, they don’t know who they want to be. They don’t know whether they want to be Europeans, part of the European community or whether they should be fighting to protect their national and ethnic identities.

“Even national boundaries don’t mean much anymore. You’ve got the movement in Italy to partition the country into two or three autonomous states. There’s the Basque-separatist movement that’s alive and kicking. Northern Ireland is still no closer to a real solution. And Yugoslavia is the most obvious example of where things are starting to dissolve. Sarajevo has been a symbol of this.”

This breakdown in boundaries and traditional roles is what Zooropa addresses, both lyrically and musically, throughout the record. U2’s mission, for once, is to constantly bewilder the listener. The album-opening title track is an update of “Where The Streets Have No Name,” only the desire for spiritual transcendence is expressed via the bland language of advertising-speak. (“Zooropa better by design / Zooropa fly the friendly skies / Through appliance of science / We’ve got that ring of confidence.”) On the album’s first single, the monotone oddity “Numb,” Bono abandons the lead singer role so that The Edge can intone a long list of “don’ts.” (This happens again at the end of the album in more dramatic fashion when Johnny Cash guests on the minimalist electronic epic “The Wanderer.”) For the second single, “Lemon,” the album’s most crushing personal narrative — Bono mournfully addresses the death of his mother — is set to its poppiest, most ABBA-like music.

Meanwhile, car crash imagery — an everyday form of technological disorientation and destruction — recurs in multiple songs. Even the most conventional U2-sounding track, “Stay (Faraway So Close),” double-backs on itself twice in the title. “Uncertainty can be a guiding light” is Zooropa‘s defining lyric, and yet another contradiction. Uncertainty guided U2, but there is very little light on this esoteric record made by the era’s broadest guitar-rock band.

Zooropa was artistically successful in that it set out to evoke an increasingly incoherent world by making anyone who heard it also feel incoherent. But that kind of artistic success plainly put it at cross-purposes with commerciality. (It is unlikely that the majority of listeners will ever appreciate the difference between deliberate confusion and confusion-confusion.) In 2023, however, Zooropa sounds different than it did in 1993. Unlike a lot of big-time alt-rock records from that year, it doesn’t feel dated. It, in fact, seems more relevant now than it did then.

To explain this, allow me to go on a brief, personal tangent: In August of 1993, more than a month after Zooropa was released, I reviewed the album for my local hometown newspaper. I was 15, and this was my first paid music-writing gig. I gave the album an “A” and wrote that it was composed of “pop songs that sound nothing like pop songs.” (I believe I was paid $15 for this incisive prose.)

My family did not own a computer in 1993. I wrote this review out longhand on notebook paper. I then asked my mother to drive me downtown to the newspaper office, at which point I slipped my folded-up notebook paper sheets with the fringes on the side into the mail slot. An editor then entered this data into a computer as big as 50 iPhones, and it wound up in the newspaper a week or so later.

That is how technology worked in 1993. Technology was slow, cumbersome, and ancient. But unbeknownst to me or my mother, the world as we knew it was already finished. About four months before I wrote that review — on April 30, 1993 — a world-changing innovation dreamt up by a 37-year-old Swiss physics researcher named Tim Berners-Lee entered the public domain. It was called the World Wide Web, and it was a new information system that made it possible for the average person with little or no computer knowledge to explore the Internet with ease. The effect of this, obviously, was seismic. In 1993, only 1 percent of all information moving through telecommunication networks came from the Internet. By 2007, it was 97 percent.

When U2 made Zooropa, they weren’t thinking about the World Wide Web, because virtually nobody was thinking about the World Wide Web in 1993. They were instead concerned with things like satellite television, that thrilling and overbearing new-ish innovation that allowed you “to go anywhere,” as Bono croons in “Stay (Faraway So Close).” Even though technology in 1993 was slow, cumbersome, and ancient, it felt quick, easy, and overwhelmingly immediate. The preoccupation with satellite TV should make Zooropa seem dated. But, incredibly, it does not. And that’s because the world U2 thought they were commenting on in 1993 was in reality just coming into existence, and it’s the world we’re living in now.

