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Wednesday’s NBA Summer League tilt between the Miami Heat and the Memphis Grizzlies was notable for many reasons. Grizzlies rookie Ziaire Williams had a strong game, connecting on four three-pointers, and returnees like Desmond Bane and Xavier Tillman showcased their intriguing skill sets. For the Heat, big man Omer Yurtseven was tremendous, scoring 23 points and grabbing 11 rebounds, and DeJon Jarreau put pressure on the opposition with 14 points and 10 assists. The star of the day was Heat guard Max Strus, though, and that star only rose in the final seconds.

While it wasn’t completely unprecedented in Summer League history, this particular contest went to “sudden death.” That may seem strange in basketball but, considering the exhibition nature of Summer League games in Las Vegas, the NBA likes to keep the overtime periods short, with a two-minute allotment in the first extra frame and “first to score wins” format in double overtime. Strus, understanding the rules, gathered the tip-off and essentially walked into a game-winner without so much as a false step.

Strus’ long-range connection won the game for Miami but, even before that, he was tremendous. The former DePaul wing finished with a game-high 32 points, including seven three-pointers, and he added nine rebounds for good measure.

The 25-year-old Strus was a rotation player for the Heat at times last season, so this kind of performance doesn’t emerge completely from left field. Still, it was nice to see him getting buckets from beginning to end, and anytime there is a “sudden death” game-winner in the basketball world, it can be described as momentous.

Since 2017’s A Love Letter To You, Trippie Redd has managed to release an album a year. Last year saw Pegasus, but so far he hasn’t released a follow-up. With 2021 just months away from coming to a close, the rapper has been working hard to keep the streak going. And now, at long last, he let fans know this year wouldn’t break it.

On Wednesday, Trippie announced August 20 as the release date for his next album, Trip At Knight. He also unveiled its tracklist, which will feature 18 songs and guest appearances from Drake, Lil Uzi Vert, Playboi Carti, Juice WRLD, Lil Durk, Polo G, Sofaygo, Ski Mask The Slump God, XXXTentacion, BabyFace Ray, Sada Baby, and Icewear Vezzo.

With Trip At Knight just a little over a week away from arriving, fans can revisit the album’s lead singles, “Miss The Rage” and “Holy Smokes.”

You can check out the artwork for Trip At Knight above and the tracklist for the album below.

1. “Molly Heart”
2. “MP5” Feat. Sofaygo
3. “Betrayal” Feat. Drake
4. “Finish Life”
5. “Holy Smokes” Feat. Lil Uzi Vert
6. “Super Cell”
7. “Miss The Rage” Feat. Playboi Carti
8. “Supernatural”
9. “Demon Time” Feat. Ski Mask The Slump God
10. “Matt Hardy 999” Feat. Juice WRLD
11. “Vibes”
12. “New Money”
13. “Danny Phantom” Feat. XXXTentacion
14. “Space Time”
15. “Baki”
16. “iPhone”
17. “Rich MF” Feat. Polo G & Lil Durk
18. “Captain Crunch” Feat. BabyFace Ray, Sada Baby & Icewear Vezzo

Trip At Knight is out 8/20 via 10K Projects.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Earlier this year, videos surfaced of Adam Sandler putting on a pickup basketball show in Long Island. This wasn’t the first time that Sandler was captured playing basketball in an interesting setting and, by all accounts, the actor seems enjoys the game quite a bit. In fact, the plot of “Uncut Gems” centers heavily on the NBA, with Kevin Garnett making an extended appearance alongside Sandler and putting in tremendous work.

With all of that said, legendary actor James Caan shared a tweet on Wednesday that created quite a stir, and it focused on a shirt that his assistant owns.

As you can see, the shirt has Sandler in three different outfits playing basketball, all under the banner of his name as if he was an NBA superstar. Caan, who is 81 years old and known for an extensive catalog of work, seems genuinely confused by the shirt’s existence, as many would. His only explanation being that his assistant is “from Cleveland and he’s Polish,” though that doesn’t necessarily paint the clearest picture.

If nothing else, we need answers for this. How was the shirt procured? Who made it? What was the idea behind it? Does the assistant have a particular fascination for Sandler? At any rate, this shirt is also fantastic, and we will keep you updated as this situation develops. This is mostly because we really want it to continue developing.

With Halo Infinite approaching, there’s a lot of excitement over the new features that have been teased for the game. One of those features will be the inclusion of bots, which will be a helpful way for new players to learn the Halo multiplayer experience. They’re designed to mimic how actual players would play Halo, but a lot of the players who got to experience the recent tech demo for Infinite said the bots could be pretty brutal at times.

These same players also saw the bots doing something else that caught everyone a little off guard. Anyone that’s played Halo knows that when someone defeats you in combat, they have two choices: run past you and move on with their day, or proceed to walk on top of your body and crouch constantly. Since this is Halo, the majority of players choose the latter. Well, because the bots are supposed to mimic humans, there were apparently reports from players of the bots doing exactly this, with a few videos confirming it.

