NEW YORK (AP) — Russell Westbrook moved past Oscar Robertson and kept right on going to the top of the NBA.
Westbrook was voted MVP on Monday night after setting a record with 42 triple-doubles during his historic season. He led the league with 31.6 points and added 10.7 rebounds and 10.4 assists per game, joining Robertson as the only players to average a triple-double for the season and breaking Robertson’s single-season record of 41 triple-doubles in 1961-62.
“I remember growing up just being home, playing the video games and stuff with my pops, and my mom sitting there and my brother and just talking about maybe one day I could be the MVP. Obviously I was joking at the time,” Westbrook said.
“But now to be standing here with this trophy next to me is a true blessing, man, and it’s an unbelievable feeling, something that I can never imagine.”
Westbrook’s victory ended the first NBA Awards show, which included two wins apiece for the Houston Rockets and Milwaukee Bucks.
He received 69 first-place votes and 888 points from a panel of 100 media members and a fan vote to easily beat Houston’s James Harden, who had 22 first-place votes and 753 points. Kawhi Leonard was third with nine first-place votes and 500 points.
Westbrook succeeded Stephen Curry, who had won the past two MVP awards. The point guard who plays with defiance on the court got choked up during an acceptance speech in which he brought some teammates onto the stage with him.
The Thunder went 33-9 when he had a triple-double, riding Westbrook’s record run into the playoffs in their first season after losing Kevin Durant to the Golden State Warriors.
“Oscar, guys like him, Magic Johnson, those guys, obviously I wasn’t able to see those guys play, but just to look back at history and see the things that they did, it’s something that I looked up to as a kid,” Westbrook said.
“I never thought I would be able to say that I broke Oscar Robertson’s record, and that’s just a true blessing.”
Earlier, Milwaukee’s Malcolm Brogdon became the first player not picked in the first round to win NBA Rookie of the Year in the common draft era, beating out Philadelphia’s Dario Saric and Joel Embiid.
Brogdon was the No. 36 overall selection out of Virginia. The common draft era began in 1966.
“I think it’s an example for guys that are told they are too short, they are not athletic enough, they are not real point guards, they are not real shooting guards,” Brogdon said. “I just think it’s an important message for people to see, and it can be done. It just takes a lot.”
Teammate Giannis Antetokounmpo won the Most Improved Player award.
Houston coach Mike D’Antoni won his second Coach of the Year award, and the Rockets’ Eric Gordon was Sixth Man of the Year after setting a record for most 3-pointers off the bench in his first season as a reserve.
“Obviously I’m just proud of the team and the way they responded all year. Great organization,” D’Antoni said of the Rockets’ 55-win season.
“This is not an individual award. This is a lot of people, a lot of hard work goes into it, and I’m the recipient of some pretty good players.”
In his first season coming off the bench, Gordon set a single-season record with 206 3-pointers by a reserve. He averaged 16.2 points to help fuel the Rockets’ run to the surprising No. 3 seed in the Western Conference and edged former NBA Finals MVP Andre Iguodala of Golden State by 32 points.
Golden State’s Draymond Green won the Defensive Player of the Year, ending Leonard’s two-year run. Leading the league in steals from his do-everything role with the NBA champions. He had a franchise-record 10 steals in a Feb. 10 game at Memphis while recording the first triple-double in NBA history without scoring in double figures, adding 11 rebounds and 10 assists.
The NBA formerly gave out its individual awards at various points throughout the postseason before switching to the awards show this season and presenting them all at once in front of the league’s top players and stars from the entertainment world.
Two of the best moments came during segments that didn’t include the NBA’s six individual awards.
Bill Russell was presented the first Lifetime Achievement award, welcomed on stage by fellow Hall of Fame centers Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, David Robinson, Shaquille O’Neal, Alonzo Mourning and Dikembe Mutombo. The 11-time champion as a player and the league’s first black coach first pointed at them and joked that he would have kicked their butts, then told them: “You have no idea how much respect I have for you guys.”
