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The Oklahoma City Thunder felt slighted last season when they were left off the NBAs Christmas schedule. That wont be an issue this year. MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the NBA champion Thunder will be working at home for Christmas this season, playing host to Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs as part of the leagues annual Dec. 25 quintuple-header. BetMGM Sportsbook has the Thunder favored by 9.5 points. The other Christmas games, released by the NBA on Tuesday: Cleveland at New York (favored at -2.5), Houston at LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers (-1.5), No. 1 pick Cooper Flagg and Dallas visiting Golden State (-4.5), and Minnesota playing at Denver (-4.5). Some NBA Cup games are scheduled to be released Wednesday, and the full schedule80 of the 82 games for all teamsis to be released on Thursday. The remaining two games for each club will be filled in December based on how teams fare in the NBA Cup. They make the schedule. We play it, Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said last season, when asked about his club not being picked for the Dec. 25 lineup. Our players, I know, would have liked to play on Christmas because thats such a staple day in the NBA season. But we cant control that. Well, they sort of did control their Christmas scheduling fate this season. The NBA champions typically get invited to play on Christmas the following season; Oklahoma City beat Indiana in a seven-game NBA Finals last season. The Eastern Conference champion Pacers are among the Christmas snubs this year, after losing Tyrese Haliburton to an Achilles tear that will sideline him for the entirety of this season and seeing Myles Turner opt to sign with Milwaukee in free agency. The Knicks will be playing their 58th Christmas game, extending their NBA record. The first Christmas game in league history was at Madison Square Garden in 1947. Boston, Philadelphia, and Phoenix played on Christmas last season and didnt make the Dec. 25 cut this season, replaced by Cleveland (which was the Easts No. 1 seed), Houston (which landed Kevin Durant in an offseason blockbuster from the Suns), and the Thunder. Cleveland and the Thunder are playing on Christmas for the first time since 2018. The Rockets have a Christmas game for the first time since 2019. James, if he plays on the holiday, will be making his 20th Christmas appearance in his record 23rd NBA season. Only 12 NBA franchises have 20 Christmas games, and James could soon have that many as a player. And it’ll be a big NBA holiday in Texas: All three of the state’s teams are playing on Christmas for the first time. Opening night NBCs return to the NBA broadcast world officially starts with opening night on Oct. 21, when the Thunder (favored by 6.5 points) will receive their championship rings before playing host to Durant and the Rockets in the first game of the season. That will be followed by Stephen Curry, Jimmy Butler, and Golden State taking on James, Luka Doncic, and the Lakers (-3.5) in the second game of the NBC doubleheader. Those are the only two games on opening night. MLK Day Peacock and NBC will have four games on Jan. 19, which is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The matchups: Milwaukee at Atlanta on Peacock at 1 p.m. ET, followed by three games on NBC: Oklahoma City at Cleveland at 2:30 p.m. ET, Dallas at New York at 5 p.m. ET, and Boston at Detroit at 8 p.m. ET. Memphis, which typically plays on the holiday, is not this season. The Grizzlies will be returning from Europe, after facing Orlando on Jan. 15 in Berlin and Jan. 18 in London.
