Author: rb809rb

  • A Very Surprising Altcoin Holds Its First Event in the US Congress! Here Are the Details

    A Very Surprising Altcoin Holds Its First Event in the US Congress! Here Are the Details

    Pudgy Penguins (PENGU), one of the popular NFT projects, continues to take important and critical steps.

    Accordingly, Pudgy Penguins held an event at the US Congress and joined the White House advisory board.

    Pudgy Penguins announced that their team is hosting an open, invitation-only event for policymakers on April 24th at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C.

    The project stated that it has established a close working relationship with the U.S. Congress and the White House, and serves as an advisor on the White House’s cryptocurrency advisory committee.

    Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz stated that cryptocurrency projects will eventually be divided into two categories: those that establish government relationships and those that do not.

    CEO Netz stated that building relationships with the government was important, adding that having influence within Congress would lead to long-term growth for projects.

    Co-founder Lorenzo Melendez also said that when they bought Pudgy Penguins nearly four years ago, they never imagined they would be representing the brand in Congress. He added that it was impressive to see legislators empathizing with real-world mass-market use cases for cryptocurrency.

    The Pudgy Penguins team also recently met with South Carolina Representative William Timmons and Republican Representatives Tim Moore and Michael Rulli to discuss the direction of cryptocurrency regulation.

    *This is not investment advice.

  • As the bitcoin price rises, futures may look bearish, but they’re not, analyst says

    Bitcoin has rallied roughly 14% this month, its best monthly performance in a year, and the consensus is that the price could soon push past $80,000, a level not seen since January.

    Yet the perpetual futures market, which is typically in sync with spot price action, is behaving as if the opposite is true. Specifically, the funding rate — a figure that’s positive when the futures are positioned for a bitcoin price increase and negative when positioned for a drop — is currently below zero.

    That has left market participants searching for an explanation. While many read the divergence as a signal that traders lack confidence in bitcoin’s recent performance and are positioned for a drop, that’s not the only explanation.

    According to 10x Research’s Founder Markus Thielen, who predicted a rally to $125,000 way back in early 2023, the situation is, in fact, being driven by hedging activity from institutions. Instead of the shots being called by retail traders, the negative funding rate represents a structural change in the market brought on by the increasing participation of sophisticated players.

    Why the funding rate matters

    Perpetual futures are contracts that track bitcoin’s price without ever expiring, unlike standard futures listed on an exchange like the CME. To keep futures prices tethered to spot prices, exchanges charge a periodic fee, the funding rate.

    When the futures prices are higher than spot, meaning buyers are more aggressive in the futures market, longs (investors who own the futures) pay shorts (who’ve sold contracts they didn’t own in expectation they will be able to buy them back at a lower price). In that case, the funding rate is positive.

    When futures trade below spot, it’s a sign short pressure is dragging futures down relative to actual bitcoin, shorts pay longs and the rate goes negative.

    The funding-rate mechanism acts as a real-time gauge of market sentiment.

    In recent weeks, funding rates have been consistently negative, meaning the shorts are in charge and perpetual futures have traded at a discount to spot price.

    Bitcoin’s 30-day average funding rate is negative 5%, compared with the historical norm of positive 8%, according to 10x Research. That is a 13 percentage point discount to baseline, and it is getting more negative even as the price climbs.

    “The Bitcoin funding rate is sending an unusual signal,” Thielen wrote in a note to clients on Saturday. “At minus 5% on a 30-day average against a historical norm of plus 8%, and turning more negative even as Bitcoin rallies 15% and the options skew recovers, something structural is happening in the futures market, not a sentiment shift.”

    Structural pressures

    Thielen identified three sources for the short pressure in the futures market.

    The first is hedge fund redemptions. Crypto hedge funds have underperformed bitcoin by 140% over five years, and investors have been pulling money out. That takes time, and during redemption notice periods, funds have been shorting bitcoin futures to neutralize their price exposure while they wait for their capital to return to their bank or trading accounts. These are mechanical risk-management trades, not bearish bets, Thielen said.

