Spurs’ Mitch Johnson Finishes Third in Coach of the Year Voting

[ad_1]

-->

OKLAHOMA CITY — Mitch Johnson was in the running for Coach of the Year in his first full season at the helm in San Antonio, but the award went to Boston’s Joe Mazzulla.

The NBA made the announcement on Tuesday night before Game 5 of the Western Conference Finals, where Johnson’s Spurs are even with the Thunder thanks in large part to his leadership and strategic choices. Detroit’s J.B. Bickerstaff finished second in the voting, and Johnson was the only other coach to receive a first-place vote with nine of them.

Johnson took over the Spurs’ head coaching job on an interim basis after the legendary Gregg Popovich suffered a stroke last season. Before this year the Spurs announced that Johnson was their man moving forward, and some fans questioned if the 39-year-old was the right man for the job. Much like the players on the roster, Johnson is young and has never made a playoff run before.

It didn’t take long for Johnson to prove just how much he belongs at the helm of this team. Wearing a wire in the first game of the season, it went viral in the best way when he implored his team to “embrace the mundane” and hammer the details.

That level of discipline has become a calling card for Johnson’s team this season, and he has this young group playing intense, connected, relentless basketball.

The Spurs vastly overperformed preseason expectations and won 62 games in the regular season, en route to the second-best record in the NBA behind only the Thunder. In the Western Conference Finals, Johnson and his staff are credited with making a huge chess move in the game-plan to even the series at two games apiece.

“Sometimes you have to adjust or react to something that they’re doing, especially at a high rate, if it’s going well for them,” Johnson said. “Obviously this team is the defending champs, and Mark [Daigneault]’s a hell of a coach, so there’s quite a bit that goes into it. I think there was a 24 hour stretch where if I wasn’t sleeping, I was doing something, trying to be better, or I was in the game. So yeah, selfishly it’s a lot of fun.”

Johnson was the only coach to earn multiple Coach of the Month awards this season, and when he did he shared the credit with his staff and the whole organization. Associate Head Coach Sean Sweeney is a defensive star, expected to draw interest from teams with vacancies this summer.

Corliss Williamson, Scott King, Matt Nielsen, and Mike Noyes round out his bench, and Johnson’s illustrious mentor Gregg Popovich is always around the team.

After that Game 4 masterpiece, Lakers legend Magic Johnson took to Twitter to give Mitch Johnson his flowers.

“The San Antonio Spurs were outstanding on defense tonight, holding NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to 19 points in their victory over the Oklahoma City Thunder,” Johnson wrote.

“Victor Wembanyama dominated the game with 33 points, but what really impressed me was his leadership and how he communicated with his teammates throughout the entire game,” the five-time champion said. “I also have to show some love and credit to Spurs’ Head Coach Mitch Johnson, who had a great game plan and made major adjustments from Game 3 to Game 4. The Series is now tied 2-2 and I can’t wait for Game 5 on Tuesday!”

Longtime fans of Magic Johnson’s tweets will immediately recognize his trademarked style: a purely informational description of something we all just watched happen, like the lede of an Associated Press story. But he followed it up with something a lot of people probably didn’t know.

“Oh, and a fun fact – I played against Mitch Johnson’s dad, Seattle SuperSonics superstar John Johnson in the Western Conference Finals back in 1980!”

Oh, and a fun fact – I played against Mitch Johnson’s dad, Seattle SuperSonics superstar John Johnson in the Western Conference Finals back in 1980!

— Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) May 25, 2026

John Johnson is remembered as one of the game’s first point forwards, and he dubbed his son Mitch ‘Maestro’ when he was young. On Tuesday night, after his biggest triumph as a coach and before the biggest game of his career, Johnson reflected on hearing those stories from his father’s perspective.

“There’s a lot of stories that I got, unfortunately, over and over and over again,” he said with a smile. “I was born in 86′ and my dad was done, so that’s all he had, was stories. So I got quite a few of them, he played against obviously guys like Magic, Oscar Robertson, whoever it was, Larry Bird, quite a bit.”

Add us as a preferred source on Google

[ad_2]

Source link

Supreme Court is only way to end Trump’s control of midterms

[ad_1]

What if Trump tries to overturn election results while ignoring court orders? ‘I have such a hard time believing that would happen,’ one judge said. ‘But I think you have to consider the possibility.’

