More than 775,000 fans attended last week’s NFL Draft held in downtown Detroit, Michigan, breaking the previous record of 600,000 football followers that flooded Nashville, Tennessee, in 2019 to partake in the annual gathering that has become the second most popular event on the league’s calendar behind only the Super Bowl.
At the Giants’ and Jets’ draft headquarters in East Rutherford and Florham Park, New Jersey, respectively, the teams painstakingly considered their options before settling on their first round picks. Both selected players that fill pressing needs. The Giants have lacked a world-class wide receiver since Louisiana State University product Odell Beckham Jr. was a three-time Pro Bowler in 2014, 2015, and 2016. The Jets’ offensive line has been unstable for a half decade and with 40-year-old starting quarterback Aaron Rodgers coming back from suffering a ruptured Achilles in the first offensive series of last season, it is imperative the Jets are sound in front of him.
Thus, the Giants selected another dynamic LSU pass-catcher, Malik Nabers, with the sixth overall pick, and at No. 11, the Jets secured offensive lineman Olumuyiwa Fashanu from Penn State. The Giants also drafted safety Tyler Nubin from Minnesota in the second round (No. 47) and cornerback Dru Phillips in the third round (No. 70) among their six picks. Among the Jets’ other six picks in addition to Fashanu was Western Kentucky wide receiver Malachi Corley (Round 3, pick No. 65), Wisconsin running back Braelon Allen (Round 4. pick No. 134), and quarterback Jordan Travis (Round 5, pick No. 171) from Florida State.
“We had a lot of guys that we liked that would fit in with the way we had them stacked,” Giants general manager Joe Schoen revealed via Giants.com. “At the time we took him, he was the top receiver on our board.”
Nabers is confident of the versatility and attitude he brings to the team. “I’m able to play different positions, create separation, open up a great window for the quarterback to throw me the ball,” he said. “Great teammate. Great leader. All in all, a great football player. Dog mentality when I’m out there on the field.”
As for Fashanu, Rodgers expressed his agreement with Jets’ general manager Joe Douglas’ choice of a player who competed in 29 games at Penn State, all at left tackle, starting 21.
“Olu Fashanu didn’t give up a sack his entire college career, which is saying a lot because you’re going against great schools in [the] Big 10,” Rodgers noted. “Olu is a mauler. He’s not going to need to jump in right away. We’ll see if we work him in at guard.”
The basketball gods have a sense of irony and drama.
After the Knicks overcame a five-point deficit at Madison Square Garden with 45 seconds remaining to improbably defeat the Philadelphia 76ers 104-101 in Game 2 to take a 2-0 series lead in the best-of-seven matchup, 10 days later, they afforded Philadelphia reprisal.
Leading by six points with 28.2 seconds to go in regulation in Game 5 at MSG on Tuesday night, cerebral lapses, missed foul shots, and the remarkable shooting by 76ers guard Tyrese Maxey erased the 96-90 lead and sent the game into overtime knotted at 97-97.
The Knicks’ lack of discernment and execution on both ends of the court continued over the five-minute OT period and an advantageous circumstance to close out the series morphed into a 112-106 loss. Now, the Knicks find themselves back in Philadelphia for Game 6 tonight (9:00 p.m.) holding a fragile 3-2 lead.
In victory, the 76ers became the first team in the last 25 playoffs to win a game trailing by at least six points in the final 30 seconds of regulation.
Although accountability for the loss should be shared by the Knicks players as well as head coach Tom Thibodeau, guard Jalen Brunson, who scored 40 points, placed much of the blame on his shoulders.
“Not good judgment on my part,” Brunson said. “There was a careless turnover in overtime, and then just making sure we were all on the same page at the end of regulation.”
The Knicks were up 97-94 with 15.1 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter after Josh Hart made one of two foul shots. The one miss would prove to be costly. Philadelphia was out of timeouts but the Knicks were reluctant to foul Maxey, who ten seconds earlier was hit by Mitchell Robinson on a made 25-foot 3-pointer and added a free throw for a game-altering four-point play. Instead of putting Maxey back on the foul-line for a possible two points, the Knicks let him launch a 35-foot 3-pointer from well beyond the top of the circle to even the score at 97 with 8.1 seconds showing on the clock. Brunson’s subsequent shot at the buzzer was off the mark.
“In those situations, you talk about what you want to do out there…” said Thibodeau regarding allowing Maxey to get off a 3-pointer. “We could’ve done better in that situation, and we will.”
Maxey, who posted a career playoff high 46 playing 52 minutes. was acutely aware of the gravity of the moment. “What was going through my mind was trying to survive,” he said. “Our season is on the line. I trust my work. I trust what I’ve done all my life, and I just tried to get to a spot, raise up and knock that shot down.”