Zooropa is often uncanny in how it accidentally comments on online culture. The industrial guitar hook in “Numb” resembles the squawk of an Internet dial-up. “Babyface” is a good song about obsessing over a TV starlet, but it’s a great song about how internet porn disconnects chronic users from reality. And then there are the songs that unfold like lists (“Zooropa,” “Numb,” “Some Days Are Better Than Others”), which replicate the disconnected data dumps that populate social media feeds.

Above all, Zooropa summons the modern desire to unplug from the grid and reconnect with something “real” or “authentic.” The trilogy of songs that close the record (“The First Time,” “Dirty Day,” “The Wanderer”) meld the shadowy iconography of ’40s film noir and ’70s anti-westerns with Old Testament sermonizing about a godless society wracked by climate disasters and familial dysfunction where “sons turn their fathers in.”

The most remarkable track on Zooropa is also the most forward-looking: For “The Wanderer,” U2 was once again ahead of the curve in their appreciation of Johnny Cash, who was a year away from his Rick Rubin-assisted comeback with 1994’s American Recordings. Unlike Rubin, who stripped Cash’s music down to the studs, U2 mashed him up with a backing track that resembled the alien soundscapes of Another Green World. Thirty years ago, this might have seemed like a gimmick. But now, given the flattening of cultural boundaries online and the power of A.I. to situate deceased musical legends in any context we wish, putting Johnny Cash on the moon is plausible to the point of seeming barely noteworthy.

Listening to the song, you can picture Johnny traversing a post-apocalyptic hellscape. “Now Jesus, don’t you wait up,” he says. “Jesus, I’ll be home soon.” He’s out here “in search of experience.” He wants to feel as much as a man can before he repents, which is another way of saying that he wants tomorrow to be more exciting than today. In 1993, tomorrow presented real possibilities. No one could see what was around the corner. What we didn’t know is that the future wound up being scarier, and more banal (and definitely more spherical), than we could possibly imagine.

Rick Ross can’t seem to dodge zealous skydivers. This past Sunday (July 2), Ross hosted a pool party at his house in Georgia. This party spawned various viral clips, including one of him stumbling off of a diving board as he attempted to make a dive into the pool.

But in a perhaps more full circle moment, it appears a favored guest of Ross’ made a second appearance at his Promised Land estate.

In a clip shared to social media, Ross is seen in astoundment, as he learns that a skydiver is parachuting into his yard.

“They told me the parachute guy landed somewhere,” said Ross in the clip. “Where he at?”

Ross then faces the camera toward the sky, where the skydiver is seen making his way through the air, and preparing to land on Ross’ roof.

“Ay don’t land on my roof!,” says Ross in the clip.

This isn’t a parachuter’s first attempt to enter Ross’ property. Back in June, a parachuter tried to jump his way into Ross’ car show, however, was arrested upon his landing. Ross urged the police not to press charges on this fan.

At the time of writing, it is unclear as to whether or not the skydiver who crashed the pool party is the same skydiver who attempted to crash the car show.

You can see a clip above.

Taylor Swift is days away from releasing her re-recorded Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) album. Obviously, fans are excited. They are also wondering if her updated version of “Better Than Revenge” will be a little different — after initially spotting it was three seconds longer when the song lengths dropped.

Many first thought that the added length would be Swift opening the track with the “Leave a message, make it hot” lyric that she used when performing it during the Speak Now World Tour. However, fans now are suspecting that Swift changed one of the song’s controversial lyrics: “She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress.”

When searching for the lyric right before it, “She’s not a saint and she’s not what you think / She’s an actress,” it registers as “Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version)” on iTunes. However, the first lyric about the mattress does not — taking fans only to the original. (I also tested this myself to confirm.)

Given the song was first released in 2010, the way it has aged has been questionable — with internalized misogyny and shaming toward Joe Jonas’ girlfriend at the time. Despite this, many Swifties enjoy the chaos of the original.

