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 night, along with ones you will remember forever.

Letting All the Air Out

Jay Caspian Kang: Let's call them the Great Deflaters. That's what the Heat have done throughout the last two rounds of these playoffs — Chicago and Indiana both came out of the gate with energy and confidence, and in both cases, Miami found a way to slowly, methodically choke the life out of its opponent. At their best, the Heat play with negative dynamics — they take away everything the other team does and wait for the inevitable implosion. I can see why this style can be irritating to watch, especially with the Heat's rampant flopping, which sometimes makes them look like extras in Kung Fu Hustle. Greatness is easier to quantify when it involves something that can be easily quantified — points scored, blocked shots, steals, rebounds, or whatever. It's harder to appreciate a team that takes away because it almost feels like it is cheating somehow. Instead of negating Paul George and Roy Hibbert, the typical fan would rather see the Heat offensively supercede the Pacers. Kobe is an offensive superceder. The Heat are deflaters.

Dwyane Wade is one of the best deflaters of all time. This quality can be called "toughness" or "championship experience" or a host of other things, but what it describes is Wade's ability to control the pace of the game through brute force. It's another side of "clutch" — when Wade is grabbing offensive rebounds, scoring in the post, and dominating the ball in a good way, you can see the opponent shrink up in frustration and ultimately slink away. Wade has done this throughout his career: He (and arguably the refs) did it in the 2006 Finals against Dallas. He did it in the 2011 Eastern Conference semifinals against the Celtics. And he did it again last night.

Thanks to tipster @MyKBO, who sent us the following video from the Korea Baseball Organization. Click below to watch the video of Jeun Jun-woo of Lotte hitting what he thought was his second home run of the season.

Before we begin, a quick question for the people back in the homeland. How do you decide which characters get written in the Korean hangul and which characters get written out in the English alphabet? For example NC, the visiting team, is written out in the English alphabet, but Lotte, the home team, is written out in hangul.

CUE THE MOST RIDICULOUS BAT FLIP IN THE HISTORY OF ORGANIZED BASEBALL. JORDANY VALDESPIN AND TSUYOSHI SHINJO, YOU ARE BOTH ON NOTICE.

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.

The Black Falcon Has Landed

Jay Caspian Kang: Last spring, when the Golden State Warriors were redefining the acceptable parameters of tanking and Harrison Barnes was redefining the boundaries of how badly I could troll a player on my beloved Carolina Tar Heels, I wrote a series of columns stating the Warriors were doing the NBA a disservice and that Barnes was a bust. Around that time, I recall a friend joking that the best possible outcome would be if the Warriors tanked their way into the middle of the lottery and picked up Barnes. That way, my two beloved hatreds could be intertwined forever. If Barnes ended up being an NBA bust, the specious logic of sports predictions and the Internet record would vindicate me forever.

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 night, along with ones you will remember forever.

Warrior

(All GIFs by @HeyBelinda)

Chris Ryan: Maybe it's just the fraying of my emotional meniscus or something, but Stephen Curry makes me nervous. You can't blame me. After Rondo, Rose, Westbrook, Kobe, and Gallo, I can't help but have the feeling like it's only a matter of time before Curry is helped off the floor by Kent Bazemore and Richard Jefferson, and we go back into the dreaded "awaiting MRI results" zone again. It doesn't help that the kid has papier-mâché ankles, is built like a Big Bang Theory cast member, and gets a little slick with his responsibilities. Before Friday's Game 3 against Denver, Curry surreptitiously removed his ankle brace, prompting his coach, Mark Jackson, to remark after the game, "I've learned very early, he's very slick." In a playoffs that has been largely about loss or absence — about teams making do without some of their key players, or with some of their key players banged up — Golden State has given us all something. They're in the black. For a lot of fans, they are getting to see a star be born. A perfect Warriors star, too — a guy who seems to embody the delirious passion of the franchise and plays as part of a legacy of "this is so fun" players who came before him.

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 night, along with ones you will remember forever.

He Ate the Bones

Bucks coach Jim Boylan on LeBron James: "I mean, what can you do?"

