Andrei Kirilenko does something right. (David Sherman/NBA/Getty Images)

A look around the league and the Web that covers it. It's also important to note that the rotation order and starting nods aren't always listed in order of importance. That's for you, dear reader, to figure out.

C: HoopSpeak. “I’m pretty good at understanding what’s not good, so I’m not going to [do] it." Leave it to Andrei Kirilenko to offer just about the best description possible of what makes him such a unique all-around marvel on the basketball court. Steve McPherson's drops that great line, plus many more jewels, in a very fun and enlightening feature on the Minnesota Timberwolves forward, back in the NBA after a year away and acting as one of the few constants for a team that's been beset by injuries and volatility this season.

PF: The Diss. On the occasion of another Martin Luther King Jr. Day chock full of NBA basketball — an "informal Diet Christmas," as he calls it — Jacob Greenberg considers the decision to start off the day with a spotlight game in Memphis, the site of Dr. King's assassination, and what he views as an incomplete depiction of who Dr. King really was and what he really promoted at the time of his death. An interesting, thought-provoking read that also gives me the opportunity to share one of my favorite videos — Ill Doctrine maven Jay Smooth's 2008 reminder of 10 other things Dr. King said.

SF: SB Nation. Amid news that the sale of the Sacramento Kings to the a Seattle-based ownership group intent on moving the team to Washington to bring back the Sonics is all but a done deal, Tom Ziller tells the Maloof family exactly how he, and likely most other Kings fans, feel about their actions in this ongoing debacle. This isn't mere spleen venting — it's what happens when research, experience and talent meet justifiable anger. As I've said before, I'm glad Tom wrote it; I'm just sad that we've got occasion to read it.

Of course. (Getty Images)

After missing the first 36 games of the 2012-13 season following surgery to repair torn ligaments in his left knee, Iman Shumpert made his season debut for the New York Knicks during last Thursday's 102-87 win over the Detroit Pistons in London. Knicks fans are excited to have the athletic second-year guard back in the lineup to bolster the team's perimeter defense, but the young wing player is probably more recognizable around the league for his hair than his play.

While rehabbing his injured knee, he decided to let his hair grow out and fashion it into one of the league's two fiercest high-top fades (the other belongs to fellow sophomore guard Norris Cole of the Miami Heat). What kind of player Shumpert develops into remains to be seen, but under the bright lights of Madison Square Garden, the 22-year-old Chicagoan seems intent on not only maintaining his individuality, but celebrating it, which is cool; in a league like the NBA, personality can go a long way.

Shumpert talked about his high-top with Nate Taylor of The New York Times, sharing not only the genesis of the style ("When I was growing up, all my cousins had high-top fades. I thought it would be cool to see how long I could grow a high-top") but also a pretty weird yet somehow perfect piece of Shump-related trivia:

Shumpert said he planned to keep his high-top fade. When Shumpert’s mixtape album, Th3 #Post90s, was released in December, his high-top fade was the focal point of the album cover. He loves the haircut so much he has a tattoo on his left forearm of Johnny Bravo, a cartoon character with pompadour-style hair.

For those of you who didn't watch a ton of Cartoon Network in the late '90s and early '00s, "Johnny Bravo" was an animated series that starred a musclebound blonde dude who sounded like an Elvis impersonator and gets beat up by women a lot. And, yes, he had a huge pompadour.

With four minutes, 43 seconds left in the first quarter of the Los Angeles Lakers' Sunday visit to the Toronto Raptors, Lakers center Dwight Howard was whistled for a technical foul. Howard had just made a baseline drive against Raptors defender Aaron Gray, which he attempted to finish with a left-handed lay-in; it missed, Toronto rebounded and Howard, upset that no foul was called against Gray, clapped in frustration at referee Ken Mauer, who promptly rung Howard up.

The problem with early technicals like that is that they leave players with very little room for error; just one more momentary slip or misunderstanding later on and you're looking at a second T and an automatic ejection. With that in mind, let's fast-forward to the closing stages of the second quarter.

After an and-one layup by Metta World Peace had drawn the Lakers within two scores just before halftime, Howard and Raptors forward Alan Anderson got tangled up coming off their spots on the block, and remained connected as they headed up-court. There was some bumping, some jostling and perhaps even some tussling; there was, in Mauer's view, enough to warrant double technicals on Anderson and Howard. That made two on Dwight, which meant, in the words of Tas Melas, he gone:

On one hand, Howard doesn't get the early gate if he doesn't complain about the first no-call. On the other, though ... man, that's a rough way to get chucked before the second half, isn't it?

[Also: LeBron James' angry tweet over Kings sale report]

It was super cool to see Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell in attendance in Washington, D.C., on Monday morning at the inauguration of President Barack Obama for his second term in the Oval Office. It's not necessarily surprising — after all, the 78-year-old Russell was not only an exemplary athlete and champion, but also a proud, tireless advocate for civil and human rights who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Obama has previously recognized Russell's contributions to both sport and society by honoring him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. But still: Pretty cool.

A bit less cool: Russell's identification by ABC News correspondent George Stephanopoulos, one of the hosts of the network's coverage of the inauguration festivities, as captured by closed captioning and Deadspin's Timothy Burke:

Not quite. (Screencap via 30fps.mocksession.com)

Whoops.

[Y! News: More on President Obama's inauguration]

To his credit, Stephanopoulos quickly corrected himself — perhaps after realizing that the man on his screen was wearing a hat with a Celtics shamrock logo (complete with Russell's No. 6, retired by the team in March 1972, in the top leaf of the clover) — before moving on with the rest of the broadcast. We're betting Mr. Russell wouldn't have minded the case of mistaken identity all that much; for one thing he had much bigger, and better, stuff to think about this morning, and for another, he loved "The Bucket List."

