GoneTrending

Breaking Bad‘s “Ozymandias” was previously the only television episode with a perfect 10.0 user rating on IMDb (with good reason: it’s the best episode of Breaking Bad and, therefore, one of the best episodes of any show ever), but no more.

“Ozymandias” still retains its pristine score, but it’s joined by two episodes of another series: anime mega-hit Attack on Titan. Both season four’s “Assault,” which has already aired in Japan and will debut in the U.S. on Adult Swim’s Toonami block soon (it is available via Crunchyroll, however), and season three’s “Hero” have 10.0 ratings.

IMDb user ratings should be looked at with the same amount of skepticism as Netflix viewership numbers, but it’s still interesting to find an example of something that tens of thousands of internet strangers think is “perfect.” How often does that happen? For instance, “Ozymandias” was directed by Rian Johnson, who also directed The Last Jedi, which has a 90% rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes but only a 42% audience score (the critics are correct). But on IMDb, he’s 10 out of 10 would recommend. Speaking of Star Wars: three episodes of The Clone Wars, “Victory and Death, “Shattered,” and “The Phantom Apprentice,” have 9.9 ratings. The rest of the 9.9s include multiple episodes of Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and Attack on Titan, as well as individual episodes of Person of Interest (?), Chernobyl, and Mr. Robot.

The “Finding Frances” episode of Nathan for You is nowhere in the top-50, invalidating the entire list. But if you’re still interested, here it is.

If you aren’t exactly sure what’s happening with the Redditor-fueled GameStop (and AMC) mayhem, you’re not alone (that’s where The Daily Show‘s alternative to Margot Robbie might come in handy). The chaos has been sparking Wall Street anxiety for at least a week, and it all began when the flagging stock of GameStop (a brick and mortar operation that sells physical copies of games, which can more conveniently be streamed) began skyrocketing. The WallStreetBets Subreddit had led the charge and also sent AMC stock soaring in a move that might just save movie theaters.

Well, none of this sat too well with the Wall Street big boys, especially when the GameStop stock frenzy crashed a hedge fund that made a ton of money when Cyberpunk 2077 flopped. Days later, and GameStop was still soaring and even briefly topped $500 a share during early Thursday trading after another massive rally on Wednesday. Well, someone must have pressed hard for an end to the madness, or brokerages are growing nervous about retaliation or… some other financially punitive repercussion (by the more typically powerful traders or even the government).

This led to TD Americatrade temporarily restricting trading on both GameStop and AMC on Wednesday before thinking better of the move and reversing course with an apology (after a backlash). Well, this didn’t stop Robinhood Interactive Brokers from deciding to restrict GameStop trading on Thursday, which is an ironic move because it’s apparent that any claims of “market manipulation” (by Redditors) aren’t acknowledging how hedge funders (like those on Showtime’s Billions) already do this on the regular.

In any event, Robinhood boasts “Democratizing finance for all” as one of its slogans. The company holds itself out as a free-stock trading pioneer, and this 2016 tweet (“Let the people trade”) is now attracting a lot of attention.

All of this has led to justifiable responses (on Twitter) about the free market putting on the brakes because the wealthy are losing money due to this Subreddit/GameStop rally. People are angry as heck because, yes, the market is being manipulated again under the guise of halting market manipulation. It’s very circular, given that the GameStop rally began as a means to illustrate (and maybe even punish) those who profit big time from manipulating the market.

Even Fyre Fest co-founder Ja Rule has weighed in.

The Biden Administration has yet to step into this mess but is said to be “monitoring” the situation. As if Joe Biden didn’t already have enough to deal with this month, right? This isn’t over yet.

It’s easy to hazard a guess for why people don’t follow news about Wall Street: It makes us feel powerless in a million different ways all at once. When endlessly confusing financial instruments get filtered through infinite layers of elite cronyism and poured into a big old vat of government corruption, it’s no surprise that the general public is left disengaged. A feeling which, as Ryan Gosling says in The Big Short, Wall Street thrives on — making us think that “only they can do what they do; or, even better, for you to just leave them the fuck alone.”

Who can blame us for tuning out? It’s what literally everyone seems to want. Plus, it’s too painful to look.