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Shares of major U.S. carriers jumped on Tuesday after upbeat airfare data for July signaled improving pricing power for the industry, as airlines bring capacity in check to align with a soft demand environment. Shares of legacy carriers United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines jumped nearly 10% each, while budget rival Southwest Airlines gained 4% in afternoon trading. Smaller peers Alaska Air and JetBlue Airways rose about 10% each and low-cost carrier Frontier Group surged 22%. Data from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday showed airfares rose 4% in July after slipping 0.1% in June, marking their first increase in six months. Uncertainty stemming from President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs and budget cuts has prompted travelers to curb discretionary spending and reassess plans. A soft demand environment, particularly from budget-conscious domestic travelers, had forced carriers to discount fares, squeezing margins despite summer typically being their peak money-making season. Airlines have since been trimming seats on offer and readjusting routes to keep their pricing power in control and shield margins. During their second-quarter earnings calls in July, major executives expressed confidence in the industry’s ability to cut capacity and boost airfares in the latter part of the year. Shivansh Tiwary, Reuters Shares of major U.S. carriers jumped on Tuesday after upbeat airfare data for July signaled improving pricing power for the industry, as airlines bring capacity in check to align with a soft demand environment. Shares of legacy carriers United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines jumped nearly 10% each, while budget rival Southwest Airlines gained 4% in afternoon trading. Smaller peers Alaska Air and JetBlue Airways rose about 10% each and low-cost carrier Frontier Group surged 22%. Data from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday showed airfares rose 4% in July after slipping 0.1% in June, marking their first increase in six months. Uncertainty stemming from President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs and budget cuts has prompted travelers to curb discretionary spending and reassess plans. A soft demand environment, particularly from budget-conscious domestic travelers, had forced carriers to discount fares, squeezing margins despite summer typically being their peak money-making season. Airlines have since been trimming seats on offer and readjusting routes to keep their pricing power in control and shield margins. During their second-quarter earnings calls in July, major executives expressed confidence in the industry’s ability to cut capacity and boost airfares in the latter part of the year. Shivansh Tiwary, Reuters
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As the battle to train artificial intelligence models becomes more intense and Reddits rich content library becomes more valuable, the social media giant has taken steps to block the Internet Archive from indexing its pages. While the Wayback Machine has historically recorded all Reddit pages, comments and user profiles, the company has put limits on what the system can scrape. Moving forward, it will only be permitted to archive the sites home page, which shows popular posts and news headlines of the day, but no user comments or post history. The action comes as Reddit has become increasingly protective of the content on its site. Reddit, in May, announced it had struck a deal with OpenAI to use its content to help train ChatGPT. It previously announced a similar deal with Google and blocked other search engines from crawling the site after that deal unless they struck financial agreements with Reddit as well. AI companies that are less well-financed, however, have reportedly been using the Internet Archive to scrub the sites previous posts and train their large language models from that content. Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt, in a statement, told Fast Company “Internet Archive provides a service to the open web, but weve been made aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine. Until theyre able to defend their site and comply with platform policies (e.g., respecting user privacy, re: deleting removed content) were limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect redditors.” Reddit shares were higher Tuesday, gaining more than 3% in midday trading, hitting $228. Year to date, the company’s stock is up 38%. Reddits legal battles meet its AI ambitions In June, Reddit sued Anthropic, claiming the AI company behind the Claude chatbot was scraping the Reddit site. “In July 2024, Anthropic claimed, in response to Reddits public protests regarding Anthropics misuse of Reddit content, that it had blocked its bots from accessing Reddit. Not so,” the suit reads. “Anthropics bots continued to hit Reddits servers over one hundred thousand times. Unlike its competitors, Anthropic has refused to agree to respect Reddit users basic privacy rights, including removing deleted posts from its systems.” (Anthropic has denied the accusations.) Reddit’s latest defensive act against AI scraping comes as the company is focusing more on its own AI initiatives. Last December, the company rolled out Reddit Answers, an AI-powered tool that will summarize conversations and posts on the site, letting users bypass traditional search engines. That AI product is now used by six million people, the company said in its second quarter earnings announcement, up from one million in the first quarter. Reddit is planning to use that momentum, as well as the significant use of its own internal search engine (which the company says services 70 million users per week) to challenge Google and other popular search tools. “The world and the internet are rapidly changing, and I believe Reddit has a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” said CEO Steve Huffman on an earnings call following the earnings. “Were unifying [search and Reddit Answers] into a single search experience. Were going to bring that front and center in the app. So, whether youre a new user opening the app for the first time or returning user opening the app, that search box will be present immediately for users who open the app looking for something specific.” While Reddits efforts in the search space will include AI components, the company said it hopes to differentiate itself from the growing number of AI search engines by highlighting the human component. “Conversation and connection are becoming more valuable and rare,” said Huffman. “In a world increasingly dominated by algorithms and automation, the need for human voices has never been greater.”
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