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In the seconds after Seth Jarvis scored the winning overtime goal for the Carolina Hurricanes, the Sportsnet broadcast cut to six exuberant men in Jarvis jerseys falling into each other's arms, screaming with joy, and about to cry with happiness. Their smiles were so big. Their enthusiasm was unmatched. Their love for one another is almost as great as their love for No. 24, whose jersey they all wear. These are not normal fans. These are Seth Jarvis's friends. What are their names? I wish I could tell you. I watched hundreds of videos that the boys have posted on their social media (@goodolcanadianboys), but when they said their names—which was very, very rarely—I immediately forgot which one was which. They are not individuals anyway. They are The Jarvy Boys. They are his friends, and they love him so much.

The New York Knicks take on the San Antonio Spurs in Game 2 of the NBA Finals tonight, and there is a very real possibility that the Knicks will head into the weekend up 2-0 in the series as they prepare to play their first Finals home game since 1999 on Monday. Can you imagine how good the vibes in New York City would be? Is it even possible to comprehend how electric the crowd inside and out of Madison Square Garden would get in this situation? You might argue, in fact, that nothing could possibly ruin a time as good as that. OK, well, now imagine if a half-alive racist who everyone hates decided to show up and make the whole night about himself. According to ESPN's Shams Charania, Donald Trump is planning to attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals, at the invitation of Knicks owner James Dolan. This will afford fans in the arena and at home a rare opportunity to watch Trump make some of the faces he makes, and also to think about him. Aren't you excited? It's obviously difficult to keep Trump away from any place where he thinks he might get attention, and Dolan has surely been pulling whatever strings he can to make this visit happen. (Dolan inviting Trump to MSG while maintaining his feud with Charles Oakley despite everyone in the world begging him to just be an adult for once is a pretty good representation of his character and priorities.) That's just James Dolan being James Dolan at some point, but you'd hope the league itself might try to resist letting Trump smear shit on what should be one of the most joyous occasions of the season. NBA commissioner Adam Silver couldn't even offer up icy indifference when asked about Trump's planned attendance, though, choosing instead to harp on his bonafides. From ESPN:

Border Czar Tom Homan wants you to know that there is definitely not a hunger strike happening at Delaney Hall—a privately run ICE jail in Newark, N.J.—and also that he condemns this non-existent strike. On his ongoing Tour de Fox, one week Homan’s telling Laura Ingraham that he’ll force-feed hunger strikers if he has to. The next, during a “Did You Assault Enough People Today?” performance review with Sean Hannity, he’s saying “there was never a hunger strike” and listing all the food he enjoyed alongside detainees during a surprise visit to the jail. “I had beans, I had green beans, I had bread and rolls, I had drinks, I had dessert.” Get it? Got it.  The strike at Delaney Hall follows months of prisoners and their families sounding the alarm about conditions they describe as psychological and physical torture. Some people have languished in the jail for a year, with no due process or end in sight. Some have already secured court orders for their release. Some signed self-deportation papers rather than suffer through more detention. All of them are still stuck in the hell of Delaney.  On May 22, they decided they were done waiting and launched a combined hunger and labor strike. As many as 400 people began a collective refusal to eat or to work for GEO Group, the private prison corporation and major Trump donor that runs the jail. The strike will continue, they say, at least until they meet with the governor and ICE releases pregnant, young, elderly and medically vulnerable detainees. Their ultimate goal is freedom for everyone jailed inside the detention center. 

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. Ah, the Netherlands. Pain and misery comes for all but one team at the World Cup every four years, but that pain and misery has magnitudes. A team like Morocco in 2022, for example, will have felt the pain of coming so close to a miracle, but the first African team to make the semifinals left with their heads held up high. It is only for the contenders, the countries that have shaped soccer history over the last century, that the worst disappointments are reserved.