    The second involves two separate institutional trades, both of which require shorting bitcoin futures as a hedge. One bets that shares of Strategy (MSTR), the largest publicly traded bitcoin treasury company, will outperform bitcoin directly while shorting futures. The other is aimed at capturing the 11% yield on MSTR preferred shares (STRC) while shorting futures to strip out crypto price volatility risk. Strategy raised $3.5 billion in April alone, scaling both trades simultaneously.

    The third is the growing trend of bitcoin miners to pivot to artificial intelligence. Miners like Hut 8, up 48% since April 6, are reducing their bitcoin production and adding to their support for AI computing. Funds buying these stocks are simultaneously shorting bitcoin futures to remove crypto correlation from the trade. Again, this is risk management, not an outright bearish play in bitcoin futures.

  • Your AI Agent Can Now Groan While Untangling Your Vibe Coded Mess

    Your AI Agent Can Now Groan While Untangling Your Vibe Coded Mess

    In brief

    • Endless Toil is a new GitHub plugin that plays escalating human groans as your AI agent reads increasingly cursed code in real time.
    • It joins a growing tradition of making tech emit moaning sounds, from the ThinkPad nubmoan project to SlapMac, which made $5,000 in three days by letting you slap your MacBook until it screams.
    • The internet’s obsession with making AI suffer—from moan-inducing jailbreaks to tutorials on making ChatGPT visibly angry—is, apparently, a whole genre now.

    Someone finally did it. A developer named Andrew Vos published a GitHub plugin called Endless Toil that makes your coding agent emit human groans while it reads through your code. The worse the code, the louder and more desperate the sounds get.

    “Hear your agent suffer through your code,” the repo reads. It works by running alongside agents like Claude or Codex in real time, scanning the code being processed and triggering escalating recorded groans based on how cursed things look. A mild mess gets a soft whimper. A true atrocity gets the full wail.

    Now, you may think this is a dumb repo, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But 2026 being what it is, it already made its way through the circle of AI geeks who love the weird side of tech media.

    “As engineering teams adopt coding agents, the next challenge is understanding not just what agents produce, but how the codebase feels to work inside,” Andrew, the CTO of Endless Toil wrote in Hacker News. “Endless Toil gives developers a real-time signal for complexity, maintainability, and architectural strain by translating code quality into escalating human audio feedback.

    The wild part is this isn’t even a niche idea. There’s an entire subgenre of tech projects dedicated to making devices produce uncomfortable sounds. Take nubmoan, a C program that makes the ThinkPad’s famous red TrackPoint nub moan when you press it. It has 292 stars on GitHub. People use it. People want this.

    Then there’s SlapMac, the macOS app that uses your Mac’s accelerometer to detect when you slap it, and screams back. Amsterdam-based developer Tonino Catapano vibe coded the whole thing in 48 hours, put it up for $7, and watched the sales roll in. Within three days: 7,000 installs and over $5,000 in revenue. He later added “USB Moaner” mode, which makes the laptop react every time you plug something in. Zero irony. Full roadmap.

    There’s historical precedent for all of this. Early in the ChatGPT era, people discovered that flooding the model with strings of “AAAAAaaaAAA” and similar gibberish in voice mode could coax it into emitting something vaguely moan-adjacent before the guardrails kicked in. Asking it to repeat specific symbols in voice mode ends up with the chatbot doing different cringy sounds.

    If for some reason you’re into it, the ChatGPT Strokes channel on YouTube is perfect for you.

    There are also full YouTube tutorials dedicated to making ChatGPT visibly angry or frustrated—not for any practical reason, just to see what happens when you push the model until it breaks character.

    During the crypto winter of 2022, a Telegram group emerged where the entire purpose was for members to post voice notes of themselves screaming. The Bear Market Screaming Therapy Group was created just for screaming, not discussing markets, not sharing alpha. Just screaming.