Former Thunder assistant coach Monty Williams was given the SagerStrong Award for the strength he showed after his wife was killed in a car crash in Oklahoma City. He was given a colorful jacket like the ones worn by Craig Sager, the longtime Turner Sports reporter who died of cancer this past season.
Denver Simmons admits to 4 prison murders to get the death penalty
Video After The Jump
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — One by one, Denver Simmons recalled, he and his partner lured inmates into his cell. William Scruggs was promised cookies in exchange for doing some laundry; Jimmy Ham thought he was coming to snort some crushed pills.
Jimmy Ham
Over the course of about a half-hour, four men accepted Simmons’ hospitality. None of them made it out alive.
Calmly, matter-of-factly, the 35-year-old inmate told The Associated Press how he and Jacob Philip strangled and beat their blockmates to death and hid their bodies to avoid spooking the next victims. They had nothing against the men; one of them was even a friend, Simmons admitted.
Why did they do it?
Convicted in the cold-blooded shootings of a mother and her teenage son, Simmons knew he would never leave prison alive. Tired of life behind bars, a failure at suicide, he hoped killing these criminals would land him on death row.
Officials say Philip and Simmons have confessed to the April 7 slayings of Ham, 56; Jason Kelley, 35; John King, 52; and Scruggs, 44. But until Simmons talked to the AP, no motive had been made public.
William Scruggs
The South Carolina Department of Corrections doesn’t allow in-person interviews with inmates. So the AP wrote letters to the two men. Philip’s attorney responded with an email: “Jacob is a severely mentally ill young man who has been so adjudicated by the court. Accordingly, I would ask that you make no further efforts to interview him or contact him.”
Simmons, though, called the AP three times, once using another inmate’s time slot. And he described a twisted compact between two men who had “a whole lot in common” from the moment they met — most important, both despair and a willingness to kill again.
“I’d always joke with him — from back in August and September and October of 2015 — that if we weren’t going to kill ourselves, that we could make a name for ourselves, so to speak, and get the death penalty,” Simmons, told the AP. “The end of March of this year, he was willing to do it. So, we just planned to do it. And we did it.”
Each man was serving life without the possibility of parole for a double murder.
In May 2010, Simmons shot an acquaintance, 45-year-old Sheila Faye Dodd of Round O, an unincorporated community northwest of Charleston. Prosecutors say he ate a pizza he’d bought with the dead woman’s debit card, picked her 13-year-old son, William, up from school and killed him.
Simmons agreed to plead guilty in exchange for prosecutors taking the death penalty off the table.
In August 2015, Philip pleaded guilty but mentally ill to strangling his girlfriend, Ashley Kaney, 26, and her 8-year-old daughter, Riley Burdick, two years earlier. At the time, he’d been attending the U.S. Navy’s nuclear training school in nearby Goose Creek.
Both men were sent to Kirkland Correctional Institution, a maximum security facility a few miles from the state capitol in Columbia. They were being housed in a unit for inmates who need significant mental health help but whose conditions aren’t serious enough to require hospitalization.
Simmons said spending the rest of his life in prison would be a meaningless life of fear and boredom. Inmates are always scheming to take advantage or hurt fellow prisoners and guards only see the men behind bars as numbers.
“It’s just not a good place to live, you know, day in and day out,” Simmons said.
Because of their relatively clean records in custody, Simmons said he and Philip, 26, were named “dormkeepers” for their unit. That meant their doors remained open when others were on lockdown.
Just two officers were assigned to the dorm, which housed 139 inmates, Corrections Director Bryan Stirling told lawmakers in April. He said pay that starts at $33,600 and chronic low funding from the Legislature make it almost impossible to even approach the national standard of four officers for every 30 inmates.
About 9:30 the morning of April 7, Simmons said, he hung a “flap” over the narrow window to his room — in this case, a clear trash bag on which he’d scrawled the words, “Using restroom. Don’t open.”
“You’re not supposed to keep a flap,” Simmons said. “But if you’re using the restroom, you know, they turn a blind eye to it.”
