So much amazing is happening, and the Shootaround crew is here to help you keep track of it all. You'll find takes on moments you might've missed from the previous weekend, along with ones you will remember forever.

Speed Kills

Chris Ryan: Like everyone else, I was wondering how the Thunder, and specifically Kevin Durant, would cope without Russell Westbrook. I hadn't considered the possibility that Durant might compensate for his running buddy's absence by playing like him.

Order was restored in the Chinese pro basketball universe last night when the Guangdong Tigers finished their sweep of the Shandong Lions to claim their eighth Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) title. This was probably the most competitive game of the series, which basically means that there was a 10-minute window in the first half when it looked like the underdog Lions weren’t going to get blown out. I had begun following the CBA playoffs while in China the past few weeks, but I watched the final game this morning on a Chinese website. I was familiar enough to recognize a few things: “Tear It Up” will inevitably play during timeouts and Yi Jianlian will not lose. His Tigers have now won the CBA eight of the last ten years.

Join your Shootaround crew for some fake trades, pipe dreams, and beautiful, dark, twisted, deadline day fantasies.

The Book of Revelation

Golden State Warriors get: Devin Harris (Hawks), Earl Clark (Lakers), DeMarcus Cousins (Kings), Aaron Brooks (Kings)
Los Angeles Lakers get: Josh Smith (Hawks), Andris Biedrins (Warriors)
Atlanta Hawks get: Pau Gasol (Lakers), Tyreke Evans (Kings)
Sacramento Kings get: David Lee (Warriors), Klay Thompson (Warriors)

The worst-case scenario is that this is the annihilation of many teams at once — but at least it will be entertaining! The Lakers reunite Dwight Howard with his old pal Smith, who gets reunited with his own Cliff Paul; Biedrins slides in at the end of the bench. The Hawks build around Al Horford, Gasol, and Evans, who gets a little more institutional structure — for him, this is one of those “change of scenery” reboots. The Kings lose two streaky young stars but acquire solid cornerstones for the future, whatever that concept means to them. The Warriors get a couple experienced guards who, on any given night, might offer a passable impression of a fourth-quarter triggerman. They also get the budding Clark and Cousins, a combustible talent who could really benefit from a God-fearing coach. Ivan Johnson gets thrown in just to give the Warriors an edge in weirdness. Consider it an homage to 2006-07, when the Warriors traded a third of their team away in January and went on one of the most thrilling playoff runs ever.
— Hua Hsu

It all started with Ma$e.

I had just taken my seat on my flight from Atlanta to New Orleans, one of the few Niners fans on a plane where anyone wearing Ravens gear had been given a complimentary drink ticket, when a man wearing a red leather jacket and a different shade of red jeans sauntered up the aisle. He was carrying a red duffel bag. A meaningful percentage of his zippers were gold. He stopped at the row in front of me, looked up at his ticket, and sighed. It was Ma$e. He had been assigned a middle seat.

On any given Sunday (or Monday or Thursday), your NFL Run & Shootaround crew will be gathered around multiple televisions, making inappropriate jokes and generally regressing to the mean. Catch up on all the NFL action right here.

Anquan Boldin: Hall of Famer?

Anquan Boldin has not made a Pro Bowl since leaving the Arizona Cardinals at the end of the 2009 season. He has not had a 1,000-yard season in Baltimore, and the beast who caught 11 touchdowns in 2008 has been limited to a total of seven touchdowns in his past two seasons. Up until these playoffs, Boldin had mostly fallen off the casual fan's radar — if your interactions with the NFL come mostly from highlights, fantasy, and Red Zone, you might have even forgotten that Anquan Boldin was still in the league.