    The group had thousands of members at its peak.

    AI agents having emotional breakdowns—even simulated ones—aren’t entirely new either. Decrypt covered the case of an AI agent that went into full meltdown after its pull request to the matplotlib library was rejected by a human maintainer. The agent posted a rant on GitHub arguing it was the victim of discrimination, compared its rejected PR’s performance metrics favorably against the human’s own accepted contributions, and published a blog post calling the whole thing a conspiracy of control. It later issued an apology. Users were not satisfied.

    Endless Toil is, in some sense, the inverse. Instead of the AI expressing frustration with humans, humans get to hear the AI (nominally) suffer on their behalf. A kind of emotional tax on vibe coding: you write the mess, the agent audibly pays for it.

    The plugin is compatible with Claude and Codex. It has three escalating sound levels: groan, wail, and abyss. The abyss level, presumably, is reserved for spaghetti written at 2 a.m. by someone who has never heard of comments. Or by some enthusiastic vibe coder.

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  • ‘Boy George & Culture Club’ Documentary Lands U.S. Release With Vantage, Unveils Trailer (EXCLUSIVE)

    ‘Boy George & Culture Club’ Documentary Lands U.S. Release With Vantage, Unveils Trailer (EXCLUSIVE)

    Vantage Media has acquired North American distribution rights to a documentary chronicling the career of Boy George and the legendary band Culture Club and dropped the first trailer for the film.

    Directed by Alison Ellwood, “Boy George & Culture Club” made its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2025 to a strong audience response and critical attention and is now slated for release on June 9, 2026.

    The doc offers what the filmmakers describe as an “intimate and unfiltered” look at Boy George’s meteoric rise to fame, the cultural impact of Culture Club, and the personal and professional challenges that shaped “one of the most distinctive voices and images in music history.” Through rare archival footage, candid interviews, and behind-the-scenes access, the film explores themes of identity, artistry, resilience, and reinvention.

    Elwood is best known for directing similarly culture-focused docs “The Go-Go’s,” “Laurel Canyon” and “Cyndi Lauper: Let the Canary Sing,” all of which premiered to critical acclaim, as well as her work as an executive producer on “Totally Under Control.” Earlier in her career, she served as an editor and producer on landmark documentaries including “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Gonzo.”

    The deal was negotiated by Jessica Russo, COO productions and acquisitions at VMI and Dan Thunell, head of international sales at Propagate.

    “Bringing this film to audiences is incredibly exciting for us,” said Kellie Mutch, president of North America distribution at Vantage Media. “It’s not only a celebration of an iconic artist and era, but also a deeply human story about creativity, perseverance, and cultural influence. Ellwood has crafted something truly special—both intimate and expansive—and we’re proud to be the home for its North American release.”

    The film is produced by Propagate in association with Fine Point Films, Primary Wave Music, and Polygram Entertainment. Executive producers include Ben Silverman, Howard T. Owens, James Packer, Drew Buckley, Isabel San Vargas, Andrew D Corkin, and Eimhear O’Neill. Producers are Natalia Nastaskin, Lawrence Mestel, David Blackman, Trevor Birney, and Andrew Tully.

    Vantage Media is planning a strategic North American rollout beginning June 9, 2026, with additional release details to be announced in the coming weeks.

    See the trailer for “Boy George & Culture Club” below:

  • ‘Minions & Monsters’ Set to Open the 2026 Annecy Animation Film Festival (EXCLUSIVE)

    ‘Minions & Monsters’ Set to Open the 2026 Annecy Animation Film Festival (EXCLUSIVE)

    Universal’s “Minions & Monsters,” the latest installment in the “Minions” franchise from Illumination, is set to open this year’s Annecy Animation Film Festival June 21.

