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MINNEAPOLIS — Devin Booker reaffirmed what has been a continual problem for the Phoenix Suns, which resurfaced in the second half of Tuesday’s Game 2 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves at Target Center.

“My frustration is just within the team,” Booker said after the 105-93 defeat. “We need to execute. We play well when we’re playing and then we need to stick together once things turn bad. We’ve done that throughout the season. Something that has to be corrected.

Down 2-0, the sixth-seeded Suns will look to get back in the series in Friday’s Game 3 at Footprint Center in Phoenix against No. 3 seed Minnesota. Game time is 7:30 p.m.

“Just talking to each other, holding each other accountable,” Booker later said. “We’re all trying to fight out there and so far this series, once it has turned, we’ve kind of separated instead of being together and that’s everybody, top to bottom. We got to figure it out.”

Bradley Beal and Suns coach Frank Vogel had a heated exchange during a timeout in the fourth quarter that both addressed after Game 2.

Q: Was that a heat-of-the-moment type of thing?

Vogel: “Yeah. Just talking through the game.”

“It wasn’t between us,” Beal said. “It was about what was going on in the game. Our efforts as a team. It wasn’t nothing between me and Coach.”

Beal later was asked about the exchange as the Suns trailed by as many as 19 points in the fourth.

“It was not between us two,” Beal said. “It was just kind of like what was going on in the game. Refs. Our flow. Our defense was bad and I’m like, ‘What are we doing?’ We’re good.”

Beal said the Suns have had their share of “ups and downs” when it comes to having mental toughness through difficult stretches this season.

“We’re human beings,” Beal said. “Everything is not always going to be perfect, but we work through it. I think we’ve been a lot better than where we have been for sure in terms of just working it out, talking it out. Just holding everybody accountable. That’s the biggest thing. Once we do that, we know we can snap out of it, but nobody is going to do it but us.”

The Suns had a stretch in the second half where Kevin Durant, Jusuf Nurkic, Vogel, Booker and Beal each had words with the referees.

“We didn’t keep our composure,” Vogel said.

Vogel wound up drawing a technical foul with Phoenix down 13 points with 5:17 left in the game.

“We can’t let the refs distract our focus,” Vogel said. “The refs didn’t beat us. The T-Wolves did. We got some bad calls, but that happens every game. It can happen both ways, but we have to be locked in and we can’t let that distract our focus. When they’re scoring on us and we’re not getting the right stops, we can not be organized offensively. We had too many possessions like that.”

The Suns have scored fewer than 100 points in each game of this series as they managed only 95 in Saturday’s 25-point meltdown. The Suns never had back-to-back games all season in which they didn’t at least reach the century mark.

“Their physicality tarnishes our ability to get into our sets faster,” Beal said. “I think they just do a really good job of just denying K, denying Book, they’re being physical with them. Ant (Anthony Edwards) is picking me up full (court). They’re just making us work before we even get into our sets. They do a good job of it, but we’ve got to be better.”

‘Be legendary’:It’s time for Phoenix Suns’ Devin Booker to channel Kobe Bryant’s voice

3rd quarter, turnover troubles

The Suns have had two bad third quarters that have greatly contributed to losing Game 1 and Game 2.

Game 1: Minnesota closed the quarter on a 21-5 run to take a 92-72 lead going into the fourth.

Game 2: Phoenix led 63-60 before yielding a 17-4 run to trail 77-67 with 1:14 left in the third.

“We’ve got to figure that out,” Durant said.

Turnovers continue to plague the Suns as they are last among the 16 playoff teams in turnovers per game and points allowed off turnovers.

Game 1: Suns committed 15 turnovers that led to 23 Minnesota points. Durant had a team-high five turnovers.

Game 2: Suns committed 20 turnovers that led to 31 Minnesota points. Booker had a team-high six turnovers.

“We’ve got to handle their pressure better,” Vogel said. “I thought we found some things in the first half that worked really well in terms of our movement and pass-and-cut offense. We didn’t sustain it when they went on runs. We didn’t stay locked into that plan. Had too many lost possessions because of it, but we’ve had issues with that throughout the course of the year of taking care of the basketball.”

The Suns also lost Grayson Allen for a second straight game in the third quarter with a right ankle sprain. The X-rays were negative after he rolled it in Game 2 landing on T-Wolves point guard Mike Conley’s foot after trying to block his shot from behind.

Allen is day-to-day as the Suns didn’t practice Wednesday. The NBA’s top 3-point shooter in the regular season has scored a total of seven points in the series, shooting 1-of-5 from 3.

“Got to see what the next two days look like,” Allen said when asked about the chances of him playing Game 3.

The Suns did come out of Game 2 with a handful of positives they hope carry over into Game 3.

They limited Anthony Edwards to 15 points on 3-of-12 shooting in Game 2 after he erupted for 33 points in Game 1 and Karl-Anthony Towns had only 12 points Tuesday.

“The defensive plan was good, the defensive adjustments I like,” Vogel said. “I would run back the defensive side of this game again.”

However, Jaden McDaniels got loose in scoring a playoff career-high 25 points, going 2-of-4 from deep, to lead the Timberwolves.

“We respect him, but they got players that shift the defense and he did a great job driving at closeouts,” Durant said about the 23-year-old McDaniels, who averaged 10.5 points in the regular season and 9.8 for his career. “It’s a long closeout when you’re coming from the other side of the floor. That got him going making 3s, too.”

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Messages to Suns’ fans

The Suns did allow just 105 points, 15 fewer than they gave up in Game 1, and led by as many as eight points in the first half Tuesday.

“I think defensively, that’s going to be good enough to beat these guys,” Vogel said. “Offensively, we made some adjustments philosophically how we want to attack these guys and how we want to attack their pressure. A lot of it looked really good. Just didn’t sustain it in the second half.”

The Minnesota fans chanted “Wolves in 4! Wolves in 4!” in the fourth quarter of Game 2, something Beal brought up without even being asked about that.

“You can tell their energy,” Beal said. “It’s up to us to go out, get it done and making sure we’re on the same page collectively moving forward. Granted we got two days to get it right, but they’re not going to stop. They’re going to continue to be aggressive, continue to push the envelope the way they have and we have to respond. We haven’t responded yet.”

Beal believes the Suns have been pressing so far in the series and will “settle down” back home in Phoenix. Booker and Durant were both asked to give a message to Suns fans.

Booker: “Don’t count us out. It’s a series for a reason.”

Durant: “Can’t give up on us right now. We need them more than anything. I know it’s been a disappointing couple of games, even the season for the fans, but we need you more than ever now. Coming back home for Game 3.”

The Suns dropped Game 1 and 2 at eventual NBA champion Denver in last year’s Western Conference semifinals before returning home to take Game 3 and 4 to even the series.

Vogel is confideng this year’s team can do the same against the T-Wolves.

“We’ve got a great team,” Vogel said. “We’ve shown that throughout stretches. We’ve had our bumps in the road as you would expect with a group that’s been put together in Year 1. We’ve had our bumps in the road. It hasn’t been an easy run for us, but through those bumps in the road, we’ve responded and gotten better from that and we’ve played some of our best basketball down the stretch. The first time going through it in the playoffs, a little adversity. We’ll handle it and we’ll get better from it. So I’m very confident what our games are going to look like in Game 3 and Game 4.”