We watched the government bailout banks while leaving homeowners to rot in ’08. In 2020, we saw friends, businesses, and entire communities decimated by a pandemic that has been (both inexplicably and quite predictably) good for the stock market and bad for the wealth gap (even worse for the racial wealth gap). So sure, we know on some deep level that Wall Street is screwing us, but we’d really rather not hear the bawdy details.

The chance to briefly fight off this antipathy to knowing what’s happening on Wall Street is part of what makes the Reddit-GameStop stock price saga so fun to follow. It’s full of chaotic energy, archetypical themes, and (while there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye) it seems like a plot we can track without too much effort (thanks to Trevor Noah in the bath). On paper, it’s Robin Hood vs. the greedy ruling class in both the literal and metaphorical senses (Robinhood is the name of a trading platform where much of the story has gone down and which has now turned heel by restricting trades on certain stocks).

It’s like a real-time episode of Billions where Bobby Axelrod gets the absolute screws put to him by a bunch of lone investors making memes on message boards. Pretty fun, while it lasts.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, who co-created Billions, is covering it for the Times. Michael Burry, played by Christian Bale in The Big Short, is the voice that helped spark original optimism in GameStop. At this rate, Adam McKay will own the rights to the r/WallStreetBets subreddit by the end of the week and Ben Mezrich will have a draft of a book turned in by February.

For those not yet following along, here are some Cliff’s Notes on the whole Reddit-GameStop story:

• In October, Redditors noticed that GameStop (GME) stock was being heavily shorted (people were betting on it to fail), with Melvin Capital, run by Gabriel Plotkin, holding a large short position. (Hedge Funds don’t have to share their short positions, though they can often be deduced and Plotkin had disclosed some of his.)
• Perhaps because Plotkin’s short positions seem to heavily feature nostalgic brands for internet natives (Bed, Bath, & Beyond and Express are also on his list), because shorting brick and mortar retail in a pandemic feels almost absurdly exploitive, or simply because they wanted to make money on undervalued prospects, Redditors on the popular forum r/WallStreetBets targeted those same companies (and others) as stocks to buy. (There was a solid case to be made, at that time, that the stocks being shorted were undervalued.)
• By buying call options and using platforms like Robinhood to purchase fractional shares, Redditors created a “short squeeze.” Shorts pay off when the price of a stock falls — if it goes up, the shorts incur negative value and anyone holding shorts has to pay daily interest on them and make sure they have the money to cover their positions.
• The price of GameStop stock trended upwards for a few months and spiked astronomically on Monday, as more and more Redditors got in on the action of artificially inflating a stock to stick it to the hedge funds that bought the original shorts.
• The short squeeze turned into a “gamma squeeze” on the hedge funds. (There is no upper limit of what you can lose with a short — if a stock you betted on going down keeps going up, you have to exit your position with a loss or find the money to hold it.) This forced Melvin Capital and other hedge funds to either dump their positions and take a bath or pay enormous fees in order to maintain their positions while getting squeezed.
• The internet rejoiced and Redditors urged one another to hold their positions as Melvin Capital got bailed out by other Wall Street goliaths. Melvin Capital publicly claimed to have exited their position — though Redditors aren’t buying it.
• Right now, GME stock is incredibly volatile but up around $400 per share. It was near $19 per share on NYE 2020.
• The SEC announced that they’re closely tracking how GameStop has been traded over the past week. Yesterday, hedge fund managers called for regulation — something they’re not in the habit of doing — very publicly. (The way Gamestop has been traded more closely resembles a momentum stock amplified by media coverage and an engaged populace than actual collusion.)
• Robinhood announced that they’re restricting trading on GameStop and other volatile stocks.

That’s… the gist. There’s a lot more to it. (This has all been a boon to the explainer economy, too.)

Just like any good episode of Billions, the subplots are still hazy and will take a while to become clear. There are probably a few “heists behind the heist” going on — whether that’s hedge funds making side bets or frontrunning by paying for information from Robinhood to buy stocks and resell them at a profit in a matter of nanoseconds, Melvin Capital allegedly planting an MSNBC story about dumping their position, or hedge funds who bought into the rise early allegedly seeding commenters on Redditor to keep the pump going.

The whole mess isn’t getting untangled anytime soon, that’s for sure. There have already been a few wild plot twists — like people gradually realizing that Robinhood was more villain (or profiteer) than hero in all this.

