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Netflix named an entire fan event after the noise its streaming service makes as it boots up, and it certainly gave fans what they wanted on Saturday. With plenty of teases for The Witcher and Stranger Things also came a first look at Season 2 of Bridgerton, which while it may not have Regé-Jean Page looks to have plenty of drama and steamy intrigue in its second season in Shondaland.

While Simon, the Duke of Hastings, and Daphnie won’t appear in Season 2 the show seems set focused on Anthony’s drama, including getting grilled by a new character after overhearing his lofty expectations for an ideal wife. The brief clip shows Kate, played by Simone Ashley (Sex Education), turning the tables on Daphnie’s older brother by making it clear she isn’t exactly impressed by him, either.

“Viscount Bridgerton, when you manage to find this paragon of virtue whatever makes you think she will accept your suit?” the newcomer asks. “Are the young ladies of London truly so easily won by a pleasing smile and absolutely nothing more?”

Anthony tries his best to be charming, pointing out that she thinks his smile is pleasing. But there’s a pretty strong burn about his horse-riding skills that follows, which is about as bad as it gets as far as period-accurate insults go. It’s likely the first of many back-and-forths between the characters in the season ahead. But the preview shows them not starting on very good terms. Only can go up from there, I suppose.

Last year went pretty well for the Denver Nuggets. Despite a laundry list of injuries, namely in the backcourt, the team made its way to the second round of the postseason behind the trio of Michael Porter Jr., Aaron Gordon, and 2020-21 NBA MVP Nikola Jokic. Entering this year without Jamal Murray for some period of time, there seems to be optimism that the Nuggets can continue to build on what it has so that when Murray gets back into the fold, their hat will be tossed in the ring with the other teams that have hopes of winning a championship. So long as Jokic is in town and playing at the level he’s capable of reaching, that’ll be the expectation, and the big man is more than capable of getting them to the promised land some day. Could 2021-22 be that day? It might be hard without Murray for a lengthy stretch, but these Nuggets are good, nonetheless.

Roster:

Will Barton
Bol Bol
Facundo Campazzo
Vlatko Cancar
Petr Corneilie (two-way)
PJ Dozier
Aaron Gordon
JaMychal Green
Jeff Green
Markus Howard
Nah’Shon Hyland
Nikola Jokic
Monte Morris
Jamal Murray
Zeke Nnaji
Michael Porter Jr
Austin Rivers

Projected Vegas Win Total: 47.5 wins

Biggest Addition: Jeff Green

Unless you’re a huge fan of rookie guard Nah’Shon “Bones” Hyland (which, his name is BONES HYLAND and he’s quite good, so no one would blame you), the team’s biggest addition is Green. A perpetually steady hand who can provide them good minutes in just about any role, Green can slide into the starting lineup at the 4 or give them backup 5 minutes to keep Nikola Jokic a little fresher ahead of next postseason. With how much the Nuggets decided to lean into running it back, Green is a safe option here.

Biggest Loss: Jamal Murray

Paul Millsap is the biggest free agent loss, but man, potentially not having Murray for this entire season stinks. It was in a very small sample size, but following the Aaron Gordon trade last year, Denver looked like it was going to be a straight-up juggernaut. And then, Murray tore his ACL in April. Perhaps he’ll be able to return at some point this year, but even if he does, it’s hard to fully imagine him coming back and being Jamal Murray right away. On that note…

Biggest Question: How high is this team’s ceiling without Murray, or with a rusty Murray?

Denver is far more well-equipped to survive without Murray than it was last year, when its backcourt was super worn down by the time the second round of the playoffs rolled around. There is more than enough here — between their guards and the ability that guys like Nikola Jokic (definitely) and Aaron Gordon (as a complimentary piece) have as playmakers — to be able to win a ton of games while he’s out and as he’s getting himself back up to speed post-injury.

The question, though, is whether he’ll be able to contribute to the point that Denver can be a legitimate title contender. At his best — with Jokic doing everything he does, Michael Porter Jr. providing nuclear scoring, and Gordon doing all the stuff he does on both ends of the floor — Murray is such a perfect fit in this offense that it’s hard to imagine anyone stopping them all that consistently. But coming back from a torn ACL takes time, both in getting onto the floor and finding your form once you’re on it. Perhaps this means Denver won’t be a legitimate title contender until 2022-23, which would be totally fine. Without Murray, though, they should still be a very good team, one that does not need to play-in tournament to make the postseason.

