Each year, SB Nation polls its network of team bloggers in a referendum on the major league season that mirrors that of the Baseball Writers Association of America. But with one difference: ours is unfettered by any of the pretensions that warp the ballots of the columnists and beat writers who vote on those “real” awards. SB Nation’s informed outsiders have no illusions that they are acting as guardians of the game and redactors of its history. Rather, they have a much higher standard to answer to: The choices each of them makes will be scrutinized by a community that lives and dies with its chosen team in a way that makes terms like “loyalty” and “devotion” seem painfully inadequate and occasionally challenges accepted notions of good mental health. In other words, they can’t afford to appear to be poseurs, parvenus, dilettantes. The threat of judgment and ridicule enforces a thoroughgoing integrity that would wither the average American statesman.

What follows is the results of our annual poll in three categories: Best Player, Best Pitcher and Best Rookie in each league. In some cases our results will anticipate those of the BBWAA, while in others we will likely diverge from them. In either case, the voters are prepared to defend their decisions with the tenacity of bulldogs. Living day to day in the arena, they know it’s what’s expected of them — and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

For the last two seasons, one of the game’s dominant controversies has been whether Mike Trout (all-around excellent player) is more valuable than Miguel Cabrera (ultimate stationary masher). It wasn’t much of a conflict for our voters, who gave Trout a Nixon-McGovern-style landslide. Note also the strong showing by Oakland A’s third baseman Josh Donaldson, a strong threat on both offense and defense this year who was neglected by the establishment for both the All-Star Game bench and the Gold Glove awards.

The voting for NL Best Player presented no problems for our panel; they came close to unanimity when it came to making the final choice. A year ago, Andrew McCutchen parlayed a torrid midseason stretch into MVP consideration, but the Pirates’ second-half fade, a slide mirrored in McCutchen’s production, knocked him down to third place. This year the Pirates hung on and made the postseason for the first time since the Bonds-Bonilla-Drabek days and the center fielder was a big reason why, hitting .339/.441/.561 in the second half. Clayton Kershaw, whose extraordinary 1.83 ERA (his third straight ERA title) figures to snatch some first-place votes from the position players in the BBWAA balloting, barely registers here. Note the fifth-place showing for Joey Votto, whose high-OBP/low-RBI season was much derided in Cincinnati this summer. We’ll see if the professional pundits are as perceptive.

Max Scherzer takes our balloting going away, as he probably will the BBWAA voting. There were odd moments this season when an argument could have been constructed in favor of others, Yu Darvish, Chris Sale, Anibal Sanchez among them. In the end, even value metrics like WAR are no help to those that would prefer to construct a most-valuable pitcher narrative around something other than Scherzer’s league-leading 21 wins, are no help since the league leaders finished in an indistinguishable heap. In the final analysis, Scherzer was at least as good as any other pitcher on the circuit, and in this case the high win total isn’t a Bob Welch-LaMarr Hoyt-style red herring but a clue pointing to Scherzer’s mastery.

Legend has it that one elector in the 1820 presidential election purposely voted against James Monroe so that George Washington would remain the only president unanimously selected by the electoral college. We can only assume that the one voter who cast his ballot for Matt Harvey had the same sort of thing in mind where Clayton Kershaw was concerned.

At midseason there was some question as to whether the American League would produce a rookie worth voting for at the end of the year. Because of a combination of service-time manipulation and his own development at Triple-A, Wil Myers had only been up briefly. By the end of the year, the field was still weak, but the leader had clearly established himself.

The final controversial award on our ballot, Jose Fernandez of the Marlins seemed to have a lock on the award until Yasiel Puig came along in June and lit a fire under a Dodgers team that ultimately won its division. Perhaps if Puig had maintained his batting average in the .380s we might have had more of an argument, but a soft, injury-slowed September took some of the glow off of Puig’s debut, while Fernandez headed into the clubhouse with one of the best seasons by a rookie pitcher in the history of the game.