Even if determined Redditors holding GME stock ride this thing ’til the wheels fall off out of spite (“to the moon!” is their slogan), the stock price won’t be sustained over the long term (because GameStop is cooler than hedge funds think, but it’s not Google) and someone is going to pocket the cash when the bottom drops out. Hopefully, it’s some Redditors, but on some level, it’s also inevitably going to be Wall Street. We know that already, we’ve seen how every movie and TV show about corporate greed ends.

Brace yourself for a few title cards at the end of the eventual movie or series about the actual collusion that was going on between the big firms and Robinhood and a melancholy postscript that essentially says, “and they’re still doing it, right now.“

Nevertheless, a few billionaires are having a rough week and one that’s likely to get rougher if Redditors hold on and keep pushing, which they’re vowing to do. As Billions noted in its short squeeze plot arc, interest and fees are accumulated on short positions daily and can balloon quickly. So while victory might not be clear cut, it seems likely that some hedge fund investors will lose significant portions of their funny money and substantial credibility with corporate investors over this fiasco.

Maybe that wasn’t the point in the beginning, but a quick look at the current threads on r/WallStreetBets will tell you it’s sorta the point now. Certainly, the media is eager to celebrate these few glimmering days of feeling like David triumphed over Goliath. Plus some laughs at the expense of billionaires getting foiled by Redditors with names like /FartHammer6969.

By the time the dust truly settles this whole story will have returned to the realm of “Wall Street tales of greed that most of us don’t have the disposable time or interest to follow.” When the big reveal comes (financial reporter Alexis Goldstein lays out the biggest probable winners here), most folks will have tuned out already. Some celebrity will have said something dumb and the cultural conversation will move on.

Why? Partially because it’s so maddening to follow the financial world, but also because most Americans don’t own even a fraction of the shares traded on Wall Street. Sure, folks might hold some shares of a company via a mutual fund that’s part of a retirement package they can’t touch (where roughly 30% of US-owned stock shares are held), but with 40% of US corporate equity owned by foreign investors in 2019 and rich Americans gobbling up the lion’s share of what’s left, the amount of directly held stock by the bottom 95% of families is, according to data published Tuesday by the New York Times, in the 5% range.

Meaning 95% of the country isn’t really invested in the world of investing. But when it leads to wage stagnation or jobs slashed in favor of shareholder dividends or stock buybacks, they’re the ones who feel it the most. This is, again, what makes a Reddit revolt feels so cool (even when the story behind the story inevitably doesn’t end up being quite so tidy).

The best we can say for now is that it’s exciting as shit to see a small fraction of Wall Street’s underbelly exposed this week. The fact that the stock market is just rampant gambling in every sense (with American workers typically picking up the tab) is, gradually, becoming common knowledge. Moments of wild speculation and frenzy like this remind us: that’s pretty much all Wall Street does. This knowledge can potentially create a sea change around investing, in which rampant greed is checked.

At the very least, there are a lot of hedge fund managers who will have to also hedge their lust for money out of fear of being the next viral target.

Yesterday, Chamath Palihapitiya — a tech investor who often takes vocal positions against Wall Street’s excess, has lots of fans on r/WallStreetBets, and has now both made and donated money thanks to a GameStop position — said on MSNBC: “Just because you’re wrong doesn’t mean you get to change the rules.” It’s a great pull quote for this real-time Billions episode, if not 100% correct — in the past Hedge Funds and other big investors have been allowed to change the rules when proven wrong. Because while Hedge Funds absolutely treat investing like gamblers, they’re also — when conglomerated together — “the house.”

And one way or another, the house always wins. Robinhood restricting trading seems to be a harbinger of that.

Still, it’s hard not to be at least a little charmed by the Reddit-based investors who seem to know all of this and are nevertheless committed to seeing their line of action through. Whether they did it for the nostalgia, for the laughs, to troll big investors, or simply to get rich off a market opportunity just like everyone else who invests, for a few days they made everyone pay attention to just how broken the system is. And they absolutely infuriated everyone who has a stake in “business as usual” on Wall Street.

That, in itself, makes their made-for-TV/movie efforts a success.

About three years ago, I made a wish for more artists to livestream their concerts.