While we won’t fully know if Swift changed the line (or what the swap will be) until tomorrow night, fans still have a lot of thoughts. Find some reactions below.

Shortly after the release of the long-awaited Pink Tape, Lil Uzi Vert has already begun teasing another upcoming album. Uzi previously noted that Pink Tape would not be getting a deluxe edition — breaking tradition with many recent new releases — and that they would instead put out a whole new album. This is similar to what they did in 2020 with Eternal Atake, whose “deluxe edition” turned out to be a completely different album titled LUV Vs. The World 2.

It seems Uzi is starting a new tradition because they have changed their Instagram bio to read “Luv is rage 3,” suggesting another sequel to their 2015 debut mixtape is on the way. Considering how quickly Uzi turned around LUV Vs. The World 2 — which came out just a week after Eternal Atake — perhaps fans won’t have to wait very long to find out. Uzi first teased Luv Is Rage 3 in 2020, so they’ve had plenty of time to get it done. If Uzi continues in the same vein they did back in 2020, a potential Luv Is Rage 3 could have a completely different sound from Pink Tape.

This could be a good thing, depending on your feelings on Pink Tape‘s wild range of sounds, which included takes on 2000s Eurodance hits, a cover of System Of A Down’s resurgent signature hit, a collaboration with Travis Scott, and even a sample of WWE star Shinsuke Nakamura’s ring entrance music.

Lil Uzi Vert is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Among celebrity couples, Kaitlin Olson and Rob McElhenney rank among the best. (Also in the top 10: Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, and Donald Duck and Minnie Mouse — I have my sources) So I was a little worried when I saw reports that they broke up “after the husband cheated on her in Wales.” I became less worried when I realized that the rumors came from Perez Hilton, by way of anonymous gossip account DeuxMoi, and not at all worried when Olson responded to the allegations.

“It was me who had the affair,” she tweeted. “But it was not with someone from Wales. It was with a whale. I’ve always loved whales. They’re the bosses of the ocean and I’m attracted to power. We ask for privacy as we navigate this difficult time.” McElhenney added, “Sad to admit that the rumor is true. However some of the details are…. incorrect.”

Even the fan club for the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia co-creator and star’s soccer team got in on the fun. “Something tells me they are not fin-ished… moar to this story I’m shore,” Wrexham USA tweeted. (It’s good to know Deadpool is staying busy during the writers’ strike.)

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia needs to run forever, and celebrity gossip sites need to stay from Kaitlin Olson and Rob McElhenney. Thank you.

In January, Meghan Trainor announced that she was pregnant with her and husband Daryl Sabara’s (Juni Cortez in the Spy Kids movies) second baby together. Well, nature has taken its course and the baby is officially here.

The couple made the announcement on social media yesterday (July 4). A post shared on both Trainor and Sabara’s Instagram accounts features miscellaneous photos of the baby and Trainor. The caption reads, “On July 1st (our 7 year anniversary of our first date) we welcomed Barry Bruce Trainor into the world. He was a big boy at 8lbs 7oz…and sideways (transverse), but we had an amazing, successful c-section, and I finally got my skin to skin time! Thank you to all of the incredible doctors and nurses who took such great care of us.”

The two went viral in April when Trainor discussed the difficulties they have during sex. Noting that she had been diagnosed with vaginismus, which causes tension that makes penetrative sex more difficult, she said, “[It’s] to the point where I’m like ‘Is it all in?’ and he’s like, ‘Just the tip.’ And I’m like, ‘I can’t do anymore.’ I don’t know how to fix that. […] As he would penetrate, I would be like, ‘Ow, ow, ow,’ like, to the point when […] I had to ice myself after.”

Known to take a long time in between albums, Robyn hasn’t been active on social media since last October. But it appears she may have had other obligations keeping her busy over the past year. Yesterday (July 4), the “Dancing On My Own” artist took to Instagram to share a photo of a baby that appears to be hers.