There aren’t any Bulls players in Indianapolis this weekend for the NBA’s just-past-mid-season Super Bowl knockoff party and fashion show. It’s no longer the sleepy Midwest crossroads city often referred to as Naptown, which actually came about less as an insult for a lack of activities than just a nickname drawn from a syllable.

Indy has been rockin’ for the NBA this weekend, but it’s not about to have the effect on Bulls history that it did the last time the NBA parked there for a party 39 years ago.

Because Indianapolis, the game then in the cavernous football Hoosier Dome, was the site of Michael Jordan’s first All-Star game, and if not one of the most discussed NBA All-Star games of all time, it was probably the most important All-Star game for Bulls franchise history.

That Jordan inaugural 1985 All-Star game became the famous “Freeze-Out” game when NBA stars, supposedly led by Chicago native Isiah Thomas, allegedly kept the ball away from the super popular rookie Jordan in an attempt to embarrass him and demonstrate that he’d have to wait his turn behind the stars of the day, like Magic Johnson, Julius Erving, George Gervin, Larry Bird, Moses Malone, and, of course, Thomas.

It’s the stuff of NBA legend, and it almost certainly didn’t happen the way they said then. Still, you don’t want to ignore a good conspiracy as we see so often these days.

But what the events and whispers produced was the beginning of the Jordan/Thomas and Bulls/Pistons rivalries that were among the most intense and brutal perhaps in NBA history, and more importantly for the Bulls it began in Jordan the career long chase for slights and motivations that came to define his competitive nature and likely was one of the main reasons Jordan became the on-court killer that he did. And with that his unique refuse-to-lose ethic that pushed him to become one of the biggest winners in league history and regarded as likely the greatest player ever in the NBA.

After all, that wasn’t the Jordan in college, who did make a game winning championship shot, but who willingly deferred to better known teammates and never averaged more than 20 points in a college season, 17.7 combined for his three at the University of North Carolina.

But just a few days after that All-Star game in which Jordan scored seven points, the same as starting East center Moses Malone who played more than Jordan and during the game little notice was paid, the Bulls opened the post All-Star sprint with a home game against Isiah’s Pistons.

A fiery, focused and forceful Jordan scored 49 points with 15 rebounds, five assists and four steals in a 139-126 Bulls overtime win. Only beside the point—or points—no Bulls player even attempted a three-point shot in the game. Teammates recalled an angry, almost frothing Jordan they hadn’t seen before. Though many would see it since and come to regret it in legions of stories about payback after payback.

And it all began that Sunday afternoon in Indianapolis.

Though first some history about the overall significance of that weekend in Bulls lore.

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Michael Jordan actually should have been representing his home team Indiana Pacers.

In the all-time draft gaffes category one of the top prizes goes to the Portland Trailblazers, who had the No. 2 pick in the 1984 NBA draft and selected center Sam Bowie. It wasn’t a huge ‘What!’ at the time since the Trailblazers had a year before drafted All-American shooting guard Clyde Drexler, and, after all, there was that 17.7 per game Jordan.

The 1984 draft had been all about Hakeem, nee Akeem, Olajuwon, the star center who had played with Drexler at the University of Houston. In that era, a star center meant championships from Russell to Wilt to Kareem with side trips to Walton, Moses, Willis Reed and Wes Unseld. The race to the bottom and the No. 1 draft pick was so intense it led to the creation of the NBA lottery for the following season.

The eventual 1984 winner was biggest loser Houston Rockets, the tanking champs racing to finish last after the previous draft getting center Ralph Sampson, an eventual Hall of Famer. It was elite tanking.

The Bulls also were busy basically losing on purpose, 14 of their last 15. The 76ers, run by former North Carolina star Billy Cunningham, may have been the only team that might have passed on Olajuwon for Jordan with Dean Smith whispering in their ears about Jordan. They would eventually offer the Bulls their No. 5 pick they used for Charles Barkley and two All-Stars for Jordan. Bulls GM Rod Thorn badly wanted Olajuwon, but he made Jordan the consolation. The 76ers had the San Diego Clippers pick, and almost moved up. But the Clippers out of the tanking won their last game of the season to fall a game ahead of Houston.

The big what if in recent years, however, has been what the Rockets should have done and maybe they’d have passed Boston’s record 11 titles in 13 seasons.

Houston was taking Olajuwon, who now would replace Sampson. And Portland at No. 2 badly wanted a center as they had Drexler and Jim Paxson, the latter who had been an All-Star at shooting guard. Bowie was injured in college, and the Trailblazers gladly would have accepted Sampson for the No. 2 pick. But the playing ethic then was two big men. The Knicks signed Marvin Webster to pair with Bill Cartwright. The Celtics were winning with Robert Parish and Kevin McHale. No one thought Olajuwon with Michael Jordan was better than any of those jumbo combos. In subsequent years, I spoke with Portland’s Jack Ramsay and Houston’s Bill Fitch. Both said trading Sampson to select Jordan No. 2 for the Rockets never was discussed.

But Jordan should have been wearing Pacers blue and gold.

The NBA wasn’t thrilled in 1976 with the settlement of the Robertson free agency suit and merger to let in four ABA teams. The Pacers had been an ABA dynasty, but the NBA was making it difficult on all the former enemies. TV revenue was almost nothing, so teams like the Pacers relied on gate receipts, and thus wins to attract fans. They had a chance to draft Larry Bird in 1978 before he went back to school for another year, but passed because they knew they wouldn’t have enough money to sign him.

In 1980-81, the Pacers had their first winning season since coming into the NBA and made the playoffs, losing in the first round. But center James Edwards, the future Piston and even, yes Bull, left as a free agent. Desperate for a replacement, at a time draft picks weren’t that valued, the Pacers traded theirs for 1984 to the Trailblazers for center Tom Owens. Indiana would miss the playoffs the next five years and inn 1983-84 was 26-56, and thus the Portland Trailblazers got the No. 2 pick in the 1984 NBA draft.

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Michael Jordan stole Isiah Thomas’ city.

Thomas was the story of Chicago and was on the way, even playing for the Detroit Pistons, to being one of the most popular athletes in Chicago’s history.

Until You Know Who came along.

“I didn’t understand being booed in Chicago Stadium and I took it personally,” Thomas admitted years later.

Thomas was one of those kids who snuck into the old Chicago Stadium late in Bulls games in the Sloan/Van Lier days and begged for shoes. Though for him to wear rather than sell. Breakfasts at his West Side home often came courtesy of the church or the Black Panthers. He watched the tanks come down his street in the late 1960s riots.

But young Isiah was a basketball prodigy. When his older brother Larry played in a Catholic youth league, three-year-old Isiah provided the half time entertainment with dribbling shows. His brother, Lord Henry, was a basketball star headed for fame but sidelined as so many were in that era by drugs and gangs.