I was writing about the run of 13 shows performed in 2017 by the band Phish at Madison Square Garden, which were made available to watch live online. “Whenever I’m in the midst of following Phish on a ‘couch tour,’ I often find myself wishing that I could replicate this experience with other bands,” I said. In a sense this wish has come true, though strictly in a cursed, Monkey’s Paw kind of way. I was hoping for a future in which more bands made it possible for fans to engage with their live performances from the comfort of home, and to enhance this engagement by approaching their setlists in more creative and innovative ways. Certainly, I did not anticipate that a worldwide pandemic would completely level the concert industry and make livestreaming, for now, the only game in town.

Nevertheless, this is where we currently find ourselves. And, in spite of what some in the industry might want to believe, I don’t think this is a temporary stopgap. Even if concerts come back in some form later on this year — hardly an automatic proposition given the slow rollout of Covid vaccines — I suspect that livestreaming will continue to play a significant role in how fans experience “live” music, as it already has for years in the jam scene. Artists and platforms are just starting to figure out what works and doesn’t work in this sphere, both in terms of the technology as well as larger philosophical questions about how to replicate the sensation of an ineffable, in-person experience via a screen. Ultimately, livestream concerts exist in an unsettled DMZ between a concert and a more cinematic experience. The question is how to strike the right balance between presenting something that’s visually and musically exciting, and giving viewers the feeling of togetherness that no television show or movie can provide as well as actually rubbing shoulders with strangers in a club or theater.

Judging by my experience over the weekend with the new Bandsintown Plus livestream platform, this question will be especially tricky to navigate. Launched earlier this month, Bandsintown Plus — an offshoot of the site previously known mainly for concert listings, sort of like Pollstar for indie bands — is a subscription service in which more than 25 concerts per month by a range of acts are made available for $9.99. While the majority of the artists are up-and-comers with minimal name recognition, the site has booked a handful of indie-folk luminaries for exclusive shows, including Phoebe Bridgers, Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes, and Soccer Mommy.

Bridgers, Lenker, and Tweedy performed last week on consecutive nights, no doubt drawing some of the largest audiences to Bandsintown Plus in the platform’s young life. Immediately, many of the distinguishing features of Bandsintown Plus, both good and bad, were apparent. On the plus side, the concerts looked and sounded quite good, with practically no technical glitches in any of the concerts I watched. (As anyone who was viewed a lot of livestream concerts will tell you, this is no small feat.) The artists also presented something that went beyond a normal club or theater experience.

Bridgers played in a rehearsal room with frequent collaborator Ethan Gruska, reworking her songs to suit Gruska’s beautiful piano playing. Lenker performed at a house in the Minneapolis area, softly strumming stunning tunes from her recent solo record, Songs, as her grandmother painted a mural behind her. Tweedy was the only one to play with a full band, but his show also felt more intimate than usual, with both of his sons joining him. (The Tweedy progeny will be familiar to viewers of the family’s IG program The Tweedy Show, one of the more delightful examples of livestream music in the Covid era.)

I count myself as a fan of Bridgers, Lenker, and Tweedy. And yet during these performances I couldn’t help feeling, frankly, a little bored. It didn’t have anything to do with the music — I’ve seen all of these artists play live in person, in some cases multiple times. So, what was the problem? Why was this music I normally enjoy not translating?

For starters, some of the shows I saw on Bandsintown Plus were not actually live. No matter how good these not-live performances were, they didn’t have the nervous energy that is apparent during actual live performances, even when you’re watching at home. These canned gigs seemed doubly egregious given that Bandsintown Plus doesn’t archive performances — if you don’t show up at the scheduled start time, there is no going back and catching up with what you missed. If artists don’t have to be there on time, it seems fair to allow subscribers a window of at least 24 hours to view the shows they’ve paid for.

Another problem is that the performers themselves, in some cases, couldn’t help but point out how strange it is to perform under such circumstances. Much of the patter between songs reiterated this time and again, and as a viewer it was just deflating after a while. Yes, playing music in a mostly empty room to an unseen internet audience is definitely weird. But so is watching “live” music by yourself on a couch. Is it possible to at least briefly suspend our collective disbelief over reality not being generally crappy at the moment? We’re all trying to make do here.

