I was one of eight or 10 media members who got to watch the lottery last night from inside the television studio where the NBA draft order is filmed. It’s not quite as cool as being in the secret locked-down room where the lottery actually happens, but it’s an experience — a bizarre event filled with odd moments, awkward silences, uncomfortable people, team representatives wearing ridiculous amounts of makeup, endless commercial breaks where everyone on the dais just sort of sits there, Jay Bilas, and other strangeness. Some quick observations from TV land:

• The Cleveland Cavaliers contingent at these things is just very weird. They make a party of the lottery, and the party treads the line between quirky and unseemly. They bring at least a dozen people every year, and there is always a local celebrity or two among them; Bernie Kosar came last year, and he was on the list again this year. He didn’t show, but a rapper named Machine Gun Kelly, who does not know how to tie a tie, filled the celebrity void.

A survey of the players and teams making moves in last night's NBA action.

1. Tim Duncan

Brett Koremenos: Of all the great narratives basketball gives us, the most exciting is when an all-time great, probably one a little past his prime, turns back the clock for a vintage performance when his team needs it the most. Tim Duncan gave us the pleasure of such a moment last night. After being forced to battle a feisty Memphis for an extra five minutes, the Spurs needed someone, anyone, to step up big. Enter Duncan. He played like he was 10 years younger than his actual age of 37 — delivering crucial buckets, making great defensive plays (including a huge block on Zach Randolph early in OT), and snaring tough rebounds.

Duncan’s urgency was almost palpable, as if he realized that a loss in Game 2 might close the window on his last run to the NBA Finals.

2. Athleticism

(All GIFs by @HeyBelinda)

Chris Ryan: This is exactly what the ancient Greeks had in mind when they created the Olympics.

Yu Darvish has been nearly unhittable in his second big league season. Though known more for his mastery of multiple pitches and eerily consistent delivery, the Rangers right-hander can also beat you with pure heat, with a fastball that averages 93.1 mph and ranks among the game's fastest. The pitch's results have been merely good this year, but that fastball can still be extremely tough to hit, especially given all the other pitches he might throw in any count.

David Ortiz laughs.

Matt Moore has what you might call easy heat. Though his fastball velocity is down about 2 miles per hour and not as effective this year as it was in 2012, it's still one of the fastest in the game, averaging 92.5 mph. It's the way he throws it that can be so deceiving. Emanating from a delivery that seems to require less effort than anyone else's, Moore looks like he's about to soft-toss the ball to a 7-year-old in the park … right until the moment when he releases it, and suddenly it's by you. Moore's curveball and changeup have been the secrets to his success this season — but that fastball can still induce whiffs, especially when elevated.

David Ortiz thinks all of that is adorable.

In case you were even busier not making up with Sergio Garcia, here's what you missed in sports on Tuesday:

• Despite an epic comeback to force overtime, Tim Duncan and Tony Parker proved to be too much for the Memphis Grizzlies, who fell into a 2-0 hole in the Western Conference finals after falling, 93-89, to the San Antonio Spurs. "All praise to Tim for this win," Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said after the game. "He spends his offseasons as a scoutmaster, so bear traps are kind of his thing. And in this case he set a really good one made out of leafy foliage and letting Jerryd Bayless try to beat us. I was nervous it wasn't going to hold, but Tim's such a calm presence that we stuck with it and came out of there with another trophy for our mantle." Popovich then laughed nervously and added, "figuratively."
• Joe Thornton led the San Jose Sharks to a hard-fought 2-1 win over the Los Angeles Kings to even up their series at two games apiece. When asked if Thornton was a thorn in his team's side, Kings coach Darryl Sutter said, "No. He's a Thornton on their side." When asked again, Sutter angrily replied, "You want your headline? Here's your headline: Sharks Swim Over Deposed Kings as Thornton Proves a Thorn in the Too Slow Quick's Side." Sutter then yelled angrily, "You monsters! Look what's become of you. Making me, Daryl Sutter, utter those words in that order! Look what's become of me!"

No part of what’s been a mostly predictable NBA postseason has been more entertaining than Stephen Curry’s emergence as a bona fide superstar. Even on the playoff stage, where opposing coaches knew exactly what Curry wanted to do, and how he wanted to do it, defenders were still resigned to simply crossing their fingers and hoping he would go cold.