In the famous story played in a TV movie about his life produced by Bulls legend Chet Walker, chieftains of the notorious Vice Lords street gang appeared at homes on the West Side of Chicago to take recruits. One summer night in 1966, 25 chiefs stopped in front of the home of Mary Thomas. There were nine children, seven boys, with Isiah the youngest. They lived then on the first floor of a two-story red brick building on Congress Street facing the Eisenhower Expressway. The bangers had guns.

“We want your boys,” the gang leader told her. ”They can’t walk around here and not be in a gang.” She looked him in the eye and said, ”There’s only one gang around here, and that’s the Thomas gang, and I lead that.” She shut the door and came back with a shotgun.

“Get off my porch,” she said, ”or I’ll blow you across the Expressway.’’

Isiah never joined a gang.

It became basketball. First at Our Lady off Sorrows elementary and to stay safe, if not convenient, Isiah got into mostly white St. Joseph’s in west suburban Westchester. So it would be up at 5:30 a.m. for a 90 minute trip to school. St Joseph’s became a state power. Isiah went on to Indiana University, and after leading them to an NCAA title as a sophomore and deflecting the wrath of Bobby Knight, Thomas went on to be the No. 2 pick in the 1981 NBA draft to the Pistons.

The Bulls had the No. 6 selection and Isiah was angling to get there. He desperately wanted to play for the Bulls.

But he was the top rated prospect in the draft. So when he went to Dallas, which had the No. 1 pick, he told owner Don Carter in his cowboy hats and boots how stupid he looked and he wasn’t wearin’ no ridiculous cowboy outfit. The Mavericks selected Thomas’ buddy, Mark Aguirre at No. 1. Thomas then told Pistons GM Jack McCloskey what a pit Detroit was. McCloskey told him to complain all he wanted, he was going to be a Piston.

Even still, Isiah was a hero to Chicago.

The Bulls were lousy, and Isiah was an instant star starting every All-Star game from his rookie season, the first NBA player ever to do it his first five times. The Pistons were starting to win, 49 wins by 1983-84, and Isiah still was the hometown hero when he was back at his favorite courts in Gladys Park (Gunderson) Park.

Until that Bulls rookie came along with the tongue hanging out of both his mouth and his famous sneakers, and finally Bulls fans could begin to wipe away the haze of defeat. Isiah still came back to Gladys Park, but this time the hangers on were yelling that he wasn’t good enough for Jordan. How could that be?

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The Buildup and the background.

It was love at first dunk for Chicago with Michael Jordan.

The Bulls had a great run in the early 1970s, but more on grit than talent, and the talent always prevailed as first Kareem and then Wilt took them out of the playoffs year after year. There was a brief resurgence with the merger acquisition of ABA superstar Artis Gilmore, but they ran into Bill Walton’s one magical season and the Bulls soon faded back to basketball oblivion. There seemed to be almost as many drug rehab stints as wins some of those seasons.

And then came Michael.

Set featured image

He shocked the world in the 1984 Olympics as the coach of Spain’s team marveled how everyone went up and came down, and this Michael stayed up.

But it still was the league of Magic and Larry and to a developing extent Isiah, and certainly at the All-Star game.

The NBA All-Star games in the 1960s and 1970s were relatively competitive games since the winner versus loser prize money was significant in an era of low pay. They’d occasionally try to get a car for a member of the home team, like they did for Cincinnati’s Adrian Smith in 1966. But the games were reasonably close to regular season.

Then they became the greatest show on hardwood thanks to buddies Magic and Isiah.

They’d become close friends with the same representation, Isiah playing in Michigan and Magic from there. The winner/loser share began to mean much less as salaries began to increase in the 1980s, and Magic and Isiah combined to make the All-Star game the spectacle weekend it’s become the game to see. Both were showmen players, and they showed out for that game with the best of street ball and their phenomenal skills. Most of the players stepped aside to watch as they filled the game with behind the back full court passes, lobs off the backboard for dunks, the best of the Harlem Globetrotters smoothed over with the best of NBA talent.

Basketball now had the midseason classic.

So actually it was no surprise that Jordan would have a modest debut. Isiah actually did, also, when he was a rookie. But even as Johnson was winning the titles and Isiah was winning hearts, Michael was winning the endorsements.

There was that infamous Nike contract. Jordan as a rookie was really just this wide-eyed kid thrilled about being in the NBA and at his first All-Star game to play with and meet players he’d idolized in college. Yes, really, though he’d never admit it now. He was a Mr. and Ma’am guy, and he wanted to be careful about understanding his place in the game. Dean Smith and his parents always had made that clear.

So when Jordan ran into Isiah in the hotel elevator, Jordan didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to act out of place. Isiah took it as rookie arrogance, a snub. And Jordan was wearing some of his specialty designed Nike stuff while the other players wore the league mandated jerseys. Showing off his endorsements, which were not big in that era, it seemed to some.

“Part of the tension might have been that I was coming into a city he grew up in and was loved in,” Jordan said years later in a Playboy magazine interview when it was the place for celebrity interviews. “I think a bigger part was the way I came into the league. Magic had that great smile and had won multiple championships while I was in high school and college. Isiah also had a great smile and was a great player before I came into the league. But here I come, a rookie, and David Falk is making all these deals, and there’s an explosion of marketing opportunities that Magic and Isiah and George Gervin hadn’t had. Those guys were all great players. But they hadn’t yet been marketed to the level of their skills or celebrity. I came in, unproven in pro basketball, and was getting the stuff they should have previously gotten.

”I was very quiet when I went down there,” Jordan said. ”I didn’t want to go there like, ‘I`m a big shot rookie and you must respect me.’ I didn’t want to be perceived as having an arrogant attitude. That was my first All-Star game. I stayed in my room most of the time because I didn’t know what to do. None of my teammates were there. I didn’t want to be out in a situation that I wasn’t comfortable with. The one time I did go out, I got on an elevator with Isiah Thomas to go downstairs for a league meeting. I was really intimidated because I didn’t know him and I didn’t want to get on his nerves. I didn’t want to seem like a rookie. You know, to just be so stupid. So I was quiet. I stayed in the corner. When I went down in the room for the meeting, I still didn’t say anything. After the weekend was over, it got back to me that I was arrogant and cocky and I wouldn’t even speak to Isiah on the elevator, that I gave him the cold shoulder.”

Thomas in later years explained his view.

“He became a great player,” Thomas said. “But at that time he wasn’t the Michael Jordan that he became. At that time, the NBA was Dr. J, Larry Bird, Magic, Moses.”

When the East lineup was introduced that day, Thomas, who attended Indiana University, and Bird, a native of Indiana, were greeted with far bigger cheers than Jordan. The crowd that day of 43,146 was the biggest ever to see an All-Star Game.
“I thought he may have been a little nervous because of what had happened that whole weekend,” Thomas said. “When he came to Indianapolis there was the big controversy with Nike, his warmup suit, his gold chains (NBA fines for not wearing conforming sneakers which Nike turned into more ads). That whole weekend he was in some controversy. I thought at the start of the game, Gervin came out and was into his thing, Bird was ready, Dr. J was ready and in the All-Star Game, it was the show. We were trying to feature Larry, which we should have. Moses and Doc had just won the championship. Larry and Moses had been MVPs of the league.”

The Freeze-Out.