But the biggest hurdle with livestream concerts in fact has nothing to do with the artists. When I think back to the livestream concerts I’ve enjoyed the most in recent months — The Hold Steady’s performances from the Brooklyn Bowl in December, Trey Anastasio’s autumn run of concerts at The Beacon Theatre — their shared attribute is the discernible presence of a virtual audience.

At The Hold Steady’s gigs, video screens were visible around the stage showing fans at home pounding beers and singing along to songs from all over the world. For the Trey Anastasio concerts, the Phish frontman frequently engaged with commenters watching at home on Twitch, addressing their comments as they scrolled on a nearby screen. Anastasio also had the benefit of a large and enthusiastic audience that live-tweeted all of his Beacon shows, which added to the feeling that this was an actual event and not a secondhand representation of an event.

People go to concerts because they love music, but they also are seeking community. You bond with those around you who love this thing as much as you do. This makes us all feel less alone in the world. For Bandsintown Plus and other platforms like it, this community-building aspect is crucial. And it requires more than just having a chat room scroll endlessly during the performance. (Chat rooms are magnets for some of the obnoxious people online, no matter the context. Most of us avoid them like a sketchy nightclub bathroom.) Of course, I have no doubt that the people involved in these services already know this, and I recognize that this is always easier said than done. The acts I’ve responded to most positively in the streaming realm benefit from fan communities that are already well established. Generating similar excitement for artists who are just starting to build fanbases is infinitely harder.

But it remains a necessity regardless. Now more than ever, we all need to feel connected to something. And so many livestream concerts, unfortunately, only enhance the feeling of isolation, reminding us that this is not what live music is supposed to be like. But we’re not alone, we just haven’t figured out the best ways to connect at these concerts yet.

Merely seeing other people Zooming into those Hold Steady shows had an unexpected affect on me; it made me forget myself for a while. I felt part of a group again, cracking open my own beer and joining in on the sing-along. That’s the power of live music, and it’s an ideal that all livestream concerts ought to pursue.

I have read every article about what’s happening with Reddit and GameStop and Wall Street, including our own, but I still understand only 10 perfect of what’s happening. It’s turning all of us into the “Pepe Silvia” meme. If only we had Margot Robbie in a bathtub to explain everything, like she did with mortgage bonds in The Big Short. Unfortunately, the actress is doing literally anything else, so you’ll have to settle for The Daily Show host Trevor Noah’s face superimposed on Robbie’s body. It’s the next best thing.

“Basically, there’s a group of people on Reddit who don’t use the stock market to invest, they use it to gamble,” Noah-as-Robbie said. “And, yeah, that’s what a lot of serious investors do, too, but these guys on Reddit are more honest about it and they love to troll the people who aren’t. So, there’s a store called GameStop that sells video games since games can be downloaded now. Which is why serious investors decided to short GameStop, which means to bet against it. But the Redditors are gamers who have a semi-ironic love for the store. So they started making memes encouraging each other to punish the serious people by buying worthless GameStop stocks.”

Are you beginning to understand? Good… Now, f*ck off. Watch the clip below.

It was another tough night for Bradley Beal and the Wizards on Wednesday, as they suffered their third straight loss, this time at the hands of the lowly Pelicans, who escaped with a 124-106 victory, giving Washington their seventh loss in their last 10 contests and ownership of the league’s worst record.

For Bradley Beal, it was another night of dubious distinctions, as the Wizards superstar remains the NBA leader in scoring at 34.4 points per game despite racking up the Ls, and with his 47-point explosion against New Orleans, passed Walt Bellamy for the most consecutive 40-point games (10) that ended in a loss.

Beal, who’s been the subject of persistent trade rumors since before the season, didn’t try to hide his frustration when speaking to reporters after the game. He had a blunt response for the poor reporter tasked with asking him the most obvious question about his mental state, yet Beal also appeared to use the opportunity to reiterate his commitment to the team.

Omg.

Reporter: “Are you frustrated?”

Bradley Beal: “Is the sky blue?”

— Fred Katz (@FredKatz) January 28, 2021

Here is the single most important Bradley Beal quote from his postgame session today.

Amidst all the trade talk, he said this:

“It’s tough. We wanna win. I wanna win. This is why I stayed. I wanna win (here). I figure this is the place I can get it done.”

