The Nuggets head to the Finals while the Celtics hang on versus the Heat
A healthy and dynamic Jamal Murray has provided the supremely gifted 7’ Nikola Jokic the necessary sidekick to finally lift the Denver Nuggets to their first NBA Finals in franchise history, defeating the No. 7 seed Los Angeles Lakers in the Western Conference finals Monday night by 113-111 on the road.
As one of four American Basketball Association (ABA) teams to merge with the NBA in 1976, the No. 1 seed Nuggets joined the Indiana Pacers, the then-New York Nets, and the San Antonio Spurs to make it to the NBA Finals with a 4-0 sweep over the embattled Lakers.
The 28-year old Jokic, a two-time league MVP (2021, 2022), bolstered his resume by earning the Earvin “Magic” Johnson trophy as the conference finals most valuable player, capping the series with 30 points, 14 rebounds, and 13 assists, his eighth triple-double this postseason. The 6-4 Murray, who lit up the Lakers for 30 points in the first half—he finished with 37—of the Nuggets’ 119-108 Game 3 victory on Saturday, followed up with 25 in Game 4.
RELATED: Nuggets and Lakers set the stage for epic series
The 2023 playoffs have been an emotional validation that Murray remains one of the most electric backcourt performers in the league. After tearing his ACL in his left knee in April 2021, the 26-year-old University of Kentucky sharpshooter’s outlook on his future was permeated with doubt. He didn’t return until October 2022.
“When you’re hurt, you’re in the unknown. You don’t know what’s going to happen, if you’ll recover or what the results are going to be,” Murray said in a January interview with Men’s Health Magazine. “I was very fearful of the unknown before, but now I embrace it.”
Murray and the Nuggets await the winner of the Eastern Conference Finals between the No. 2 seed Boston Celtics and No. 8 seed Miami Heat. Down 3-0 entering Game 4 in Miami on Tuesday, the Celtics got the series back on their home court for a Game 5 tonight with a 116-99 win. Jayson Tatum had 33 points, 11 rebounds, and seven assists, all team-highs, as the Celtics lived to play another game.
“We were just trying to save our season,” said Tatum.
If Boston takes Game 5, Game 6 will be in Miami on Saturday. The NBA Finals begin on June 1.
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Invoke the 14th Amendment?
Utter the words “14th Amendment,” and most Americans know it as a Reconstruction act that guaranteed citizenship, particularly to Black Americans who had been enslaved. But now it’s once again part of the current discussion, economically speaking, as a possible resort by President Biden to solve the debt ceiling crisis.
On Wednesday, Biden got a surprise announcement from Sen. Bernie Sanders for him to invoke the amendment to avoid a default.
“In my view, there is only one option. President Joe Biden has the authority and the responsibility under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to avoid a default,” Sanders wrote. “This is not a radical idea. Making sure that the United States continues to pay its bills regardless of whether the statutory increase in the debt ceiling is raised or not is an idea that has been supported by Republicans and Democrats.”
Sanders’ reasoning is that the proposed cuts by the Republicans passed in their debt limit bill last month would be a “disaster,” and, to his mind, equivalent to a default. He insisted that Section 4 of the amendment, known as the public debt clause, must be utilized to “continue to pay its bills on time and without delay, prevent an economic catastrophe, and prevent huge cuts to healthcare, education, childcare, affordable housing, nutrition assistance and the needs of our veterans.”
In effect, the constitutional amendment authorizes by law the public debt and it “shall not be questioned.” At that time, it referenced debts incurred during the Civil War.
On Tuesday, the White House seemed to balk at exercising the amendment, fearful that it would create a constitutional crisis. Even so, Biden said last week from Japan, “The question is could it be done and invoked in time that it would not be appealed as a consequence past the date in question.”
That remains a question.
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Second detainee dies on Rikers Island this year
Rubu Zhao is the second person to die on Rikers Island this year. The 52-year-old was “severely injured” while detained at the George R. Vierno Center (GRVC) jail and was pronounced dead at Elmhurst Hospital two days later last Wednesday, May 16.
“I am saddened by the circumstances that led to Mr. Zhao’s passing and I offer my condolences to his family,” said NYC Department of Corrections (DOC) Commissioner Louis Molina. “The health and safety of everyone in our custody is a top priority and a full investigation is underway to determine how this unfortunate incident occurred.”
Zhao came into DOC custody last December and was reportedly awaiting trial. His lawyer, Jonathan Fink is currently unavailable to speak but agreed to talk to the Amsterdam News after press time. The story will be updated online to reflect any such changes.