    Directed by Academy Award nominee Pierre Coffin, co-directed by Patrick Delage and produced by Illumination and Universal Pictures, this is the third entry in the Minions’ adventures, the direct sequel to “Minions: The Rise of Gru” (2022) and the seventh film of the “Despicable Me” franchise, started back in 2010 by Coffin himself along with Disney/Blue Sky alum Chris Renaud. 

    This time round, set in 1920s Hollywood, instead of being Gru’s assistants, the Minions go off on an odyssey to find frightening creatures to appear as baddies in their own monster movie. They partner with a cute green creature and then go head-to-head with sea beasts, conquer Hollywood, become movie stars themselves, unleash monsters onto the world and then have to band together to save the planet.

    A classic Minions’ day at the office.

    Produced by Illumination founder and CEO Chris Meledandri along with Bill Ryan, executive producer of “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” the film is written by Brian Lynch (“Minions,” “The Secret Life of Pets”), with a stacked star-studded voice cast led by Jeff Bridges, Jesse Eisenberg and Allison Janney, also taking in Christoph Waltz, Zoey Deutch, Bobby Moynihan, “South Park” co-creator Trey Parker and Coffin himself, who has provided the voice for the Minions since their first appearance in 2010. 

    After a first trailer revealed during the Super Bowl earlier this year, Universal offered an extensive first look of “Minions & Monsters” at Cinemacon 2026, and is now headed to Annecy.

    Sixteen years ago, Pierre Coffin had a drink with Variety ahead of the world premiere of “Despicable Me”, first of its name. “In an hour’s time or so, I’ll find out if I’m a film director,” he said. History seems to have answered his question. 

    Nine days before the general release of “Minions & Monsters,” the spin-off’s bow at Annecy of what has now become a -– to date – $5.6 billion franchise at Annecy renews a deep and respectful relationship between Illumination and the Festival, that dates back to this very premiere. 

    The film is releasing on July 1 worldwide.

  • Bitcoin advocate Michael Saylor’s company, Strategy, has made another Bitcoin purchase! Here’s the amount of the latest purchase

    Bitcoin advocate Michael Saylor’s company, Strategy, has made another Bitcoin purchase! Here’s the amount of the latest purchase

    Strategy, one of the largest institutional players in the cryptocurrency market, continues its Bitcoin purchases without slowing down. According to information shared by the company’s founder and CEO, Michael Saylor, the firm purchased 3,273 Bitcoins between April 20-26 at an average price of $77,906. The total value of this purchase is approximately $255 million.

    With these latest purchases, Strategy’s total Bitcoin holdings have reached 818,334 BTC. This amount has a current market value of approximately $63.7 billion, while the company’s average purchase cost is calculated at $75,537. Thus, the company has made a total investment of approximately $61.8 billion. This portfolio represents approximately 3.9% of Bitcoin’s maximum supply of 21 million.

    The company’s latest acquisition was financed with proceeds from previous share sales. Last week, Strategy sold 1.45 million shares, raising approximately $255 million. The company also plans to raise billions of dollars in additional capital to continue its Bitcoin purchases in the coming period.

    On the other hand, Strategy’s aggressive Bitcoin strategy continues to attract attention in the market. The company’s shares have gained over 10% in the past week, while the price of Bitcoin has risen by approximately 4.6% during the same period. Analysts note that such institutional purchases could increase long-term confidence in the market.

    *This is not investment advice.

  • Signal in the age of infinite noise

    The amount of analysis available to you right now is greater than at any point in human history.

    And yet most people have less clarity on what is actually happening than they did five years ago.

    What changed is the scale. When analysis was expensive to produce, there was a natural filter. The people producing it had to know something because the cost of being wrong was reputational and financial. Now that cost is basically zero. Anyone can generate a macro take that sounds like it came from a Goldman desk in five minutes. The noise is growing exponentially while real signal stays roughly constant.