Ask anyone around the league what has caught their eye in the first week of the season, and it's a safe bet the first words out of their mouth will be "Anthony Davis," followed by long sighs. The long-winged bird of prey has arrived, and we’re not talking about Pierre the Pelican.

Barely a half-dozen games into his second season, Davis is putting on a nightly show for the rebranded New Orleans Pelicans. It’s not just the gaudy stats, although 23 points, 11.5 rebounds and 4.3 blocks tend to get your attention. Rather, it’s the way he plays: dominating stretches of the game with his soft touch, nimble athleticism and dontbringthatweakstuffinhere presence at the rim.

On Friday night against the Lakers, Davis reached back over his body to block a disbelieving Pau Gasol and then sprinted down the court and got fouled at the other basket. The whole play took a couple of seconds, but contained all of the jaw-dropping athleticism and court sense that makes fans giddy and opponents shake their heads.

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In another sequence, Davis caught the ball above the free throw line, took one step to the dotted half circle and dunked from there. He eviscerated Gasol all night, swallowing up his shots and repeatedly beating him and the rest of the Lakers down the floor for dunks, en route to a career-high 32 points.

It's not like this is any great surprise. Davis entered the NBA fresh off a devastating season at Kentucky, where he controlled the college game from the opening tip. It was always going to happen. It was just a question of when.

As a rookie, Davis averaged a respectable 13.2 points and 8.5 rebounds while shooting over 50 percent from the field. It was a solid, if relatively unspectacular debut. He finished second in the Rookie of the Year voting to unanimous winner Damian Lillard despite posting a better PER, but no one really argued the decision too strenuously.

Perhaps that was because Davis' defensive impact didn't live up to his advanced billing. He blocked his share of shots, but New Orleans was a poor defensive team with him on the court. They weren't much better without him, which was an indictment of the whole roster.

Things are starting to change. With Jrue Holiday at the point, the Pelicans have someone to defend the ball, and with the addition of Tyreke Evans and a healthy Eric Gordon, they are more balanced offensively.

Early season small sample sizes abound, but New Orleans is ranked a respectable 11th in defensive rating and an equally-encouraging 11th on the offensive side, per Basketball Reference. Save for a dreadful 20-point loss to the Magic in their second game, they've also been competitive every night out and earned an impressive win in Memphis on Wednesday.

The Pelicans still have a long way to go. The depth is better, but still worrisome. Evans has been slow to adjust to his new role off the bench and Ryan Anderson's shooting and floor spacing are sorely missed. But, they are getting there, and thanks to Davis' emergence, they may be ahead of schedule.

Here are a few other pleasant developments from the first full week of the season:

PAUL GEORGE RISES AND THE PACERS TAKE CARE OF BUSINESS

When we last left the Pacers, they were on the wrong end of a rather incredible seven-game conference finals loss to the Miami Heat. It was incredible because no one really expected Indiana could keep up with Miami in a playoff series. Certainly few expected that George would be able to match LeBron James point-for-point and shot-for-shot like he did at times.

It was a massive leap forward for both the team and the player, and George was rewarded with a maximum contract extension in the offseason. Still, the prevailing wisdom was the Pacers would take a backseat to the Bulls once Derrick Rose returned to the court. They were good, obviously, but unless George took a massive leap into the superstar strata, they had probably reached their limit.

We might want to reconsider. George may not average 25-8-4 and shoot 40 percent from behind the arc for the entire season, but no one should be eager to put a cap on his potential after what he's shown in his first few seasons. The multi-talented hybrid forward has improved every year he's been in the league. The only stop left is legit star status.

The Pacers have followed his lead, winning their first six games while dispatching both the Pistons on the road and the Bulls at home. Both George and the Pacers have taken the essential lessons from their postseason baptism and applied them to the regular season. They have cracked the code on winning games. Double digit deficits in the second quarter disappear by the end of the third, and they are mastering the art of putting games away in crunch time.

The Pacers are also not in a mood to give ground back to Chicago. As George told NBA.com's Steve Aschburner:

"We want to step away from that shadow as the 'little brothers' of this division. Their success is the Michael Jordan era. This is a new age, this is a new team. It's ours till they take it."

