Lots of people were excited when Shaquille O'Neal was announced as an addition to the "Inside the NBA" crew, for obvious reasons. He's always been a personable guy with plenty of willingness to make fun of himself. On the other hand, sometimes his jokes can seem forced and prepared, which suggests that he might be an uneasy fit with the casual vibe of TNT's industry-best studio show.

Monday, Turner released its first ad touting Shaq's appearance on the show, and it will serve as evidence for either opinion. In the spot, he lip-synchs to an unfortunate cover of The Temptations' "Get Ready," complete with the Big Pundit's usual mugging. If you like Shaq's antics, this will probably be cool to you. If you don't, you'll probably wonder how "singing a song" qualifies as humor. Guess which side I'm on!

(via PBT)

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Last February, Chauncey Billups was traded from his home city of Denver to the New York Knicks. Whereas most players would be happy to play in such a large market, Billups and his family weren't especially thrilled, although they didn't make too big a stink about it. He's a professional, after all, and getting traded is part of the NBA life.

That said, there comes a point at which being traded often becomes a sizable nuisance and not just a known occupational hazard. Now that the Knicks are regular patrons at the rumor mill for Chris Paul, Billups has been mentioned as part of pretty much any potential major trade. He's not very happy about it, as he told Howard Beck of The New York Times (via EOB):

Although a deal is only a remote possibility, it would surely involve Billups, who plays the same position (point guard) and who is one of the Knicks' few valued assets.

"It wouldn't make me happy," Billups said Friday in a phone interview from his Denver home. "Because for me, at this juncture in my career, I just want to win." [...]

"I want to win another championship," he said. "I think we got some good pieces in New York. I felt like we were making that move to be possibly one of those top teams. I don't want to play for no team that's rebuilding."

All talk of winning a championship aside, Billups has every right to be upset about this treatment purely in terms of his lifestyle. Certain professions involve lots of traveling or movement from city to city, but few require a player to move around as if he were a professional make-weight rather than a valued employee. Billups has been in New York for less than a year and still could be on his way out at the earliest opportunity. That's no way to live. And, if the new collective bargaining agreement changes the league as expected, we may see many more cases like this one in the future.

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At this point, seemingly half the NBA is on Twitter. It's a wild world of training updates, questions as to which movies they should go see, and explanations of their Call of Duty prowess. Every so often, though, you also get a picture into the more interesting aspects of NBA life. This feature is your window into that world.

LaMarcus Aldridge: Saw a old lady driving and trying to read a book. She know she can barely see the highway and trying to read a book.

Shane Battier: My head spins with free agency potentials. Does anyone have a copy of NBA 2K12 to work some of these scenarios out? Thanks.

Deron Williams: Don't know why people are tripping just bc I'm opting out doesn't mean that I won't resign with the nets! W/ new CBA it makes sense

Danny Green: Saddens me to say that tonight was my last game here in Ljubljana...wanna thank the fans n teamates for supportin me..was a great experience

Mo Williams: Just dropped my oldest son @lilmokd25 at school in the sip. I always wonder how

The various NBA players who looked for work overseas during the lockout have ended their stints earlier than expected, but their brief employment has still mattered to the teams and cities that signed them. Basketball is huge in those places, but the NBA reigns supreme. Sure, maybe the teams shouldn't retire jerseys after 15 games. Still, it makes sense for them to remain excited about having housed an NBA player for a brief time.

Sonny Weems isn't a star by any means, but he's still a guy with a legitimate NBA career. So, as a show of gratitude for his temporary employers at Zalgiris Kaunas in Lithuania, Weems ended a key Euroleague game in pretty much the best way possible. As you can see in the video above, he beat Unicaja Malaga in the final seconds with an and-one dunk in overtime. It's hard to get a better game-clinching shot than this one. They won't soon forget this play, or Weems, in Kaunas.

Weems doesn't have an out-clause in his contract, so he'll be in Lithuania for the

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NBA players make lots of money, but they value their Christmas gifts just as much as anyone else. There's something special about knowing that your friends and family can give you gifts with your interests in mind. It's the spirit of giving, and it's wonderful. That's what I've heard, at least. I'm Jewish.

So you can imagine how much it must hurt a professional athlete for his future holiday gifts to be stolen, because it would be your own feeling, too. So, please, feel some empathy for Memphis Grizzlies defensive stopper Tony Allen right now. From MyFoxMemphis.com (via SLAM):

Tony Allen says that someone has stolen $20,000 worth of clothing out of a rental car that his mother was using.

His mother returned a rent-a-car to Enterprise at 7263 Winchester, and left the goods in the car. She later realized that she didn't have the merchandise, called the rental car company and was told that nothing was found in the vehicle.