It’s treatment typically reserved for scoring machines like Kobe Bryant and Carmelo Anthony, two potent scorers who have frustrated defenses for years with their incredible shot-making. Curry has joined that rarefied company, and in terms of his ability to pile up points, the comparisons are apt. What sets Curry apart, though, is that he has the potential to be much more than a brilliant individual scorer. He can be the maestro of great offenses for years. It’s not Kobe or Carmelo to whom Curry should be compared. It’s Steve Nash.

There will be a lot to say about Vinny Del Negro's time with the Clippers, and his exit from the Clippers. But for now, let's celebrate the man. Here we have the greatest moment in Italian basketball history, Vinny Del Negro subcategory. It's footage of Del Negro, back in his Lega Basket Serie A days. He was playing for Benetton Treviso, and he apparently had the ability to manipulate reality the way one might adjust the difficulty settings on an NBA 2K game. Actually, you know what this all reminds me of?

From time to time, the writers of Grantland will use this space to unpack a new sports book. Most of these books will be bad.

Relentless is a sports self-help/inspirational book by famed athletic trainer Tim Grover that reads like it was written by the love child of Gordon Gekko, Ayn Rand, and Sonny Vaccaro. Imagine The Onion doing a parody of an ultra-sociopathic Michael Jordan with the constant roar of the author swinging his dick like a helicopter rotor in the background and you have Relentless.

The moment I knew that Relentless would be a special read was when I got to Grover’s list of 13 traits that define a “Cleaner,” Grover’s term for the ultimate, take-no-prisoners type of winner exemplified by Michael Jordan. Why 13? “To remind you that there is no such thing as luck,” writes Grover, who is mostly known for training athletes in a sport where hitting the same percentage of your shots as a coin flip means you’re really good.

BALD EAGLES THAT LOOK LIKE ARSENE WENGER. SOMEONE BACK UP THE MACARTHUR GENIUS GRANT TRUCK TO THE HOUSE OF WHOEVER MADE THIS TUMBLR PAGE.

“What do you mean, white shirts?”

“What e-mail? Did you get an e-mail?”

“This is bullshit.”

The Brooklyn Italians coaching staff looks worried. Less than an hour to go before the kickoff of their U.S. Open Cup first-round game at the Aviator Sports and Events Center in Brooklyn, and they’ve just discovered they’re not supposed to be wearing their usual blue jerseys for the game, and that apparently they’d been told this two weeks ago. (“Why’d they e-mail him? He was on vacation and he’s not even the right person.”) Nobody has brought the team’s spare white shirts, and after some internal debate, one of the younger members of the Brooklyn Italians entourage, Mario Frasca, is dispatched to take coach Lucio Russo’s car to get the shirts from Bensonhurst. As Frasca dutifully sprints across the field toward the parking lot, there’s a loud blast of music from the speakers on the side of the official scorer’s room/referee’s locker room/press box. It stops abruptly and a head appears around the door. “You guys playing the national anthem?” The assembled Brooklyn Italians turn to glare up at him for a beat, then one breaks off to deal with the ceremonial issues while the rest drift back to the locker room to wait for the non-blue kit to arrive. Welcome to the magic of the cup.

What's that? You were wondering exactly how many days until the start of the NFL season? Well, you're in luck! We here at the Triangle are set to spend the next three and a half months providing a daily reason to get excited about pro football's return.

A couple of weeks ago, just before the Colts started their rookie minicamp, Andrew Luck was a guest on NFL Network’s NFL Total Access. Asked by host Scott Hanson how much more comfortable he felt going into this season compared to his first, Luck gave a platitude consistent with someone who owns this cell phone. “One hundred percent more comfortable,” Luck said. “On this day last year I was probably sitting in class.”

Like most things Luck has ever said, that doesn’t seem much worth reading into, but there’s still probably some truth to it. It’s important to remember that the era of the just-add-water rookie quarterback is still fairly new. When Matt Ryan threw for more than 3,000 yards in 2008, he was just the second rookie to ever do so. Last year, every rookie quarterback that started from Week 1 had at least 3,100. Luck’s 4,374 yards were enough to break Cam Newton’s rookie record set the year before, and everything about the Colts offseason points to Luck being even better in Year 2.