What Makes This Season A Success: Championship contenders. This doesn’t necessarily win a ring. Heck, Denver can probably afford to make the playoffs and lose in the first round depending on the matchup they draw and how well they play. But they need to be in the hunt for a championship and look like a team that, when fully functional, is right there with anyone.

What Makes This Season A Failure: A wholly unconvincing year. Maybe Nikola Jokic can’t get back to being an MVP-level player. Maybe Michael Porter Jr.’s contract talks linger and he seems distracted all year. Maybe Aaron Gordon falls back into some of his bad habits from Orlando, or Jamal Murray doesn’t come back at all, while none of their role players do more than tread water. This is still a playoff team almost regardless — Jokic is just that good — but “playoff team” and “championship contender” are two things, and it’d be a failure if Denver doesn’t look like it’s trending towards the latter.

Fresh off dispatching Max Holloway in back-to-back title fights, Alexander Volkanovski (23-1) earned his 20th consecutive win in an instant classic over Brian Ortega (15-2) Saturday night at UFC 266 from T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.

Volkanovski spent much of the first round chopping down Ortega with leg kicks. Ortega looked to his length advantage, but Volkanovski used his speed to snap and evade. The fight began to open up toward the end of the round, with both men opening cuts on their opponents.

The champ continued to lay it on in the second, mixing up leg kicks, body kicks and big shots up top. Ortega continued to move forward, opting for counter strikes and occasionally beating Volkanovski to the punch. With less than a minute remaining, Ortega began to find his range with the leg kicks, but that didn’t seem to slow Volkanovski.

A much more aggressive Ortega came charging into the third round, but Volkanovski met him right in the middle, charging in with big shot after big shot. An apparent head clash looked to have Ortega hurt momentarily, but he continued to try to find his range. Ortega hurt Volkanovski late in the round and dropped into a guillotine, but the champ escaped and found his way into mount. From the ground, Ortega jumped into a triangle, but again, Volkanovski escaped and jumped back into the mount and poured it on. Ortega was saved by the bell and looked absolutely spent going into the fourth round.

Volkanovski picked Ortega apart to open the round, when Ortega yet again earned a takedown and went for the guillotine. Volkanovski worked his way out and jumped back on top to toss haymakers at Ortega. From a standing mount, it looked like the champion was about to earn the TKO, but Ortega rolled out and was able to get to his feet.

To open the fifth, Volkanovski yet again went on the offensive. The champ walked Ortega back, but the challenger refused to give in. He looked energized and tossed counter strikes before sending Volkanovski backwards. Volkanovski and Ortega continued to toss hands right until the bell, sending the bout to the judges.

Volkanovski entered his title fight with Ortega with no losses in his UFC career, having won 19 consecutive fights.

Saturday night offered Brian Ortega his first title fight since 2018, when he was handed a fourth-round TKO loss to Max Holloway. Ortega returned to the Octagon in 2020, when he exploded onto the scene with a decision victory over Chan Sung Jung.

In maybe his best performance since winning UFC gold, Robbie Lawler (29-15) earned a TKO victory over Nick Diaz (26-10) Saturday night at UFC 266 from T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. The bout was a rematch 17 years in the making, where Diaz earned a second-round KO over Lawler.

Lawler opened the first round clearly with a plan to overwhelm Diaz, who was making his return to the Octagon for the first time in six years. Diaz weathered the early storm and caught his rhythm with shot after shot in what equated to stand-and-throw bout. For every great combo Lawler put together — attacking Diaz’s legs, body, and head — Diaz peppered Lawler with jabs, hooks, and uppercuts.

To open the second, Lawler appeared to hurt Diaz momentarily with a nice liver kick, but again, he worked his way around the cage and bought himself enough recovery time. Diaz tried to walk Lawler down, but the former welterweight champion stood his ground and continued to walk Diaz back instead. Lawler finished the second with a few more big shots to the body, moving to the head and forcing Diaz to yet again retreat around the cage.

In the third, Lawler opened up with big body shots and landed a huge right hook that sent Diaz to his knee. When the referee encouraged him to get back to his feet, he remained on his back to give Lawler the TKO victory.

Saturday night marked Diaz’s first fight in the UFC since drawing Anderson Silva in 2015. Lawler has now won two fights since being dismantled in August 2019 by Colby Covington.

We’re slowly creeping up on a year since Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, and the twice-impeached now-ex president is still finding ways to lose. The latest is a months-long advocating for a haphazard recall election in Arizona that actually saw him lost votes.