— Fred Katz (@FredKatz) January 28, 2021

Outside of Beal’s Herculean efforts, little has gone right for the Wizards this season, and Beal didn’t even pretend to know the solution for how to repair things going forward as Washington tries to find a way to salvage as season that has quickly gone south.

Bradley Beal on how to solve the issues for the 3-11 Wizards: “I swear, if I had that answer, I think I would be a genius, probably. I think if we all had that answer, we’d all be blurting it out right now, but I don’t have that answer.” pic.twitter.com/rFMd03nLDY

— Fred Katz (@FredKatz) January 28, 2021

And despite his comments, Beal will continue to be at the center of trade rumors until the March trade deadline, and it may not be his decision if the front office decides to seriously entertain the offers that are certain to start pouring in, given the rapidly deteriorating situation.

Wednesday marked four years since Migos dropped their third album, Culture II, and to celebrate the anniversary, the Atlanta rap group shared a new behind-the-scenes trailer. It gives their supporters a look into the creation of their upcoming album, called, of course, Culture III. Viewers can see the trio recording music in Atlanta and at an L.A. mansion often referred to as “The Compound.”

“We’re just young men trying to grow,” Quavo says in the trailer. “Right now, we’re at a point in our life we’re allowed to sit down and build and start from scratch.” Elsewhere, Offset took a moment to share how the long period between Culture II and Culture III benefited the group. “We were absent for a reason though,” he said. “How we were putting so much music out, you could flood the market. With everything going on, I’ve never been so political in my life. I got out my first time to vote this year. And all that happens from just seeing everything happening in the world.”

The trailer arrives after Quavo revealed Culture III would arrive at some point this year. He shared the news during an appearance on The Etcs podcast co-hosted by Kevin Durant and former Uproxx writer Eddie Gonzalez. “We done with the album, we just waiting on 2021, man so everything can crack up,” he said. “I just want to be with the people,” he said. “I want to touch the people and that’s what we gon’ do at the top of the year.”

You can watch the Culture III trailer above.

Two of the NBA’s top teams collided on Wednesday night, as the Lakers and Sixers squared off in Philadelphia, with the Sixers sneaking away with a 107-106 win after nearly blowing a 14-point lead in the second half. It took a Tobias Harris jumper with 2.4 seconds remaining to salvage what was shaping up to be an ugly fourth-quarter collapse.

Harris had 24 points and seven rebounds on the night, but it was Joel Embiid who led the way for Philly as he continued his streak of dominant play, finishing with 28 points, six rebounds, four assists, and a pair of blocks. But the big man also had a scary moment in the second half as he went up for a layup and came down hard on his hip.

Upon review, it appeared LeBron shoved Embiid while he was in the air and was subsequently hit with a Flagrant 1.

Joel Embiid was visibly in pain and went down hard on his back after being fouled.

LeBron was called for a flagrant 1 and Embiid stayed in the game. pic.twitter.com/LSOVsgVy5f

— ESPN (@espn) January 28, 2021

Any situation where a player gets hit in the air like this is taken seriously by the officials and is sometimes grounds for Flagrant 2 and automatic ejection. This, of course, is at the discretion of the officiating crew, and in this instance, they ruled it a Flagrant 1 and allowed LeBron to remain in the game.

Afterwards, Embiid sounded off on the play, claiming that LeBron received preferential treatment in this instance and that, if the roles were reversed, he believes he would’ve been hit with a Flagrant 2 and ejected.

Embiid on the LeBron flagrant: “You look at it, that’s a very dangerous play, and I guarantee if it was me I would have probably been ejected from the game.”

— Kyle Neubeck (@KyleNeubeck) January 28, 2021

There’s obviously a lot of gray area in these incidences, and the wording in the rule book certainly leaves things open to interpretation as to what constitutes “unnecessary and excessive” contact. Regardless, Embiid obviously didn’t appreciate what was inarguably a dangerous foul on LeBron’s part and something he’ll surely be feeling in the morning.

The Washington Wizards were a bad team to start the season, and things have only gotten worse with injuries and being the team that, thus far, has been hit hardest in terms of sheer number of positive COVID-19 tests. However, this isn’t exactly new territory for Washington, which for the past two seasons has gone 57-97 following five straight seasons at .500 or better.