Right now, Brunson’s extraordinary performance in setting the Knicks’ franchise playoff record of 47 points in Sunday’s 97-92 Game 4 win seems like a distant memory. What is front and center is Game 6. And perhaps Game 7 Saturday at the Garden. Which the Knicks hope to avoid.
NBA legends and future Basketball Hall of Famers LeBron James (Los Angeles Lakers) and Kevin Durant (Phoenix Suns) have been eliminated from the 2024 NBA Playoffs.
Stephen Curry didn’t even make it that far as the Golden State Warriors’ season ended in the play-in tournament. It is the first time at least one of the three hasn’t been in the second round of the playoffs since 2005.
But a new crop of young players is ushering in the next generation of potential greats, led by 2024 NBA MVP finalist Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder and Anthony Edwards of the Minnesota Timberwolves.
Gilgeous-Alexander, a 25-year-old guard, averaged 30.1 points, 6.2 assists, and 5.5 rebounds this season lifting the Thunder to the top seed in the Western Conference (57-25). Eastern Conference powerhouse Boston Celtics (64-18) topped the entire league. His spectacular play has continued in the playoffs, where he’s averaged 27.3 points per game, propelling the Thunder to a four-game sweep over the New Orleans Pelicans to advance to the second round.
The Thunder, the second-youngest team in the league when the season began, will meet the winner of the series between the Dallas Mavericks and the Los Angeles Clippers. It was tied at 2-2 heading into Game 5 in Los Angeles last night.
“When you take a step back, it’s very hard to beat an NBA team, no matter what NBA team, four times in a row,” said Gilgeous-Alexander after the Thunder’s 97-89 win on Monday.
“You have to do a lot of things right, and a lot of possessions, and there’s so many possessions in the game just to get one, and for a group of guys that I guess you can say we’re young and don’t have the most experience in winning basketball games,” he added.
In addition to Gilgeous-Alexander, Edwards, just 22-years-old, averaged 25.9 points, 5.4 rebounds, and 5.1 assists this season pushing the Timberwolves (56-26) to only one game behind OKC and Denver (57-25) in the final standings in the West. OKC held the tie-breaker over the Nuggets.
Edwards was even better in Minnesota’s first-round series against the Phoenix Suns, averaging 31 points per game, including a 40-point performance in game 4 in Phoenix in a 122-116 victory to blank the Suns 4-0. They will next battle the reigning NBA champion
Denver Nuggets in a West semifinals beginning on Saturday. The Nuggets defeated the Lakers 4-1 in the opening round.
Sure, we all lived off a very healthy diet comprised of nothing but Cup Noodles and bagels throughout our college years, but does slurpy-ready instant ramen and those boiled-and-baked rounds actually go together? One of New York’s most viral bagel spots, PopUp Bagels, is exploring the oddball combination by partnering with Cup Noodles on a limited-edition cream cheese.
Inspired by the Cup Noodles brand’s recently released Everything Bagel with Cream Cheese flavor—which “blends ramen with a saucy mix of caraway seeds, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, garlic, onion, and cream cheese flavor for the ultimate everything bagel experience” and is available to purchase exclusively at Walmart stores and Walmart.com—PopUp Bagels has created a limited-edition everything bagel cream cheese with actual noodles in it.
“We know this flavor got you thinking: but what if the noodles were IN a cream cheese and we can actually schmear on an everything bagel?” Cup Noodles posted on Instagram on April 30. “We partnered up with the iconic @popupbagels to create a limited edition Cup Noodles everything bagel cream cheese. Available 5/1-5/7 at all PopUp bagels locations and limited mail orders.” Even bolder, the ramen brand instructs “bagel and ramen enthusiasts looking for an extra creamy eating experience” to add a dollop of the new cream cheese directly into the Cup Noodles Everything Bagel with Cream Cheese cup.
From today, May 1 through Tuesday, May 7, the limited-edition cream cheese will be available exclusively at PopUp Bagels locations, including the 177 Thompson St storefront, as well as online for national shipment. The bagel bakery is set to open several other locations in New York City, including in the Upper West Side (at 338 Columbus Ave) and Upper East Side (1457 Third Ave).
It’s not the only wild-sounding bagel collaboration that PopUp has participated in lately—just last month, the bakery collabed with Dominique Ansel on a limited-time Parmesan Gruyère Bagel schmeared with confit garlic cream cheese and topped with actual escargot.