Among the items stolen were high dollar sweaters, shoes, and shirts meant for the NBA star as Christmas gifts.

I have no idea how those gifts total $20,000, but I'm sure Tony appreciated his mother's decision to buy him gold-plated sweaters and shoes made of whale blubber. With the kind of money he makes, he has probably done quite a bit for her. It's nice to give back.

(CORRECTION: Tony Allen has informed me multiple times on Twitter that these were not Christmas gifts, but rather stolen belongings, in which case much of this post makes no sense. Tony, I apologize.)

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The best part of the NBA lockout, apart from "how u" jokes and imagining negotiations in which David Stern and Billy Hunter argued over whether to order dinner from Papa John's or Pizza Hut, was how players embraced grassroots basketball leagues and played exhibitions for charity. Without billion-dollar backing and official infrastructure, they appeared to be playing for the love of the game and their fans. It was loose, fresh, and a lot of fun.

With the new CBA set to become official soon, these exhibitions are mostly a thing of the past. But Wednesday night, Kevin Durant and LeBron James will play a flag-football game with friends as a sort of last-minute goodbye to their free period away from NBA contract rules. You can watch a livestream complete with commentary and multiple camera angles at uStream. The broadcast starts at 7 p.m. ET with kickoff an hour later.

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The lockout was a bad situation for many NBA-related employees, with layoffs for salaried league and team workers to reduced hours for arena wage-workers. It was a tough time for many Americans, just as it has been during this entire extended recession.

Luckily, with the league set to start back up again, there's good news for people looking to get a foot in the NBA door. As Henry Abbott reports at TrueHoop, there should be quite a few entry-level hires around the league soon:

"The method to get an entry-level basketball operations job for an NBA team has always been to get your résumé to the right person at the right time," says a front office executive who wishes to remain anonymous. "Now is the right time."

League-wide, this source guesses, something like 20 to 40 first NBA jobs for hard workers with some basketball experience will be filled.

The reason so many executives are scrambling to identify candidates is because the lockout has removed many from the mix -- those with connections and experience in the business found jobs in high school or college, where they are generally committed for the rest of the season if not longer.

The upshot here, if I may put things into the only economic terms I understand, is that there's high demand and low supply for these roles. So if you've ever wanted to spend your days deflecting requests for interviews regarding Clippers lawsuits or marketing a Kemba Walker/DJ Augustin backcourt as if they were the second coming of Earl Monroe and Walt Frazier, this is your chance.

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Several new rules and stipulations have leaked from the NBA's forthcoming collective bargaining agreement, and many of them suggest new contract situations for many young players in the league. In addition to the oft-noted "Derrick Rose rule," there are new games-started provisions that affect qualifying offers for restricted free agents. As noted in the official leaked lockout memo (via SI.com), a first-round pick who averages 41 starts or 2,000 minutes per season will be afforded a higher qualifying offer than his draft position would suggest. It's a good deal for players who outperform their draft status.

However, it also relies on a questionable premise. As Rob Mahoney noted at NYTimes.com's Off the Dribble blog, obsessing over games started as a measure of value is a faulty way of judging a player's importance:

One would think that in the era of Lamar Odom, Jason Terry and James Harden, the basketball world would look beyond the number of starts as an important criterion for determining player worth. Yet from their first contract in the big leagues, the N.B.A. is grooming players to regard starting as an important indication of their value.

Even more unfortunate is the other implication of such a rule: if a premium is placed on players who start, then those who do not start — for whatever reason — are deemed by the system to be inferior. The N.B.A.'s owners and players have ingrained games-started as a goal for the coming generations and, in the process, marginalized the value (in the case of this specific contract element) of influential reserves. A spot in the P.A. announcer's opening roll call took top priority, while the team-first mind-set that brings Odom, Terry or Harden off the bench was thrown into the wind.

To borrow two examples from my earlier post: DeShawn Stevenson and Keith Bogans would have theoretically met the requirements for an increased qualifying offer last season, while players like Louis Williams, Tony Allen and Taj Gibson would have been deemed ineligible based on their limited number of games started. The idea of a playing time threshold is certainly understandable, but the notion that starting games is an actual element of performance worthy of compensation is not.

It's difficult to find uniform and uncontroversial criteria for salary bumps, and playing time is a good one. But, as Rob notes, games started makes very little sense as a one-size-fits-all system, primarily because a starter can play fewer minutes than a reserve and mean far less to the team. The minutes-played stipulation is a good one, but it should also be the only bar to clear. There's no reason for Keith Bogans to make more money than James Harden in any situation. One is simply far more effective and important to his team than the other.