However, the developers at 343 Industries have already confirmed this is a bug and not a feature. The bots are meant to teach players how to play the game, not humiliate them for the times they aren’t good enough, and these clips are actually from a bug where the A.I. gets confused after a jump. A dev explained more about this bug to EuroGamer:

“We never want to punish learning, especially not by having bots engage in behaviours that a player could feel is exclusionary. For that reason, we don’t have explicit programming that tells the bots to teabag or taunt you in any way.”
…
“[The bug] caused bots to fail to successfully jump and clamber on the edge of stairs or ramps. A bot’s feet would leave the ground very briefly, then play a landing animation when they failed the jump, and they’d get stuck in an animation loop that could look like crouching rapidly. If that happened to be observed shortly after a kill, or near a player’s body, it can definitely feel like an intentional behaviour. In reality, the bot was just struggling to go up the stairs.

Video games should be enjoyable to everyone and bots are a learning tool. For someone who has never played Halo before, the idea of getting taunted the entire time isn’t very fun, and the only thing it would do is make them want to turn the game off and never jump into actual multiplayer.

J.R. Smith was last in the NBA during the Bubble, where he was on the bench for the Los Angeles Lakers as they won a title. Now, he’s going to college and may play a different sport.

In an interview he gave to the PGA Tour’s official website, the 35-year-old Smith revealed that he is enrolling to take classes at North Carolina AT&T University and pursue a degree in liberal studies. Smith also said that he may play golf for the school’s men’s team once the NCAA sorts out his eligibility. He is supposed to begin classes in a week.

North Carolina AT&T is an HBCU located in Greensboro, North Carolina. Per the article, he says he decided on going back to school after talking to Ray Allen while both were in the Dominican Republic on vacation and Chris Paul, who is currently working on his college degree at another HBCU, Winston-Salem State. Smith went straight to the NBA out of high school, so he never played in college or took any classes. He’s also a 5 handicap golfer, has been golfing for over a decade, and co-hosts his own golf podcast that has featured guests like Allen.

“Golf is one of those games that has you feeling really high and or can bring you down to your knees and humble you,” Smith said in the interview. “And to have that feeling and knowing that all of the game’s pretty much on my own hands and I don’t have to worry about teammates to pass the ball and receiving passes and playing defense so, I can play my game and just have fun.”

While it might seem a stretch to compare an imminent super hero blockbuster to a 90s cult-classic comedy, it’s exactly what Michael Keaton is doing. In an interview for the YouTube channel Jake’s Takes, Keaton revealed that working on the upcoming DC movie The Flash strangely reminded him of working on one of his former movies: Duplicity.

According to Keaton, Duplicity’s story — which follows a father who creates clones of himself in order to keep up with his hectic life — shares a lot of similarities with 2022’s The Flash. The actor then went on to say he feels a lot of the challenges he faced while filming Duplicity, such as having to play different versions of himself, are seemingly the same ones Barry Allen star Ezra Miller has incurred while on set:

I mean just did The Flash and there’s a similarity in how – I don’t want to give too much away – but how he has to play against himself and with himself. And we were talking about the difficulty of making multiplicity and the challenge.

While it might seem a strange pull, what Keaton’s saying actually makes perfect sense considering everything we know about the upcoming DC film. It’s been confirmed for some time that The Flash will be the DCCU’s take on the iconic comic book series Flashpoint, a story in which Barry Allen must merge three separate timelines into one in order to save the universe… s.

Honestly, and Flashpoint plot aside, just Keaton’s involvement in the film alongside Ben Affleck’s Batman makes it seem as if there are going to be alternate realities and versions of other superheroes — heroes such as Miller’s Flash — aplenty. While the abundance of Batman movies makes for quite a few Batman variants to pepper in the film, it wouldn’t be shocking at all to hear that Miller will be playing his own counterparts in a very Duplicity-esque fashion seeing as The Flash has had much less prominence in the film. Only time will tell if our speculations are correct, but we’re pretty certain at least in some reality they are.

Jeopardy!, America’s brainiest game show, is currently experiencing a bona fide champion run, with grad student Matt Amodio killing it for over two weeks straight, with no end in sight. He could be one of the all-time greats! Sadly he’s not been the top news out of the long-running program. That would be the total fiasco that has been the showrunners’ attempts to finally find a replacement for longtime host Alex Trebek, who passed away in November. And after the latest development, one of its biggest champs had the perfect, most devastating take.

To recap: Since Trebek’s passing, the show has seen a revolving door of guest hosts. Many assumed this was their chance to test out a permanent replacement. A lot of people loved LeVar Burton. Even Aaron Rodgers got great notices. But after all that they wound up going with Mike Richards, one of the show’s executive producers. A huge pushback ensued, and not only because he was hardly anyone’s top pick; there’s also his involvement in some lawsuits with previous shows to which he’s been attached.

But on Wednesday, Richards was officially named permanent host. There was more, though: There would be a Jeopardy! off-shoot, which would be lorded over by actually popular guest host Mayim Bialik. This is the news that seems to have irked show legend James Holzhauer.

“Also new for next season: contestants can submit two Final Jeopardy responses in case the first one causes public backlash,” tweeted the show’s second-highest-ever earner, and the third-highest in game show history.

