Kobe Isn't With The Lakers Right Now, But He's Still A Dick To Them

Without the help of Kobe Bryant most believe that the Los Angeles Lakers stand very little chance against the San Antonio Spurs during the first round of the playoffs. And if the Spurs 91-79 victory is any indication, they're probably right. But if you thought Kobe would shy away from the spotlight you were dead wrong.

Image by Ross D. Franklin / AP

While he may have been unable to lace up his sneakers, Black Mamba took to the internet and decided to live-tweet the Lakers first round game against the Spurs.

Then Phil Jackson, who many believe should be coaching this Lakers squad, decided to get in on the fun.

So of course the post game press conference revolved around a player who wasn't even in the building.

Image by AP

Image by Ezra Shaw / Getty Images

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Article author: mjkiebus

What's Ryan Lochte's Favorite Movie?

1. Ryan Lochte's new reality show debuted last night on E!

Image by Thanassis Stavrakis / AP

2. It was what you'd expect from a reality show starring a sex idiot who wears shoes like these and considers himself a fashion icon.

Image by Thanassis Stavrakis / AP

But there was one truly shocking moment in the otherwise long line of predictable Lochte idiocy.

4. It came time for Lochte to pick a movie to watch, and he chose what is apparently his favorite movie. And it's terrifying.

5. The only way to sound dumber when you're claiming thatWhat Women Want is your favorite movie is to call itWhat Woman Want.

Video available at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=iUTtO1KNdAY.

6. So why does Lochte love that Mel Gibson "classic" so much?

The saddest part is, I bet Ryan thinks there is a literal king of the world.

8.

LINK

Rich Juzwiak at Gawker put together a super cut of all of Ryan's finest moments from the show's first night. You'll want to see this.

gawker.com

Visit the source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jpmoore/whats-ryan-lochtes-favorite-movie
Article author: jpmoore

Marilyn Monroe's Classic Life Magazine Covers: 1952-1962

1. Marilyn Monroe's short career as an actress spanned just 15 years. In that time she made 32 films, and left one uncompleted. Her career took off in 1952 when she was cast in her first starring role inDon't Bother to Knock.

According toLife:

She [Marilyn]only graced LIFE's cover six times while she was alive…. that's fewer than Dwight Eisenhower, for example, while Liz Taylor holds the record with fourteen appearances on the cover of the premier photographic magazine of the age.

Also it might surprise some people to learn how seldom she actually appeared in the magazine itself.

Image by Alfred Eisenstaedt/Pix Inc./Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

2. April 7, 1952 - Marilyn's debut cover, photographed by Philippe Halsman. According toLife, it became one of the most famous and collectible covers in the magazine's history.

3. May 25, 1953 - Marilyn and Jane Russell, promoting their film,Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

4. April 20, 1959 - Marilyn was photographed for the cover by the legendary Richard Avedon. Inside the story promoted her recently released film,Some Like It Hot.

5. November 9, 1959 - Philippe Halsman photographed this iconic cover. The photo was part of a photo gallery on jumping actresses.

6. August 15, 1960 - Marilyn and her co-star, French actor Yves Montand, were photographed for the cover as part of a story to promote their upcoming film,Let's Make Love.

Marilyn and Yves reportedly had on-set affair. To complicate matters, Marilyn's then-husband, Arthur Miller, been responsible for script revisions - those revisions forced Gregory Peck (who had originally been cast) to dropout and Yves to be cast in the role instead.

7. June 22, 1962 - Marilyn invited photographers, William Woodfield and Lawrence Schiller to come on-set while she shoot her infamous skinny dipping scene for her film,Something's Got To Give.

Marilyn was fired from the film shortly after the photo shoot. The film was never completed.Life published the issue with the headline "A skinny-dip you'll never see on the screen."

8. August 17, 1962 - Marilyn's (first of sev
ral) posthumousLife cover – published a week after her death.

Marilyn had given an interview toLife after she was fired fromSomething's Got to Give. The interview was published in the August 3, 1962 issue — just two days before her death.