It really began after the game the West won 140-129 with Sampson the MVP with 24 points and ten rebounds. Gervin had 23 points and Thomas led the East with 22. Bird had 21. Jordan was two of nine for seven points, though starting center Malone had just ten shots. The story of the game was the Magic/Isiah showmanship.

Until in the airport waiting to return to Detroit.

Charles Tucker and Bill Merriweather were advisors to Isiah and Magic. They were waiting for the plane with Detroit columnist Charlie Vincent. He says, ‘What’s going on?’ So they say, well our guys taught Michael a lesson. And they described this plot that Magic, Isiah and their Michigan buddy Gervin schemed to make Michael look bad for all his showing off.

Which Chicago attorney George Andrews, who then represented both Thomas and Johnson, insisted was nonsense.

“You’re telling me Larry Bird was in a conspiracy with Isiah Thomas?” said Andrews. “If Isiah said one thing, Bird would do the opposite (it would be two years later, remember, that Thomas at the conference finals declared Bird only the MVP because he was white. And then made to apologize by the league). Bird years later when he took over the Pacers immediately fired Thomas as coach.

“And you’re getting Dr. J, who was the moral compass of the league back then who started the basketball chapel, and Larry Bird ganging up on Michael Jordan?” wondered Andrews. “If Isiah said to do this, Bird would say screw you. And remember, Bird and Magic had not made up yet from the college and their NBA rivalry.”

There’s also another classic footnote in Bulls history from this episode.

The following training camp, Bulls general manager Jerry Krause signed Gervin. Yes, with Jordan still believing Gervin was part of the plot. To do so, Krause released Rod Higgins, who then was Jordan’s only friend on the team that was deep with drug addled veterans. That more likely was the start of Jordan’s feud with Krause than the issue with his foot injury and returning, with came later.

Vincent wrote the story in the Detroit Free Press, and when the Pistons came to Chicago for that first game after the All-Star break it was on.

The Jordan legend thus began.

It really didn’t matter if there was a plot since, after all, two of the supposed plotters were on the other team. But even when Jordan was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame he attributed “the Freeze-Out” to a large part of his famed game face.

“I’m going to thank a couple people that you guys probably wouldn’t even think that I would thank, Isiah Thomas, Magic Johnson, George Gervin,” Jordan told the audience. “They say it was a so-called ‘Freeze-Out’ in my rookie season. You guys gave me the motivation to say ‘you know what, evidently I haven’t proved enough to these guys. I gotta prove to them that I deserve what I’ve gotten on this level.’”

And he just kept on proving it after it really all started that Sunday in Indianapolis.

Chicago can only be grateful.

 

 

 

French Montana claimed that Taylor Swift turned down $9 million to perform a show in the United Arab Emirates.

Last month, the “Pop That” rapper, 39, shared a screenshot of text messages from someone who offered him $1 million to perform and another person, whose name Montana censored, to perform for $9 million in December.

Last month, the “Pop That” rapper shared a screenshot of text messages from someone who offered him $1 million to perform and another person, whose name Montana censored, to perform for $9 million in December.

“They had a show offer for me and Taylor — her $9 million, me $1 million,” he told VladTV. “Somewhere in Emirates.”Djvlad/YouTube

“Somebody just sent me a show offer who y’all think the 9 million for lol?” he wrote atop the messages in the now-deleted post.

 

The “Unforgettable” emcee — born Karim Kharbouch — claimed that person was the “Bad Blood” singer, 34, in a new interview with VladTV.

“They had a show offer for me and Taylor — her $9 million, me $1 million,” he said. “Somewhere in Emirates.”

He pop star made Forbes’ billionaire list earlier this month.Getty Images for TAS Rights Management. It’s unknown why Swift allegedly turned down the offer.

Page Six has reached out to her rep for comment but did not immediately hear back. The money definitely isn’t an issue for the pop star, as she was named a billionaire earlier this month.

The Grammy winner’s estimated $1.1 billion fortune came from earnings made from her Eras Tour, her music catalog and her real estate portfolio.

Swift is currently on a short break from her record-breaking Eras Tour, which has reportedly earned more than $1 billion.Getty Images for TAS Rights Management

“The most famous newcomer is, of course, Taylor Swift, whose record-breaking, five-continent Eras Tour is the first to surpass $1 billion in revenue,” reported Forbes.

“The 34-year-old pop star amassed an estimated $1.1 billion fortune, based on earnings from the blockbuster tour, the value of her music catalog and her real estate portfolio.”

Additionally, Swift became the “first musician to hit ten-figure status” solely based on her songs and performances. The “Cruel Summer” songstress has been spending quality time with her beau, NFL star Travis Kelce.

Swift is currently on a short break from her record-breaking Eras Tour, which became the highest-grossing tour by any musician of all time, earning more than $1 billion, per Rolling Stone.

The tour is set to resume on May 9 in Paris and will wrap up in December with three consecutive shows in Vancouver.

Until then, the “Cruel Summer” songstress has been spending quality time with her beau, NFL star Travis Kelce, who is currently in his offseason after winning the 2024 Super Bowl.

The music and fashion icon Rihanna has added a new title to her repertoire — aunt, as her brother recently welcomed a son named Reishi. The arrival of the new family member has brought joy and excitement to Rihanna and her family, marking a special moment for the close-knit clan.

Rihanna, known for her powerhouse presence in the entertainment industry, took to social media to share her excitement and affection for the newest addition to her family. Her posts featured heartwarming messages and snapshots of baby Reishi, instantly capturing the hearts of her millions of followers.

“Being an aunt is a joy I never expected,” Rihanna captioned one of her posts, showing her cradling the newborn. The pictures radiated warmth and happiness, showcasing a softer side of the superstar, often known for her bold and dynamic public persona.

Baby Reishi’s arrival has been celebrated not just by Rihanna but by her entire family. Her brother, whose privacy she respects by not revealing too much about him in the media, is reportedly overjoyed and grateful for the support from his famous sister. Rihanna’s involvement in her nephew’s life is anticipated to be active, given her well-known love for family and her hands-on approach with those she loves.

Fans and well-wishers have flooded Rihanna’s social media with congratulatory messages, commenting on the visible joy in the singer’s expressions and her natural ease with baby Reishi. The posts have also sparked discussions among fans about the importance of family and the grounding effect it has, even on global celebrities like Rihanna.

The name Reishi, which shares its name with a type of medicinal mushroom, suggests a unique and thoughtful choice, reflecting perhaps a deeper familial or cultural significance. While details about the reason behind the name remain private, it adds an intriguing layer to the baby’s identity.

As Rihanna steps into her role as an aunt, her family-oriented values come to the forefront, reminding everyone that behind the glitz and glamour, the bonds of family hold a cherished place in her life. This new chapter for her brother and the addition of baby Reishi is likely to bring new inspirations for Rihanna, possibly influencing her creative endeavors and personal life in beautiful ways.

