As The 300s continues to grow its footprint in the sports entertainment world we’ve been creating more and more content so naturally I’ve been on the lookout for additional personalities. Guys that are funny and knowledgeable yet possess a healthy dose of sarcasm; guys you’d want to have discussions from the cheap seats with. With that being said we’ve brought on two new bloggers that will jump in and help us build out our writing, podcasting, and videos. More updates on the specifics coming soon, but without further ado lets meet the new guys!
Jimmy Lips @Jimmy2Lips
Bringing you a New York state of mind from the Jersey side of the Hudson River. I moonlight as a researcher for MLB and NHL Network. In my spare time I like to perform “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)” for karaoke.
Dom
Will be moving to DC and then to some foreign country soon to live out my life as a Boston curmudgeon abroad. Went to QU for a film degree I used twice.
If you’re a frequent reader of #RushHourRap then you know I am a J. Cole stan. Ever since I first heard The Warm Up mixtape in 2009. J. Cole has always been one of the best live performers in the game. I’ve seen him live multiple times from small venues like the Paradise in Boston where I saw him for $1 to watching him at the Garden where he performed his entire show sitting on a stool. And every time Jermaine brings it. Every damn day. He did just that last night in the place I least expected it; the NBA All-Star game.
In an era where so many artists routinely mumble, lipsync and sleepwalk their way through live performances, @JColeNC brings it every damn day. Even at the NBA #AllStarGame
Performing in his throwback Hornets starter jacket just a few miles from his hometown, J. Cole played for over 10 minutes straight with maybe 2 or 3 breaths taken the entire time. He didn’t show up and just play some of the hits and the hooks, he rapped some of his best stuff showcasing his lyrical ability to a bunch of people who probably weren’t expecting it. He legitimately killed it at an event best known for partying, mediocre dunk contests, tampering player recruitment, and the absence of defense.
Even LeBron had to stop and watch the show.
I was gonna say theres no way these guys are missing a free J Cole show so they can talk about their defensive effort at halftime in the locker room https://t.co/JRDFe5OBQZ
Have a weekend J. Cole. First it was helping out Dennis Smith, then nearly showing up every scrub in the NBA dunk contest to now putting on the best halftime show I’ve seen in a long time.
“League revenues have increased from $4.8 billion to a projected $9.1 billion in Silver’s five years.”
and the growth of individual teams as well:
“Team valuations have increased by 267 percent, from an average of $509 million in 2013 to $1.9 billion in the latest Forbes Magazine valuations.”
The NBA has become the most popular sport in the world for anyone under the age of 25 and its not even close. The NBA and Fortnite are what kids care about and not necessarily in that order. I went to a youth basketball game last night and the effect is real:
At a youth basketball game before I’ve even had a coffee.
A lot of that credit has to go to Adam Silver. Sure players not having to wear helmets that hide their face helps, but he’s made the NBA the most marketing friendly sport we’ve ever seen. It routinely embraces cultural trends, technology, and social media, and he’s had the NBA at the head of the line for two of the biggest opportunities in America: esports and legalized gambling.
I’m calling it right now. As the most progressive league in professional sports, the NBA will be the one to partner with the first national marketing campaign for recreational cannabis. Oh the NFL banned a marijuana commercial? Well Adam Silver will use that opportunity to make anyone even associated with the league even more money.
Just patently absurd how good this man is at his job and he ain’t resting. I still hate the advertising patches on jerseys and expect it to only get more distracting, but hey money talks.
15 years? Preposterous. The College Dropout, Kanye’s debut album, dropped on Feb. 10, 2004 when I was all of 15 so Yeezy has been in my ear for about half of my life. I still remember seeing the video for Through the Wire on MTV and immediately thinking two things: 1.) This is incredible and 2.) Who is this guy because it seems like he’s already a force behind the scenes.
If you’ve never seen some of the behind the scenes footage, this is a good place to start the YouTube rabbit hole. A then unknown Kanye just blowing Jay-Z’s mind with the beat that would later become Lucifer on HOV’s 2003 classic, The Black Album.