In the interview Marilyn opened up about the ups and downs of fame, saying:

"Fame is fickle… I now live in my work and in a few relationships with the few people I can really count on. Fame will go by, and so long, I've had you, fame. If it goes by, I've always known it was fickle. So, at least it's something I experienced, but that's not where I live."

Source: Life

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Will Fast-Break Teams Suffer In The "Grind-It-Out" Playoffs? No. (We Don't Think.)

Ty Lawson and JaVale "Pierre" McGee of the Denver Nuggets. Image by Matt York / AP

The NBA playoffs are a different beast than the regular season. You know this. I know this. We all know this. The pace of the game slows to a crawl as players expend maximum energy on defense; moving the ball or beating your man down the floor becomes harder, while the more physical D also leads to more fouls that interrupt the flow of the game. Any team that normally plays fast is D.O.A. unless it can figure out a backup strategy.

We've all heard this said, and probably said it ourselves. But is it true? I looked at the question specifically in reference to this year's most prominent run-and-gun teams, the Denver Nuggets and the Houston Rockets. The Nuggets hold the Western Conference's third seed, and beat Golden State in the first game of their series Saturday. The Rockets are an eighth-seed underdog against West favorite Oklahoma City, where they were blown out last night. Their playoff success obviously depends on a lot of factors, but will a slower pace be one of them?

I first checked to make sure the pace of the game was actually slower in the playoffs. On that issue, at least, the conventional wisdom is correct. Over the last five years, teams average somewhere between two and 4.5 fewer possessions per game in the playoffs than in the regular season. That may not seem like much at first glance, but here's another way of putting it: theaverage playoff pace in 2011, for example, was lower than the slowest regular-season team's pace.

So the game does get slower. How does pace influence offensive output? Let's look at Denver and Houston. Both teams spent most of the season playing at impossibly fast speeds. The league average number of possessions per game this season was 92.0. Denver's pace was 95.0, Houston's an even more ridiculous 96.2, a full two standard deviations above the mean (HIDE THE KIDS! MATH TERMS!). They're also two of the most efficient offensive teams in the league. Even adjusted for pace, Denver and Houston were the fifth- and sixth-best offenses in the league, respectively.

But are they able to score so efficiently BECAUSE they play fast? It sounds like a reasonable assumption — teams that play fast will get more easy baskets in transition, and they'll create quick scoring chances before the opposing defense is able to set up. You might expect them to tend to play worse in games in which they don't get quite as many of these easy chances as they're used to. So I charted each game of Houston and Denver's seasons besides their last one, which they hadn't yet played while I was doing the research. That's 81 games for each team. On one axis I put the number of possessions they had, their "Pace Factor." On the other, their offensive efficiency. If they had a problem playing slow, we should see a slanted line: lower efficiency in games with lower pace.

Via: http://Jeremy%20Conlin

But that's not what happened. The "r-squared" value for each team is less than .01, which is to say that there's very little correspondence between pace and efficiency. The slope of Houston's trendline is actually very slightly negative, which means they actually played a tiny bit better this season when playing slower. Each squad had some of their best offensive games of the year playing slow, and some of their worst playing fast. Denver and Houston are just as good offensive teams regardless of how fast the game is moving.

There could be more work done on this issue, of course. We could expand our study to include more fast-break teams from years past. We could consider whether other playoff-specific factors might hurt fast-paced teams — perhaps there are more fouls called in the playoffs, which could make the game choppier without affecting the overall number of possessions. Maybe, for some reason, fast-break teams tend to suffer more ondefense in slow games than they do on offense.

In the end, neither Denver or Houston are likely to make much noise in the playoffs this year — Denver because of a recent ACL injury to starting forward Danilo Gallinari, Houston because of a general inability to play defense and the aforementioned matchup against Oklahoma City. But if and when they're eliminated, it doesn't seem like slow-paced games will be to blame.

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Article author: jeremyconlin

8 Things We Learned During The NBA Playoffs' First Weekend

We're through two days of NBA Playoffs action, with more games to come tonight, and now we know a little bit more about what these teams are really made of. (Regular season, schmegular season, as nobody has ever said.) Here are the eight things — one from each series — that most stand out after one game.

