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"If we were in Serbia, we'd all get fired," Nikola Jokic said Thursday night, shortly after his Denver Nuggets lost their first-round playoff series in six games to the Minnesota Timberwolves, who were missing their best player, another starter, and also a third guy who had filled in to capably replace the second guy. The Nuggets were down two key players as well, but you cannot construct any excuse for them to have lost this series at all, let alone to have lost it as comprehensively as they did. They won the title three years ago and continue to employ, in the least charitable estimate, the third-best player in the NBA. For the second time since winning that title, the Nuggets have been booted from the playoffs by a physical Wolves team that exposed their lack of athleticism and supporting talent. This time, Minnesota didn't even need Anthony Edwards, Donte DiVincenzo, or Ayo Dosunmu to finish the job. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb6exsh8ik8

Obviously, going to print with piddly retail squabbles is the stuff of hacks. But I'm hacky enough, and still stunned enough by the upselling tactics, that I just gotta share. I’ve previously noted that some power people here at Defector have occasionally suggested I try to write regularly about food, because they think I’m a weirdo about eating, and most mundane things. I’ve always begged off, mostly because a column is work, but also because I’m the most easily pleased eater of all time. I’d have to call my column "Portions" because I would rate every eatery based on how much food was piled on my plate. (This post could also be Exhibit A of why putting me on the food desk is a dumbass idea.) But I’m also the cheapest mofo who ever lived, so were there such a column, a Portions ethos would be: “It ain’t the deal you get, it’s the deal you think you get.” And making you feel like you got your money’s worth is not a science, it’s an art. My lunch last week was artless as hell. And relentless. Death by a thousand gouges.

One walk-off win can cure you of any emotional or intellectual ailment. The smack of the bat, the moment of anticipation as you wait to see if all you've wished for could come true, and the immediate, deafening roar of the crowd all inject you with a hope and belief that buoys you forward against all odds. To dream of two walk-off wins in one day is impossible. It is irresponsible. It is too good to imagine. On Thursday, I attended my fourth Phillies game of the still-young season. Before then, I had been to three games where the Phillies had ostensibly played baseball, but mainly stood around on the field while the other team beat them. They didn't just lose; they were absolutely clobbered. A 13-2 loss against the Nationals. A 10-4 loss to the Cubs. A 9-0 loss against Atlanta. This team is so bad that when they attended the Flyers game on Wednesday night, the crowd booed them. I am embarrassed to admit that, as I made the long walk from my home to the stadium, I wished in my heart for a win. I know better than to bank any emotional wellbeing on a sports team, much less the Philadelphia Phillies, but sometimes, on some weeks, in the middle of some years, you need a win—any win!—so badly it feels like hunger in your stomach. The Phillies themselves needed wins, too. Entering yesterday's game, they were 10-19: bad enough that the manager they all seemed to like had been fired as a consequence. Despite the whole season of evidence, I entered the stadium with hope in my heart. I had planned to take the day off weeks in advance to attend the afternoon game, and I felt optimistic. There are few better feelings than skipping work to go to the baseball stadium.

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today, we have two home office cleanup situations and a delightful bird-related request. Selene asks: I work from home at a computer job and am a hobbyist musician. My partner, who lives with me, has done a phenomenal job making the rest of our 2-bedroom look very cute, cozy, and personal. My office, however, still looks like the apartments I lived in before I met him. While he has excellent taste in furniture, neither of us are quite sure how to best utilize this space in a productive way to be able to access the dozens of cables and cords and keyboards and amplifiers, etc. I'm looking for ways to make this a space that doesn't feel like a cell for the 40 hours a week I spend in here for work and ideally could feel comfortable spending time in AFTER work, to actually do music and such. I have so much crap on the floor or in boxes or bags. I would like it if I had a way to access music gear and other accoutrements without them being in a big bag or simply sitting on the desk.  We rent so I'm very hesitant to paint, and changing the flooring itself is not an option. I'd roughly estimate it's about a 12' × 15' rectangle.  I'm sorry I didn't clean up more for the photo but I felt like it was important to show the truth of it as it existed.  Thanks for your sage wisdom! 

Fourteen years. My wife and I were proud minivan owners for 14 years until this month. Once you have three children, practicality takes immediate priority over self-image, so I was never fundamentally against owning a minivan. I was never like, “Oh my God, they’ll take away my man card now!” I was too busy changing diapers and cleaning up barf for that kind of shit to matter. As my old friend and fellow dad Steve Czaban once told me, a minivan is the right tool for the job. It’s affordable, it’s spacious, and you won’t freak out if its paint job gets a scratch. A minivan is built for its owner to treat it like shit. And folks, my family and I did just that. We left metric tons of Goldfish crumbs in between the seat cushions. We got sunscreen stains on the plastic interior that wouldn’t come out. And we tossed all manner of dirty items—wet towels, pungent soccer cleats, sand-covered beach chairs, the dog—into the back. We used every part of the animal when we owned our minivan. This spring, the van suddenly wasn’t the right tool for the job. Our youngest son, now 14, had grown so large that he audibly complained about not having enough legroom on our last road trip. And he was barely ever riding in the van by that point. We have one kid already in college, and another not far off. With a partially empty nest, we now had fewer bodies to transport regularly, with less baggage accompanying them. My wife often drove the van all by her lonesome, which made no practical sense. She and I always knew that we’d outgrow minivans eventually, both physically and aesthetically. We’d always talked about what we’d buy in the post-minivan phase of our marriage. It was a fun little daydream: “Maybe we’ll get a convertible hahahaha.” So the second she openly mused about trading in our Honda Odyssey for something new, the die was cast. Once my wife has an idea, it will become a reality. I learned to accept this fact well before we’d even gotten hitched. As such, the Odyssey’s days were now numbered. It was time to downsize, and perhaps upgrade. We were both cautiously excited.

