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.

Of the NBA players who signed in Europe during the lockout, All-Star point guard Deron Williams easily stood out as the best player in the bunch. When he signed with Besiktas in Turkey, it suggested that Europe could be a legitimate option for the best players in the world. While no other players of that caliber ended up crossing the pond, Williams still stands out as an important figure in the history of Americo-European basketballular relations.

That said, he only played 15 games in Turkey. Which makes it somewhat shocking that Besiktas has retired his No. 8 jersey. You can watch the video above and read more from Barry Petchesky at Deadspin:

Beşiktaş honored Williams before their game today, and raised his jersey to the rafters. Williams averaged 21.8 PPG and 6.5 APG in his time in Istanbul, and says he hopes to return one day.

The TBL is especially hard-hit by the resumption of the NBA, with Zaza Pachulia, Thabo Sefolosha, Semih Erden and Mehmet Okur returning to their American teams. It's not all bad, though: Sasha Vujacic will stay with his Turkish team through the end of the year.

Those links go to the Besiktas website, which you'll probably have a hard time reading unless you read Turkish. Nevertheless, it seems as if the club honored and appreciated Williams' service quite a bit. He must have had quite an effect on everyone during his short time in the country. Maybe he expressed real interest in learning more about the historical significance of Mt. Ararat.

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NBA teams make gains every day in the world of analyzing on-court performance, whether that involves creating new stats to quantify value or figuring out which older metrics most readily correspond with winning. For the most part, these tools haven't carried over to practices, where vaguely defined goals make it difficult to determine exactly what matters most.

However, teams are trying by tapping into more scientific methods of judging performance in practices. The Austin Toros, a D-League squad owned by the San Antonio Spurs, have begun to check their players' vital signs during practice. They do it with high-tech man manssieres (or bros, if you prefer that term). From Andrew A McNeill at 48 Minutes of Hell (via TrueHoop):

Last season at Austin Toros media day, I quizzed new coach Brad Jones on if the Spurs had any plans to use the D-League as something of a petri dish. I didn't put it to him that way, however, I can't imagine Coach Jones feeling comfortable thinking of his new gig as a petri dish. Jones mentioned that the Spurs planned on testing out a new nutrition plan via the Toros, but didn't seem to know the specifics of said plan. As little time as I spent with the Toros last year, I didn't have much of a chance to follow-up with Coach Jones on whatever eating plan the Toros implemented.

This year at Toros media day, I was prepared. I mentioned to Coach Jones what he had told me last season and asked him if the Spurs had anything new they wanted to try in Austin this season. Sure enough, Coach Jones gave me what I was after.

"It's a load meter and it's a new sports science thing," he said. "It's like a vest you put on underneath [your clothes] and you wear it in practice and it keeps track of the energy you're burning."

What this load meter is, specifically, is from Catapult Sports, "a world leader in wearable athlete tracking technology" based in Australia. What the system does, according to my basic understanding of it, is track almost everything imaginable on the player wearing it. Think of it like Google Analytics for athletes.

"Everything: speed, heart rate, distance covered," Toros trainer Nixon Dorvilien said. "By gathering all that information, sometimes you'll be able to tell if an athlete is being overtrained or how they're recovering."

You can check out an image of the item at the link above. As you can see, it looks like some kind of futuristic training bra. And while that may be embarrassing for the players who have to wear it, this technology could help their careers and long-term health.

Taiwanese animation studio NMA has reached impressive levels of Internet fame on the strength of its totally whackadoodle animations of news stories. It put out a particularly crazy one about the NBA lockout in mid-October, and Tuesday it weighed in on NFL player Ndamakong Suh's penchant for roaring like a lion and tearing opponents limb from limb. It is artist and genius.

For the most part, though, NMA is not known for the strength of its news coverage. Yet, with the lockout now a few votes away from ending, NMA has produced one of the best recaps of the NBA lockout imaginable. Even if you had been in a coma since July 1, this video would explain the key issues and general structure of the lockout quite well. You would only have to realize that Michael Jordan and other owners did not shovel water out of their sinking boats, or that they did not celebrate their victory at a strip club. That last one was just an educated guess.

The general concept here is absolutely correct: that the