Kobe Bryant silently judges Blake Griffin (Getty Images)

Chris Paul is probably having the best season of any Los Angeles Clipper, but in terms of sheer star power Laker guard Kobe Bryant and Clipper forward Blake Griffin are two names that I didn’t have to fully type out in order for you to understand who I was referencing. And though the Lakers still lead the Clippers in columns posted daily by a two-to-one margin, the Clips are winning the Pacific division and making a strong bid to unseat the Oklahoma City Thunder as Western conference champions.

That hope took a hit on Sunday as the Thunder kept the Clippers at arm’s length for nearly the entire 108-104 Oklahoma City win. And, in ways that you could see coming, Blake Griffin took a hit to his junk from Serge Ibaka that, as of press time, Ibaka has yet to be suspended for. Ibaka wasn’t even ejected from the game, oddly, after a move that most saw as intentional despite Ibaka’s protests to the contrary.

Kobe Bryant, at Laker practice on Monday, is protesting Blake Griffin’s lack of a response. Lack of a violent one, at least. From the Los Angeles Daily News’ Mark Medina (via Pro Basketball Talk):

“I probably would have smacked him in the mouth,” Bryant said after practice Monday at the Lakers’ facility in El Segundo.

Nicolas Batum discusses shoulder pain with Trail Blazers athletic trainer Jay Jensen. (Getty Images)

During a panel discussion at the 2013 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference on how football coaches do (or don't) use analytical information when making in-game coaching decisions, former New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs head coach Herman Edwards presented a good point: The health of a team's roster — not which names are and aren't on the injury report, but the actual physical well-being of the human people on the field and the sideline — really isn't something fans can't know just watching the team from TV. Interestingly enough, though, it's become increasingly evident that it's not always something you can know in the locker room or at practice, either.

Want to know how serious Mark Cuban is about improving the Dallas Mavericks' visibility into their players' health so that they can not only get injured players back faster, but also prevent health from deteriorating to the point where a stint on the injured list is necessary?

"We're locking up our medical staff to longer-term deals than our players," he said during the conference's opening panel on Friday morning.

(Actually, come to think of it, given the Mavs' "get under the cap and avoid the luxury tax" salary structure and the once-and-future openness of the Bank of Cuban, maybe that's not that big a statement.)

Yes, we've come a long way from the mid-1990s, when — as Stan Conte, the former director of medical services and head athletic trainer for the Los Angeles Dodgers, said during the conference's injury analytics panel — it took 2 1/2 years to figure out how many total player games a Major League Baseball team had lost to injury because there wasn't yet such a thing as a disabled list log. But while NBA teams continue to develop better analytical tools and collect more information about what happens on the court, there's still quite a bit of work to be done on understanding what goes on within player's bodies and inside their heads.

Advancements might be coming there, too, however.

Diana Taurasi and DeWanna Bonner, two athletes who play a sport (Christian Petersen/ Getty).

The WNBA started playing games in 1997. Since then, discussion about the league has barely progressed. The majority of NBA-leaning basketball fans make the same comments about the lack of dunks, the league being boring, and the form of basketball generally holding no points of interest for holders of the XY chromosomes. All this despite the fact that many of these people have never attempted to watch a full game.

At least one team is tired of these terms of argument and ready to do something to change men's minds. Ben York, a writer for the official site of the Phoenix Mercury, wants men to give the WNBA an honest chance. So he and the franchise are offering tickets to anyone with an open mind (via SLAM):

Toni Kukoc, in October of 1997 (Getty Images)

Last week both Eric Freeman and I discussed the provocative and slightly depressing trip Dennis Rodman made to North Korea, ostensibly to reach out in a goodwill gesture, but most assuredly to work the ego of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. The head of state is a notorious hoops nerd, with a particular love for the 1990s Chicago Bulls – a love that this hoops nerd shares and is most definitely questioning as these stories leak out.

In a Washington Post feature from 2009, it was relayed that Kim Jong-un had a bedroom filled with 1990s NBA paraphernalia, including pictures taken with both Kobe Bryant and former Chicago Bull point forward Toni Kukoc – photos presumably snapped before any of the particulars were aware that Kim Jong-un was the son of the ruthless Kim John Il. On Monday, New York Magazine’s Dan Amira reached out to Kukoc to ask about the encounter, and Toni was quick to give the reporter an electronic pair of shrugged shoulders.

From NY Mag:

Nothing else is known about how Kim Jong Un came to meet Kukoc or Bryant. Asked via e-mail today if he could remember anything about the encounter, Kukoc, a Croatian-born small forward who helped the Bulls to three championships, enthusiastically told Daily Intelligencer, "No, not really, maybe it was McDonald's tournament in Paris! I don't recollect anything else!"

Dwight Howard and Josh Smith, ponderin' (Getty Images)

Josh Smith is not speaking out of turn nor trying to paint a pretty picture when he talks up Dwight Howard’s loyalty and desire for consistency. The Atlanta Hawks forward has known Howard for over a decade, the two played on the same AAU team in Georgia as teens, and they remain thick friends. It is even being suggested that the Hawks are attempting to clear cap space in order to sign the current Los Angeles Lakers center when he becomes a free agent this summer.