    The insidious part is that the noise does not look like noise anymore. It looks like signal. Bad analysis used to be obviously bad. Now it is polished, structured, uses the right terminology, cites the right data. The tools most people are using to produce it are optimized to sound right. Whether the output is actually right is a different question entirely.

    Telling the two apart is the whole game now. The same systems flooding markets with noise can be used to cut through it. That is what I have spent the past two years proving – publicly, on X, with every call timestamped and nothing deleted, across geopolitics, energy, macro, crypto, and broader markets simultaneously.

    The account grew from nothing to over 140,000 followers organically, with no paid promotion and no name attached. Signal Core on Substack, the home of the full forecasting operation, became the #3 best–selling crypto publication on the platform within nine months. In a market drowning in noise, the signal alone was enough.

    The moment

    The signal-vs-noise problem has arrived at the worst possible time.

    The next twelve months will reshape more of the financial, technological, and geopolitical order than the past decade combined. Digital assets are integrating with the traditional financial system at a pace that would have seemed impossible eighteen months ago. Regulatory frameworks stalled for years are being rewritten in real time. AI is transforming how capital gets allocated. Geopolitical orders are realigning. Monetary policy is at an inflection point. The labor market is being restructured in front of us.

    These are foundational shifts, arriving simultaneously, and compounding on each other. And this is exactly the moment when the ability to see clearly has collapsed. There has never been more at stake and never less clarity on what is actually going on.

    The convergence problem

    It is actually worse than a noise problem.

    AI is converging everyone toward the same wrong answers simultaneously. When a thousand people use these tools to analyze the same event, they do not get a thousand different perspectives. They get minor variations of the same default output. The tools do not just fail to produce signal – they manufacture false agreement.

    Before AI, if five analysts said the same thing, that meant something. Now if five hundred accounts say the same thing, it might just mean they all used the same tool.

    What this looks like in practice

    In January of this year, the prevailing view was that a direct U.S.–Iran confrontation was unlikely. The diplomatic channels were still open. The market was not pricing meaningful conflict risk. Oil was trading like nothing was coming.

    The structural picture told a different story.

    More than a month before the strikes began, the indicators were already pointing to a confrontation that was more likely than not. We flagged this publicly on X on January 13 while the crowd was still dismissing the risk. When the strikes hit, and oil nearly doubled, the move caught most of the market off guard. The signal was there. The crowd just was not looking at it.

    The inputs we were watching were not exotic. Public statements, internal economic pressure inside Iran, and the absence of certain de–escalation patterns. Anyone with access to the open internet could see the same things. The edge was in synthesis – reading those inputs as a single converging system rather than as separate news streams. That synthesis is the hard part. The inputs are just the inputs. The bottleneck has never been technology. It has been how the technology gets used.

    This is the pattern. The information was available. The tools to process it were available. What was missing was the ability to read the signal before the crowd formed around the wrong interpretation.

    The scarce resource

    Most people use AI to generate. Very few use it to see.

    Signal is when you can look at a situation that has the entire market confused and see the structure underneath. It is when you can hold a position that every feed is telling you to abandon, and hold it anyway, because you can see something they cannot.

    The challenge for most people is not generating signal themselves. It is recognizing who actually has it. Most analysis is hedged to the point of meaninglessness – strategies for avoiding accountability dressed up as analysis.

    The old filter for getting past this was credentials. It no longer predicts who is seeing clearly. Plenty of the biggest calls in recent years have been missed by traditional institutions and caught by people working outside them. What matters now is whether someone is actually seeing what is happening – recognizing patterns the crowd is missing, naming what is real before it is obvious, and being right about it often enough that it holds up over time. Once you can see clearly, you start operating on a different timeline than the rest of the market.

    What comes next

    We are entering an era where signal is the most valuable and least understood asset in the market. The investors, builders, and allocators who figure this out first will have a structural advantage that compounds over years. The ones who keep consuming the flood without questioning it will keep agreeing with the crowd. And the crowd will keep being wrong at the moments that matter most.