Marvin Pines was the first person to die on Rikers this year, passing in February. He was 65 years old and suffered from seizures. Last year, 19 people died in or immediately after release from DOC custody.
RELATED: City hits pause on demolition of Manhattan Detention Center after outcry from locals
According to the New York Daily News, Zhao’s injury stemmed from falling in a mental health unit. Rikers Island is often regarded as the city’s “largest psychiatric care facilities.” The Mayor’s Office reported half of the city jail’s population were diagnosed with a mental health condition last year. 16.2% of detainees had serious mental illness. Jordan Neely—the unhoused Black New Yorker killed on the subway by white vigilante Daniel Penny earlier this month—struggled with his mental health and was formerly detained on Rikers for over a year.
Jail population review bill Int 0806-2022 was passed by the City Council earlier this month. If signed by Mayor Eric Adams, the proposed legislation would allow the city to evaluate detainees eligible for release which would include accessing their mental and physical health.
The bill is just the most recent move to clear the city jail population with Rikers’ slated and legally-mandated closure in 2027, according to sponsoring councilmember Carlina Rivera. Replacing the complex will be four borough-based jails with significantly less detention capacity.
“Streamlined case processing is just one way we can reduce unnecessary, even harmful jail time, imposed on New Yorkers,” said Rivera in her statement. “The city’s failure in managing the jails on Rikers Island and the historic number of deaths last year is partly driven by hollowed out healthcare and social services systems that leave too many vulnerable to crisis.”
This Thursday, March 25 also marks the 30th birthday of Kalief Browder, the Black New Yorker held at Rikers as a teenager over a missing backpack. Browder ultimately took his life two years after release.
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member and writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.
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Historic Hinchliffe Negro Leagues stadium officially reopens
Last Friday in Paterson, New Jersey, political, community, entertainment, and athletics dignitaries were among the large contingent of attendees at historic Hinchliffe Stadium for a ceremony to rededicate the renovated Negro Leagues Baseball venue.
Among those taking part in the day’s celebration were junior U.S. Senator Cory Booker; Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh; New York Yankees icon Willie Randolph, a five-time World Series champion; Tony Clark, executive director of the MLB Players Association; actress and talk show host Whoopi Goldberg; and former Mets general manager Omar Minaya.
RELATED: Paterson’s Hinchliffe Stadium
Hinchcliffe is where the New York Black Yankees, New York Cubans, and Newark Cubans once called home. Today, it is the domain of the New Jersey Jackals of the Frontier League, an independent baseball league. The renovated facility will also host football games featuring local high school teams in the fall and winter, as well as track and field events, and a museum to honor Larry Doby, the great Negro Leagues and MLB Hall of Famer who moved from Camden, South Carolina, to Paterson at the age of 14.“This is not a state landmark—this is an American landmark,” said Booker, speaking from a podium on the field. “This stadium is a testimony to the best of who we are in America. This stadium was first built during the Great Depression…Our Paterson forefathers and mothers decided the Depression was exactly the time for us to show that the American pastime can live, and that not just a field will be built, but it will become a sanctuary for those who cannot yet see the dignity, the divinity, and the humanity of all people.”
Construction on Hinchcliffe, which sits on 5.7 acres of land, began in 1931 and was completed in 1932. Since then, it has undergone three renovations, the most recent taking place between 2021 and 2022, and costing $103 million. It was condemned in 1997 and had no official use for 24 years.
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Celebrated South African choreographer fuses ballet and African dance
Dada Masilo, the South African choreographer-dancer whose re-imaginings of classical Western European ballets have captivated the international dance world, is returning to New York’s Joyce Theatre with one of her own works, “The Sacrifice,” from May 23–28. The highly praised piece, inspired by the late German neo-expressionist dance artist Pina Bausch’s ”The Rite of Spring,” fuses the rituals of Masilo’s South African Tswana dance form with ballet and modern dance to create an iconoclastic evening-length work that will be performed by Masilo’s company of South African dancers and musicians.
In the past, Masilo’s work has amazed audiences and critics with its passionate re-envisioning, re-telling, and deconstruction of dance’s sacred cows, capturing the essence of their narrative while injecting the original fairy-tale scenarios involving swans, sylphs, and such with a contemporary sensibility that grapples with relevant issues such as racial, class, gender inequality, discrimination, and resistance to oppression.
The plot twists are conveyed by using movement that blends ballet’s developpes, arabesques, and jetes with an Africanist presence that grounds the story in a new, more diasporic reality as Masilo wrangles the classic canon into a contemporary mode.