In the post is a blond-haired baby, dressed in a beige sweater. “My time is yours 4-ever Tyko,” read the post’s caption.

This post has sent fans into a frenzy, as Robyn had never announced she had given birth, nor that she was expecting a baby. Now, fans are theorizing that Robyn may have secretly welcomed a baby as early as last year.

“No wonder she’s been quiet for a year: Robyn has always been mother, and now she is…quite literally a mother!,” said one fan on Twitter.

“robyn had a baby quietly secretly,” said another fan, “and that’s so f*cking slay.”

Maluca Mala, who collaborated with Robyn on the 2015 single “Love Is Free,” commented on the Instagram post, saying that his “titi,” or aunt, “from NYC send[s] you her love.”

You can see an adorable photo of the baby above.

WARNING: Spoilers for Marvel’s Secret Invasion below.

In last week’s episode of Secret Invasion, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) got thoroughly dressed down and fired by Colonel James “Rhodey” Rhodes (Don Cheadle) after failing to stop the Skrull terrorist attack in the season premiere. In fairness, Fury got played by Gravik (Ben Kingsley-Adir) leading to a catastrophic loss of life, so Rhodey’s actions were justified. However, Marvel fans felt the Avenger went a bit too far, and suspicions started mounting that Rhodey might be a Skrull.

Well, Episode 3 just kicked those theories into overdrive.

The clues that Rhodey is a Skrull really started stacking up thanks to three pivotal moments. Early in the third episode, Fury patches things up with Talos after telling him that he suspects a Skrull has infiltrated a high-ranking member of the U.S. government. Possibly Rhodey, but still too vague to be sure. Later, while taking down a Skrull impersonating a U.N. officer, Fury noticeably dropped the line that nobody calls him “Nick.” Rhodey did exactly that last week. And, finally, Fury’s wife Priscilla (Charlayne Woodard) takes a call at the end of the episode and asks to speak to Gravik. Instead, a voice that sounds an awful lot like Rhodey tells her she’ll be dealing with him now. Things are not looking good.

Following the episode, Marvel fans went nuts over the increasing likelihood that Rhodey might be a Skrull. You can see some of the reactions below:

And, finally, the most convincing Rhodey is a Skrull theory yet. Pretty hard to ignore this one:

New episodes of Marvel’s Secret Invasion stream Wednesday on Disney+.

We’re in a very weird spot in the Damian Lillard trade sweepstakes. Lillard, by all accounts, only wants to play for the Miami Heat, which would love to bring him on board and have him partner with Bam Adebayo and Jimmy Butler. The problem that those two sides are facing, however, is that Miami can’t really put together a package that would interest the Portland Trail Blazers, as the centerpiece of a deal would presumably be Tyler Herro, whose skillset is repetitive alongside Scoot Henderson, Shaedon Sharpe, and Anfernee Simons.

It’s unclear how this resolves itself. Maybe the Blazers and Heat can work something out with a third team that would more value Herro’s services, maybe Portland decides to just do Lillard and solid and takes whatever Miami can offer. Or maybe, just maybe, Lillard becomes more amenable to playing his basketball somewhere else, and the other 28 teams in the NBA become more plausible landing spots for the All-Star guard.

We decided to examine that scenario here and attempt to answer a simple question: If a mystery team decides to enter the fray for Lillard, who would make the most sense? We decided to look at teams that haven’t necessarily been linked to Lillard, but feature the sorts of packages that could be appealing to Portland while simultaneously giving Lillard running mates next to whom he can compete at a high level. With the understanding that this is all hypothetical for now, there’s no guarantee Lillard backs off of his reported stance, and it’s possible he just ends up on the Heat no matter what, here are four potential landing spots.

San Antonio Spurs

This is the only team on this list that has any sort of link to a Lillard trade — in the aftermath of his request, Ramona Shelburne of ESPN tweeted that Lillard “has a deep respect for the San Antonio Spurs organization.” (She did, of course, note this after saying that Lillard’s preference is a trade to Miami.)