GOLDEN STATE'S D

From Stephen Curry's otherworldly shooting to the untapped potential of Klay Thompson and Harrison Barnes, there is much to like about the Warriors this season. They play fast, bomb 3s and have a strong inside-out game with Curry and a slimmed-down David Lee. On pure aesthetic grounds, it's hard to top the Dubs for nightly entertainment.

That's all well and good. The Warriors have always been compulsively watchable, even as a guilty pleasure. What's different this season is their defensive chops.

It's really not that complicated, either. Andre Iguodala is one of the game's top perimeter defenders. Andrew Bogut is one of the league's premier rim protectors. Take those two talents and surround them with willing defenders and a sound scheme and the Warriors -- yes the Warriors -- have emerged as one of the top defensive squads in the league.

With so much depending on Bogut's health, it's futile to project where they might end up, but even without Curry on Friday, they battled the Spurs to the wire in a 76-74 defeat. It was a frustrating loss, made more so by some end-of-game miscues, but it was also encouraging. No way the Warriors hang in a game like that in the past. For now at least, the defense makes them a legit threat.

WELCOME BACK, KEVIN LOVE

The early season is full of obscure trivia, but none had as much resonance as the mark Kevin Love set when he averaged better than 26 points and 15 rebounds in his first five games. The only other player to do that in the last 15 years? Kevin Garnett, of course.

Long after his departure, KG still casts a very long shadow over the Timberwolves organization. Every mark, every number and every milestone has his name attached to it. Love and the Wolves thought they were ready to break out and write their own history last season, but injuries wrecked those plans. This year may be the one they get it right.

Love had another monster game on Friday with 32 points and 15 rebounds in a win over the Mavericks. He also had eight assists, which gives him 30 after six games. The numbers become a blur after a while, but no other power forward brings the array of skills that Love brings to the equation.

And now, a word about the Knicks.

One of the things that was so remarkable about last year's 54-win season was the relative absence of drama. Sure, J.R. Smith did weird things at times, but he saved his most aberrant behavior for the postseason. Yes, there were injuries up and down the lineup, but whenever a Rasheed Wallace or Kurt Thomas went down, there was a Kenyon Martin waiting to gobble up minutes and boards.

Despite all that, the Knicks were an often joyous crew that delighted in launching 3s and propelling Carmelo Anthony to superstar status. Even dour coach Mike Woodson got a makeover as the stern, yet pliable strategist who didn't mind running out weird lineups and reveling in the nonconformity.

Or so it appeared. Once the postseason began, Woodson shied away from the small-ball strengths that defined his team and insisted on playing a more conventional style against the massive Indiana Pacers. It was the classic old-school move for a team that should have been firmly planted in the modern era.

Still, it would be wrong to blame everything on Woodson, especially since Smith's redemption story ended in a clang of missed jumpers and screaming headlines. It's also not as if the Knicks were a smoke and mirrors act. With Melo playing at his best and Tyson Chandler holding down the paint, they were a good, albeit flawed, team that went about as far as they could reasonably expect go.

Reason and expectations don't always line up in owner James Dolan's worldview, however. He reportedly told his coaching staff he wanted a championship and he wanted it now. Nevermind that his team lacked depth or that the big offseason move was to bring in a 7-footer who doesn't rebound or play defense. This is Dolan's Knicks we're talking about.

It's unfortunate that Chandler broke his leg barely a week into the season, because there are few players who are more proud or more committed to their jobs than the 2012 Defensive Player of the Year. It was also unfortunate because the big man was mostly responsible for a defense that was just mediocre enough to keep them in games until the shots started falling.

With Chandler out of the lineup for 4-6 weeks, Woodson has turned to Andrea Bargnani to play, as he termed it, "serious minutes" at center. This has disaster written all over it. It's not as if the Knicks have the assets to go out and make a trade for a defensive big man either. The roster is top heavy and decidedly lacking in tradeable players outside of Iman Shumpert. They owe first-round picks in 2014 and 2016 and don't even have any second rounders to sweeten the pot.

