Everyone is talking about Lamar Odom. Mark Cuban, the man who just released him from the Dallas Mavericks, said he was “negative energy." Charles Barkley, unfiltered sayer of things on his mind, thinks that Odom receiving the money that he is contractually owed is “a joke." And MediaTakeOut, the most tremendous/least reputable website on the planet, is saying that he got into a fistfight in the locker room with Dirk Nowitzki. Everyone is talking about Lamar Odom because he is a very curious case. How does one go from NBA Sixth Man of the Year with the Lakers and “the most popular player in the locker room” to being traded and having his commitment questioned by his new team owner in the locker room? There is a lot of speculation about why he hasn’t performed well; some say the tragic events in his life affected his on-court performance, and others say he is depressed — and, my favorite, Cuban himself says that Lamar was distracted by his reality show.

To get to the bottom of this … oh, wait, I will never get to the bottom of this without real, like, reporting. Let me rephrase. To use this as an excuse to watch some trashy television, I decided to rewatch his reality show to try to make some sense out of why things broke so badly for The Candy Man in the Lone Star State. Scientific, I know.