RELATED: BAM’s DanceAfrica Presents Golden Ghana’s Music and Dance
While her fusion of classical ballet and African dance forms have been applauded internationally, Masilo said, “Some people have gotten annoyed when I pick the classics. They say, ‘How dare you!” But I’m like ‘Do you have copyrights on this work? I’m not taking anything away from you, I’m just introducing something different. Something that opens your eyes a little bit. That’s all.’” Her defiantly innovative approach to dance comes both from love of the art form and years of study.
Born in Soweto, South Africa. Masilo started training at the Dance Factory at the age of 12 and after matriculating from the National School of the Arts, trained for a year at Jazzart in Cape Town. At 19, she was accepted to study at the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios in Brussels. After two years, she returned to South Africa and in 2008, she was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Dance.
Three commissions from the National Arts Festival resulted in her versions of “Romeo and Juliet” (2008), “Carmen” (2009), and “Swan Lake” (2010),. In May 2017, she premiered her “Giselle” in Oslo and in 2021, ”The Sacrifice” in Vienna.
Since 2012, her works have been performed in 25 countries and 150 cities around the world. She has been nominated for or received a Bessie Award (“Swan Lake,” 2016); Danza&Danza Award for “Best Performance 2017” (“Giselle”); Prince Claus Fund Next Generation Award (2018, Netherlands); and UK Critic’s Circle 2020 National Dance Award for Outstanding Female Modern Performance in the title role as Giselle.
Discussing her unique approach to ballet classics and shared passion for the art with American Ballet Theatre Principal Ballerina Misty Copeland, a fan of her work, Masilo described how she “fell in love with ballet” at a very young age and “stumbled into choreography” after being told that her body was not right for ballet. Finding that the types of ballets she wanted to do just weren’t there, she decided to create them.
In a recent conversation with the Amsterdam News she said, “What I try not to do is limit myself. I don’t like being put in a box. I suppose as Black people, we’re always put in that box. I saw an opportunity of [asking] what happens if we get out of our boxes and just try and see if things can co-exist without going into the mode of ‘Oh, you can’t touch that.’ For me, fusing different dance styles, breaking down the barriers, is more challenging.”
Masilo’s “The Sacrifice” is an example of what happens when her indomitable spirit takes on that challenge. The piece first grew, she says, out of a dance exercise that involved learning a 3-minute segment of the Bausch work set to Igor Stravinsky’s masterpiece.
“I remember listening to Stravinsky’s music, thinking ‘this is wild,’” she said. “I became very intrigued about the music. I like working with complex rhythms. I started improvising to the music and I found it incredibly difficult and frustrating, but then I thought, I’m not giving up on this one, so I did a 20-minute version using some of the Stravinsky score.”
The result was shown in New York several seasons ago during the annual Fall for Dance concerts at City Center. But that wasn’t the end of it. Masilo wanted to do a full-length work of “The Sacrifice,” but the Stravinsky score was too short, “so I had this idea to work with live music and ask the musicians to listen to the Stravinsky score and then react to it. With the musicians, you’ve got voice, you’ve got keyboard, you’ve got violin, and then percussion. I played them the music and they said, ‘Oh, my God what is this!’”
The result was a work of music that wraps her dance into a vibrant rhythmic package, pulsating with African music and dance.
“What I wanted was to infuse the work with a dance from my South African heritage,” Masilo said. “It’s called Tswana, a traditional dance of Botswana. It’s a dance that is very much about rhythm. In fact, the whole thing is about rhythm. Not just rhythm, but also ritual—the rite of spring, the preparation of the earth and mating. I put ‘The Sacrifice’ in a South African rural context where there are so many different cultures and traditions…In South Africa, we have ritual celebrations for deaths, birth, for anything really, because ritual is very sacred. Even in ‘The Sacrifice,’ we have to honor our ancestors because that’s part of the ritual and the fact that in the African culture, ritual and religion are intertwined. They’re not two separate things. Working on this piece has been very interesting, but also very challenging and rewarding.”
Asked what she wants the audience to come away with after seeing this new work, Masilo smiled and said simply, “You know in the beginning [that] when I started work on ‘The Sacrifice,’ I was very angry and I wanted to comment on the state of the world, and then I did a 360. ‘The Sacrifice’ is about grief and healing, and I want the audience to be moved, I want them to laugh, I want them to cry because I feel like we’re so desensitized that we don’t feel anything anymore. I want to touch people.”
For more info, visit www.joyce.org.
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