Earlier this week, the Defector staff was chatting about Joel Embiid. Watching him give the business to the Boston Celtics in Game 5 of that series, with a vintage 33 points in a 113-97 road win for the 76ers, had been fun and surprisingly ... stirring? Not just because it came against the hated Celtics, but because the former MVP pretty plainly doesn't have much left. One of the things he no longer has, to cite an example, is "jumping." Another is "running." This got me thinking about what an utter mutant Shaquille O'Neal was. This is Embiid's age-31 season. In his NBA career, regular season and playoffs combined, Embiid has played 551 games, and he wears them like Jacob Marley's chains and money boxes. He has not played in over half of any regular season since 2022–23, and over his career he has missed 30 or more games in more seasons than not. O'Neal—taller and heavier than Embiid, but also playing a more rugged style in a more violent era, having played more than three times as much college basketball as Embiid, infamously never doing anything to stay in shape between seasons—played his 551st NBA game somewhere in the middle of his age-27 season. He won the MVP award that year. He played in 79 games that regular season (plus 23 playoff games on the way to his first championship and Finals MVP award) and averaged 40 minutes per game.

Morbid curiosity is not normally a healthy reason to commit to a form of entertainment, but also you don't necessarily have a say in the matter. Sometimes the morbid part just jumps in front of your face, grabs your eyelids, yanks them down and then snaps them back up like a senior-center window shade. Which brings us to Thursday night's Game 6 of the Knicks-Hawks series, which was not much as a basketball game but sure put the "more" in "morbidity." New York went to Atlanta facing a team with a puncher's chance of forcing a seventh game and instead won so convincingly that a case can be made that the Knicks actually won the series in five games, because the sixth game had to have been some sort of busted AI hiccup. Not that it started that way, mind you. Even the least convincing computer-generated nonsense begins with a notionally believable premise, but eventually the seams and joints show up and you realize that you've been kinetically bullshitted. That point was Jalen Johnson's midrange jumper with 8:11 left in the first quarter, which gave the upstart Hawks an 11-9 lead. Everything was possible at that moment, and the sellout crowd believed the best was to come. Five minutes later, the game was over—spectacularly, irrevocably, absurdly over. It got colossally worse from there, as things do.

There is an understandable tendency to make Oilers losses about the Oilers rather than about the team that beat them. After being eliminated by the Anaheim Ducks 5-2 in Game 6 on Thursday, Connor McDavid put a damper on the rhetorical appeal of that angle by summing up Edmonton's season so succinctly and so accurately that there's not really much to be said beyond it: "When you're an average team with high expectations," McDavid said, "you're going to be disappointed." Opponents matter. After four straight first rounds of drawing and beating the Kings, who could euphemistically be described as a team that focuses at both ends on "goal prevention," this time Edmonton got the Ducks. Anaheim is young, fast, and high-scoring, and the old, banged-up, and defensively suspect Oilers simply could not hang. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins directed the praise where it belongs: "That's a real hockey team over there." It's a shame they hired Joel Quenneville, because the Ducks are otherwise a pretty easy team to root for. They are unpolished and chaotic; they seem to treat their defensemen like forwards who just play back a little; I'm not sure they're aware it's legal to employ a goaltender with a save percentage that starts with "9."

New York Knicks center Mitchell Robinson is an emotional poster. The big man often posts about his romantic woes, dissatisfaction with his role on the team, and truck. He posts across multiple social media platforms, even Facebook, despite being 28 years old. He posts with sincerity and without self-consciousness. If you lacked the context that he is a standout defensive big in the NBA, you'd simply assume he was a guy you friended in 2011 and never met since. Contrary to expectations, Robinson hasn't played a ton of minutes in the Knicks' first-round series against the undersized Atlanta Hawks, but he remains engaged nonetheless. On Wednesday, apparently looking ahead to tonight's Game 6, Robinson posted a video of himself burning something on his driveway, and silently staring into the flames. It's captivating stuff. https://twitter.com/NBA_NewYork/status/2049721684702154913

The figure skater who said that Canadian ice dancer Nikolaj Sørensen sexually assaulted her—leading to Sørensen's ban from the sport, and his former partner (and current girlfriend) teaming up with a new skater, with whom she won Olympic gold—is speaking publicly for the first time. She is Ashley Foy, a former figure skater from Connecticut who now coaches. USA Today's Christine Brennan shared on Thursday a statement from Foy. Foy also gave an extensive interview to the newsletter Broken Ice. https://bsky.app/profile/cbrennansports.bsky.social/post/3mkq3mqfb222k The statement references several of the darker parts of recent figure skating history. Bridget Namiotka was among several skaters who said she was sexually assaulted by U.S. national pairs champion John Coughlin. Coughlin died by suicide not long after the investigation and restrictions placed upon him became public. Namiotka died in 2022, after struggling with addiction. Olympic medalist Ashley Wagner also said she was sexually assaulted by Coughlin.