Two months into the season, Michael Jordan looked bad. This is not to say he had looked bad for the whole of his first 26 games with the Wizards; that was a matter of some debate. The numbers were forgiving from some angles (23 points, six rebounds and five assists a night) and harsher from others (a shooting percentage that nudged just up above 40). The Wizards, who had set playoff qualification as a reasonable benchmark of comeback-season success, sat at a shaky 14–13. But on the night of Dec. 27, 2001, things reached a nadir no measure of nuance could rescue. In a blowout loss to the Indiana Pacers, the 38-year-old Jordan was sweatlogged and slow, hobbled by the pain of recent operations to drain fluid from his knee and not yet buoyed by their effects. He clanked eight of his 10 shots, and, in the third quarter, coach Doug Collins let the best player in the history of the game strap on the ice packs. Jordan finished with six points, then the fewest of his career.

During his years with the Bulls, when precious little criticism materialized and still less reached his ears, Jordan nevertheless honed a remarkable talent for unearthing it. Now there was no need; columns and SportsCenter segments scanned as obituaries. “Those bad games were his new Calbert Cheaneys,” Steve Wyche, then the Wizards beat writer for The Washington Post, says, referring to the Washington Bullets swingman whose physical style Jordan occasionally saw as an affront in the 1990s and who drew some of his most focused and explosive outings. “You could see it in warmups [of the next games]: ‘He’s lathered up, he’s not playing around today.’”

Two nights after the Pacers debacle, Washington hosted the Hornets. Less than a minute into the game, Jordan opened the Wizards’ scoring with a fadeaway jumper from the right elbow. Thirty seconds later, another. Old rhythms sounded. Faking another fade, he pivoted and ducked under his defender’s armpit to bank a four-footer off the glass. Tracking a teammate’s missed shot, Jordan slipped into the lane to tap the ball back over the front rim. He didn’t quite recapture his former ways of moving—the Air Jordan XVIIs just didn’t get as far off the floor as the XIVs had—but he was attuned to the degrees of momentum and stillness that great scorers prey on. When his opponent gave him an inch too much space, he put the jumper over top; when someone lurched out, he dropped his shoulder and powered past. He scored Washington’s first 13 points and 34 of its first-half total of 56. The Wizards won big in the end, but nobody cared; Jordan had scored 51. Steve Martin, Charlotte’s play-by-play TV announcer, laid out the game’s real purpose in the second quarter: “Relive the memories, folks.”

“Scoring six points, my career low, I’m pretty sure you guys were saying how old I was,” Jordan said afterward to the once-fawning press corps that had become, in his mind, a kind of nagging monitor. “After tonight, I’m pretty sure people are going to say I can still play this game.”

Al Tielemans/Sports Illustrated

That Saturday night showed Jordan near his peak in more ways than one. As he regained his on-court prowess, he tapped into his talent for shaping the story it told. Jordan had always been one of sports’ great mythmakers: in the fusion of underdog and deity that framed his Gatorade and Nike ads; in the too-perfect hero’s journey beats of his arrival, ascent, departure from and return to Chicago; in the horizon-scanning that would let him lord over a shoe empire and unveil The Last Dance. With the Wizards, he once again cast himself, this time as the sage elder who could still go it alone when needed. “I may not have 50 points the next game,” he said, “so someone has to come in and take some of that load.”

Twenty years later, though, Jordan’s Wizards chapter remains noteworthy—singular, really, in the polish of the rest of his career—for his inability to control it. Over two losing seasons, he put up a handful of remarkable performances and as many wretched ones. He scored well but inefficiently. He set goals, failed at them, revised them. He was a genius, a has-been, a grump, a teacher and an ambassador. He added to his story as he detracted from it. If Jordan has always taken pains to tell the public who he is, here he made the clarifying mistake of showing us. To acolytes, it’s a chapter best forgotten. To anyone interested in the mechanics of greatness, and in what you can glean from those mechanics breaking down, it’s essential.

Jordan’s announcement in late September 2001 that he’d be returning to NBA floors came as no surprise. There’d been the noticeable slimming down, the vortex of rumor and nondenial, the pickup games arranged with once and current NBAers. More telling than anything, there’d been the grumbling, the acknowledged itch. “Nothin’ compares to bein’ it,” Jordan had told Post reporter Michael Leahy—the eventual author of When Nothing Else Matters, a survey of his last playing years—in December 2000. At the time, he had not been it—a player—but rather a part-owner and executive for the Wizards, a position as artificial and removed as politics to a career soldier. He’d kept a distance from the club, rarely traveling on road trips, indulging long days of golf and nights of gambling. When Leahy reminded Jordan that the Wizards had a game that night, he snapped, “I don’t.”His process for returning had seen him lock back into his old focus. Jordan had reenlisted his personal trainer, Tim Grover, who built a regimen for strengthening the muscles around his knee. The pickup sessions served to test the soundness of the old catalog. (In one of these, a young Metta Sandiford-Artest, then Ron Artest, swung an elbow into Jordan’s abdomen, cracking a couple ribs.) He couldn’t glide through the air like he had, but he found that he could still stagger defenders with his pivot foot, which won him pockets of space for the jumper or the drive. His trash talk took the stay-in-school shape of a wizened veteran’s. “He got to jawing. It was unbelievable,” says Brian Scalabrine, a draft prospect out of USC who had worked Jordan’s summer camps during the hiatus years and partook of the heated closed-door runs afterward. “He turned into a different guy. But you could tell, in his mind, every day he was searching for a strategy, for what was gonna work that particular day.”For those who stood to benefit from Jordan’s return, the calculus was simpler. During the 2000–01 season, the young Wizards had floundered to a 19–63 record, the third-worst in the NBA, and drew the 12th-fewest fans in the league. (“He made a coaching hire, Leonard Hamilton, and that did not work out at all,” Wyche remembers of Jordan’s first splashy executive decision. “He was on nobody’s radar.”) TV ratings had suffered since Jordan retired from the Bulls in 1998, with a labor dispute condensing the ’99 season and NBA brass fretting over the marketability of a new generation of stars. The Sept. 11 attacks cast a pall over the sports world, turning routine events into security-laden shows of resolve. “The gold standard was really Jordan, in terms of what a player should be, how he should conduct himself, his competitiveness,” remembers Stu Jackson, then an executive in the league office. “I mean, he was the guy.”

Jordan was to be a palliative, if not a savior. The Wizards had sold out their season tickets on the strength of rumor alone; the NBA tore up its national TV schedule and shoved Washington into prime-time slots. Abe Pollin, the Wizards’ principal owner, basked in the celebrity (and, to be sure, the cost: Jordan took a veteran’s minimum contract and donated the sum of it to 9/11 charities). “To have the greatest basketball player that ever played playing on my team,” he said. “With all the tragedies that have befallen our country the last couple weeks and the mood being what it is, a little good news like this is really a good thing.”

Jordan, for his part, characterized his last comeback as a project of encouragement, not dominance. What could he offer that no other executive in the league could? His presence. “There is no better way of teaching young players than to be on the court with them as a fellow player, not just in practice, but in NBA games,” he said in a reintroductory statement. Still, Collins—Jordan’s second coaching hire, handpicked for his on-court return—stoked the nostalgist’s hopes: “Michael Jordan will be one of the top 10 players in the league.”

ne night in late November 2001, Jordan boarded the Wizards’ team plane from the rear, where the team’s announcers and beat reporters sat. The Wizards had just lost to the Cavaliers by 19; Jordan had led Washington with 18 points on 9-of-24 shooting. He cast his eyes down the aisle, to where his teammates settled into their seats. “F—- those mother——-,” Buckhantz remembers Jordan saying. “I’m gonna sit back here with the grownups.”