All Falls Down is still one of my favorite tracks and the video itself was just Kanye’s POV of a day in the life dropping his girl off at the airport. A pretty uninspiring concept when you say it out loud, but that shot of him rapping in the mirror of the airport bathroom is stilled burned into my brain for some reason. Having Stacey Dash in your video never hurts either.
It seems we living the american dream But the people highest up got the lowest self esteem The prettiest people do the ugliest things For the road to riches and diamond rings
Say what you want about him now, but you can’t deny the guy changed the game as the ultimate standout. You could just as easily call him a contrarian for his self described “pink-ass polos with a fuckin’ backpack. But everybody know you brought real rap back.” In an era when EVERY rapper was rocking baggy jeans and throwback jerseys, Kanye was trying to make it cool to dress dorky. And it worked.
Kanye’s style, polo shirts & cardigans, was a HUGE departure from the baggy jeans and jerseys that were popular at the time.
His campaign as a style icon started with bucking these trends, and making the world follow his lead. pic.twitter.com/UefqywJZrg
Just read this excerpt from an excellent piece about The College Dropout that I found on Sabotage Times:
He might be a superstar now, but he represented the underdog in the beginning. Back in early 2004, when 50 Cent was hip-hop’s undisputed king, street credibility was a prerequisite to success. The son of a photojournalist and an English professor, Kanye had a middle-class upbringing and didn’t fit into that mould. Sure, people loved his production work, but no one was convinced about him as a rapper. Where would this goofy dude fit in? What did he have to rap about?
…He got his record deal at Roc-A-Fella, Jay Z’s label, because co-founder Dame Dash wanted to use his beats for a compilation, not because they believed in him as a rapper. Unbeknownst to anyone at the company, he instead worked on College Dropout, an album that would transform the genre and dispense with those narrow preconceptions about rappers entirely.
WEEI – Entercom, the unrivaled leader in sports radio and one of the two largest radio broadcasters in the United States, today announced the new all-star team of play-by-play sportscasters for 2019 Boston Red Sox games on WEEI in Boston, the flagship station of the team. Broadcasters participating this season will include Sean McDonough, Josh Lewin and Mario Impemba, who will rotate in the radio booth alongside veteran broadcaster and Red Sox Hall of Famer Joe Castiglione, who has signed a multi-year extension with the WEEI Red Sox Radio Network and will begin his 37th season…
In adition to McDonough, Lewin and Impemba, Chris Berman, broadcaster for ESPN; Lou Merloni, on-air personality for WEEI; Dale Arnold, on-air personality for WEEI; Tom Caron, studio host for NESN; and Dave O’Brien, television voice of the Red Sox for NESN, will also call select games as part of the broadcast play-by-play committee. O’Brien will call a select number of nationally televised Red Sox games.
The WEEI broadcast booth needed a replacement to put next to longtime Red Sox play by play man, Joe Castiglione. Someone that could call the game, provide insights, have a regular conversation (don’t you dare call it a talk show), and essentially just create a more entertaining product.
But they couldn’t decide on one guy, so they hired EIGHT.
There’s a few familiar faces in here with current WEEI names like Lou Merloni and Dale Arnold as well as NESN personalities Tom Caron and Dave O’Brien. In addition to them, WEEI brought back fan favorite and Mass native Sean McDonough, Josh Lewin, and Mario Impemba.
Wait.
Is that what I think it is?
THATS CHRIS BERMAN’S MUSIC!
Chris Berman is back back back back baby! I honestly don’t know how many “backs” Berman is gonna be able to squeeze in when Mookie hits a piss missile over the Monster. There’s really not enough time, but he’ll adjust he’s a professional.
In all seriousness, I only really listen to the Red Sox radio broadcast if I have to. If I’m stuck in traffic or I’m crushing a few Bud Lattes win the old man in his backyard. So I don’t really care who they bring in, but it does scream indecisiveness. I know they probably wanted to test out a few guys to try and jumpstart a broadcast they had grown tired of, but there’s something to be said for familiarity. Having 8 different guys in there on any given night could do 1 of 2 things. It could provide excitement because you’re always hearing different voices and opinions. Or it could quickly create favorites leading to fans tuning out when they hear that Lewin’s calling the game and not Merloni on a given night.