Bradley Beal has carried the load these past two and a half seasons, as John Wall has dealt with various injuries (and then was dealt to Houston right before he returned) and the Wizards have failed to build a competent roster around the All-Star guard as he enters his prime. Beal recommitted to the Wizards in 2019 on a two-year max extension to quiet trade rumors, in hopes that the franchise would put things together and he could lead their path back to the playoffs. However, that has yet to happen, and the apparent frustration of Beal is not just understandable but justified, as the consistent losing has clearly taken a toll on him.

It hasn’t impacted what he does on the court, as he currently leads the NBA in scoring at 34.4 points per night (and that was before Wednesday’s 47-point outburst in New Orleans) a full four points clear of Kevin Durant, and is doing so on career-best efficiency, shooting 48.3 percent from the field. Those are preposterous numbers, particularly given the lack of help around him and, as such, the immense attention he receives from opposing defenses, but his monstrous output simply can’t push the Wizards over the hump.

On Wednesday, he had 47 points and six assists in a 124-106 loss to the scuffling Pelicans, as it was him and a rag-tag group that went to New Orleans — Garrison Mathews was the second-leading scorer for Washington with 15 off the bench.

That performance in another loss gave Beal a special spot in dubious NBA history, breaking a tie with Walt Bellamy for the most consecutive losses when putting up 40 points.

Beal’s face on the bench — which, late game candids of Beal on the bench have become a go-to for producers of Wizards broadcasts — told the story, as did this tweet from his wife, Kamiah Adams-Beal.

The trade rumors surrounding Beal have been rather constant for some time, and he has yet to indicate publicly that he wants out, although you’d be hard pressed at this point to find anyone who would blame him for such a proclamation. Still, one has to think that the phones will be ringing with serious and strong offers for the star guard as February rolls on and the March trade deadline approaches because the entire hoops world can see that he is a star withering away on an aimless team, tasked with a Sisyphean effort each night of trying to push the boulder that is the Wizards up a hill where the top can never be reached.

The Philadelphia 76ers were in control for almost the entirety of Wednesday night’s showdown with the Lakers, but in the closing minutes, L.A. erased what was an 11-point deficit to take a 106-105 lead with 12 seconds to play.

The play they dialed up for their go-ahead bucket was a beauty, as they had LeBron James come get the ball from Dennis Schröder, who then went to the corner to set a screen for Anthony Davis, forcing Joel Embiid and Danny Green to communicate and navigate an inverted guard-center screen, which they were unable to do, as Davis cut to the hoop for the uncontested layup.

That was the culmination of a rather incredible run, sparked by Alex Caruso’s energy for L.A. and some timely shots from Schröder and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and some disastrous offensive play from the Sixers. However, on their final possession, Philadelphia was able to find the bucket they needed as Tobias Harris took the reins and got to his spot underneath the left elbow for a pull-up jumper to take the lead with 2.4 seconds left.

The Lakers had called their last timeout to set up the AD go-ahead bucket, so they were unable to advance the ball and Joel Embiid was able to force Davis into the halfcourt scoop shot to preserve the win that should’ve been much easier than it was.

Joel Embiid continued his dominance in the game with 28 points, six rebounds, and four assists, out-dueling Davis who finished the night with 23 points and eight boards. LeBron James was the reason Philly could never fully get detached from L.A., as he had 34 points, seven assists, and six rebounds on the night. But it was Harris’ 24 points and Ben Simmons putting together a 17-point triple-double that made the difference for the Sixers in getting a big win over an L.A. team that had yet to lose a road game this season.

The Lakers have seemed determined to see how poorly they can play while still winning this season, and they certainly tried to pull out an absolute theft on Wednesday. Harris’ jumper put an end to that comeback effort, and the team that should have won did, but the end of that game showed why L.A. will always have a chance and the area where the Sixers still have work to do. The Lakers defense late in games is tremendous, and they have two closers in Davis and LeBron surrounded by decent at least shooters. Philly, meanwhile, has to find ways to get some easy buckets in the halfcourt, as the offense looked like they were pulling teeth in the final minutes when the Lakers ratcheted up the pressure.

Still, a win is a win, and the Sixers get a big feather in their cap as they move to 13-6, while L.A. drops to 14-5, likely to fall behind Utah to second in the West by the end of the night.