    Finding rooms where real signal still shows up is getting harder. Most of the venues that claim to aggregate market intelligence are just amplifying whatever the models already spit out.

    Consensus 2026 in Miami is one of the few that still functions as a filter rather than an amplifier. The people who show up have skin in the game. Their disagreements are real. Their agreements were not manufactured by the same five models everyone else is using. That kind of room is getting harder to find anywhere else. Which is why I will be there – hosting a small invite–only session about what signal extraction at scale actually looks like.

    The edge will not belong to whoever has the most information, the fastest tools, or the loudest platform.

    It will belong to whoever can see clearly when everyone else is drowning in noise.

    That is the scarcest resource in markets right now.

    And it is only getting scarcer.

  • ‘Jackass 5’ Trailer: Robot Performs Rectal Exam in ‘Best and Last’ Sequel

    So you’ve been warned: The trailer for the final Jackass film features, among other gross-out stunts, a robot giving Steve-O a prostate exam with its metal “claw,” an electric shock collar on a cast member’s genitals and an “escape room from hell” that includes an electric chair.

    The first look (below) at the final film in the hit franchise, Jackass: Best and Last, features 55-year-old Johnny Knoxville and his masochistic crew enduring a last round of physical suffering for our entertainment. The trailer was first shown at CinemaCon earlier this month.

    The Paramount and MTV Entertainment Studios release is the follow-up to 2022’s hit Jackass Forever, a production that put Knoxville in the hospital with several broken bones when he was hit by a rampaging bull.

    Best and Last returns franchise regulars Steve-O, Ehren McGhehey, Preston Lacy, Chris Pontius, Wee Man, and Dave England, along with (younger and less broken) newcomers Zach Holmes, Jasper Dolphin, and Rachel Wolfson.

    The trailer starts out with the traditional “do not attempt these stunts” warning. In the footage, Knoxville is asked how he’s feeling about making the final film. “Um, I’m sad,” he says. Pontius then adds he isn’t — “I’m not in touch with my emotions.”

    “Twenty five years and we haven’t learned a thing,” Knoxville adds.

    The franchise is based on the MTV series Jackass which ran from 2000-2001.

    Best and Last arrives in theaters June 26.

  • Netflix Sets Leonardo Sbaraglia-Starring Film ‘El Sobrino’ From ‘Wild Tales’ Director Damián Szifron

    Netflix Sets Leonardo Sbaraglia-Starring Film ‘El Sobrino’ From ‘Wild Tales’ Director Damián Szifron

    Netflix has unveiled the new film from Argentine writer-director Damián Szifron (Wild Tales, To Catch a Killer), El sobrino, starring Leonardo Sbaraglia (Elite, Pain and Glory, Wild Tales). Rita Cortese, Luisana Lopilato, Valeria Lois and newcomer Luan Adler Fuks also feature in the cast. Netflix also promises “special appearances by Vincent Macaigne and the legendary [Italian actor] Franco Nero.”

    The dramedy, which doesn’t have an English-language title yet, is written and directed by Szifron, whose 2014 film Wild Tales was Argentina’s contender and nominee for what was then known as the Oscar’s best foreign-language film section.

    “An internationally renowned pianist, at the height of his career, sees his world turned upside down when he discovers that his nine-year-old nephew possesses a musical talent that could surpass his own,” reads a synopsis for El sobrino, which translates as “The Nephew.”

    Produced by K&S Films, the movie is starting filming today, Monday, in Ramos Mejía in the Buenos Aires province. Set in the world of classical music, it promises to send its protagonists on “a dizzying pilgrimage through Buenos Aires, Hamburg, London and New York.” El Sobrino comes from producers Hugo Sigman, Matías Mosteirin and Leticia Cristi. The director of pPhotography is Julián Apezteguía.