EAST

1. Jason Terry is terrible and he needs to not be terrible

Image by Elsa / Getty Images

The Celtics scored eight points in the fourth quarter against the Knicks in Game 1. EIGHT. That's so few points that I have to write it out as a word, not use the corresponding number. Even style guides are biased against how badly the Celtics sucked on offense in the second half of that game. And, although that sort of disastrous performance implicates everyone involved, one of the main culprits has to be Jason Terry, who would've been more effective if he'd tied both his hands behind his back and tried to bounce the ball into the hoop with his nose. Terry played 20 minutes and scored 0 points on 0-5 shooting, including four three-pointers, most of which were rushed and sloppy heaves that appeared to have no chance of ending up in the hoop. All told, the Celtics' bench produced an appalling four points total, all from Courtney Lee, and a little more scoring out of Leewould be nice — nobody expects anything out of Jordan Crawford — but if the Celtics are to keep up with the Knicks scoring-wise, they can't depend on Jeff Green to carry them, like he did in the first half. Terry has to show some evidence that the dynamo who helped beat the Miami Heat in the 2011 Finals still exists, however faded he might be.

2. Jerry Stackhouse is a great singer!

Video available at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=jlqvwOiBFP4.

Source:  youtube.com

The Brooklyn Nets' Jerry Stackhouse sang the National Anthem prior to their game against the Chicago Bulls, and it was by far the most interesting part of the night — the Nets rolled the Bulls by 17, and it doesn't look like Chicago has the offense necessary to beat the Nets, especially with Joakim Noah hobbled.

3. Paul George is BONAFIDE

Image by Ron Hoskins / Getty Images

Here's how you arrive in the first playoff game of your first season as your team's A-option: you go for a triple-double. Paul George had 23 points, 12 assists, and 11 rebounds during Indiana's win over the Hawks in what is easily the least interesting matchup of the 2012-13 playoffs. Seriously, I often forget that the Atlanta Hawks are even in the NBA, much less a playoff team. Considering the feebleness of the Hawks as an opponent, the main draw here comes from seeing whether the Pacers seem up to the task of offing the Knicks/Celtics for the privilege of losing to the Heat in the conference finals. So far, so good.

4. Brandon Jennings is a doofus

I mean, we already knew that, mostly. But the fact that he went out and predicted a Bucks win over the Heat in six, and then went out and failed to prevent his team from getting clobbered in Game 1 — although he did lead the team in scoring — just confirms it. Other than that, we learned something we also already knew: Guy Fieri has a better chance of catering the nextNew York Times office party than the Bucks have of winning this series.

WEST

5. Old Man Andre Miller's still got something in the tank

28 points, including a game-winning layup. Miller picked up all the slack left by the season-ending injury to Danilo Gallinari during Game 1, which became particularly important in light of the surprisingly tepid offense produced by the rest of the Nugs. It's fitting that Miller's 37, because he plays his age: his performance was a masterpiece of body control and shifty pivot-foot machinations, creating space where there appeared to be none. The Nuggets' victory at the point-guard position was surprising considering that Stephen Curry is the best player on either of these teams, but Curry started off slow and Miller plus starter Ty Lawson combined for enough velocity to push Denver through. If the Warriors had stolen that win in Denver, they would've had a shot in this series; without it, and without David Lee, who tore his hip flexor during the game, you can practically give the Nuggets the series already.

6. GINOBILI BACK

Image by D. Clarke Evans / Getty Images

The conventional wisdom was that the Lakers might —might — have a shot against the Spurs if a hobbled Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili hamstrung their ability to score. That did not happen. Ginobili, who was playing in only his second game since returning from a hamstring injury, dropped 18 points on the Lakers' hilariously thin backcourt, and Parker contributed another 18. Considering that the Lakers only managed 79 points of their own, they would've needed a heroic effort to keep the Spurs even loosely within striking distance; the reality is that, hurt TP and Ginobili or not, L.A. doesn't have a prayer of winning a game in this series unless they're scoring close to triple digits.