Now, having respect for an organization and wanting to work there are two entirely different things, but let’s imagine for a moment that Lillard would come around to the idea because this entire piece is predicated on Lillard eventually coming around to the idea of a trade somewhere else. San Antonio has not made the playoffs since 2019, which is tied for the second-longest drought in the league. For a franchise that was synonymous with success for so long, that’s a pretty remarkable drought, although it must be noted that the Spurs aren’t exactly the kind of team that tries to do quick fixes in order to say they made the playoffs, only to lose in the opening round.

Having said that, there’s shooting for a quick fix and building out a good basketball team, and Lillard could help San Antonio achieve that second thing pretty quickly. The team won the most important lottery since LeBron James came into the league, and now has a guy in Victor Wembanyama who can become the best player in the world. With Lillard under contract for at least the next three years, the bet the Spurs would theoretically make here is that their French rookie can reach that point while Lillard is at the end of his prime, and I don’t know about you, but I am terrified at the thought of the 7’3 two-way monster who earns the title of being the planet’s best basketball player on his rookie contract pairing up with Damian Lillard while he can still get the job done at a high level. There is a belief that Wembanyama can compete for an All-Star nod as a rookie, and if he did that alongside Lillard, he’d be the first All-Star teammate Dame has had since LaMarcus Aldridge in 2014-15.

Add in the fact that their skillsets would be spectacular fits alongside one another and this feels like a wonderful partnership if San Antonio wanted to pursue it. As for Portland, a deal with the Spurs could get a collection of players who are quite the snug fit alongside its trio of promising young guards, as a package revolving around Keldon Johnson, Devin Vassell, and Devonte’ Graham’s salary would work financially. If San Antonio wanted to keep one of Johnson/Vassell (along with Jeremy Sochan, who we’ll keep out because of his prior relationship with Wembanyama), guys like Khem Birch and Doug McDermott can provide the salaries to facilitate a deal, while youngsters who would be a bit repetitive in Portland like Malakai Branham or Blake Wesley can be sent back. The Spurs can also put together quite the package of picks, as they have 31 picks going forward, including 14 first-round selections. And if they really wanted, there’s a way to do this deal that also gets Jusuf Nurkic’s salary off of the Blazers’ books — something like Lillard and Nurkic for Johnson, Graham, Birch, Wesley, and former Blazer Zach Collins works, as would replacing Birch and Collins in that deal with McDermott.

The overarching thing here is there are a whole lot of ways that San Antonio can make this happen. While this isn’t a franchise that is known for going star hunting, Lillard would be an incredible running mate for Wembanyama and a perfect cultural fit, and it’s not hard to imagine a Spurs team built around those two competing for a ring sooner rather than later.

Utah Jazz

No team in the NBA can beat Utah if it decides to put together a pick-heavy package for any superstar. In the event that Portland prioritized getting draft capital back for Lillard, the Jazz are able to throw together a collection of firsts from themselves, Cleveland, and Minnesota that would be appealing for any team that has a superstar on the trade block. And perhaps most importantly for a star who wants to compete for a championship, Utah has so much in the war chest of picks that it can go out and get another running mate pretty easily.

Lillard, of course, went to college in Utah, as Weber State is about half an hour away from Salt Lake City. He would join a team that surprised last season before things went off the rails a bit, and the Jazz could put together a package of players that lets them keep most of the core that helped them get to that point. Collin Sexton’s contract presents some issues, but a package revolving around him, Kelly Olynyk’s expiring deal, second-year wing Ochai Agbaji, and one of the team’s 2023 first-round draft picks (once they are eligible to get moved) along with draft capital could blow away any deal that doesn’t land Portland a star.

Doing a deal like this would give Utah the sort of start it just hasn’t been able to attract in free agency, and would give it an All-Star under contract to pair with Lauri Markkanen, Walker Kessler, and the recently-acquired John Collins. That is a dangerous team, especially if the Jazz can limit how many younger guys are heading to Portland in return. Plus Utah CEO of basketball operations Danny Ainge would probably love nothing more than to swipe Lillard from Pat Riley and the Heat, which doesn’t matter that much but would surely be a fun subplot.