— Tom Haberstroh (@tomhaberstroh) April 22, 2013

Chris Ryan: Oh well. That was a fun playoffs. Thanks for coming, guys. Have a nice summer.

We asked some of our writers to tell us what they're expecting from the upcoming NBA playoffs.

Jay Caspian Kang: Miami will go 16-3 in the playoffs, and one of the losses will come to the Bucks. They'll also lose a game to the Knicks and the last one to the Thunder in the Finals. They're the first team since the first Ubuntu Celtics that's going to legitimately intimidate their opponents. The Nets vs. Bulls first-round series will be unwatchable. In the Western Conference, I think we'll see more than 10 different games in which a player scores more than 40 points. Steph Curry, Tony Parker, James Harden, Durant, and Westbrook will all turn in memorable performances. Oh, and this Western Conference playoffs, as a whole, will trend on Twitter every single night. Just so many great matchups and players there. Every series in the Western Conference will go at least six games, but all the top seeds will advance.

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 night, along with ones you will remember forever.

Sleeping With the Lights On

netw3rk: The Boston Celtics exist in the minds of Eastern Conference playoff teams as something akin to the bogeyman. Even the Miami Heat — who certainly don't fear the Celtics — reach a pitch of intensity in their play against Boston, and a level of exaltation in their victories over them, that betrays a depth of hatred for the leprechauns unmatched by that for any other team.

When you put the bogeyman on his back, you stand over him and you do a dance. Every Eastern Conference team has a litany of Celtics grievances just waiting to be uncorked: the moving screens, the trash talk, the suffocating and gratingly physical defense that dared refs to blow the whistle every 10 seconds. And, yes, the winning. Because the KG-era Celtics didn’t just win; they stormed your arena, tore your relics out of their holy places, and gleefully salted your fields. That’s why, despite no longer being a truly elite team, the Celtics still have a sort of cultural hegemony over the Eastern Conference. The hatred they engender is the ultimate sign of respect.

If boxing is sometimes stupid and always macho, there’s no better example of the magnetism of stupid macho than Brandon Rios. He is boxing’s early Ironclad, a slow-moving, indestructible and arguably ugly fighter who advances upon his opponents without a hint of subtlety or trickery. When he gets close, he blasts them to hell.

This is not to say that Rios is unskilled or lacking in intelligence, but his plodding feet and his static stance offend the eyes of fight fans who see boxing as a brutal, balletic act. His considerable popularity instead comes from his refusal to engage in anything but a brawl — there isn’t a fighter out there who enjoys getting punched in the face more than Rios. Guys like that tend to have short careers marked by epic bouts against other guys like that. After watching his first fight against Mike Alvarado from ringside, I didn’t think much of Rios's chances as a legitimate pound-for-pound contender — sure, he was exciting and he certainly had the ability to put together tight, powerful combinations on the inside, but I couldn’t see him ever beating a fighter who could dictate the pace and the distance of the exchanges. It seemed that if you could just keep your cool and circle around Rios’s slow advance, you could win a pretty easy decision.

Meet the Harvard University Band (h/t to Deadspin/Emma Carmichael).

ROW 1

Danny Margolis, drums: A sophomore political science and government major from Teaneck, New Jersey, Danny runs a campus neocon blog called Francis Fuk-ya-mama. Traffic is light, but the commenters are all intelligent, thoughtful people. He listens to Immortal Technique in the gym because it’s important to consider the other side of things. Also, he has learned, like all Harvard grads, that sometimes the best way to appeal to the common folk is to wrap oneself up in delightful high-low contradictions. His favorite drummer is Mick Green of the Rollins Band.

Tabitha Engstrom, cymbals: A junior linguistics major from Glenview, Illinois, Tabitha, known as "Pithy Bithy" to her friends, wrote and directed 15 plays during her three years at Glenbrook North High School. Seven of those plays featured a protagonist named Tabitha Engstrom and all 15 took place in the late '50s. She is one of six people in the Harvard band who wears a cape around campus. During the spring of her freshman year, Tabitha tried acid for the first time and wrote a long, meandering letter to Jeremy Lin in which she tried, unsuccessfully, to defend the People’s Revolution. Lin never responded, but a love for basketball was born in Tabitha’s heart.

