After an at-times notable but mostly just steady and entertaining 11-year NBA career, Cuttino Mobley(notes) was traded from the Los Angeles Clippers to the New York Knicks with Tim Thomas(notes) in exchange for Zach Randolph(notes) and Mardy Collins(notes). A post-trade physical turned up hypertrophic cardiomyopathy — an enlarged heart, the same condition from which Hank Gathers and Reggie Lewis suffered, and an affliction about which Mobley had reportedly known throughout his career.

The Knicks finalized the deal (after all, they needed to shed Z-Bo's contract), but Mobley never stepped on the court for New York, retiring in December 2008. He worked out with the Boston Celtics for a few days back in September, but didn't catch on.

Since then, we haven't heard too much from the Philadelphia-born shooting guard. Now, though, the former member of the Houston Rockets, Orlando Magic, Clippers and Knicks is working on something.

In late January, the Providence Journal's W. Zachary

C'mon, Eli Roe. The joke that Utah Jazz head coach Tyrone Corbin just told you is not complicated — two muffins are in the oven, one says, "Man, it's hot in here," the other says, "Oh no! It's a talking muffin!" How could that go over your head? No wonder Corbin's so steamed; you should T yourself up for not having a sense of humor.

Best caption wins software for understanding jokes (NOTE: not really). Good luck.

MAJOR BUMMER ALERT: After a Sloan-conference induced few days away from the world of C-a-C, I took a look this morning at our last adventure, in which Shane Battier(notes) somehow managed to compel me to ignore a flailing Hamed Haddadi(notes) and a "not in the face!" Tiago Splitter(notes), so that I could judge your responses and award imaginary prizes. Unfortunately, when he was switching out and upgrading the commenting feature on our site, the Hamburglar appears to have absconded with all your jokes — as I look at the post, I see no comments. I know they were once there,

Sure, maybe Mike D'Antoni is the NBA's mustachioed J. Mascis. But just because he feels the pain of the Miami Heat, that doesn't mean the rest of the New York Knicks do, and it sure doesn't sound like the team's two signature stars share his sympathy.

According to Chris Sheridan at ESPN New York, after the Knicks scored a 92-79 road win over the Atlanta Hawks on Sunday evening, Amar'e Stoudemire(notes) and Carmelo Anthony(notes) had a few snickers at the expense of the members of the Heat who reportedly cried following their loss to the Chicago Bulls earlier in the day:

When the locker room first opened to reporters after the game, Stoudemire and Anthony were bantering and laughing about players on the Miami Heat crying after their loss earlier Sunday to the Chicago Bulls, with Stoudemire fingering Chris Bosh(notes) as the watery-eyed one (although Bosh, when asked by reporters in Miami whether he had cried, said he almost had but did not).

"I heard Chris Bosh was crying tears,"

The Chicago Bulls walked away as the biggest winners on Sunday's jam-packed slate of NBA goodness. The Central Division leaders notched an 87-86 road victory over the Miami Heat to take over second place in the Eastern Conference, sweep their season series with Erik Spoelstra's squad and extend a four-game losing streak that reportedly had some in the home locker room reaching for the Kleenex.

The win was paced, as most Bulls wins are, by the performance of All-Star point guard and top-tier MVP candidate Derrick Rose(notes), who finished with 27 points on 12-for-23 shooting and authored several stunning plays, including this lightning-quick crossover and no-angle floater (plus the foul) that he busted out late in the second quarter to cut Miami's lead to single digits.

Under most circumstances, I would regard any time that ESPN/ABC play-by-play man Mike Tirico takes mic time away from the incomparable Hubie Brown as a pistols-at-dawn-worthy broach of NBA broadcast etiquette, but in

Tarek Kamil predicts that technologists will one day be just as important to a basketball team's on-court success as coaches are. Not only that, he says, they'll actually be determining in-game strategy and making sideline calls themselves.

And as he sees it, that day's coming sooner than you think. During a presentation on the second day of the 2011 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Kamil said he figures it'll arrive within the next 20 years.

Analysts will pore over mountains of data mined from an array of individual player snapshots and game situations to arrive at evidence-based conclusions, according to Kamil, executive director of online strategies for InfoMotion Sports and founder of the popular online sports simulation site WhatIfSports.com. Those conclusions will form the basis for the kind of critical decisions that frequently mean the difference between winning and losing.

Kamil forwarded this idea during a presentation promoting InfoMotion's 94Fifty technology, which

I walked into the 2011 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference thinking I needed to be quick on the draw with a graphing calculator and had to know my way around a scatter plot to keep up with the next-lev chatter whizzing past my ample Irish melon. At Friday's first session, though, I quickly found out that I mostly just needed to be willing to ponder Tracy McGrady's(notes) place in basketball's space-time continuum. Done and done!

Well, that, and two other things. I needed to be willing to consider that being AMAZING at something — like, tallest letters on the marquee, top five in the world, stunningly and nigh-on-unfathomably gifted — could be not only bad, but also a massive impediment to becoming the best version of yourself.

Huh and huh?

Best-selling author and noted hairsman Malcolm Gladwell introduced the concept while moderating the opening session of this year's Sloan conference. The talk dealt with how the "10,000 hour rule" that Gladwell discussed in his 2008 book "Outliers"

Of all the players you've come across, who's been the biggest miss? Which players seemed to have everything going for them -- the athleticism, the talent, the chances, etc. -- but just never put it all together and, as a result, either burned out or faded away?

That's what moderator Malcolm Gladwell asked of the panelists during the morning session that kicked off the 2011 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which centered on how the much-discussed "10,000 hour rule" that he introduced in his 2008 best-seller "Outliers"-- that the key to success in any field is the purposeful practice of a specific task for 10,000 hours -- relates to athletic development.

When his turn came, Houston Rockets general manager/Sloan co-chair Daryl Morey instantly referenced Marcus Banks(notes).

Coming out of UNLV, talent evaluators saw Banks as a gifted 6-foot-2 point guard "with speed, built like a running back -- really nothing holding him back," Morey said. But during a pre-draft interview conducted

This is not a genius.

This is a dude who, when faced with a giant sculpture of a dinosaur in Chicago, figures that the important thing to do is pose like it and smilegrowl. This is a guy whose vocabulary as a youth came almost entirely out of the letters page of issues of "The Amazing Spider-Man." This is a bro who frequently has a hard enough time getting through the front of the box score, let alone following KD behind it.

This, for better or for worse, is Your Man. And I am about to dive headlong into a world of super smart people saying super smart things about how they're charting the future of sports by combining common sense with a head for maths. I'm at the 2011 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in South Boston, and I feel a little bit like I'm 16 again and about to walk into a calculus quiz for which I forgot to study.

The goal is to bring you guys some of what I see here (thus far: tote bags, T-shirts, a media room and a lot of coffee!), share the kind of fun things that