u/Luka77GOATic

Luka Dončić announced a few days ago that he will not play for the Slovenian national team this year for family reasons, but the national team’s sporting director, Saša Dončić, believes that his son may still be able to help them in August.

Now Saša Dončić explained in an interview with STA that the decision was made after careful consideration. At the same time, he stressed that this does not mean Luka will also miss the national-team action at the end of August, when Slovenia will play its first two games of the second round of World Cup qualifying against France, Finland, or probably Hungary.

“He won’t be there in July, but August is still far away and there is definitely a possibility that he joins Aleksander Sekulić’s team. He will make the decision himself; the club supports him and is not setting any restrictions or conditions for him. Otherwise, I am convinced that Slovenia can successfully continue the qualifiers even without Luka and finish the first part with two wins, which would open the door wide for us to the 2027 World Cup in Qatar,” Saša Dončić explained.

Source: https://www.rtvslo.si/sport/kosarka/sasa-doncic-luka-bo-reprezentanci-morda-pomagal-avgusta/782710

“It’s NBA Playoffs season, and once again as fans are glued to their televisions. There is something strangely familiar abrew between the online keyboard warriors and the voices of punditry as they respond to the continued dominance of the Oklahoma City Thunder. A young, disciplined, strategically crafted organization, impeccably drafted and relentlessly adherent to a culture of selflessness and community, suddenly finds itself resented. The greater the Thunder’s success becomes, the more critics seem determined to diminish it or even root for its demise.”

Source: https://www.oklahoman.com/story/opinion/columns/guest/2026/05/18/like-thunder-israel-has-risen-out-of-ashes-despite-all-odds-opinion/90078750007/?gnt-cfr=1

This may be the most bizarre NBA related article I have ever read. What the fuck?

“Both James and the Lakers, according to team and league sources, have interest in continuing their partnership (Rob Pelinka and Jeanie Buss have both said they hope James’ career ends with the Lakers). But Golden State and Cleveland could try to lure the NBA’s all-time leading scorer in an effort to win now – especially if James senses the Lakers are set on moving on in a different direction without him.

Team sources still believe there are avenues for the roster to improve substantially if the Lakers retain both James and Reaves this summer, no matter how narrow those pathways might appear.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7272005/2026/05/12/lakers-nba-offseason-luka-doncic-lebron-james-austin-reaves/

“xAI is becoming SpaceXAI.In Wednesday’s annoucement of its compute partnership with Anthropic, the company formerly known as xAI referred to itself as “SpaceXAI.” It was the first time I had seen that name, and while I don’t think it’s a good one, it made some sense following SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI.

According to Elon Musk, “xAI will be dissolved as a separate company, so it will just be SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX.”

Spruce: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/925469/xai-is-becoming-spacexai

This was obviously expected after the acquisition, I am just not sure on the name.

“SpaceXAI has signed an agreement with Anthropic to provide access to Colossus 1, one of the world’s largest and fastest-deployed AI supercomputers.

Built from the ground up in record time, Colossus delivers unprecedented scale for AI training, fine-tuning, inference, and high-performance computing workloads. Colossus 1 features over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, including dense deployments of H100, H200, and next-generation GB200 accelerators. The cluster delivers extreme parallel performance for large language models, multimodal systems, scientific simulations, and generative AI at frontier scale.

Anthropic plans to use this additional compute to directly improve capacity for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers.

As part of this agreement, Anthropic also expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.

The compute required to train and operate the next generation of these systems is outpacing what terrestrial power, land, and cooling can deliver on the timelines that matter.

SpaceX is the only organization with the launch cadence, mass-to-orbit economics, and constellation operations experience to make orbital compute a near-term engineering program rather than a research concept. If engineering challenges can be overcome, space-based compute offers near-limitless sustainable power with less impact on Earth.”

Source: https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership

Good for both the future IPO of SpaceX and the more distant potential Anthropic IPO. Anthropic desperately needed compute for Claude while SpaceX gets to make a nice profit and show the market in the interest in orbital compute.

Jamal Murray’s playoff rep isn’t fake. The bubble was insane. Three 40 point elimination games, two 3-1 comebacks, all of it. 2023 was legit star production too: 26.1/5.7/7.1 on 47.3 FG%, 39.6 from three and 58.6 TS%.

And the two game winners over the Lakers in 2024 were ridiculous. Nobody can take those moments away from him. But when you look at the full playoff runs from the last three years, not just the highlights, the picture gets a lot rougher.

Year GP PPG RPG APG FG% 3P% TS% +/-

2024 12 20.6 4.3 5.6 40.2 31.5 47.4 -32

2025 14 21.8 4.9 5.2 44.4 35.4 55.5 +30

2026 6 23.7 5.0 5.7 35.7 26.2 48.4 -28

Last 3 32 21.7 4.7 5.4 40.9 32.2 50.9 -30

The counting stats are fine. That’s not really the issue. The issue is that the efficiency is nowhere near the way people talk about “Playoff Murray.”

The 2024 Lakers series is the perfect example. The two game winners were iconic and deserved all the hype. But in that same series, he shot 40.0% from the field, 29.4% from three and had a 46.8 TS%. So the highlights are carrying the reputation, while the full series production tells a much rougher story.

And 2026 might be the worst one. Murray had arguably his best regular season, then dropped to 35.7% from the field, 26.2% from three and 48.4 TS% in the playoffs. He closed it with 12 points on 4-17 shooting in an elimination loss, against a Wolves team missing Edwards, DiVincenzo, Dosunmu and Anderson.

Denver wasn’t fully healthy either with Gordon and Watson out. That matters. But this is still three straight postseasons now. Murray isn’t washed. He still has huge moments. But the gap between the reputation and the actual production is getting hard to ignore.

At some point, we probably have to stop assuming the 2023 version is just guaranteed to show up.

Sources:

https://www.statmuse.com/nba/ask/jamal-murray-stats-in-the-2024-playoffs

https://www.statmuse.com/nba/ask/jamal-murray-stats-in-the-2025-playoffs

https://www.statmuse.com/nba/ask/jamal-murray-stats-in-the-2026-playoffs