Ainge, in general, is in the business of pulling off big moves, and as of right now, there is no bigger move than acquiring Lillard. Doing that and having enough in the tank to make another big move that could legitimately vault Utah into championship contender territory sure seems appealing, and would satiate Lillard’s desire to be on a team that has a shot at winning a ring.

Orlando Magic

Orlando is a tricky trade partner for Portland for a few reasons. The main one here is that the Blazers would, understandably, do everything in their power to get Franz Wagner or Paolo Banchero back, and the Magic would, understandably, do everything in their power to keep them.

Let’s assume Orlando draws that line from the jump, which would make sense because a Lillard-Wagner-Banchero trio is the entire point of doing this and would be very, very good. There is the potential for an intriguing deal built around the contracts of Jonathan Isaac (who one can argue is an intriguing buy-low candidate if he can remain healthy) and Gary Harris, along with … well, here’s where it gets tricky. Would the Blazers, which already have a plethora of guards, want Jalen Suggs or Markelle Fultz? How interested would they be in recent first-round picks Anthony Black and Jett Howard, who cannot be moved until August 1 at the earliest? Would Wendell Carter Jr. be on the table, and if he is, would there be a way to make this work where he goes to Portland and Orlando takes Nurkic’s contract back? The Magic have 22 draft picks to play with, although only eight of them are firsts and one of them is a 2025 selection from the Denver Nuggets.

Among these three teams, they certainly have the hardest path to figuring out a trade, but it’s hard not to think of what pairing Lillard with Banchero and Wagner could end up doing in the Eastern Conference. Right away, this would be a team with a good shot at making noise in the playoffs, something the Magic have done two times in the last 11 years. They have not gotten past the first round since 2010. It stands to reason that they would have a hard time satiating Lillard’s desire to compete for a championship right away — something that might make this whole thing a non-starter — but if you’re willing to bet on Banchero and Wagner staying here in this deal and becoming All-Stars (I think they can, others might not), then there is a potential championship-caliber team here.

Toronto Raptors

No team in the NBA has a better understanding of how to handle this sort of situation than the Raptors. This is, of course, the team that took a chance on trading for Kawhi Leonard while knowing full well he had the chance to leave after one year. They took that chance, he ended up leaving, and in the meantime, Toronto was able to win the only championship in franchise history.

Masai Ujiri is a savvy operator who isn’t afraid to take risks, and while you can make the case the other three teams on this list would have a higher ceiling at some point in Lillard’s time with them, the Raptors would immediately have the highest floor and the best chance of competing for a ring next season. They also have O.G. Anunoby, a player who the Blazers have been linked to in the past, and although those links happened with the hopes of pairing him with Lillard, he’d be an excellent fit alongside Portland’s young guards and is the best player who we’ve brought up among these four teams.

If Toronto wanted to take a swing and attempt to recreate their Kawhi magic with Lillard, Pascal Siakam in the final year of his contract, and Scottie Barnes, the team could push all its chips in and send Anunoby, Chris Boucher, and Thaddeus Young’s expiring salary to the Blazers, along with a bunch of picks — they sent a 2024 first-round pick with top-6 protections to San Antonio in the Jakob Poeltl trade, but could otherwise send a collection of picks and pick swaps to Portland. Perhaps Gradey Dick, the team’s 2023 first-round selection, could be thrown into the deal, but it’d make sense to want to keep him and his ability to stretch the floor.

The question that looms over this, outside of Siakam’s future, is whether a team built around Lillard, Siakam, and Barnes can be a championship contender immediately, particularly when the Boston Celtics and Milwaukee Bucks both look like they’re going to healthy and ready to go once next season rolls around. A lot of it would depend on Barnes taking the next step towards being an All-Star caliber player, but absolutely no one in the Eastern Conference would enjoy playing against them.