Credit to them for trying something new, but it won’t be easy to build a rapport with Castiglione if some of the new guys are only working a game a week.
Just give Jonny Gomes the job and be done with it.
PS – It’s spring training and I just made a Jonny Gomes reference so get your Jonny Gomes Duckboat shirt before the season starts!
Yahoo – Tim Tebow, the former Heisman Trophy-winning college and NFL quarterback, is happily ensconced in the New York Mets minor league system, and eyeing a possible promotion to the majors in 2019. But there’s always that lingering question: could he ever return to football?
While we don’t know the final, definitive answer to that question, we do know that Tebow is so committed to baseball right now that he turned down an offer from Steve Spurrier, the coach of the Orlando Apollos of the Alliance of American Football, to join his team.
Spurrier, the former Florida and South Carolina football coach, confirmed to “PFT Live” that he reached out to Tebow in 2018 about playing for the AAF, but Tebow passed. And Spurrier understood why.
“No, and I don’t blame Tim,” Spurrier said. “Tim’s got a chance to go to Major League Baseball. I think Tim’s probably headed in the baseball direction. I don’t blame him. If I were in his situation I’d probably do the same thing.”
At least we’ll always have that Fantasy Football championship you won me in 2011, Tim. But hey in all seriousness if I had the opportunity to maybe get called up and play for the New York Mets (warranted or not) vs the opportunity to play in the illustrious AAF? Ummmm probably sticking with the Mets, even if they are run by dopes in the Wilpons.
I really do hope to see Tim Tebow playing Major League Baseball, even if it is a sham so the Mets can sell tickets. I mean whats Tebow supposed to do? Say no? Build that brand baby. While he has a career .244 batting average in the minors, in true Tebow fashion, he’s actually gotten better the closer he’s gotten to the big time. After hitting .220 in A ball, he then somehow got promoted and proceeded to rake with a .273 avg in AA. Now he’s been invited to spring training by the Mets and as we all know, AA is where all the prime prospects come from. Granted you don’t see a lot of successful players making their MLB debut at 30-years-old, but I’ll never doubt a guy that has Jesus in his corner.
PS – I still wear my Tebow Patriots t-shirt jersey with pride. Top 5 piece of obscure memorabilia that I own.
One of the most influential mixtapes in hip hop history, So Far Gone, turned 10-years-old today. That mixtape turned Aubrey Graham, a TV actor that only teenage girls were moderately aware of, into Drizzy Drake, one of the hottest rappers in the world that lit the charts on fire before ultimately joining forces with Lil Wayne.
This may have been one of those instances where an album hits you at just the right time. At 19 years old, experiencing living on your own, meeting new people, drinking a bit too much, beginning and ending relationships, Drake struck a chord with me as a college kid.
I’ll never forget back in late 2008 when I was a sophomore in college and our school sent around a questionnaire asking which artist we’d like to see perform at the spring concert. Well Drake was on that list and I vividly remember saying we need to book this guy now because he is about to blow up and that’ll be the end of liberal arts college concerts for Drake.
Naturally the school went in another direction and a few months later Drake dropped So Far Gone.
Off that mixtape Drake released the singles Best I Ever Had, which went double Platinum, and Successful, which hit No. 17 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Off a mixtape. You just didn’t see mixtape music cut into the mainstream like that in 2009. Featuring collabs with guys like Trey Songz, Lloyd, Omarion, Bun B, and of course Lil Wayne, So Far Gone put Drake on the map. Complex ranked it the fifth best mixtape of the decade.
A few months after that Drake dropped one of the biggest rap collabs of all time with Forever featuring Lil Wayne, Kanye West, and Eminem.
If So Far Gone put Drizzy on the map, Forever turned him into the biggest star on the planet. Drake wouldn’t even drop his debut album Thank Me Later until the following summer in 2010 so he’s come a looong way.