Unsurprisingly, especially given his track record on judging reality, Trump has a different take on a recall that showed him get fewer votes and Joe Biden get even more than before. At a rally in Georgia on Saturday night, Trump claimed the audit done by Trump-friendly Cyber Ninjas actually showed he won the election he continues to have lost.

“We won at the Arizona forensic audit yesterday at a level that you wouldn’t believe,” Trump said, a blatant lie by every measure of the words. “They had headlines that Biden wins in Arizona, when they know it’s not true. He didn’t win in Arizona. He lost in Arizona based on the forensic audit.”

That’s entirely untrue, though: the result of the audit in Maricopa County showed that Trump actually had 261 fewer votes in the election and Biden had 99 more than first counted. Not only did the audit not magically find thousands of votes for Trump, it in theory gave Biden an even wider margin of victory in Arizona.

None of that matters, however, as Trump’s rally where he campaigns for… something is largely an airing of grievances in front of an equally delusional but very supportive captive audience. Later on, Trump claimed that he never conceded the election, which he also did.

In another wild bit of rambling, Trump admitted that he called Georgia governor Brian Kemp and demanded he call a “special election” against Biden in the weeks after the state went his way in November.

At another point during the rambling rally, Trump says the government should be “looking at” sending Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to prison, presumably in response to Trump being banned from the platform he created.

It’s all a pretty wild trip into what Trump and his most devoted followers feel is actually happening in America. But it doesn’t change reality: Trump lost, and somehow he keeps finding new ways to confirm that and say otherwise anyway.

Kyrie Irving is reportedly among the NBA players who have yet to receive a vaccine against COVID-19, per a report that came out earlier this week. Irving plays in New York City, and while the NBA is not mandating the vaccine for players, it is requiring players to recognize their local vaccine mandates. New York is one such city that has a mandate, and as a result, remaining unvaccinated would mean Irving can’t enter the Nets’ arena or practice facility for games or team activities.

Irving has not directly confirmed or denied whether or not he has received a vaccine, but according to his aunt, Irving might look for a “moral-based” exemption.

“He is going to try to figure that out as it comes, because it’s not religious-based, it’s moral-based,” Tyki Irving told Matt Sullivan of Rolling Stone. “You may have to sit on the sideline, you might not have to be in the arena during this. If it’s that freaking important to get a vaccine that, hell, it’s still not preventing the Covid, then I’d rather them working it out that way than to say, ‘Hey, if you don’t get the vaccine, then you can’t be a part of the franchise that you f*ckin’ helped build.’”

Of course, it is incorrect that the vaccine is not preventing COVID — a study in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet called breakthrough cases “extremely rare” — but that seems like it does not matter in this case. Sullivan’s reporting shows that conspiracy theories regarding the vaccine have started to make their ways into NBA locker rooms, and Irving, to one extent or another, appears empathetic.

Irving, who serves as a vice president on the executive committee of the players’ union, recently started following and liking Instagram posts from a conspiracy theorist who claims that “secret societies” are implanting vaccines in a plot to connect Black people to a master computer for “a plan of Satan.” This Moderna microchip misinformation campaign has spread across multiple NBA locker rooms and group chats, according to several of the dozen-plus current players, Hall-of-Famers, league executives, arena workers and virologists interviewed for this story over the past week.

It must be stressed that there has been no answer from Irving, and that there is no guarantee that comments from someone close to him indicate exactly what he is thinking. This is, however, a departure from comments given by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the subject, as the Hall of Fame inductee believes the NBA should have a zero tolerance policy for passing up the vaccine.

A new piece by Matt Sullivan of Rolling Stone takes a deep dive into some of the issues that the NBA is having getting its final 10 percent or so of players vaccinated against COVID-19. While there are a whole heck of a lot of individuals who do not come out looking good, one person who takes a hardline stance based in the science behind the vaccine is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

In the eyes of the Hall of Fame center, the NBA should be proactive in how it handles those who will not get vaccinated. As Abdul-Jabbar argues, “there is no room for players” who opt to pass on the vaccine.

“The NBA should insist that all players and staff are vaccinated or remove them from the team,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “There is no room for players who are willing to risk the health and lives of their teammates, the staff and the fans simply because they are unable to grasp the seriousness of the situation or do the necessary research. What I find especially disingenuous about the vaccine deniers is their arrogance at disbelieving immunology and other medical experts. Yet, if their child was sick or they themselves needed emergency medical treatment, how quickly would they do exactly what those same experts told them to do?”