(NOTE: Last item might be false)

Here's video of the slip-up as it happened:

LeBron doesn't believe you, owners. You need more people. (Rocky Widner/NBA/Getty Images)

The ongoing drama surrounding the potential sale of the Sacramento Kings to a Seattle-based group helmed by hedge fund manager Chris Hansen and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer ramped up another notch on Sunday amid reports that, after a week and a half of discussions, the Kings ownership — led by the Maloof family, which has held a controlling interest in the team since 1999 — had reached an agreement to sell a 65 percent stake in the Kings to the Seattle group, which plans to move the Kings from Sacramento north, rebrand them the SuperSonics and revive a local NBA legacy cut short in 2008 when owner Clay Bennett moved the Sonics to Oklahoma City and turned them into the Thunder. The NBA confirmed those reports on Monday morning.

[Related: Kings to Seattle a done deal, Sonics will return]

News of the reported sale, understandably, drew plenty of attention from all sorts of people involved with the NBA ... including reigning MVP LeBron James, who took to Twitter with a pretty strong reaction to the steep financial figure cited in stories about the sale:

So the Kings getting sold for 525M!! And the owners ain't making no money huh? What the hell we have a lookout for. Get the hell out of here

— LeBron James (@KingJames) January 21, 2013

#lockout! My bad. U know what I meant

— LeBron James (@KingJames) January 21, 2013

And from what I hear the 525M isn't even the whole % of the team! Smh. One thing is I can't hate on their hustle though. Crazy

— LeBron James (@KingJames) January 21, 2013

James has a point, of course — it does seem pretty remarkable that just over a year after the league told anyone who would listen that the NBA's business model was broken, that owners were finding it so impossible to operate teams at a profit that players needed to give back tens of millions of dollars per year in a scaled-back basketball-related income split and harder caps on what players could earn in salary lest the league's economy capsize, long-moribund franchises are selling for boatloads of cash. It's almost like the lockout wasn't about the league and its owners being poor, but rather the league and its owners being very, very eager to become richer. Imagine that.

You don't want it with David West. Like, at all. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

A look around the league and the Web that covers it. It's also important to note that the rotation order and starting nods aren't always listed in order of importance. That's for you, dear reader, to figure out.

C: Pacers.com. We've spent a decade getting to know David West's game — the bruising post play, the high-low acumen, the soft touch on that 16-footer, the fact that no person in their right mind wants any quarrel with this grown-ass man — but, if you're like me, you don't know a whole lot about how the Indiana Pacers' probably-should-be-All-Star power forward got to where he is today. For tramps like us, Mark Montieth's got a damn fine two-part profile of Indy's steady-as-she-goes leader.

PF: CSNNE.com. Another outstanding profile, this one from Boston Celtics beat writer Jessica Camerato, of West's former Pacers teammate, guard Leandro Barbosa. When you think of the Brazilian shooting guard, you probably think of speed, high-octane offense, those "Seven Seconds or Less" Phoenix Suns teams and generally happy, positive things ... but as Barbosa tells Camerato, that's not how his story started, and, unfortunately, not necessarily where he finds himself now. There are some gut punches here.

SF: TrueHoop and TrueHoop again. There is a RIDICULOUS amount to learn in these two posts about the coaching histories, philosophies and pedagogies of Chicago Bulls head coach Tom Thibodeau (by Beckley Mason) and Dallas Mavericks head coach Rick Carlisle (by Kevin Arnovitz). A RIDICULOUS amount.

Last Friday, we discussed Zach Randolph's fear of cats, a revelation brought about by an interview tied to his appearance on the Animal Planet series "Pit Bulls and Parolees." The cat thing was a fun goof, but the good that Z-Bo did by donating $10,000 to New Orleans' Villalobos Rescue Center to cover the costs of rehabilitating and caring for a pit bull that had been found trapped in a Memphis drainpipe back in July was the real story, told in an episode that aired this past week.

In case you missed it, the folks at Beyond the Buzzer did not:

Five things that stood out to me during the six-minute segment:

Kevin Garnett and Rajon Rondo don't want to talk to or even look at anyone else. (Boston Globe)As Eric Freeman related Thursday night, the starting fives for the Eastern and Western Conference teams in next month's 2013 NBA All-Star Game have been announced, and basketball fans around the world decided that they wanted to see a starting Eastern backcourt composed of Miami Heat shooting guard Dwyane Wade and Boston Celtics point guard Rajon Rondo. This makes sense for a few reasons — they are very exciting individual talents; they've been the conference's two most consistently elite performers thus far this season (via Kyrie Irving missing time); they have played a lot of games on national television in recent years, so more people know who they are than, say, Jrue Holiday. As both Eric and Kelly Dwyer wrote, the fans got this, and most of the other, starting selections right.

One other thing makes the Wade-Rondo backcourt pairing especially intriguing — the prospect of sparks between two players with a way-less-than-friendly history.

Remember that Wade took Rondo down in Game 3 of the Heat/Celtics series in 2011, hyperextending Rondo's elbow and forcing him to play basically one-handed for the balance of the series, which Miami won. And that Rondo called Wade and his teammates out for "crying to referees" during a Boston win over Miami last postseason. And that Rondo committed a flagrant foul on Wade at the start of this season, which the Heat star called "a punk play" and the Celtics triggerman said Wade "sold [...] a little bit." Suffice it to say, they're not especially chummy.

Then again, as ESPN Boston's Chris Forsberg learned Thursday, Rondo's not "especially chummy" with anybody in the NBA, and doesn't really plan to start in Houston next month: