Report: Cavs have pursued Kings center Kosta Koufos
February 16, 2016Ohio State becomes odds-on favorite to win 2017 CFP Championship
February 16, 2016“Have you listened to Future yet?” – Scott Sargent, WFNY
Happy Tuesday WFNY!
I hope everyone enjoyed their All-Star break weekend. I hate NBA All-Star games and most skill competitions bore me to death, but the slam dunk contest this year was incredible. Incredible, as in, “maybe the best dunk contest ever” incredible. The show that Aaron Gordon and Zach LaVine put on was everything the dunk contest was intended to be.
I can buy into the arguments that Aaron Gordon should have won. He definitely had the single best dunk of the night (the dunk where he grabbed the ball with one hand off the mascot’s hands, took it under his legs, and completed the dunk). However, if we take the sum of all dunks, I do think LaVine had an ever-so-slightly better resume.
A lot of comparisons are being made to this and the 1988 contest between Michael Jordan and Dominique Wilkins. And with good reason. The similarities are striking. Like ‘Nique, Aaron Gordon had the flashier1 dunks. And like MJ, it was LaVine who used his dunks to showcase his sheer athleticism. LaVine’s dunks may not have the same wow factor of some of Gordon’s dunks, but the degree of difficulty/athleticism to LaVine’s dunks is why I thought he was probably the rightful winner.
Either way, we are all winners for getting to experience this event.
*****
The Cavaliers probably won’t make a big trade deadline move….but they might
We are a mere two days away from the NBA’s trade deadline. It always seems kind of silly to me that teams need some kind of artificial deadline in order to motivate them to make moves, but the truth is, nobody wants to make a move before they have to. The deadline works because the pressure is very real. There’s a certain finality to it. Once it hits, that’s it. This is the team you will be going to war with. Are you satisfied?
I never expected the Cavaliers to be players at the deadline, but here we are. The Cavaliers are rumored to be one of the most active teams out there looking for the right deal. While Kevin Love’s name has been thrown around in rumors, it sounds more like teams calling the Cavaliers to inquire about him opposed to the Cavaliers being the team shopping him around. However, Iman Shumpert is rumored to be on the block. Mo Williams and Anderson Varejao’s names have been tossed around as well.
Is it strange for the Cavaliers to be active in trade deadline talks? Not especially. However, most teams that win the NBA Championship were not major trade deadline players. You have to go back to the 2004-05 San Antonio Spurs to find an NBA Champion that made a significant move at the deadline. The Spurs traded Malik Rose and two first-round picks to the New York Knicks for Nazr Mohammed and Jamison Brewer. Of course, the year before that, the Detroit Pistons pulled off one of the biggest and most successful trade deadline moves of all time in acquiring Rasheed Wallace as part of a three team trade. The Pistons went on to win the Championship.
It might seem like the Cavaliers are trying to buck convention this season first in firing their coach mid-season and now by trying to potentially make major moves at the deadline. These are not things that NBA Champions typically do. But this is not a typical NBA season, either.
The Cavaliers are chasing down a team that might go down as the greatest in NBA history. The Golden State Warriors have an excellent chance to overtake MJ’s Bulls with the best regular season record ever. The Warriors are an all-time great team. Of course it’s the most Cleveland thing ever for a team like the Warriors to come out of nowhere the moment LeBron James returns. But that’s the reality of where we are. The Cavaliers know they’re probably not good enough to beat the Warriors, so if they can make some changes to improve their odds, they have to consider it.
I’ve never been one to propose trades or anything like that. I’m not going to sit here and say I think the Cavaliers should do this or that. But I do understand why they would make Iman Shumpert available. I understand why they’ll take the call if a team wants to discuss Kevin Love. The Cavaliers have to consider anything and everything that can make them better.
I would be stunned if the Cavaliers traded Kevin Love. I would be fairly surprised if they actually traded Shumpert. I would guess they will probably not do much of anything. But I won’t fault them for trying. The Warriors aren’t going away any time soon. If they actually do get Kevin Durant this offseason, they could be starting one of the NBA’s biggest dynasties since Bill Russell’s Celtics. We don’t know how big the Cavaliers’ window is, but the window is closing.
*****
New music of the week
Sorry, Kanye West, I’m not subscribing to Tidal just to listen to your album. So you have no chance of being my favorite new album of the week (I’m sure Kanye is just crushed). Not that it would be anyway. This week, there’s only one option, and it’s the new album from Future, “EVOL”.
In music, there is prolific, and then there is Future. This is the rapper’s second release of 2016, and his seventh since 2015 started. This is simply an unmatched run of releases, each as good as the last. Most thought it culminated with 2015’s excellent “DS2”, an album that was on many Top 5 year-end lists. While many will probably always hold “DS2” in higher esteem, I personally think “EVOL” is my favorite Future album yet.
I’ve always had one major issue with Future: the auto-tune. I despide auto-tune. I think it’s awful. And Future uses it. A lot. As in, almost every vocal part. Why does he use so much auto-tune? He says he likes the way it makes his voice sound, thinks it gives it a grittier tonal quality. He might be right about that. The big, sweeping auto-tuned pitch changes are absent. Instead, he uses the auto-tune on his raps with only the slightest pitch. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still noticeable, but this is the first Future album where I don’t mind it. It feels more natural on EVOL than any of his previous albums.
This borderline insane run of music from Future follows some personal turmoil in his life. A couple years ago he was engaged to Ciara and she gave birth to their son. However, before they were married, the engagement was called off and speculation was that Future had cheated on Ciara. Since then, Future has taken on something of a villain form.
Make no mistake, Future is not using this prolific output to proclaim his innocence and to try to make himself an endearing figure. Instead, he is going full in on his hedonistic lifestyle, openly rapping about his exploits with women and copious amounts of drugs. His music, to that point, is taking on more and more of a psychedelic feel as the drugs become a bigger and bigger influence.
Following the likes of A$AP Rocky, Danny Brown, The Weeknd, and countless others, Future is carrying the flag for the psychedelic movement in hip hop. As rock music moves generally further and further away from that scene and indie rock in particular pushed more and more into a shoegaze space, it’s hip hop that is exploring drug culture in a much more overt way than most music has in the past.
None of this is to say drugs are good or that they should be glorified in any kind of way. For me, however, as someone more closely aligned philosophically with straight-edge, music has always been my drug of choice and for that reason I vicariously explore psychedelic music as a pseudo-altered state frame of mind.
While lyrically I vastly prefer Kendrick Lamar’s social consciousness over ego-ridden bragging about drugs and misogyny, I love the trippier feel of the music that some of these other artists are bringing. I haven’t stopped listening to EVOL on repeat since I first heard it. It’s a perfect album musically, the beats living up to the namesake Future. There is not a wasted moment on this album. No nonsensical interludes, no throw away tracks. This is a pure album from start to finish. Considering he has already put out six other releases in the last fourteen months, that he can still deliver something so potent and urgent is astounding. I’ll be listening to this album all year long, I know that much.
- I prefer the word ‘flashy’ over ‘gimmicky’ to describe Gordon’s dunks [↩]
7 Comments
https://vine.co/v/inlTbgQdeQi
You see that one Andrew?
No matter how many times I watch it, I will never understand that dunk. So great.
Looks like he went off a trampoline
That you had to wait a week or so to dig in to Future is completely understandable given the amount of new music that’s come out through the first two weeks of February. That you saved it for last is all the better.
This isn’t just a ridiculous run in terms of production; it’s the quality as well. EVOL is his third No.1 album in seven months. That it was able to do so despite being an Apple Music exclusive for the first week is all the better. This whole discussion doesn’t even include the fact that he then released a TWENTY-SEVENT TRACK MIXTAPE of songs that weren’t included in EVOL dubbed “The Road to EVOL.” I’ve read some thoughts saying that he needs to slow down, but I’m not sure why we’d want that outside of letting his songs/albums have more lasting value.
Kanye will continue to be the focal point of so much due to his transcendence across different facets—music, fashion, etc. Kendrick is undoubtedly the most talented emcee out there right now. Drake is everywhere. But if anyone wanted to argue that Future is the No. 1 name in the game, I’d listen. Few hip-hop albums are front-to-back listens. Even TLOP has some skippable moments. EVOL is the rarity.
February is the worst sports month. We’re at the bottom.
It would be natural to lose focus when you have the run of output that Future has had. But you nailed it. The most impressive thing is not the number of releases, but the quality of said released. I just can’t get over how focused EVOL feels to me.