Simmons said the original plan was to wait until cells were being cleaned, “where ALL the doors were open.” But that morning, they opted for a different strategy.
“We just decided, you know, we’d use my room,” he said. “Until it was full. And then we’d use Jacob’s. And that’s just how it started.”
So, how did they choose their victims?
“This is the part that’s gonna sound bad,” Simmons said. “They, they trusted us. We talked to these people every day. One of them was a friend of both of ours. And they just trusted us. We come up with something for each one.”
The first name on the list was King, who was in for burglary, theft and larceny.
They knew King liked coffee. And there was a bonus, in Simmons’ mind: At 5-foot-4 and just 132 pounds, he was the smallest.
John King
“He was older, but he was small,” Simmons said. “And he wouldn’t offer much resistance.”
Since Philip was the experienced strangler, he took the first turn, Simmons said.
“He took his from behind and put his arm on his neck and just choked him,” he said. “It happened really fast.”
They slid King’s body under the lower bunk and went looking for their next victim in the common area known as “the Rock.”
William Scruggs, killer of a disabled veteran, was waiting in line for the restroom. Simmons knew him as a lifer who did laundry in exchange for goods from the canteen.
“I said I had some cookies for him. ‘Just come up to my room,’” Simmons said. Scruggs showed up a few minutes later, and Simmons said Philip dragged him to the floor.
Unlike Philip, Simmons said, he’d never strangled anyone.
“It’s totally different than killing somebody with your hands,” he said.
Simmons said he grabbed an extension cord from a lamp and wrapped it around Scruggs’ neck. Scruggs was facing him, but his eyes were closed.
“And, you know, he didn’t suffer a long time, man,” Simmons said. “I know that sounds lame. But he didn’t suffer a long time.”
The two placed Scruggs’ body, the cord still tied around his neck, on the lower bunk. They hung a sheet from the top bunk to conceal the corpse, then went in search of their next victim.
Simmons said Philip chose Jimmy Ham, who was to be released in November after serving nearly a decade for aggravated assault and battery, grand larceny and two counts of burglary.
“I didn’t want him on the list, because I knew he would fight,” Simmons said. “And Jacob, as big as he is, he’s not a fighter.”
But Philip prevailed, and Ham was invited in to snort some drugs.
Simmons said Philip told their guest to break up the tablets on a stool that was in the room. As Ham bent over the stool, Simmons said, Philip pounced — but he slipped.
Simmons said Ham had Philip pinned down on his back. As the two men struggled on the floor, Simmons said he grabbed a broken broom handle that he’d hidden in his room and hit Ham twice in the head with it. In the struggle, Simmons tried to silence Ham by jamming the broomstick in his mouth (“there could be no noise”) and Ham “just died. I mean, he died very fast.”
Simmons said they placed Ham’s body on the bunk beside Scruggs and let the curtain fall back into place.
“And we just went on the Rock,” Simmons said with a sigh, “and Jacob said, ‘Who’s next?’”
Simmons chose Jason Howard Kelley, who was serving time for stabbing his teenage stepson.
Jason Kelley
Everything about Kelley “was just annoying,” Simmons said. But unlike the others, he considered Kelley a friend.
Once in the cell, Simmons said, Philip told Kelley, “Look behind the curtain.”
“And he literally peeked behind and he said, ‘What the?’” Simmons recalled. “And Jacob grabbed him and threw him down.”
Simmons said he climbed on top of his friend and pressed the broomstick against his throat until he stopped struggling. And as Kelley lay there — dead or just unconscious, Simmons couldn’t tell which — Simmons thrust the stick in his ear.
By then, the murderers were too tired to bother with hiding Kelley’s body. When they stepped outside, Simmons said, he asked Philip, “Who do you want to do now?”
“I’m tired,” Philip replied, according to Simmons. “I don’t want to do anymore.”
“And I said, ‘Are you sure? Because this is going to be our only chance,’” Simmons recalled. “And he said, ‘Yeah.’”
It was just before 10 a.m., about 15 minutes before the next head count. Simmons said they walked down to the guard station and told what they’d done.