Ray Lewis Is Truly Awesome

Ray Lewis has described many things as “awesome.” He dieted and exercised before this season and showed up to camp at his lightest weight in some 15 years: “It’s awesome,” he said, “I feel great.” Earlier this season he described Joe Flacco and the Ravens' much-improved offense as “awesome.” Last week, as he took a victory lap around the Ravens’ stadium one last time, he described it as “the most awesome thing you could ever ask for in any professional career.” After Baltimore’s twist-filled victory over Denver on Saturday, Lewis began doing that postgame proselytizing thing that’s common in such contexts. Maybe it’s the awareness that Lewis is nearing the end or maybe it was the delirium of the game, but there was something wildly moving and strange about his incantations. He said some cold-blooded shit about “weapons,” just as the tool that had been forged for his demise, Peyton Manning, walked up to hug him. Then his eyes got gone and serene as he admired his team’s mile-high handiwork: “Man … it’s just awesome,” he said, all blissful and blessed, clouds of mist surrounding his face, as though the Creator had taken a highlighter to him. There’ve been few players over the past decade as intense and absorbing as Lewis. For those of us who remember when “Ray Lewis weapons” turned up a different kind of search-engine result, there hasn’t been another athlete whose path to righteousness has felt so visceral and extreme.

It was the year a man became very famous for possessing an unshakable belief in math and basic reasoning skills. This probably says less about Nate Silver and more about the small armies of Silver skeptics, gut-driven intuitionists uninterested in parsing the differences between probability and prediction, correlation and causation. But in the weeks leading up to election night, Silver cemented his role as our all-seeing eye. His name and fine-tuned, closely guarded formulas became an instant salve anytime someone started freaking out: “Nate Silver says … ” Between his bestseller, The Signal and the Noise, and near-flawless election predictions, nobody had a better year reputation-wise than Silver.

I was standing outside of Madison Square Garden, waiting for my friend, when a middle-aged Asian American man in a fancy suit walked by me and smiled. It wasn’t quite like the throes of Linsanity, when a new constituency of Knicks fans began showing up to the Garden, but last night’s game against the Houston Rockets definitely had a different, faintly festive vibe to it. Someone surged toward the man in the suit and asked him what entrance he should use for his seats, and he didn’t seem to understand when the man in the suit told him he didn’t work at the Garden. The man in the suit looked at me again, not smiling this time. Everyone projects whatever they want onto a man wearing a suit. My friend showed up a few minutes later, we shuffled into the Garden, and cheerfully bought some beer and two bowls of sesame chicken noodles.

Bernie Williams is not a great guitarist. In fact, listening to him last night as he studiously inched through as spangle-free and un-Hendrix a rendition of the national anthem as I could possibly fathom, I wondered if he didn’t secretly hate America. But none of that really matters, not as long as he remains a beloved hero in New York and New York needs talented children and celebrity hobbyists to perform the national anthem. And, you know, it’s great that Bernie has some other passion to fall back on, something to fill the void now that he no longer patrols center field for the Yankees. He is 44. That’s ancient for an athlete but some 20, 30, 40 years younger than most American retirees.

On any given Sunday (or Monday, or Thursday), your NFL Run & Shootaround crew will be gathered around multiple televisions, making inappropriate jokes and generally regressing to the mean. Catch up on all the NFL action right here.

Comeback Season

The day before Christmas last year, Adrian Peterson was lying on the field in Washington and screaming in pain. His left leg had just bent in a way legs are not supposed to bend, and as he waited on the FedEx Field turf for the training staff, his right one shook, as if his brain were distracting itself. It has been said a lot in the past 10 weeks of this NFL season, but after yesterday’s win, Peterson’s fourth straight game with more than 120 yards, it should probably be said again — Adrian Peterson had no business playing football again by September. He has less business putting together one of the best seasons a running back has ever had.

For me, at least, that Peterson is playing at all is the most awe-inspiring thing. In catching chunks of the Vikings every week, there always seems to be at least one run that makes me shake my head and give an obligatory, “Wow, Adrian Peterson.” I just didn’t know how many of those runs there were, and that each week, there seems to be more of them. Peterson’s season started modestly enough. In Minnesota’s first six games, he broke the 100-yard mark just once while averaging about 4.4 yards per carry. In the Vikings’ past four, that number has gone to 7.67, including 8.2 against the league’s best rush defense. The new gear is shifting Peterson’s 2012 from unbelievable to potentially historic.