You see successful unsigned artists everywhere these days, with Chance the Rapper being the most prominent, but Drake was the first to not only crack into the mainstream, but become the biggest thing in music, all without a deal. He did this obviously with excellent music featuring some big name collabs, but the guy built a bigger buzz on the still emerging social media platforms unlike any artist had before him.
So I’ve always been bummed I missed out on seeing Drake before he became the mega star that he is today, but I did finally get to see a Drizzy show when he was at the garden in 2018.
Oddisee is an artist I just recently stumbled onto and his music is a breath of fresh air. Coming out of Washington D.C. Oddisee has a serious flow that doesn’t waste a single breath, but unlike some purely lyrical artists, this song is catchy AF. Smash that play button.
We just want to matter more tryna be the matador in the pit of bull Tryna gather our status to the masses looking at the glass like that’s pitiful I ain’t seein’ what you seein’ cause your problems ain’t my problems how you solve ’em really I don’t even care Puttin’ pressure on the shoulders that ain’t really there, but I know you see it when you stare
Yahoo – Patriots backup quarterback Brian Hoyer used one of the projects [Peyton] Manning is currently involved with to help him prepare his teammates on defense for the Super Bowl…He bounced around a bit, but got a chance to be a starter in 2013-14 with the Cleveland Browns. In Cleveland, Hoyer played under offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan — and a young coach named Sean McVay, who was then tight ends coach.
Via Albert Breer of The MMQB, Hoyer (who also played for Shanahan in San Francisco) believed he’d have institutional knowledge of the offense McVay now runs with the Rams because of his time in Shanahan’s system.
So in the days before the Super Bowl he watched Manning’s “Detail” on ESPN+, the episode centered around Rams quarterback Jared Goff, and quickly realized the offense is the same one he worked in.
Hoyer watched film of the Rams, saw an interview in which Goff and McVay discussed McVay being in Goff’s ear right up until the 15-second cutoff during games, and for good measure, he watched the Amazon series “All or Nothing” which focused primarily on the last days of Jeff Fisher’s tenure with the organization but included McVay’s first organized team activities from his first months with the Rams.
The language was the same.
Armed with all of that, Hoyer was able to do a great job impersonating Goff during practice, preparing his teammates for how to play Los Angeles’ young quarterback.
I mean this was bound to happen sooner or later was it not? You have one of the best, most analytical quarterbacks of all-time in Peyton Manning just breaking down game footage for anyone with $4.99 in their pocket to see. Surely someone was going to watch that and use it to their advantage. Especially the Patriots if their opponent in the Rams appeared on said show. Especially if those MORONS didn’t even bother to change anything in the last 5 fucking years.
The key excerpt is just that. Brian Hoyer, from his time playing under Kyle Shanahan, and a young Sean McVay, on two different teams knew the type of system they like to run on offense. Except it wasn’t just the system that was the same.
“The language was the same.”
How is that even possible? For a league that treats the smallest of details like Soviet Bloc state secrets this is laughable. Now a lot of coaches rehash the same ideologies and styles of play over the years (i.e. Andy Reid, Wade Phillips), but to just re-use the same system without even changing a word here or there? Come on Sean, you learn this in every 9th grade homeroom across America when you need to copy off of your buddy’s homework.
This was why it took two full years for the “A Football Life” documentary on Bill Belichick to come out. Released in 2011, the doc featured behind the scenes footage of the 2009 Patriots season, the one made famous for Bill predicting how easily the Pats would be stopped in the playoffs:
and him commiserating with Tom Brady on the sidelines during a blowout to the Saints
That was legendary, behind the scenes, insightful footage that I never thought would see the light of day. But it literally took two years after the season ended to come out. When half the players featured were no longer even on the team. Not a couple of weeks after a game in real time so anyone with an ESPN+ subscription can watch behind the scenes Rams footage to go along with Rams game tape as well as a Hall of Fame quarterback breaking it down so even idiots like me can follow along.
Well hats off to Brian Hoyer for doing his goddamn job.
Hoyer had done such a good job preparing his teammates that when the Patriots were practicing in Atlanta, he felt frustrated.