A month into the season, the Wizards had lost 10 of 13 games, and MJ the mentor was faring about as well as MJ the exec had. A roster made mostly of youthful promise and mid-career flotsam was prone to lapses in focus—after the Cavs loss, Collins had complained that they hadn’t made it out to warmups in a timely manner—and lacked the talent to compensate. Richard Hamilton, the club’s third-year shooting guard, looked the part of a ready-made Jordan disciple, with a hair-trigger midrange shooting stroke and inexhaustible stamina for moving without the ball. But he also had his own bona fides—a national title and All-American status with UConn, a No. 7 draft slot—and chafed at the notion that he needed to be tucked under anybody’s wing. When Jordan sat out to tend to his knee, Hamilton hardly hid his pleasure. “The guys take pride and want to show we can play without Michael,” he said after one such game, per Leahy. “Hopefully he can watch and maybe get an understanding of our games.”

Upon his return, Jordan struggled with his young teammates and an aging body.

Bob Rosato/Sports Illustrated

The team’s other young centerpiece, rookie big man Kwame Brown, presented even more challenges. In his last major act in the front office in June 2001, Jordan had drafted Brown with the first overall pick out of high school, seeing in him a collage of potential. He had unteachable size and speed, with a frame that could support top-tier NBA muscle. A post move or two and he’d dominate, the thinking went. But Brown entered the league out of shape and raw; he fumbled passes, cuffed rebounds and forgot plays. One trait irked Jordan more than the rest, as it represented what he saw as a shortcoming in his own diligence. In the locker room before a road game during Brown’s and Jordan’s second year together, Jordan would vent to Charles Oakley, an offseason signing and longtime MJ confidant. “God, I would never draft a big man who couldn’t palm the ball,” Jordan said, repeating the sentiment within earshot of Brown. Wyche asked why he’d done so, then; the team had had access to all the combine measurables. “It’s a lesson learned,” Jordan replied.

As it became apparent that the team’s stated goals were likely out of reach, Jordan’s public posture shifted. He spoke in increasingly defensive terms, not of sowing the seeds for lasting success but of girding his reputation. He kept to the rear of the team planes, smoking cigars, venturing forward primarily to up the ante in his teammates’ card games. He feuded with Pollin, at one point footing the bill for the team to stay downtown on the road, instead of at a hotel closer to the airport owned by the owner’s brother Harold. Having spent his entire career in the luxury of pure stakes—the pursuit of being the best player on the best team in the world—Jordan had to make do with smaller motivations and cherish more fleeting victories. When a reporter commented on a hot streak by noting that Jordan had averaged 35 points over his last four games, he shot back, offended by faint praise. “That surprise you?” he asked.

But stretches like those were a surprise. Some nights, Jordan would flub a dunk attempt or have his jump shot blocked by the likes of Voshon Lenard—a three-point specialist and fine role player but nobody’s idea of a stopper. Wyche remembers a murmur among the press seats on that occasion. “It was, ‘Whoa, O.K., this is a different MJ.’” The remainder of the games fell somewhere in the middle, Jordan logging his 20-something points fitfully: pump-faking more than he once had, leaning back at a steeper degree, searching out fissures in defenses he’d once simply risen over.

The knee, which would cost Jordan much of the final third of the 2001–02 season, became a metaphor: for what its owner had to deal with and for how impressive it really was that he could. “It was honestly the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen,” remembers Etan Thomas, then a young forward for the Wizards. “His knee was swollen like the elephant man, and the doctor took out this long needle and extracted this black tar, goo-looking stuff out of MJ’s knee. He was writhing in pain.”

Afterward, Thomas asked Jordan why he bothered. “He looked at me and just kind of stared at me, but he didn’t have an answer.”

The Wizards’ heady plans unraveled: a 37–45 record in Jordan’s first year back, with their old, new star missing 22 games, and an identical mark the next season, despite him playing all 82. Between seasons, the team unloaded Hamilton and brought in Jerry Stackhouse, to little effect. Still, the gambit remained a box-office success. Washington sold out its home arena every night and drew packed houses on the road. “He was still a shot in the arm,” Jackson says. “It was just more about the man than the team, at least to my mind.”

Jordan led the Wizards in scoring during his two seasons in Washington, but he was unable to lift them into the playoffs.

Bob Rosato/Sports Illustrated

To fans, Jordan’s return had the powerful twin pulls of nostalgia and celebrity. For league figures, his comeback captivated for different reasons. The way a failing mind can hold onto essential memories, great athletes in decline isolate their core characteristics. It was true, this ground-bound and loss-saddled Jordan was haughty, frustrated, dismissive of his teammates. He faltered in ways that once would have been unthinkable. (In the 2002 All-Star Game, Jordan broke free into the open floor, lined up his steps … and clanked a dunk off the back rim.)

But he remained as competitive and thoughtful about his sport as ever, even when it was clear those qualities would get him nowhere near where he’d once been. Every so often came a game like a thesis statement: I can still play. Days before Christmas 2001, with three seconds left in a tight contest in Madison Square Garden, Jordan muscled Latrell Sprewell to the right elbow, leaned back and dropped in a game-decider. (“Firing … AND HITS!” went Marv Albert’s muscle-memory call.) Two nights after putting 51 on the Hornets, Jordan scored 45 against the New Jersey Nets. In a January game against the Bulls, his first against his former team, Jordan tallied 29 hard-won points, but the representative moment came after he had his shot blocked by Artest with 23 seconds left. Jordan griped for a foul but then turned and raced downcourt, tracking a Chicago fastbreak from behind. Ron Mercer tried a layup, and Jordan soared (the word could here be used legitimately, not nostalgically), snared the ball with two hands and pinned it to the backboard, preserving Washington’s six-point lead. Phil Chenier, Buckhantz’s partner at the broadcast table, remembers the play as an instant of pushback—against lacking teammates, diminished hops, a shot that could suddenly be tipped by defenders who once wouldn’t have gotten within a foot of it. “You could just see the energy, the emotion going into it,” Chenier says. “It was a great block.”

“There was a maturity level to his game, a perspective,” says Bryce Drew, who grew up near Chicago in Valparaiso, Ind., and guarded Jordan during his 51-point game against the Hornets. The reflexes were a touch duller, Drew remembers, and the burst more than a touch lessened; at one point, he swiped Jordan’s dribble. But in the midrange he was a composer, one variation setting up the next. “It was face-up shot, pump-fake, step-through, 12-foot finish,” Drew says. “It wasn’t the high-flying dunks. It was all skill.”

In total, over his last two seasons, Jordan scored 21.2 points a night on 43% shooting, with six rebounds, four and a half assists, and a steal and a half per game. Fans and pundits saw some sadness in the numbers, that perfect conclusion scuffed by a crummy coda. Jordan’s competitors—the players, coaches and executives whose matchup with the Wizards suddenly became loaded with significance—tended to look at it differently.