You know the story. Jeffrey Loria bought the Montreal Expos, ran them into the ground, then swapped them for the Florida Marlins. For the next 10 years, he ran, essentially, a skeleton operation, at one point so brazenly failing to compete that Major League Baseball started leaning on him to spend more on player salaries. He argued that, as a multimillionaire, he couldn’t make enough of a profit unless the taxpayers of Miami-Dade County (who have a median household income of $43,957, and 17.9 percent of whom live below the poverty line, according to the latest census figures) bought him a new stadium.

And when they did, at the eventual cost of more than a billion dollars to taxpayers, Loria and his front office made a good-faith effort to compete for one season, before shipping off Hanley Ramirez, Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson, and Mark Buehrle and replacing them with players who make the major league minimum. All told, it’s a tale of class warfare that would make Karl Marx’s hair stand on end even more than it did before.

But despite the overall ickiness of their ownership group, one that seems to view actually having to field a baseball team as an annoyance (and wouldn’t you, if said baseball team was in the habit of hitting Greg Dobbs cleanup?), the Marlins are in an interesting position. They know they aren’t going to win, and so with all the depressing, .600 OPS-toting retreads and career replacement-level non-prospects they’re marching out there, they’ve taken the opportunity to blood a couple more exciting young players.

This seems to be how the Marlins work — they assemble oodles of talent, develop it slowly, make the playoffs and win the World Series, then sell that championship roster for parts. No owner, perhaps in all of North American sports, is trying less hard to build a champion than Jeffrey Loria. But if these players grow up together, in a couple years he might get one anyway.

By now, hockey fans have probably seen the video of a group of Toronto Maple Leafs fans watching last week’s Game 7 loss to the Bruins. If you haven’t, it’s below. Fair warning: It’s downright painful to watch.

You don’t have to be a Leaf fan or even follow hockey to understand what you’re witnessing. If you’ve been a die-hard fan of a team in any sport for long enough, chances are you’ve suffered through watching a game like that. Depending on which teams you follow, you may have been there far more often than you’d care to remember.

There’s no right or wrong way to react to the sight of your favorite team self-destructing on national television. But through the years, fans seemed to have developed a variety of methods for handling it. The next time you have to sit through a sports disaster for the ages, here are 20 different types of unhappy sports fans you might find yourself in the room with.

The Premier League season ended on Sunday. On the last day of the 2011-12 season, I needed oxygen, a Sergio Aguero mask, and a vacation. It was all last-second drama, intra-city power shifts, and brave new worlds. This season? Not so much. United had the league wrapped up a couple of weeks ago, Wigan went down the trapdoor to the championship (joining the already relegated QPR and Reading) when it lost to Arsenal last week, and the only real unanswered question going into the final day of league play was which North London club would nab the final Champions League position. That "prize" went to Arsenal, just like it always does.

Honestly, I feel like Watford's promotion playoff semifinal match against Leicester from mid-May soaked up all the drama in the known universe. So maybe it's just as well. I don't know if the tectonic plates could have handled any more scenes.

In case you were busy not making up with Sergio Garcia, here's what you missed in sports on Monday:

• Detroit overcame a Patrick Kane third-period goal, as the Red Wings topped the Chicago Blackhawks, 3-1, to take a 2-1 series lead in their Western Conference semifinal matchup. Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville held himself responsible for the loss, explaining, "I motivated our team before Game 1 by having them all watch Ridley Scott's Gladiator. Worked like a charm. Then I'm like, boom, stick with Scott, but emphasize teamwork: Black Hawk Down. But they all got hung up on the title. Mixed message on my part. OK, Game 3, Prometheus. Huge mistake. Movie makes no sense. Totally lost control of the team." When asked if there were any actual tactical or line adjustments he would implement, Quenneville said, "I'm this close to going with Thelma & Louise before Game 4 just to mix things up."

What's that? You were wondering exactly how many days until the start of the NFL season? Well, you're in luck! We here at the Triangle are set to spend the next three and a half months providing a daily reason to get excited about pro football's return.

This morning, Calvin Johnson reportedly confirmed something that we’ve sorta known, but not really known, for a few months. Then he didn’t. Right now, we know this much: For a significant portion of a season in which he broke the single-season record for receiving yards, Megatron played with at least one messed-up finger.

Now, as others have noted, broken fingers for wide receivers are not uncommon. Torry Holt looks like this. Antonio Freeman can’t wear his Super Bowl ring because notorious asshole/finger-breaker Brett Favre ruined his hands.