7. Zach Randolph will do his damndest to kill Blake Griffin

Zach Randolph wants Blake Griffin dead. It's that simple. His approach to guarding and posting up Griffin in the first game of their series was to use his body, and specifically his massive midsection, to abuse the muscular but smaller Griffin as brutally as he could. It worked to an extent — BG only had 10 points and five rebounds in 25 minutes, all very small totals for him — but the Clippers still managed to rule the boards and ended up clobbering Memphis.

8. Russell Westbrook somehow upped the sartorial ante

Image by Layne Murdoch Jr. / Getty Images

I mean. Look.

Visit the source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/ktlincoln/8-things-we-learned-during-the-nba-playoffs-first-weekend
Article author: ktlincoln

Watch A Dodger Fondle An Invisible Boob And Roll An Invisible Joint

1. During a Dodgers-Orioles game this weekend, Justin Sellers filled the time going into his happy place. Which apparently included a giant invisible boob:

2. And rolling an invisible fatty:

In his defense, nothing says "America's Pastime" quite like boobs and pot.

H/T Tim Burke at Deadspin.

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Article author: jpmoore

Reddit Apologizes For "Fueling Online Witch Hunts"

In a post this morning, "Reflections on the Recent Boston Crisis," Reddit General Manager Erik Martin issued a formal and candid apology on behalf of the site for its role in spreading false information about the identity of the Boston bombers.

While Martin took pains to highlight acts of kindness and generosity by the Reddit community in the aftermath of the bombings, as well as some measured and responsible news threads, Martin used strong language to condemn the dangerous speculation going on in subreddits like /r/findbostonbombers, which the site shut down in an unprecedented fashion over the weekend.

Though started with noble intentions, some of the activity on reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties. The reddit staff and the millions of people on reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened. We have apologized privately to the family of missing college student Sunil Triphathi, as have various users and moderators. We want to take this opportunity to apologize publicly for the pain they have had to endure. We hope that this painful event will be channeled into something positive and the increased awareness will lead to Sunil's quick and safe return home. We encourage everyone to join and show your support to the Triphathi family and their search.

Martin also posted traffic figures from the past week. According to Google Analytics, 272,000 users were on site at the time of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's capture Friday night, with 85,000 in /r/news alone, making it the first news thread since Obama's "Ask Me Anything" thread to exceed Reddit's front page traffic.

Reddit has taken fire for its role in last week's media maelstrom, which is why it's important to note that these traffic numbers put Reddit's news threads on the same level as the largest news sites on the internet. Often dismissed as a fringe element, outside of the mainstream, Reddit's ability to draw eyeballs during major news events is evidence that the gap between mainstream news consumers and those seeking raw information elsewhere is narrowing considerably.

It's not without a hint of hopelessness, then, that Martin makes the closing plea: "We hope that Boston will also be where reddit learns to be sensitive of its own power."

Update: This afternoon, during an AMA, Oops777, the Reddit user who created /r/findbostonbombers/ noted that Reddit admins "advised that we shold [sic] consider making it private or deleting it." This type of intervention from Reddit administrators is rare for the site, which usually goes to great lengths not to intervene in user behavior. Earlier in the AMA, when asked if /r/findbostonbombers was "worth it," Oops 777 expressed regret in creating the page. "Not even slightly," he curtly replied.

Reached by phone, Martin denied that administrators had shut down the subreddit — the decision to block it from view with a custom stylesheet, and then to make it private, was made by user moderators, he said.

But he didn't rule out such an action in the future: "If this exact scenario happened again we might not let /r/findbostonbombers exist," he said. But he didn't seem convinced that it would change much. "One of things that almost all the reporting missed was that the main thread that IDed Sunil [Tripathi] was not in /r/findbostonbombers," he said. "Let's say we had shut this subreddit down. That still doesn't help Sunil."

"The vast majority of people... did the right thing," he said, referring to moderators' efforts to remove posts containing personal information.

Asked about specific policy changes, he told BuzzFeed: "we're thinking about it."

"It's something we ask ourselves all the time," he said.

Visit the source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/reddit-apologizes-for-fueling-online-witch-hunts
Article author: charliewarzel