Smith, who will also be a free agent in July, wasn’t attempting to throw cold water on the Hawks’ hope when he spoke with the Los Angeles Daily News’ Mark Medina on Sunday, prior to Los Angeles’ win over Atlanta. And you may chortle of Josh’s choice of words, and think very little of the post-2011 Dwight Howard that we’ve come to know, but Smith isn’t wrong in guessing that Howard remains in Los Angeles. Even if Josh declined to even mention the money involved.

[Related: Dwight Howard takes a swipe at former Magic teammates]

From the Daily News:

“I can’t pick his brain and be in his head but to me, I don’t see him going anywhere,” Smith said before the Lakers hosted the Hawks at Staples Center. “It would be a shock to me.”

If SportVU expands to all 30 teams, its findings could work their way into in-game decisions. (Getty Images)

On Friday afternoon, during the first day of panels at the 2013 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, NYU-Polytechnic Institute professor Dr. Philip Z. Maymin presented a research paper that looked, in part, at how often individual players speed up and slow down while playing, and where they most often do so. Maymin pored over more than 30,000 half-court set plays captured by STATS' SportVU optical tracking technology (which I've written about before) in the hopes of creating "a suitable dynamic language" that would make it easier to talk about the kinds of things that static Xs and Os on a chalkboard can't really display — the best spots for certain players to begin possessions, the trajectories they should take as they move, how they should time their cuts/screens/drives, etc.

There was some interesting stuff in Maymin's talk — players tend to accelerate or decelerate most rapidly and most often in the paint, at the top of the key and past the elbows; centers tend to exhibit bursts of acceleration more than other positions because they're screening and rolling or popping a lot; Paul Pierce accelerates more often than you'd think for a dude who seems to do everything in slow motion. But it still felt quite a ways away from a usable framework for defining basketball plays that would enable us to really measure half-court execution. When the presentation ended, John Hollinger (formerly of ESPN, now with the Memphis Grizzlies) offered his estimation:

Paper on acceleration in NBA is interesting ... next step is figuring out what it means. #SSAC13

— John Hollinger (@johnhollinger) March 1, 2013

To some extent, that's the case for just about everything presented at Sloan. Asked during the conference's opening panel how far along teams are in translating collected information into action on the court, Houston Rockets general manager/Sloan co-founder Daryl Morey offered a sobering assessment: "We're nowhere yet."

After the Oklahoma City Thunder had rolled up a 19-point lead in the third quarter of their hotly contested Western Conference matchup with the Los Angeles Clippers on Sunday afternoon, L.A. was determinedly forcing its way back into the proceedings. A 4 1/2-minute 10-2 run got the Clips within two points midway through the fourth quarter, and despite a quick 8-3 spurt keyed by Russell Westbrook to give the Thunder some breathing room, the Clippers still had a puncher's chance of making one more late push ... until one OKC puncher took a chance that, unfortunately, paid off.

We pick it up with just under two minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, L.A. down six and Blake Griffin having just boxed out Serge Ibaka for a potential offensive rebound of a Matt Barnes corner 3-point attempt:

Yeah, that sure looks like Ibaka — having been beaten to the spot by the Clippers All-Star — pushes down Griffin's right hand with his own, then pulls it back and chops downward at Griffin's groin. I mean, it's not quite as blatant a low blow as the one that Nicolas Batum laid on Juan Carlos Navarro during the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, but it's at least as blatant as the one that DeMarcus Cousins delivered to O.J. Mayo back in December. And if you believe neither me nor your lying eyes, maybe you'll listen to one of the smartest and sharpest basketball minds we've got.

"In my opinion, this is an easy call. Easy call by the referees," ABC color commentator Hubie Brown said.

Except ...

The Los Angeles Lakers' struggles remain one of the biggest stories of the NBA season, but they are beginning to turn around that narrative. Heading into Sunday night's home game against the Atlanta Hawks, the Lakers had won four of their last five and 12 of their last 17, improving their record to 29-30. Another victory would put them at .500, a mark they hadn't hit Dec. 28, 2012.

Against the Hawks, longtime Lakers talisman Kobe Bryant ensured that they would not keep that losing record. In the last minutes of the game, Kobe took over, scoring the team's last six points to lock down a 99-98 victory.

The clear highlight is available for your viewing pleasure above. With roughly 2:20 left on the clock and the Lakers down 94-93, Bryant drove to his right past well-regarded Hawks defender Josh Smith. While most 34-year-old players would have laid the ball up, thereby allowing the quick-leaping Smith to block the shot, Kobe kept on elevating and exploded for the emphatic dunk. It was reminiscient of his younger days, back when he was regularly discussed as one of the two or three most athletic players in the NBA.

[Related: Magic Johnson offers LeBron James $1M for dunk competition appearance]

But Kobe wasn't finished. With 33 seconds left, he nailed two free throws to put the Lakers back on top 97-96. After an Al Horford dunk on the ensuing possession, the Lakers held the ball with 26 seconds remaining. After the jump, check out Kobe's game-winning bucket.