“They had everything covered,” Hoyer said. “I was like, ‘Either these guys know what all our plays are, or they’re gonna ball out in the game.’ You could see it. They were playing so fast, they were so on top of it. And you get to the game, and they go and have the best defensive performance I’ve ever witnessed.”
ESPN – Philadelphia 76ers general manager Elton Brand called Los Angeles Lakers president of basketball operations Magic Johnson on Monday afternoon to apologize for insinuating in a radio interview that the Lakers had called — unprompted — to ask permission for Johnson to speak with Sixers forward Ben Simmons, league sources told ESPN.
In the interview with 97.5 The Fanatic on Monday morning, Brand said, “[Lakers GM] Rob Pelinka called me and said that Ben wanted to talk to Hall of Famers after the season; Magic was on the list. He asked for authorization … I said no.”
Brand did not mention in that interview that someone from the Sixers, at the urging of both of Simmons’ brothers, had contacted Pelinka first, which is what prompted Pelinka’s call to Brand.
Granted I’m a 90s kid so I never grew up watching Magic Johnson, but I just don’t see the same aura around him that someone 10 or 15 years older than me might. With that being said, I am constantly in awe of how this guy just gets people falling all over themselves to kiss his ass.
I have a developing theory that Magic is in fact the Keyser Soze of the NBA.
He tampers with their kids, he tampers with their wives, he tampers with their parents and their parents’ friends. He burns down the houses they live in and the stores they work in, he tampers with people that owe them money. And like that he was gone. Underground. Nobody has ever seen him since. He becomes a myth, a spook story that NBA GMs tell their kids at night.
Did you know that you can’t find a single clip of his old Magic 8 Ball segment on ESPN? The one where he struggled to speak complete coherent sentences, yet is now the President of the Lakers? Yea well they’ve all been scrubbed from the internet.
Okay so just a quick recap for anyone that is a little out of the loop. Ben Simmons is a player that LeBron James has publicly coveted for a long time and after Simmons signed with LeBron’s Rich Paul’s agency Klutch Sports, many thought LeBron was headed for Philly. Obviously that didn’t happen as LeBron went to LA, but the two now share the same agent.
LeBron and Magic proceeded to tamper with other young big name players like Anthony Davis, also a Rich Paul client, with rumors and leaks and very public trade requests. AD didn’t get moved as the Pelicans hold out hope for the holy shit mega deluxe package from Danny Ainge and the Celtics.
Now most recently, Sixers GM Elton Brand came out and said the Lakers asked to speak to Ben Simmons, which obviously set off massive tampering alarms right? Well not really as the league has seemingly turned a blind eye to Magic Johnson in the same way everyone in Boston used to adoringly say oh thats just Manny Being Manny every time Manny Ramirez did something moronic.
NBA spokesman Mike Bass told ESPN on Monday, “The league office is looking into whether any contact took place between Ben Simmons and the Los Angeles Lakers that violated NBA rules.”
Brand told ESPN earlier Monday that Simmons simply wanted the Sixers to help him facilitate “chatting with some of the game’s all-time greats.”
So a little bit more context to that story came out today. Allegedly Ben Simmons wanted to have a meeting with his (and LeBron’s) agent and Magic Johnson, the President of Basketball Operations for the Lakers (whom LeBron plays for) to just chat about basketball. All of this with everyone in the world knowing that LeBron has pined after Simmons, Simmons signed with the same agent and lifelong friend of LeBron, and now they all want to have a meeting with Magic Johnson, who has repeatedly gotten into dubious situations regarding tampering.
Got all that?
Well if you’re the Sixers GM you’re probably pretty pissed off about the whole thing right? Well you’d be wrong because today HE apologized to Magic Johnson for the whole situation.
I don’t get it. This is how the Lakers routinely wind up with the best players in the league despite offering nothing but nice weather and poor management. Magic has got guys apologizing to him after trying to steal their players. Got it.
Jimmy Lips
Dom
This was why it took two full years for the “A Football Life” documentary on Bill Belichick to come out. Released in 2011, the doc featured behind the scenes footage of the 2009 Patriots season, the one made famous for Bill predicting how easily the Pats would be stopped in the playoffs:
The 300s 