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If there’s anything that’s constant in New York City, it’s change, and most New Yorkers have become hardened to the tragedy of seeing their favorite small businesses shutter. Since COVID, the trend has only gotten worse: Places like China Chalet and Coogan’s, which once defined their respective neighborhoods and the city at large, practically disappeared overnight.
When I think of small New York businesses that have held out, Ollin, the small, orange Mexican restaurant in East Harlem, instantly comes to mind. Located on the corner of 108th Street between First and Second Avenues, they’ve survived multiple recessions and a pandemic, a testament to the power that their community—as well as their undeniably bomb food—continues to hold in the face of gentrification.
Ollin’s story began in 1997, when Juan Perez immigrated from a small town in the Mexican state of Puebla and opened a deli called Rosas de Tepeyac. It was a place where other Mexican immigrants could buy ingredients that were hard to find elsewhere at that time, like jalapeños and tortillas. In addition to those ingredients, Juan also sold food he made himself, like tortas, tacos, and most notably, cemitas, a subgenre of torta that’s local to Puebla and that you can’t find in most Mexican restaurants.
The deli blossomed, and it got so busy that Juan had to recruit his wife, Leticia, to help him out. Soon, their three sons got involved in the business, too. On weekends, Jonathan, the family’s middle child, worked closely with his parents at the register and mopped the floors. In 2008, Juan decided to close the deli and try his luck opening a restaurant just a few blocks away. That’s how Ollin—the Aztec term that means “to act with one’s heart”—was born.
Shortly after Ollin began its operations, though, there was a rupture in the family: Jonathan realized he was queer and began to distance himself from the family business. He tells me that during this time he barely saw his parents. Instead, he found jobs at restaurants throughout Manhattan and found a chosen family among the Latino queer community in Jackson Heights.
Then, in 2020, the pandemic hit and restaurants began to close en masse. Even though his relationship with his family was shaky at times, Jonathan worried for his parents. “I thought there’s no way Ollin was going to survive COVID if they already had a hard time when there was no pandemic,” he tells Time Out. He quit his job at the Japanese restaurant where he worked and decided to try and help his family’s restaurant survive.
The first thing he did was get on TikTok. Jonathan began making videos of himself talking about his family’s story, how they’d been in the neighborhood for several decades, and, of course, all their food offerings, including their iconic cemitas and homemade churros. Those videos resonated at a time when we were seeing small businesses close en masse, and Ollin quickly gained a following (today, the restaurant has 83k followers on TikTok). For several months throughout 2021, you could see a line out of Ollin’s door, and people would drive from Long Island and beyond just to see what the hype was about.
Photograph: Courtesy of Ollin
Pretty soon, Ollin became a hub for the local community. They held sip and paint sessions and organized screenings of Coco for children in the neighborhood. They also set up an altar for Dia de los Muertos where neighbors could put pictures of their deceased loved ones and honor them. “Ollin has become a beacon for so many different communities,” Jonathan tells Time Out. “We’re so proud that beyond our food, we built a place of community and care.”
The family’s compelling story is the reason many people go to Ollin. But let’s be real, the food is the reason they keep coming back. For first timers, Jonathan recommends ordering their sope with chorizo, since the dough is made in house. For a main course, he recommends the cemitas, which are made with fresh papalo, an herb popular among Indigenous cuisines throughout Latin America, homemade chipotle, and quesillo, a type of cheese they source from Mexico (it’s also commonly referred to as Oaxaca cheese).
Photograph: Courtesy of Ollin
Another very popular dish from the restaurant is their birria, the quesadilla-like dish that you dip into a beef broth. Ollin uses the dried chilis required in traditional recipes, as opposed to tomatoes, which some restaurants use as a substitute to cut costs. If you’re lucky, you’ll also get a chance to try their mole, which is made and shipped by the family’s grandma back in Mexico—which also means it’s not always in stock.
Another favorite is the Plato Juancho, named after Juan, which is a hearty plate that includes grilled potatoes, a whole cactus, onions, jalapeños, cheese and the meat of your choice. It’s the plate that the patriarch of the family would eat to keep him going after long days of work, and a dish that says a lot about the family’s origins.
Ollin is a restaurant that has survived out of a family’s grit, but has thrived out of the love of the surrounding community. Ultimately, Jonathan sees Ollin as a vessel that will propel his family into a more gentle era, an era where they can rest. He wants Ollin to be successful enough so that his family can build their house in Mexico, where Juan and Leticia eventually want to return and retire. “Once I see my parents’ house fully built, I can think more about my future,” Jonathan says. “I want my parents, who are in their 60s, to have somewhere comfortable to go once they are older.”
You can visit Ollin at 339 E 108th Street Monday through Thursday from 11am until 9:30pm.
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