Abdul-Jabbar went on to say that while he is not demanding these athletes act as “spokespersons for the government,” he believes there is a moral obligation that comes with having a platform that can save lives, and opting to not use it is “contributing to these deaths” that occur due to the ongoing pandemic.

“They are failing to live up to the responsibilities that come with celebrity. Athletes are under no obligation to be spokespersons for the government, but this is a matter of public health,” the Hall-of-Famer writes Rolling Stone in an e-mail. Abdul-Jabbar is especially disappointed in athletes of color: “By not encouraging their people to get the vaccine, they’re contributing to these deaths. I’m also concerned about how this perpetuates the stereotype of dumb jocks who are unable to look at verified scientific evidence and reach a rational conclusion.”

Abdul-Jabbar has, for the entirety of his basketball career, spoken with a level of forwardness and moral clarity that is oftentimes unmatched. That, once again, is the case here.

The Netflix live action edition of Cowboy Bebop has certainly looked the part so far, more or less. While Jurassic Park star Daniella Pineda has already fired back at critics of her look as Faye Valentine, for the most part fans of the legendary animated series have responded well to casting and the actual humans playing the parts.

So much of the show’s look and feel is iconic, including the original “Tank!” title sequence that features one of the more memorable scores in animation.

And now it’s clear just how serious Netflix is about hitting the same tone and look of the original. On Saturday, the streaming platform debuted the title credits for its live-action Cowboy Bebop that are essentially a shot-for-shot remake of the animated title sequence beloved by fans.

The music alone is a strong wave of nostalgia for fans of the original, which led to mostly relief from some eager to see how the show turns out. And while the live action title sequence is bound to disappoint some of the show’s biggest and most critical fans, it seems like the attention to detail is certainly here from Netflix. If you really need it, IGN put together a side-by-side comparison of the two so you can see just how close they are for yourself.

Those involved in the show, however, certainly think they’re on the right track. As Pineda said on Instagram on Saturday, “we came correct.”

The Ohio State Buckeyes fell behind early against the Akron Zips on Saturday night in Columbus, but then, things went more or less how you’d expect. Ohio State, despite playing without starting quarterback C.J. Stroud, started pouring it on, taking a 38-7 lead into a locker room at the half against their foes from the MAC.

There was, however, one pretty big way in which this game was unusual. According to reports from the stadium, senior Buckeyes linebacker K’Vaughn Pope appeared to end his tenure with the program in the middle of the game.

Apparently, Pope was unhappy with a decision made by Ohio State’s coaching staff, which led to him getting into it with people on the sideline and, eventually, being escorted to the locker room.

Perhaps this was simply a player wanting to cool off after a fracas on the sideline, but apparently, Pope went to the locker room, grabbed his phone, and started tweeting. In one post, he wished the rest of his teammates luck, and in a tweet that has since been deleted, he had a pretty stern message for his school.

Pope was a four-star recruit in the class of 2018, and had recored 19 tackles during his career as a Buckeye.

We already know when we’ll see the second season of The Witcher at this point, as the Netflix series based on a video game and book series officially returns in December. The official trailer arrived at WitcherCon earlier in the year, too, and fans of the series know a lot is on the horizon in Season 2.

The latest trailer came Saturday, served up as a “road” to Season 2 that features a quick recap of the first season’s events as well as some considerable training montage moments for Ciri. But Netflix also gave fans another taste on Saturday as part of its Tudum event — you know, the sound the app makes when you first log in — with a slew of announcements and another sneak peek of what we’ll see from Geralt and Ciri in a few months.

The clip is extremely brief, but shows Geralt waking a sleeping Ciri to tell her to prepare for trouble. She seems startled to say the least, as Geralt drinks in preparation for attackers while the young girl leaves him for whatever fight is ahead. The rest of the clip is mostly silent, with Geralt creeping slowly around a castle prepared for a fight.

While we didn’t learn much from it, the clip is certainly a tease of some big action. Another scene shared on Saturday offered a look at some of the big tensions that Geralt will have to navigate in Season 2 as he tries to protect Ciri from danger, as is his oath.

All that news also came alongside some revelations about other Witcher spinoff shows. Not only was The Witcher already given a third season by Netflix, that news came with a behind-the-scenes video that the streaming service dropped on Saturday of The Witcher: Blood Origin.

It’s a lot of small morsels of Witcher content on a day where Netflix went all-out with announcements, but we’re still a few months away from figuring out exactly what’s waiting for Geralt in those darkened hallways when Season 2 drops on December 17.