The Department of Corrections referred the AP’s questions to the State Law Enforcement Division, which has declined to comment on the case.
Simmons was asked why he did not commit suicide, if prison life was unbearable.
He said he’d tried several times: “You know, killing yourself is, it sounds easy. It’s really hard. Your body even fights you when you cut yourself.”
He said he’d even discussed having Philip “choke me out.”
“The original plan was that if I decided that I wanted to do it, I would be the last person,” he said. “And I’ll be honest with you. After I saw how it works, I guess you would say I was scared. I just couldn’t see myself going through with it.”
Simmons expressed no remorse for the killings.
“Honestly, we could have got staff members,” he said. “But they’re just there doing their job, you know? The people we killed, whether they deserved it or not, were not fine, upstanding members of society. You know, none of us are, or we wouldn’t be in where we’re at.”
And the more you kill, he said, the easier it gets.
“The second time, the third time, it’s just, I guess you’re desensitized to it.”
In retrospect, he said, the plan was not well thought out.
“Because Jacob’s not going to get the death penalty either way,” he said. “He’s legitimately mentally ill.”
As for himself, South Carolina hasn’t carried out an execution in six years, and court challenges likely will keep capital punishment on hold for the foreseeable future. Even a recently confessed killer of seven got life without parole, he noted.
Simmons said he imagines he’ll do the next 10 years in solitary and probably get another four life sentences tacked onto the two he was already doing.
“I did it all, I did it for nothing,” he said. “So that makes it especially bad for me, you know?”
___
Breed, an Associated Press national writer, reported from Raleigh, North Carolina.
Nicki Minaj was a performer at the inaugural NBA Awards show on Monday, June 26. She used the occasion to perform a medley of "Realize," "No Frauds" and "Swish Swish" with an assist from 2 Chainz.
MULTI-FACETED RECORDING ARTIST MARCUS SINGLETON DROPS 10-TRACK PROJECT, CHEMISTRY
Los Angeles, California’s Marcus Singleton has released Chemistry, an album which blends together many elements to create a sound that is entirely unique, though rooted in the rich musical history of those who experimented with sounds of the past. With the LP, Marcus aims to highlight both the metaphorical and literal interpretations of chemistry, applying the concepts of attraction and reaction to creativity and artistry. “Chemistry is something that one can not inhibit,” explains Marcus. “It is something that can not be forced, and it is also something that is profoundly routed in physical attraction. It not necessarily sexual, but through the progression of the music you understand that the impulse of wanting to be with someone is something that is intuitive and natural.”
Marcus Singleton
"Too Good To Be True"
Available on: iTunes & Spotify
ABOUT MARCUS SINGLETON
Los Angeles Hip-Hop Soul artist Marcus Singleton is a multi-faceted musician whose latest album, Chemistry, showcases the multi-genre fluency with which he was raised. As the son of a professional touring guitarist, Marcus was exposed to everything from Jazz Fusion to Gospel and Reggae at a young age. Developing an ear for live instrumentation as a child, he idolizes the dynamism of artists like Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, and Earth, Wind & Fire - artists whose musical fingerprints can be found in Marcus’ own work. Far from referential, Marcus’ approach to production is as innovative as it is nostalgic, with live flute, saxophone, violin, bass, guitar, and keyboards merging with Hip-Hop Soul beats. Lamenting the saturation of 808s, hi-hats, and drug references in today’s popular music, Marcus aims to embrace the groove and substance of prior generations with the more contemporary stylings of artists like Common and Musiq Soulchild.
Up-and-coming Ohio emcee, Stevie Sarado, takes jabs at the current wave of copycat rappers in his latest satire "TRAPped." The official music video parodies trending styles in rap as Stevie aims to out-do newer artists, by not just mimicking, but also by improving upon popular styles and flows. "TRAPped" serves as the latest single off of the emcee's recent mixtape, "A Reclusive's Exclusives", which is available for a free stream/download on multiple sites (Datpiff, Spinrilla, Soundcloud, etc).