This, via a tip from David Parker.

Are you in a private place? Is there a lotion supply nearby? Have you dimmed the lights?

Good. Because you’re about to hear the sexiest song about J.R. Smith to ever grace the Internet.

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 night, along with ones you will remember forever.

Crime Scene

Chris Ryan: This is LeBron James's shot chart for this season, specifically his behind-the-arc shot chart. You see the area in the left-center, where James is 26-of-74? Isn't it weird that area isn't littered with skeletons and burned-out Cutlass Supremes and tattered American flags and crashed F-15s? I think it's weird, too. Because that's where LeBron is ending entire worlds, on a nightly basis. Statistically, it might not be his most effective shooting zone, but emotionally, narratively, this is where he likes to take opposing teams by the heart and squeeze the life out of them. It's the dramatic weight with which these shots go down that make them noticeable. There was the dagger in the Celtics the other night, and then, last night, in his homecoming game in Cleveland, he did this:

1. Was that the fight of the year?

Jay Caspian Kang: It’s only early March and the big fights of the fall haven’t been lined up yet, but should we go ahead and proclaim Saturday’s brutal 12-round welterweight battle the Fight of the Year? For those rightfully rolling their eyes right now, let me clarify the question. Given the ongoing feud between Golden Boy Promotions and Top Rank, the age of some of the top fighters in the sport (Sergio Martinez, Floyd Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao, and Juan Manuel Marquez are all at least 34 years old), and the general putridity we’ve seen so far in 2013, are there any potential matchups that could possibly match the skill, power, and heart we saw on display Saturday night in Carson, California? Great fights often come out of nowhere, with Bradley vs. Provodnikov being the most recent example of that truth. But given the protection of some of the top young contenders via their promoters’ matchmaking, will we really see a fight where a top-flight fighter like Bradley gets seriously tested by a guy who has absolutely nothing to lose? What would that fight even be?

The smart money lies with Canelo Alvarez’s upcoming bout against Austin Trout in San Antonio. I suppose there’s a chance that Trout’s speed and the sheer volume of his punches slows down the unstoppable Canelo machine, but count me as maybe the only boxing writer out there who doesn’t really buy all the talk that has circulated about Canelo taking the fight against the wishes of his handlers and Golden Boy Promotions. Someone sees a real weakness in Trout that the rest of us who watched him beat Miguel Cotto do not. If Trout’s as dangerous as he seems, there’s no way Golden Boy would risk their big golden Canelo baby at the tender age of 22.

Self-awareness is overrated, especially among the famous. Should it really be cause for celebration that some historic asshole has the wherewithal to recognize his asshole past? Should we forgive so easily, simply because a celebrity shows the common decency to admit past mistakes? Have our troll-convictions really become so soggy and desperate?

[IF YOU WANT TO GET STRAIGHT TO THE VOTING MADNESS, GO TO OUR FACEBOOK PAGE]

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 night, along with ones you will remember forever.

Man on Fire

(All GIFs by @HeyBelinda)

When James Harden returned to Oklahoma for the first time, the basketball reception from his former teammates was in line with the Thunder’s newfound edge. Harden didn't just go 3-for-16; he had six of those attempts sent back, and for as much love as Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook have for their friend, it was clear they wanted to show him what he would miss.

Last night, Harden returned the favor. His 46 points were a career high, and he did it on 19 shots. Sixteen of those points came during a fourth quarter in which his team trailed by 11 with eight minutes left. In many ways, it was just another great James Harden game, only with the volume turned up. But that final 3, the one playing on a loop above, is all anyone needs to get that last night was about something more. Harden probably didn’t need to try to make Ibaka fall over twice, and he probably didn’t need to stare down the Thunder bench after burying the game-tying 3. But he did. If it seems a little vindictive, that’s because it is. And I love every bit of it.