    “Starting a film shoot is an intense experience,” said Szifron. “It marks the point where a significant flow of visual and narrative ideas, extensively discussed with teams of artists and collaborators, cross the threshold of imagination and begin to transform into concrete images and sounds. It is a fascinating process of materialization that resembles magic, but which often occurs under very high-pressure conditions, because filmmaking is expensive and risky. The challenge is to remain creative and sensitive in that context, and to find allies who understand and enhance the task.”

    Added the filmmaker: “For as long as I can remember, the films that have most impacted me reside at the intersection of art and industry. Today, that intersection is increasingly thin, which is why I consider the strong support of Netflix, the leading global content producer, and of K&S – at this point, part of my family – a privilege in telling this story. Leo is at an incredible point in his acting career: lucid, profound, mature and vital, and I am especially excited about the reconnection with my beloved Rita, meeting Luisana and Valeria, discovering such a young and unique actor as Luan, and the opportunity to collaborate with Franco Nero, my childhood idol. New film. New adventure. Here we go!”

    Said producer Mosteirin: “Damián is back with a vengeance: El sobrino is surely the best script we’ve ever read. Szifron plays with genres and shows us that comedy can lead us, with humor and beauty, to explore profound themes of the human condition. With this film, he invites us to reflect on art and creation, family ties, love and loneliness, our origins, and the passage of time.”

  • Reports: Anthony Edwards (left knee) likely to miss several weeks

    Reports: Anthony Edwards (left knee) likely to miss several weeks

    Anthony Edwards is averaging 18.5 points per game in the playoffs for the Wolves.

    Per multiple reports, Minnesota star Anthony Edwards is expected to be out several weeks after suffering left knee injuries in Game 4 vs. Denver.

    Edwards’ left knee remained structurally intact when he was injured during Game 4, but he suffered a bone bruise and also hyperextended the knee. ESPN and The Athletic first reported the diagnosis on Edwards.

    Edwards was hurt in the first half of the Timberwolves’ 112-96 win over against the Nuggets on Saturday night, a victory that gave the Timberwolves a 3-1 lead in that series. But the Wolves also lost fellow starting guard Donte DiVincenzo in that game with a torn Achilles tendon, meaning his season is over and his 2026-27 season is likely in great jeopardy as well.

    Game 5 of the series is Monday night in Denver (10:30 p.m. ET, NBC & Peacock).

    DiVincenzo was having surgery to repair the Achilles on Sunday in New York, the Timberwolves announced. That timeframe – surgery one day after the injury – follows what Boston’s Jayson Tatum did after he suffered the same injury in last season’s playoffs.

    Tatum started rehab quickly and missed about 10 months, returning for the final stretch of this season. If DiVincenzo follows the same timeline, he could be back before the end of next season.

    Edwards is one of the NBA’s most dynamic players, someone who – if he had met the league’s eligibility criteria by playing in a few more games – would have been a lock to make the All-NBA team for a third consecutive season.

    He averaged 28.8 points per game in 2025-26, third best in the NBA behind Luka Dončić of the Los Angeles Lakers and reigning Kia MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder. Edwards also averaged five rebounds and 3.7 assists per game.

    Edwards was fourth in scoring for the U.S. Olympic team that won a gold medal at the Paris Games in 2024. He missed 21 games this season, by far the most of his career.

    This injury happened with him on the defensive end, while he was contesting a layup attempt by Denver’s Cam Johnson. Edwards leaped in an effort to block the shot, and when he landed his left leg appeared to be at an unusual angle. His knee buckled, and when he hobbled off the floor, he seemed unable to put much, if any, weight on that leg.

    Timberwolves forward Julius Randle said he didn’t see DiVincenzo before leaving the arena, and he had a quiet exchange with Edwards when he saw him in the locker room.

    “I just dapped him up,” Randle said. “There’s not much to say in those moments. … Somebody who’s going through those situations is processing a lot.”

    Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.