“Hey Paul, why are you crying?” Nikola Jokic asked, poking his head into the bathroom stall that had, up until the interruption, had loud sobs coming from it.
“It’s nothing. I’m not crying,” Paul Millsap replied, quickly wiping the tears off his cheeks and pretending to look at message on his phone. “Leave me alone.”
Nikola looked at his teammate with compassion and worry. “We’re friends, man. If you’re crying, I want to know why so I can help.”
Thinking about the original source of his tears caused Paul to break down in sobs again. “I’m trying to ruin Jerami’s career, but it’s not working! How the hell did he score 29 points?” In frustration, he beat his fist against the wall, causing the entire row of stalls to rattle.
“Wait, you want to ruin Jerami’s career?”
“Of course I do,” Paul answered as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “It is my personal life goal to ruin the career of every young forward on this roster by being overpaid and, by virtue of that, the starter by default, a devourer of minutes whose production is subpar and whose potential to improve ceased to exist a decade ago.”
“Wow, those are harsh words,” Nikola responded. “I don’t know why you have such a hatred for yourself or why that hatred extends to our teammates.”
Paul had a sudden look of realization on his face. “I don’t know why either. It’s really weird.”
“I wonder if we ended up in a DownToBuck video description again,” Nikola speculated. “That would explain your extremely out-of-character behavior.”
Nodding in agreement, Paul replied, “I bet that’s it. In real life I would only wish the best for Jerami and would probably take him out to dinner to celebrate his career high. Only in the twisted mind of that hack DownToBuck would I be behaving in such a childish manner. And now that we’re aware that this is a video description, it’s probably going to end soon.”
“Probably,” said Nikola.