deerstalker

According to the NBA, there is a new professional league The Basketball Africa League (BAL), which will feature 12 teams from across Africa and scheduled to begin playing in March 2020. This past week they held the first BAL Combine in Brooklyn, New York.

The two-day scouting event featured 50 aspiring players from across Africa, the United States, and other parts of the world. The BAL Combine took place last week at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) Training Center, the Brooklyn Nets official practice facility, in Brooklyn, New York.

Each of the 12 teams that are playing in the upcoming inaugural season of the BAL will have up to 16 players (12 active and four inactive), at minimum, eight of the players will be citizens of their teams’ home country and up to four can be from other countries, with no more than two players per team from outside of Africa.

“Our goal is to establish the Basketball Africa League as a destination for top players with U.S. college, G League and international experience,” said BAL President Amadou Gallo Fall. “Our first BAL Combine will provide teams with the opportunity to evaluate a deeper pool of talent as they fortify their rosters ahead of our first season, which tips off in four months.”

Related: Patrick Rishe Thinks The NBA Should Cut Schedule to 68 Games

The first BAL regular season is scheduled to take place in Cairo (Egypt), Dakar (Senegal), Lagos (Nigeria), Luanda (Angola), Rabat (Morocco) and Monastir (Tunisia). The first BAL Finals will be held in Kigali (Rwanda). NIKE and Jordan Brand will be the exclusive on-court outfitter of the new professional league.

The NBA and FIBA have plans to provide financial support and resources toward the development of Africa’s basketball ecosystem, including training for players, coaches and referees, and an investment toward the infrastructure.

The announcement about the NBA and FIBA’s launch of the BAL, which marks the NBA’s first collaboration with a league outside of North America, was initially made at the NBA All-Star 2019 Africa Luncheon in Charlotte on Saturday, Feb. 16.

While you’re out shopping for sparkly eyeshadows and festive lipsticks to wear throughout the holiday season, don’t forget to grab the one beauty product that matters the most: lip scrub.

The essential may sound insignificant when compared to a fancy face compact or a gorgeous highlighter, but trust me, you’re going to need it to keep your lips soft and supple for your New Year’s kiss.

There’s nothing worse than sabotaging the magical moment or a love connection with dry, chapped lips.

So I took the liberty of rounding up the lip scrubs that will keep your pretty pout smooth and soft for the big event.

Checkout my kiss-friendly picks below.

The post The Best Scrubs For Dry Lips appeared first on Essence.

With Rise of Skywalker and the end of the Skywalker Saga at the end of the month to look forward to, Hard NOC Life is going to be a Star Wars podcast for the month of December. Because there aren’t enough Star Wars podcasts on the internet! Each week, Dominic and Keith will be breaking […]

The Grudge is one of those impenetrable horror franchises that never really goes away. Like The Conjuring and The Ring, the title alone is enough of a draw that we get a new one of these things every few years. Now, as 2020 approaches, there’s another version of The Grudge on the horizon and honestly? We weren’t sure what to make of a reboot, but this new red band trailer might change our minds. This film looks terrifying!

As you can see, the trailer took a page out of a recent promo for It Chapter Two. Basically, it shows an entire scene of a young woman confronting an older, creepy woman in her disheveled home. In It, it was Jessica Chastain, and here it’s Andrea Riseborough. The older woman approaches Riseborough with her hand in her mouth, asking if she’ll feed her. If that wasn’t weird enough, it quickly becomes apparent that there’s someone—or something—else in the house. Maybe a few somethings.

Oh yeah, the woman is also missing a row of fingers on one of her hands and is covered in some sort of mucky, bloody substance. You know, just girly things.

If you’re unfamiliar, The Grudge franchise kicked off back in 2002 with the Japanese horror film Ju-On: The Grudge. It got an American remake (starring Sarah Michelle Gellar) in 2004, which made bank after the success of another Stateside Japanese remake, The Ring. The Americanized version of The Grudge spawned several sequels, but the 2020 version seems to be doing its own thing. It’s a reboot, not a remake, and has a whole new plot loosely associated with the other films.

This Grudge was written and directed by Nicolas Pesce (Eyes of My Mother) and is produced by horror legend Sam Raimi, of Evil Dead fame. In addition to Riseborough, it boasts a pretty all-star cast: Glow’s Betty Gilpin, Demián Bichir, Jacki Weaver, John Cho, and Lin Shaye (who plays the old woman in the trailer and who you might recognize from other horror franchises like Ouija and Insidious).

Here’s a quick, official synopsis of the plot:

A single mother and young detective, Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough), discovers that a suburban house is cursed by a vengeful ghost that dooms those who enter it with a violent death. Now, she runs to save herself and her son from demonic spirits from the cursed house in her neighborhood.

That sounds like The Grudge, alright. But how will this one be different than the others? And why was a reboot even necessary in the first place? We won’t yet know if we’ll even see characters commonly associated with the franchise, like Kayako and Toshio. We do know that this one is retaining that creepy imagery of fingers coming out of someone’s head in the shower. And there’s the whole familiar haunted house element, too.

We’re excited to check this one out to see if it earns its stripes. Who knows? Maybe it’ll be a Halloween-style success and spawn even more Grudge movies. You can see for yourself when Nicolas Pesce’s The Grudge hits theaters on January 3, 2020.

 Featured Image: Screen Gems

The post This Trailer For THE GRUDGE Will Keep You Up At Night appeared first on Nerdist.