Everything about this World Cup is designed to make you hate it. If you live here and you’re a soccer fan, tickets to games are a ripoff, fan zones are built to give you heatstroke, and Fox Sports’ soccer coverage is an unbroken insult to human intelligence. If you’re a local who’s not really into soccer but wants to be part of the fun, you’ll need to work hard to discover pockets of the host cities with any visible sign (flags, bunting, festive paraphernalia) that the World Cup is less than a week away. If you have match-day tickets and want to get to a stadium using public transport, you’ll probably need to sell a kidney to afford the bus or train fare. If you try walking, you’ll probably die (though you’ll keep both kidneys until the end, which may be an acceptable tradeoff.) If you make it to a stadium alive, you won’t be able to bring your own water. If you have the genius idea of just watching the whole tournament on TV, once again, and I cannot stress this enough: that will be awful too.   If you care about quality soccer, FIFA’s decision to expand the tournament to 48 teams means you’ll have to endure a punishingly long group stage, then an inaugural World Cup “round of 32,” before you even get to the good stuff. If you care about footballing heritage, there are assorted “improvements” designed for the American market launching this tournament that will be guaranteed to piss you off (on-field player and coach interviews during matches, a halftime show for the final, advertising on everything), and that’s before we even consider the crime of holding the final at an NFL stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey rather than at the temple of World Cup history that is Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca.  If you’re a foreign soccer fan with designs on experiencing the American World Cup in person and you’ve made jokes on social media at any point over the past two decades: tough luck pal, entry is denied. If you’re flying into a sanctuary city, there’s every chance your flight will be canceled before you even start packing. Assuming you make it here, fear not: unlike the crappy games in the group stage, you won’t go unwatched. ICE will be on hand to “secure” the World Cup and keep the brownshirt party going all summer long. As you enjoy the matches you’ll face constant surveillance and the continuous risk of deportation for being the wrong race or having the wrong face, with the possibility of indefinite detention in a life-threatening ICE facility as a bonus. Should you survive all that, you can look forward to getting caught in the dragnet of the Trump administration’s “summer surge” of law enforcement around the US’s 250th birthday celebrations. 

Here is the cheap and lazy way to show that Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final is the best postseason event of the calendar year so far, courtesy Chris Cuthbert and TSN:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpKJ11Q5auc And by doing that, we've both saved ourselves the proverbial thousand words and hustled you pretty royally. This game could only be done justice in its original three-hour format, as opposed to the 10 minutes of editors' craft above, and we are even granting grace in that three-hour figure for the often stultifying pregame and between-periods migraineries. To be totally reductive about it, this is that rarest of sporting events in which nobody got cheated and everyone came away better for the experience.

With the Milwaukee Brewers sitting comfortably at the top of the NL Central, you might think that it's an easy time to be their vice president of communications. Post the Jake Bauers highlight reel, oversee some decent memes featuring Bernie Brewer, and let the good vibes keep on flowing. All you have to do is not commit any big misstep. For example, don’t repost Elon Musk tweets in support of far-right British politicians who peddle racist propaganda about Britain being threatened by violent immigrants. I would go as far as to say maybe just don't retweet Elon Musk at all, but what do I know? I'm not the vice president of communications for the Milwaukee Brewers. Tyler Barnes is, and on Tuesday he popped onto Twitter after a two-year hiatus to weigh in on British politics by retweeting Elon Musk's white genocide propaganda.

It's not the sort of anxiety that haunts you, or maybe it just rates below too many of my other haunting anxieties to register. But as a non-soccer person, the quadrennial arrival of the World Cup has a peculiar and not altogether unpleasant anxiety about it; a bunch of stuff is about to happen that I do not really know anything about, and I am going to put myself happily in that wave's way and not know what hit me. I'm fine with that, for the most part, and this year's 48-team World Cup field is sufficiently vast and varied that I couldn't learn everything about it if I wanted to, our own stellar collection of team previews notwithstanding. For the true soccer dunce, the key is to learn enough to enjoy yourself, but not so much that you get stressed out. It was with that in mind that Drew and I welcomed Leander Schaerlaeckens, Guardian columnist and author of the excellent new book The Long Game: U.S. Men's Soccer And Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey To The Top, Or Thereabouts, to this week's episode. I am biased, of course, but I'd call this episode a success on those terms. After the usual goofery—remembering some salient scenes from The Insider, me singing in a Scott Stapp voice, Drew chastising me for referring to Long Island Cryptkeeper Bill O'Reilly a "friend of the pod"—we turned to soccer around the six-minute mark and pretty much stayed there for the rest of the hour. Even and maybe especially as a confirmed soccer dunce—one of two on the pod, as Drew cheerfully allowed—the result was pretty fascinating stuff. Leander knows a lot and explains it patiently, and he answered our questions on the possible positive and negative effects of this year's new and much bigger field, where national soccer styles come from (and whether that question can be answered without doing major cultural essentialism maneuvers), and where the USMNT as a team fits into the current firmament of international soccer both in terms of quality and style.

