The Daily Briefing
A signature debut day for one of the league's brightest stars, two pivotal Game 2s, the year's most-anticipated tour goes on sale, and the AI infrastructure money keeps moving. Anthony Edwards becomes the latest NBA star to step into a signature shoe — the adidas AE1 "Believe That" arrives today across six colorways at a retail-friendly $100, even as his Timberwolves try to dig out of a 0-2 hole after the worst playoff loss in franchise history. The NBA's second round shifts to its first true rhythm tonight with Pistons-Cavaliers and Thunder-Lakers Game 2s on Prime Video, while the Hurricanes try to flip the Flyers series on the road. Olivia Rodrigo opens 65-date tour sales, "Michael" keeps printing money for Lionsgate, and Bret Taylor's Sierra closes a $950M round at a $15.8B valuation. Here's how today moves.
Sneakers
The lead story is in Atlanta. The adidas Anthony Edwards Believe That 1 — Edwards' first true signature line — drops today at adidas.com and select retailers in six debut colorways: Velocity Blue (JQ9475), "With Love" in Core Black/Acid Orange (JQ9478), Core Black (KJ3147), White/Black (KJ3320), Solar Turbo/Black (KJ0452), and Carbon Grey/Lucid Ray Blue (KJ3146). Pricing lands at $100 adult, $80 GS — a deliberate accessibility play, with Dreamstrike cushioning replacing Light Boost and ventilation windows swapped in for the original AE1's honeycomb TPU wing. The shoe takes its name from Edwards' "Believe That" catchphrase, and the timing is uncomfortable: his Wolves were just on the receiving end of the largest playoff loss in their history. A signature shoe is a long bet on a player; the next two weeks will test how the campaign plays under postseason pressure.
Also today: Nike's Air Max 95 OG "Slate" hits the SNKRS app and select Nike Sportswear retailers in its first true Big Bubble execution since the original — White/Emerald Green/Lake Blue/French Blue/Obsidian/Black, style code IH7855-100, $190 men's with a full-family size run ($147 GS, $112 PS, $82 TD). Pair it with the Nike Air Max 1000.2 "Black" at $180, which is also dropping today. International heads should note Up There x adidas Melbourne launches exclusively at Up There today (10AM AEST in-store, 6PM AEST online).
Sports
NBA second round, Game 2. The top-seeded Pistons host the Cavaliers tonight at 7 PM ET on Prime Video, looking to take a 2-0 stranglehold after a 111-101 Game 1 win in which Cleveland never recovered from a third-quarter run. Detroit's defense — the league's best after the All-Star break — has held up so far, but Cleveland adjusts well between games and a split here flips homecourt back. Then at 9:30 PM ET, the Thunder host the Lakers in Game 2, with OKC carrying a perfect postseason record (5-0) into the night after a 108-90 Game 1 win in which Chet Holmgren put up 24-12-3. The defending champs have looked uncatchable; the Lakers need a road win or this series ends fast.
NHL. Hurricanes at Flyers, Game 3 of their second-round series, 8 PM ET. Carolina took Game 1 3-0 and the series back to Philadelphia, where the Flyers have been one of the league's best home teams. Out west, MacKinnon's Avalanche are 6-0 this postseason after a 9-6 Game 1 win against the Wild that broke open in the third period.
Around the league. The Knicks remain without a clear timeline on OG Anunoby's right hamstring strain heading into Game 3 of their second-round series — a quiet but consequential subplot for a team that has built its identity on switchable wing defense.
Culture
Tour on-sale day. Olivia Rodrigo's general public ticket sales for "The Unraveled Tour" open today at 12 PM local time across 65 dates spanning North America, Europe, and the UK in support of her third album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, out June 12. After the SOUR / GUTS run, Rodrigo enters this campaign as a generational arena draw — and the on-sale will be one of the year's tighter Ticketmaster stress tests.
Box office. Lionsgate's "Michael" — Antoine Fuqua's Michael Jackson biopic — has now crossed $424M worldwide after the largest music biopic opening on record ($97M domestic, $217M global). The reception has been split: industry-best opening numbers but reviews have been brutal, and members of the Jackson family — Janet most prominently — have publicly distanced themselves. Up next: "The Devil Wears Prada 2" launches a sequel pile-up that runs through Memorial Day, with "Mortal Kombat 2" and "The Mandalorian and Grogu" landing later in the month.
Festival opens. Welcome to Rockville begins today in Daytona Beach and runs through Sunday, headlined by My Chemical Romance and Bring Me the Horizon — the closest thing to a stadium-rock equivalent of Coachella for the post-emo generation.
Technology
The AI infrastructure round, continued. Bret Taylor's Sierra has closed $950M at a $15.8B post-money valuation, led by Tiger Global and Google's GV, with $150M ARR. Sierra's bet is the same as the rest of the agentic-AI cohort — that customer-facing AI agents become a layer of the enterprise software stack — but the metrics here ($150M ARR for a company under three years old) are the cleanest validation yet that the bet is working in production.
The capital stack keeps stacking. OpenAI raised $122B at an $852B valuation in a round anchored by Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank, and Microsoft. Anthropic, fresh off passing OpenAI on ARR, took an additional $40B from Google and $5B from Amazon (paired with $100B of AWS spend) and signed multi-hundred-billion chip deals with Google and Broadcom. Read it as: the foundation-model race is now an infrastructure race, and the four parties capable of building the data centers — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia — have effectively bought into both leading labs.
Models keep shipping. Google launched Gemini 3.1 Ultra with a native 2-million-token context window across text, image, audio, and video; OpenAI shipped GPT-5.4 with a 1M-token window and 75% on the OSWorld-V desktop-task benchmark — the kind of agentic capability that turns Sierra-style platform bets into consumable APIs.
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