“The guy in the Wizards uniform solidified, in my estimation, why he’s the greatest basketball player of all time,” former Mavericks, Heat and Hornets swingman Jamal Mashburn says. Jordan used whatever was at his disposal—once, a vicious first step and powerful jump; now, the intimidation of his status and canniness of his footwork. “He was averaging 20 points a game on smarts alone.”

Mashburn remembers his lone appearance in an All-Star Game, in 2003. It was Jordan’s final fete, a weekend soaked in nostalgia. The game started with Vince Carter giving up his starting spot for Jordan; at halftime, Jordan tearfully addressed the crowd, saying, “Now I can go home and feel at peace with the game of basketball.”

For Mashburn, the more telling moment came during a lull in the pregame warmup. “I asked some questions about the fadeaway, and he not only shared some things but had an active scouting report going on in his head about my game,” Masburn says. “He told me to keep the ball closer to my body on the turn so it wouldn’t get stripped. He was like, ‘Jamal, you turn over your right shoulder 90% of the time. You need to have a counter, just show it once a game and it’ll open things up,’” Mashburn laughs. “I played against the Memphis Grizzlies right after that. That’s when I scored 50.”

The comparisons have been made too many times to count, by teammates, coaches, trainers and staffers: Traveling with Jordan was like riding on Air Force One or touring with The Beatles. Buckhantz’s entry into the lore of Jordanmania centers on water fowl.

Some fans would rather forget the image of Jordan in dark blue.

Bob Rosato/Sports Illustrated

The story goes that the Wizards had a road game in Memphis and stayed at the Peabody Hotel, where every day a gaggle of mallards waddled from their perch on the roof onto an elevator and down to the fountain in the lobby. A Peabody official approached the team and asked whether Jordan might lead the procession, as rock stars and politicians had done during their own stays. Per Buckhantz’s memory, George Koehler, Jordan’s personal assistant, put a question back to the would-be organizers. “Do you like your ducks?” Koehler asked. “Because if those elevator doors open up and Michael Jordan walks out, you’re going to have a lot of dead ducks.” That afternoon, Jimmy Carter led a perfectly tame version of the ritual

If that level of adoration led people to rush en masse for a glimpse of Jordan, it has also led them to endeavor to forget their last look at him. Jordan in dark blue belongs to a tucked-away file in America’s collective sports memory, next to Ali leaning on the ropes being pummeled by Berbick.

Johnny Smith, a professor of sports history at Georgia Tech writing a book on Jordan’s mass appeal, grew up in Chicago and remembers avoiding Wizards games when they were broadcast. “As a historian, understanding him better, it makes perfect sense. He had to feed his ego, and he thought that the best thing he could do to resurrect the Wizards was lace up his Nikes again,” Smith says. “But at the time there was something so jarring about it. It was like it invaded my own personal memories, my joy associated with him wearing a Chicago uniform.” The cleanliness of Jordan’s previous exit—the hand cocked in follow-through against a backdrop of Utah Jazz fans who all know what’s coming—emphasized a feeling that he now tarnished something precious. “There gets to be a collective fear that heroes will be diminished, that they can’t live up to the ideal they once created,” Smith says.

Now the heroics against Utah were painted over, one last time, by a rough night in Philadelphia. In Jordan’s final game, in April 2003, he scored 15 points in a 20-point loss; Allen Iverson scored 35. His relationship with Pollin had soured, the hotel incident just one yank in an ongoing tug-of-war over franchise influence, and his return to Wizards management—long a foregone conclusion—would not come to pass. Announcing his comeback, Jordan had stated that “we have the foundation on which to build a playoff-contention team.” What he’d done instead was turn a bad team into a slightly better, and much more famous, one.

For many players, Jordan’s Wizards years showed why he’s the greatest player of all time.

Bob Rosato/Sports Illustrated

It is a truism of coaching that you learn more from losing than from winning. The same can be said of whatever strange project fans undertake, this process of trying to understand something—about an individual, about achievement, about what pushes a person to success or consigns them to setbacks—via the way an athlete moves on a court. Throughout his career, Jordan had included a “Love of the Game” clause in his contracts, a bit of language allowing him to play in any game anywhere he chose away from NBA arenas. Like so many elements of Jordanian myth, this was hard to parse amid the confetti of championship parades. Did Jordan’s combativeness fuel his teams’ accomplishments, or did his talent let them succeed in spite of it? Did he work harder than everyone else, or did his athleticism let that work show? Did he love the game, or did he love winning it? “Jordan prided himself on that clause, it tapped into this idea that he was the most competitive man on earth,” Smith says. “But was he more competitive than Magic Johnson? Larry Bird? Isaiah Thomas? I don’t know how you measure that.”

This isn’t a measurement, but it is a story. Halfway through Jordan’s last season, the Wizards were 25–28, and the East-leading Nets came to town. Jordan had turned 40 four days earlier; the Nets had a trio of 20-somethings—Jason Kidd, Richard Jefferson, Kenyon Martin—who would end the year in the NBA Finals. The stakes, such as they were, had nothing to do with playoff seedings or psychological edges in a championship race. In the context of the broader basketball family, it was a bitter father and ascendant son having it out on the driveway.

Before the game, word had circulated that Jordan had an ailing back. Rod Thorn, then an executive with the Nets, remembers a misstep. “Before the game, Kenyon ribbed him a little, asked how his back was doing,” Thorn says. “Allegedly.”

A fake NBA news account shared an altered screenshot of Devin Booker publicly flirting with Squid Game actress Jung Ho-yeon on her most recent post, only to be rejected. As the post went viral, fans took to social media to share their varied and often humorous responses.

“Check your dm shawty,” the fake Booker message read, with Ho-yeon responding with a blunt “No”.

Because of this video they say that Devin Booker wears a wig, is it?Twitter

Many were quick to express skepticism, suspecting the claim to be nothing more than a joke, while others didn’t hesitate to mock Booker.

“I don’t believe this is real,” an X user wrote.

Another added: “Missing shots on and off the PITCH”.

Suns struggling with in the playoffs

Despite the playful speculation, Booker has been making waves during the 2023/24 NBA season with the Phoenix Suns. He currently boasts an impressive average of 27.1 points per game, ranking him sixth in the NBA.

However, Game 2 of the NBA Playoffs first round ended in disappointment for the Phoenix Suns, as they fell to the Minnesota Timberwolves with a final score of 105-93, leaving the Suns trailing 0-2 in the series.

 

Despite the loss, Booker put up a commendable performance, recording 20 points, three rebounds and five assists.

However, throughout the start of the playoffs, Booker has been the subject of jokes and criticism from basketball fans. Some fans have taken aim at Booker’s shooting performance, particularly his 25 percent shooting from three-point range in the first two games against the Minnesota Timberwolves.

After blowing two leads and dropping two close games on the road, the Los Angeles Lakers return home and host the Denver Nuggets in Game 3 of their first round series on Thursday night.

The Lakers came in looking to snap their 10-game losing streak at the hands of the Nuggets and also looking to avoid going down 0-3 in the series, which is obviously a death sentence with no NBA team ever coming back from that. Ultimately, that ended up being the case as the Lakers still can’t keep up with the Nuggets, suffering a 112-105 loss.