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector’s best interior design advice column. Today we have a bathroom color dilemma, a backyard makeover, and someone wondering if they’re DIYing too close to the sun. GB asks:  I own an older townhouse type of condo in the southeast. So, heat and humidity are a foundational concern for the topic I'm going to get into. I've lived here about 3 years, and the room that has always driven me craziest is the bathroom. There is one full bathroom, and it looks like it was renovated relatively recently and not particularly well. I hate the shower and the sink and wish I had the budget, the time, the guts, or some combination to rip the entire thing out and do a full reno, but I do not believe I do. Without the right mix to feel like I could completely renovate it, I decided a sort of DIY redesign and repairs could be good enough to keep me from hating it so much. I've already started on some wall repairs, but can't quite commit to it while the main ideas are still unsettled. I tend to like more neutral colors as a base and then use art and accessories to throw more bold color in. I like color, but I am not bold enough to usually make it the big thing via the walls. But here I feel differently because of the huge amount of white, and my aversion to the gray that's already on the walls here. I already have a good amount of blue and green around the house. So, I wanted this to be something different, maybe brighter, that will go with green and blue and white without feeling overwhelming. I first started thinking of a light pinkish orange, some sort of shade that might be generally considered peach.  In short, I have no idea what color to go with! I hate red, and will ignore that, but other than that, I'm completely open to ideas. This room has no windows and no natural light, which obviously affects the look and feel. Then, I kind of want some ideas to finish it after the paint. I have a new shower curtain rod to hang, but other than that, nothing much else has been completely decided. I plan to leave the floating shelves where they are, but could change the location or what's resting on them without much issue. I want to replace the mirror, but also can't really decide on that; the current one is 24 inches high by 30 inches wide. The vanity itself is 30.5 inches wide and I'm not against painting it, although that hasn't been in my initial plans. The lighting fixture I would kind of like to replace, but again, can't really find one I like, and it might be more of a future idea. And finally, the wall opposite the sink is kind of boring, open space. I would like to put some art on it to give it more life and personality, but have never really researched what varieties of art or materials can stand up to the heat, humidity, and moisture of a southern shower in a small space. 

Even a Knicks fan would concede that Karl-Anthony Towns has his demons. They all stem from the whistle. During the regular season, the Knicks center was among the NBA's most foul-prone players, racking up 3.4 per game. He led the league outright with 65 total offensive fouls. I don't think this is all his fault. Officials seem to assume the worst intentions on his part, and overlook when he himself gets clobbered on defense. I don't think I've ever seen a superstar given less leeway by the refs. But yes—it is also sort of his fault, too. Sometimes his limbs appear to flop around autonomously, as though he had the decentralized nervous system of an octopus, and in the course of that flopping they strike an opposing player in an illegal way. If you choose to blame "Karl-Anthony Towns" for what his left forearm did of its own volition, fine, we Knicks fans simply have to accept the rules of engagement. But that's what made his performance in the Knicks' Game 1 win over the Spurs all the more remarkable. Towns and his appendages resisted their worst tendencies, and he outplayed the league's ascendant big man with a performance that cannot fully be captured by his 18 points, 12 rebounds, and four assists.Victor Wembanyama is a matchup that demands discipline. Partially because there is simply so much surface area on Wembanyama's arms for a defender to potentially foul, making this the test of a lifetime for Towns. But more to the point: It is difficult to be disciplined when the offensive player upends any expectation of what a man that size can do. Wemby hasn't yet honed all his tricks to perfection, but he already has a disturbing menu of options to select from. Bite on a pump fake and he can fluidly step through into a layup from midrange jumper range, or get up into the defender's body to draw a foul, or attempt some freak shit like throwing the ball off the backboard for a dunk. Towns doesn't always fare well under such uncertainty. He can lose focus and reach in, or lurch for an ill-advised steal, instead of trusting in his size and positioning. Yet for huge stretches of Game 1, he refused to make his usual blunders. Even if Wemby might someday obsolete every other big in the league, at time of writing he is just 22 years old and Towns is stronger than him in ways that matter in isolation defense. When Towns slid his feet and kept his hands up, he proved difficult to dislodge, drive by, or shoot over. As it turns out, those same nimble feet that make him such an effective slasher can also be put to use on the other end of the floor. These flashes reminded me of KAT's successful stints defending Nikola Jokic and Kevin Durant in postseasons past, and, going back an entire decade, the pre-draft scouting reports that hailed his post defense and rim protection. A player's role can shift over years in the league—especially when they round out into a historically great shooter, as Towns has—but the underlying traits might lie dormant, waiting for the right situation to light up again. Many observers thought the Knicks would put their big, strong, disciplined OG Anunoby on Wemby to start the series. We might still see it in the games to come. But if the Knicks can instead survive Towns as the Wemby assignment, and let Anunoby lurk on a non-shooter and disrupt the paint, they're better off. The Spurs surely won't isolate Wemby on Towns as much as they did in Game 1, and will instead attempt to run the Knicks' seven-footer through more screens. But it's on the Spurs to prove that these actions can generate good offense while perturbed by some of the most active help defenders in the league. As for the other side of the floor, the benefits of having a center with enough shooting gravity to drag Wemby out of the paint are obvious. If there's anything I've wanted to see from Towns in his Knicks tenure, it's chucking a dozen threes a game, and if there was ever a series to do it, this is the one.