North Carolina will start sending out the first general election mail ballots on Sept. 4 for the Nov. 3 midterms. Whether the voters who use those types of ballots in that state and across the country get disenfranchised will likely soon be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

President Donald Trump and his administration have been battling in federal court with voter rights groups and 24 states that are trying to prevent him from what clearly seems to be an unconstitutional federalization of our elections.

Trump, in an executive order in March, directed the Department of Homeland Security to compile state-by-state lists of eligible voters and then have the U.S. Postal Service develop rules about who can vote using mail ballots.

As always with Trump overreach, this has become a mess in every kind of way.

Trump is fighting a legal battle for control over mail-in voting

A federal whistleblower involved in the development of those rules has warned that they could cause “major disruptions” in voting and that the Trump administration seemed intent on hiding that, according to a letter to the Postal Service from U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat.

And there is also a major legal problem with Trump’s executive order: The U.S. Constitution says states run elections, not the president. Trump can’t just decide he has a new power and then act on it.

That prompts three very serious questions. Will the conservative-heavy Supreme Court stop Trump? Will Trump follow judicial orders? And will the Republican-controlled House and Senate force Trump to obey the courts?

To sort out where this goes next, I spoke to three former federal judges from the Article III Coalition, a good-government effort from Keep Our Republic to preserve an independent judiciary.

Will the Supreme Court eventually stop Trump’s election antics?

Former Judge John E. Jones III, who was chief judge for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, predicted a swift return to the Supreme Court for Trump’s executive order.

Procedural issues prompted a majority of the Supreme Court justices on Aug. 24 to block a federal judge in Boston from temporarily pausing Trump’s executive order. But by week’s end, that judge’s temporary restraining order was back in place – and Trump’s administration was appealing it.

Jones told me he expects the federal courts at every level to find Trump’s executive order unconstitutional.

“I struggle to find a scenario where the Supreme Court does anything other than find that this is a violation of Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution, in that these are executive agencies, and absent lawmaking by the Congress, the executive branch simply doesn’t have the authority to do this,” Jones said.

Retired Judge Liam O’Grady, who served in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, told me the Supreme Court might take control of the case directly, skipping over the appellate court, because the subject already reached the high court once and the midterms are looming.

“They may look at 60 days before an election and say, we now should decide this issue,” O’Grady said. “You would hope they would, because the states need direction.”

Former Judge Jeremy Fogel, who served in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was leery of handicapping the Supreme Court on this because the justices could have put an end to the executive order the first time it reached them.

“I think they’re sending ambiguous signals,” Fogel told me. “That may be just because you’ve got justices in a lot of different places.”

Trump has spent years fighting the US voting system

Jones, who was still a judge when Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election in more than 60 court cases, said the federal judiciary had prepared back then for the potential wave of legal filings and will be ready again. And he pointed to recent controversies – aggressive federal agents demanding to inspect Wyoming’s primary election in August, the FBI’s seizure of 2020 ballots in Georgia’s Fulton County earlier this year – as potential harbingers for future cases.

“I think past is prologue, and given the administration’s repeated attempts to, in effect, federalize election administration, almost anything goes from this point on,” Jones said, adding that Trump is trying to drive a narrative that “elections are inherently fraudulent.”

O’Grady noted that the federal judge in Boston, while pausing Trump’s executive order with an Aug. 27 temporary restraining order, pointed out “that the government didn’t put in any evidence of fraud occurring in mail-in voting to substantiate the need to act so quickly.”

Fogel sees a Trump-led public influence campaign to question election integrity as a “coordinated effort to suppress the vote,” recalling how judge after judge in 2020 threw out Trump’s legal challenges for lack of evidence. He expects more of the same in November.

“I think it’s likely they’re going to use all of the levers available to prevent losing control of Congress,” Fogel said.

My last question for the judges worried Fogel: What if Trump tries to overturn the results of the midterm elections while ignoring court orders meant to stop that?

“I have such a hard time believing that would happen,” Fogel said. “But I think you have to consider the possibility that it might.”

Fogel and Jones saw two off-ramps for that kind of chaos.

For Fogel, it depends on “how much integrity” Trump’s Republican allies in Congress will show if he tries to defy court orders. Will Congress step in? “That’s the big question,” he said.

For Jones, he recalls the consequences that Trump’s attorneys faced for their actions in 2020. One big example: Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who led Trump’s 2020 legal challenges, was disbarred in 2024 for actions he took in that effort.