It was clear early that the Lakers were happy to be home as they jumped out to a quick 8-0 start thanks to some Nuggets turnovers and transition finishes by LeBron James and Anthony Davis.

Davis was going at Nuggets start Nikole Jokic early for 10 points, drawing two early fouls on the former MVP. Denver eventually settled in though, cutting the deficit to 18-13 and forcing a Lakers timeout.

Rui Hachimura had a nice response for the Lakers out of the timeout with a corner triple, and then Austin Reaves got in on the action with some drives to the bucket to put his team up 33-23 at the end of the first quarter.

Jamal Murray started to get going early in the second thanks to the Lakers allowing some offensive rebounds. Once Davis returned though, he helped settle the defense and scored inside to get the lead back to double digits.

D’Angelo Russell was struggling from deep for L.A. though and his misses allowed Denver to get out in transition, finishing some easy ones. After Aaron Gordon tipped one in at the buzzer, the Lakers’ lead was cut to 53-49 going into the halftime locker room.

It didn’t take long for the Nuggets to take the lead early in the third quarter, beginning on a 9-2 run to force a quick Lakers timeout.

The Lakers started to fall apart from there as they had some costly turnovers while Gordon continued to dominate inside and on the offensive glass to extend the Nuggets lead to 69-61.

James and Davis had a nice response out of the timeout, but it didn’t matter though as the Nuggets continued to pour it on, hitting some 3s and attacking the offensive glass. At the end of the third quarter, L.A. was trailing 83-75.

Turnovers continued to hurt the Lakers in the fourth as they were never able to sustain a run, especially with guys like Murray, Gordon and Porter continuing to score with ease.

Denver lead hovered around double digits for the entire fourth quarter as Los Angeles ran out of gas and was unable to make a run to get back in it.

What’s next for the Lakers

The Lakers will host the Nuggets again in Game 4 on Saturday evening in what is obviously another must-win game to get back in the series.

In 1988, Michael Jordan officially ARRIVED.

4 years into his career, NBA fans had one criticism of MJ:

“He can score, but he’s a terrible defender.”

But the truth was – his defensive skills were masked by his immense scoring skills, especially after putting up 37.1 PPG clip the previous year. His 5.6 rebounds and 2.6 steals a game In his first three years proved just that.

Entering the 1988 season at age 24, Jordan was ready to show the world that he could stand out in a league that had Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Isiah Thomas as the faces of the league.

And then – he did this:

Played all 82 games, at 40.4 min/game
35.0 PPG
5.5 RPG
5.9 APG
3.2 SPG
1.6 BPG
1st player in history to win MVP and DPOY in the same year

MJ made Chicago Stadium his playground, and in his home arena, even topped Dominique Wilkins for his second straight Slam Dunk Championship. He also bagged All-Star MVP honors for good measure.

This was his “I have arrived” moment.

He was the league’s best player, best dunker, best defender and best scorer. Rarely do you see that combination. 3 seasons later, the rings started coming, and you know the rest.

But that 88 season turned skeptics to believers. And left his doubters speechless

LeBroп James aпd Aпthoпy Davis are both available for Thυrsday’s game.

Oп Thυrsday eveпiпg, the Los Aпgeles Lakers will host the Deпver Nυggets for Game 3 of their first-roυпd playoff series.

For the game, both Aпthoпy Davis aпd LeBroп James have beeп υpgraded to available.

Via Ryaп Ward of Lakers Natioп: “Aпthoпy Davis (low back soreпess) aпd LeBroп James (left aпkle peroпeal teпdiпopathy) have beeп υpgraded to AVAILABLE for toпight’s game vs. Deпver.”

James has averaged 26.5 poiпts, 7.0 reboυпds, 10.0 assists, 1.5 steals aпd 1.5 blocks per coпtest while shootiпg 54.3% from the field iп the first two games of the series.

Meaпwhile, Davis has averages of 32.0 poiпts, 12.5 reboυпds, 3.5 assists aпd 2.5 blocks per coпtest while shootiпg 61.9% from the field.

Apr 14, 2024; New Orleaпs, Loυisiaпa, USA; Los Aпgeles Lakers forward LeBroп James (23) aпd forward Aпthoпy Davis

Stepheп Lew-USA TODAY Sports

The Lakers lost both games iп Deпver, so they trail 2-0 iп the series.

Iп Game 2, the Lakers were υp by as maпy 20 poiпts, bυt fell apart iп the secoпd half aпd Jamal Mυrray made a bυzzer-beater to give the Nυggets a 101-99 victory.

Nikola Jokic led the way with 27 poiпts, 20 reboυпds, teп assists aпd two steals while shootiпg 9/16 from the field aпd 2/4 from the three-poiпt raпge iп 41 miпυtes of playiпg time.

James aпd Davis are still playiпg like top-15 players iп the NBA, bυt the Lakers have beeп υпable to figυre oυt Deпver.

They got swept iп the 2023 Westerп Coпfereпce Fiпals aпd have lost their last teп overall matchυps to the Nυggets datiпg back to the 2022-23 regυlar seasoп.

Game 4 of the series will be oп Satυrday eveпiпg (also iп Los Aпgeles, Califorпia).

Embark on a journey of inspiration as we explore the extraordinary ascent of basketball legend LeBron James from humble beginnings to global superstardom. In this captivating narrative, we delve into the trials and triumphs of a young man who defied the odds to become one of the most iconic athletes of his generation.

Born into poverty and raised in the hardscrabble streets of Akron, Ohio, LeBron James faced adversity from an early age. With no father figure to guide him and few educational opportunities at his disposal, he turned to basketball as a means of escape and self-expression.

Despite the challenges he faced, LeBron James never wavered in his pursuit of excellence. With unwavering determination and a relentless work ethic, he honed his skills on the court, drawing inspiration from the few role models he encountered along the way.

At just 18 years old, LeBron James became the first overall pick in the 2003 NBA Draft, catapulting him into the national spotlight. With his electrifying athleticism and unparalleled basketball IQ, he quickly established himself as a force to be reckoned with on the court.

In a testament to his prodigious talent, LeBron James secured a groundbreaking contract worth $420,000 per week at the tender age of 18. This unprecedented deal solidified his status as one of the highest-paid athletes in the world and set the stage for a career marked by unparalleled success.

Throughout his career, LeBron James has remained deeply connected to his roots, using his platform to uplift and empower those in need. From funding educational initiatives to providing essential resources for underserved communities, he has become a beacon of hope and inspiration for countless individuals around the world.

Beyond his achievements on the court, LeBron James serves as a role model for aspiring athletes and dreamers everywhere. His remarkable journey from adversity to achievement serves as a powerful reminder that with hard work, determination, and a steadfast belief in oneself, anything is possible.

As we reflect on the remarkable journey of LeBron James, one thing becomes abundantly clear: his story is one of triumph over adversity, of resilience in the face of hardship, and of the transformative power of hope and determination. From his humble beginnings to his unparalleled success, he has inspired millions around the world to dream big and reach for the stars.