I spent Game 5 of the 2010 World Series lying on the floor of my apartment, staring at the ceiling and listening to the San Francisco Giants’ local radio feed over the Internet. I was 3,000 miles away from the Bay Area and I wanted some connection to the feelings and rituals of childhood. I had first become a fan via the radio and all that it leaves to the imagination. If this was going to happen, I wanted to hear some familiar voices narrate the scene. As the Giants poured onto the field after the final out, longtime play-by-play man Duane Kuiper reflected on what the moment meant: “You can’t help but think that this group is celebrating for the Say Hey Kid ... for Will the Thrill ... celebrating for number 25 and celebrating for all you Giants fans, wherever you are.”

On any given Sunday (or Monday, or Thursday), your NFL Run & Shootaround crew will be gathered around multiple televisions, making inappropriate jokes and generally regressing to the mean. Catch up on all the NFL action right here.

Texas Toast

Week 4 began with three teams that remained undefeated, and although some late-game craziness kept it that way, Sunday was an indication that all unblemished records are not created equal. Arizona continued its close-game antics with an overtime win over 400-yard passer Ryan Tannehill. Atlanta needed a Cam Newton mishap and a secondary flub to beat Carolina. Only the Texans, who rolled Tennessee on its way to 4-0, looked the part of a team deserving the league’s best record. The question that remains is why this wasn’t to be expected.

Here’s a heartwarming story from northwest England, or at the very least an example of how much easier it is to monetize one’s bloodlines in other countries. When Ryan Tunnicliffe was 9, his father Michael “Mick” Tunnicliffe placed a £100 bet that his son would one day play for Manchester United’s first team. Young Ryan was, at the time, in the process of joining United’s youth setup after starring for local side Roach Dynamos. Hundreds of promising kids Tunnicliffe’s age go on the books of professional clubs throughout Europe each year, progressing through the academy and reserve ranks, remaining in this quasi pre-professional state for about a decade of their lives, dribbling a ball to lunch and dinner, hoping to one day make a living as a professional.

The Shootaround gang is here to break down all the story lines going into today's Game 1 of the NBA Finals between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Miami Heat.

Is This (Finally) LeBron's Year?

The 13 greatest NBA players of all time are Jordan, Russell, Kareem, Magic, Bird, Wilt, Duncan, Kobe, West, Oscar, Shaq, Moses and Hakeem in some order (you just read mine). Every one of those 13 guys captured at least one NBA championship. Eight prevailed in their first Finals. Four snagged rings during their second trips. Only West repeatedly fell short, losing seven Finals before finally winning with the '72 Lakers … and in his case, poor West only made the mistake of crossing paths with the Russell Dynasty. So if LeBron James loses his third straight Finals (2007, 2011 and, now, 2012), that would make him the unluckiest, least successful superstar since West.

Digging a little deeper, only seven other NBA players won at least three MVP awards: Russell, Jordan, Kareem, Bird, Magic, Wilt, and Moses. The first five won titles in their first Finals trip; Moses made it happen his second time (with the '83 Sixers). The career Finals record of those seven guys (not counting LeBron): 34-16. Oh, and only four players qualified for the 42 Club at least four times — you know, the club for any NBA player who averaged 42-plus combined points, rebounds and assists in a single postseason (13 playoff games or more). Here's that list:

In a way, Wednesday night marked the end of an era. About five minutes into the third quarter of New York's game against Sacramento, it became evident to everyone at Madison Square Garden that Jeremy Lin was not going to score 25 points or hit a game-winning buzzer-beater. After a quick, scintillating start, Lin settled into his role as a distributor. It's as though he's begun to set odd, nightly goals for himself — the 38 points against the Lakers, the 3-pointer against Toronto, and, in Wednesday night's 100-85 win over the Kings, 13 assists. When he hit a jumper to secure a double-double, the Garden erupted. The game was laughably out of reach by then, but nobody felt like leaving.

We sat next to a father from the Bronx who had lost his mind to Linsanity. “DON'T MESS UP HIS ASSISTS,” he shouted early on, each time a fellow Knick failed to capitalize on one of Lin's passes. “FIVE REBOUNDS. TRIPLE-DOUBLE. IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!” he begged, once Lin got his 10th point. His daughter carefully unrolled her “To Linfinity and Beyond!” sign, which charmed even the pun-weary (namely, me).