Two years back, Holzhauer spent 33 games on the show. That’s incredibly impressive, though it’s still less than half of the run owned by Ken Jennings, who reigned over a whopping 75 episodes back in 2004. Speaking of which, Jennings also weighed in the Jeopardy! host fracas, albeit a bit more lightly.

After all that, Jeopardy! addicts will be gifted with not one but two shows. Still, as Holzhauer implied, it’s better to simply get it right the first time.

While Bubbles might be “the joy and the laughter” and Buttercup is certainly toughest fighter,” the brainy Blossom is first-and-foremost the leader of the crime-fighting trio known as The Powerpuff Girls, and it seems like it’d be pretty damn hard to make a show about them without her. Unfortunately for the CW, this is currently the position they are in. According to a Variety report, Agents of SHIELD star Chloe Bennet has reportedly left the upcoming live-action series. Bennet’s departure comes as a result of the CW efforts to completely rework the show, which ultimately led to delays and scheduling conflicts for the actress.

However, Bennet leaving is merely the latest in a series of production nightmares for the show. The Powerpuff Girl live-action series — reportedly titled Powerpuff– faced major issues earlier this year when the pilot script seemingly leaked on Twitter and was met with heavy criticism and mockery, which is pretty understandable based on this rumored exert that’s still making the rounds:

The script leaks for this Powerpuff Girls reboot are the worst thing I’ve read this month pic.twitter.com/I7CrPewGc4

— Xavier’s Online (@xaviersonline) May 25, 2021

While the CW never confirmed or denied the leak, studio chairman and CEO Mark Pedowitz ultimately came forward and stated the current trajectory and tone of the series was “a miss” and confirmed the network was currently rewriting it. Prior to the rewrites, the show was intended to premiere this fall. Instead, however, the CW has confirmed they will spend the time looking for a new star to replace Bennet.

As of right now, Bubbles star Dove Cameron and Buttercup actress Yana Perrault are still attached to Powerpuff. However, Variety claims that Cameron, Perrault, and several of the show’s other cast members are all still in “talks” with the network and could possibly leave as well, seeing as how delayed this whole process has been. Despite all this uncertainty, we do know that Heather Regnier and Diablo Cody are still aboard the project as its writers and Regnier, Cody, Kiley, Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter and David Madden will all be executive producing. Here’s hoping things start coming together quickly for Powerpuff and a new Blossom steps up ready to add some “sugar, spice, and everything nice” to the series. It truly needs it at this point.

DeMar DeRozan’s trade to the Chicago Bulls became official on Wednesday. While the move was reported a little more than a week ago while DeRozan was still technically an unrestricted free agent, but now, all the various hurdles have been cleared and the sign-and-trade that will net him $85 million over three years is all done.

It’s a fascinating move, as DeRozan is the cherry on top of what has been an extremely active Bulls offseason — in addition to the former San Antonio Spurs standout, Chicago has worked hard to bolster its frontcourt by bringing in Lonzo Ball and Alex Caruso. And to his credit, DeRozan seems pretty happy about his new digs, as he responded to the move becoming official by posting the iconic intro video that played before the starters were announced for the Michael Jordan-era Bulls.

The video still is, and always will be, the coolest thing that has ever existed. Anyway, thanks to Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports, we also learned DeRozan’s jersey number in Chicago — with the No. 10 that he’s worn throughout his career retired by the franchise, DeRozan will pull a Spinal Tap and turn things up to 11.

There is legitimate buzz around the Bulls doing something this year following an offseason that featured a number of win-now moves, with DeRozan right at the center of everything.

Over the last week FX has been slowly doling out teases for Impeachment, the third season of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story. But so far, in its debut poster and teaser, we’ve only seen its main character — Beanie Feldstein’s Monica Lewinsky, whose affair with Bill Clinton comprises this next stretch of the series — from the back. That changes with its second teaser, which finally gives us a look, albeit a darkened one, at the actress’ face, complete with that iconic ‘do.

The ad shows two figures walking down a White House hallway, which is soon taken over with psychedelic imagery. (It was the ‘90s, man.) We don’t see their faces till the end, but on the soundtrack we hear Feldstein’s Lewinsky confiding in Sarah Paulson’s Linda Tripp — the woman who would take her affair with the then-president public, inciting a firestorm and making Clinton the first impeached president since Andrew Johnson, 130 years prior.

“Tell me everything,” Paulson’s Tripp tells Lewinsky after she begins confessing that she’s been canoodling with someone in power. The infamous blue dress soon comes up, leading Tripp to tell her co-worker, “It would be smart to keep that uncleaned in your possession.”

By the end, Feldstein’s Lewinsky, her face finally revealed, says something eerily prescient: “My life is over.”

For those keeping track, we’ve now seen the show’s version of Lewinsky and Tripp. We still haven’t seen Billy Eichner’s Matt Drudge, Edie Falco’s Hillary Clinton, nor Clive Owen’s Bill. (We also haven’t seen Cobie Smulder’s Ann Coulter, but probably because she only recently replaced Betty Gilpin, who had to vamoose over a scheduling conflict.)

Impeachment begins its 10-episode run on November 2, on FX. You can watch the teaser in the video above.

(Via Deadline)