“Lawyers are going to have to think hard about whether they want to jeopardize, as we call in the trade, their ticket to practice law,” Jones warned. “I think lawyers are likely to be much more circumspect about diving into some of these potentially ill-considered cases because of the experiences in past elections.”

Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on Bluesky, @bychrisbrennan.bsky.social, and on X, @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.

[ad_2]

Source link

Tornado warning canceled in Burlington County, New Jersey, as severe storms hit Philadelphia region

[ad_1]

A tornado warning in Burlington County, New Jersey, was canceled Tuesday night as severe storms hit the Philadelphia region.

A severe thunderstorm watch for the Philadelphia region expired, but some severe thunderstorm warnings remain in effect for parts of the Delaware Valley.

Some of those storms will have heavy rainfall, gusty winds and frequent lightning. Heavy rain, damaging winds, hail, lightning, and even an isolated tornado are possible.

We are not yet at the point where you can shut down the air conditioning. In fact, it will likely be running quite a bit in the coming days.

NEXT big weather changes

The heat and storm chances will continue Wednesday and Thursday.

Storms will form each day and generally move from the northwest to the southeast as they ride around a large ridge of high pressure to the south.

Atmospheric conditions will be in place for severe storms at some point each day, but mainly through the afternoon and evening time frame.

All weather threats are possible across most of the region each day.

The ridge will slowly sink southward. By Thursday, a strong cold front will be able to cross the area and looks to start to push the threat for severe weather to the south, but it still includes Philadelphia and areas south.

The NEXT Weather team will be monitoring atmospheric conditions, and we’ll keep you updated with timing and impact throughout the week.

The good news is that the unsettled pattern looks to begin breaking down by Friday to make way for a relatively nice first weekend of September with highs near 80 degrees under partly cloudy skies and lower humidity levels.

Here’s your 7-day forecast:

Tuesday: NEXT Weather Alert for storms/heat. High 92

Wednesday: NEXT Weather Alert for storms. High 84, Low 73

Thursday: NEXT Weather Alert for storms/heat. High 90, Low 72

Friday: Showers south. High 87, Low 73

Saturday: Partly cloudy. High 82, Low 68

Sunday: Mostly sunny. High 79, Low 65

Monday: Mostly sunny. High 80, Low 61

NEXT Weather Radars

Hourly Forecast

Get the latest weather info on the CBS News Philadelphia app.

In:

[ad_2]

Source link

‘Wheel of Fortune’ Announcer Jim Thornton Suspended

[ad_1]

‘Wheel of Fortune’
Announcer Jim Thornton Suspended

Published
September 1, 2026
2:05 PM PDT
|
Updated
September 1, 2026
4:08 PM PDT

Jim Thornton — the longtime “Wheel of Fortune” announcer — has been suspended by Sony Pictures Television Studios … TMZ has learned.

The studio tells TMZ … “We have recently been made aware of allegations concerning Jim Thornton. He has been suspended from Wheel of Fortune and we are recasting while we conduct a thorough investigation.”

Sony Pictures Television did not provide a reason for his suspension from the show.

However, we’ve learned the alleged incident arose while Thornton was on a commercial flight back in May, and a passenger complained to a flight attendant about Thornton.

Sources with direct knowledge tell us the pilot called ahead to have law enforcement meet Thornton when they arrived at the gate.

We’re told officers questioned Thornton — who was wearing a ‘Wheel’ jacket at the time — but he was eventually released.

American Airlines tells us, “On May 14, American Airlines Flight 1276 was met by law enforcement upon arrival at Los Angeles International Airport following concerns reported by a customer onboard.”

Thornton joined ‘WoF’ in 2011 after the death of longtime announcer Charlie O’Donnell — who was with the show from 1975 to 1980 and 1989 to 2010.

While mostly heard and not seen on the program, Thornton did host one segment of a 2023 program when one of the contestants — a woman named Sarah Ward — wanted to meet him. Pat Sajak, then the host of the show, served as an announcer for the round.

Thornton also served as an announcer briefly on “The Price Is Right,” “The Soup,” and “The Cleveland Show.” He also lent his voice to Pixar for the classic animated movie “Monsters, Inc.” … serving as a commercial announcer in the flick.

We’ve reached out to Thornton … so far, no word back.

[ad_2]

Source link