Be sure to follow the artist on social media to stay updated about new releases and future ventures!
Gennady 'GGG' Golvkin was a recent guest on The Cruz Show. He discussed his upcoming mega-fight against Canelo Alvarez, whether he'll retire afterwards and picked Floyd Mayweather to easily defeat Conor McGregor.
Police in Los Angeles are looking into a robbery that may have involved rap legend Lil Kim.
TMZ reports that The Queen Bee rented a crib for the 2017 BET Awards weekend, but when she and her entourage arrived Sunday, June 25, at 2 AM, the "Crush On You" hit maker didn't think it was up to her standards.
Kim asked for her $20,000 deposit to be returned by the homeowner or property manager, but was denied.
An argument ensued and someone called the police. When the cops got to the scene, they informed both parties that their dispute was civil and there was nothing they could do about it.
Kim's team then left the scene.
At around 4 AM a group of people wearing ski masks and brandishing weapons arrived at the home, demanding Kim's down payment. After getting the funds back, the masked perpetrators slashed the victim's tires and stole a hubcap.
A robbery investigation has been launched by the LAPD.
Drewzii pushes forth the brand new record "sacrifice" from the latest project "Now Or Never" which was just released a month ago.
The Florida native is not your average rapper to come across as it can be heard in the new single delivering a mellow yet inspirational message for the masses. In the new record "sacrifice" he knocks down tough lyrical content over Hyphy's production, speaking on the ups and downs to reach the accomplishments during his walk.
Speaking from the same cloth many have endured to climb to another level. Check this new record out while streaming the entire project.
Chicago battle raper Big T is back with two new music videos for his "Mask Off" remix and "Good Day." Check them out below and let us know what you think in the comment section.
Good Morning America welcomed Naturi Naughton and 50 Cent to the show on Monday, June 26, to talk about season 4 of "Power," which premiered Sunday on STARZ.
Master P was at the 2017 BET Awards on Sunday, June 25, but decided not to enter the venue because he was unhappy, that in his opinion the network decided to honor Prodigy as an afterthought.
"The Truth Hurts…BET Would Have Never Changed Their Show For Prodigy If He Was Still Alive!!" P captioned an Instagram video. "It was a great thing acknowledging and celebrating the life of Prodigy and all of his accomplishments. But It’s a shame that none of these artists are told how great they are while they’re alive. Why can’t they get their flowers and tokens of appreciation while they’re still living? I know the truth hurts. I just have one serious question… Was Prodigy or Mobb Deep on BET’s radar last week… were they invited to the red carpet event, offered guest passes or an invite to perform at the awards show in the last 10 years?" he continued. "I’m willing to bet the answer is NO. I came to support my daughter today on the BET Experience stage but I decided that my family and I will not participate in the red carpet or awards events this year. I love my people and I support them but we really need to do better by each other. We lost a very talented brother, Prodigy. I send my condolences to his family. Hopefully, one day we can start appreciating the talented sisters and brothers while they are still alive. I know that what I am saying may ruffle a few feathers but the truth needed to be heard."
Things got heated between the members of Migos and Joe Budden on Sunday, June 25, at the 2017 BET Awards.
Offset, Takeoff and Quavo were being interviewed by Complex's "Everyday Struggle" crew when Budden announced it was time to "wrap it up." Apparently, Budden thought DJ Akademiks was taking too long to end the segment. He drops his live mic and starts to walk off of the set.
Things got heated as all three Migos members stood up and exchanged words with the Slaughterhouse emcee.
Fresh to the streaming app Spotify, is the new single "Butterflies," from rhyme spitter Dylan Phillip, and given a strong emotional push with the powerful vocals of singer Sammie Arena. Dylan flips through this hip hop laced production with direct delivery and skill. Walking us on the path of a person faced with beautiful change in a not so pretty world. Sammie Arena brings the chorus to life with her voice. Though soft in sound she brings a full ambience of talent with each word she chimes into the melody of the beat. The single is now available for streaming on Spotify. Check it out and add it to your favorites playlist.
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