Woodson and the Knicks have defied the doomsayers for a while now, and on his first night as a starter, Bargnani scored 25 points and even blocked five shots against the Bobcats. It took him 25 shots to get there, but hey, baby steps. This came on the heels of a closed door meeting convened by Melo after a home loss to the same Charlotte club, so credit them for making a statement.

The next month may define how this Knicks' season turns out. If it goes poorly, dysfunction and disarray may come with it.

MONDAY Grizzlies at Pacers

Grit and grind versus bump and bang. Let’s count the intriguing matchups: We have the reigning Defensive Player of the Year in Marc Gasol against Roy Hibbert, the presumptive challenger. There’s Zach Randolph and David West in a manly contest of players no one messes with, and if we’re lucky, maybe Tony Allen will check Paul George. First one to 72 points wins.

TUESDAY Wizards at Mavericks

It’s a light night for the Association, but we’re intrigued by what we’ve seen from the Mavs so far, particularly Monta Ellis, who is averaging 24 points a game and shooting about 50 percent. The perpetually maligned guard has found new life in Big D playing on a team that doesn’t require him to be the best player, but doesn’t actually mind if he plays like he is the main guy. Good on ‘ya Monta. Keep doing what you do.

WEDNESDAY Bucks at Magic

We like to spread the love around here, so we’ll sample one of the most obscure games on the stocked Wednesday night buffet. Rookie guard Victor Oladipo is worthy enough of our attention, as is 30 and 20 man Nikola Vučević. With those two, plus second-year forwards Maurice Harkless and Andrew Nicholson, the Magic are creeping up the League Pass watchability rankings.

THURSDAY Thunder at Warriors

While his timing may not be all the way back, Russell Westbrook has not eased himself back into the Thunder lineup. He’s still the same old Russ, and that’s a good thing for an OKC team that was looking a little stale without him on the court. This is shaping up as an interesting little showdown between the upstart Dubs and the established Thunder, who are in danger of getting lapped in the hyper-competitive conference.

FRIDAY Timberwolves at Nuggets

Last year, the Nuggets did what many of us thought the Wolves would do. That is, rip off 57 wins and emerge from a pack of middle rans and become something of a serious threat in the West. The Nuggets faltered in large measure because of a season-ending injury to Danilo Gallinari, which just shows how precarious contenting status can be in this league. The Wolves never got started, of course, but the early returns are encouraging. If there’s a sleeper in the West, it might be in Minnesota.

SATURDAY Nets at Clippers

After Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce left the court for what would be the final time as Celtics, Doc Rivers lamented, "You just want it to always be perfect for them, and as a coach you want to protect that." Things have turned out pretty close to perfectly for all three men, but this reunion figures to be tinged with sadness and regret for what they left behind.

Everyone loves lists, especially completely arbitrary lists like this one: This week: Top five victims of circumstances.

Paul Millsap: Slot the rugged throwback forward on a half-dozen teams, and he’d be the ultimate glue guy, Robert Horry without the heroic game-winners. Millsap has been solidly consistent since his first days in the league, routinely averaging 15-18 points and 8-10 rebounds with the Jazz, which earned him the occasional blog accolades and not much else. It’s not just the public that overlooks Millsap. Somehow, the Hawks got him for a two-year, $19 million deal this summer.

Thaddeus Young: Millsap’s Northeast doppelganger. The most shocking thing about Young is that he’s only 25 years old. The second most notable thing is that he completely reinvented himself from a wannabe floor-spacer into a mid-range maestro who does his work inside the arc and in transition. Put him on a good team and he’d be a perennial Sixth Man of the Year candidate.

Courtney Lee: The sixth-year guard is already on his fourth NBA team, and considering the Celtic' longrange rebuilding program, it wouldn’t be a shock to see him make it to a fifth at some point in the next year or two. Call Lee what you like: a tweener, a combo guard, a 3 and D wing, but his skillset looks a lot better on good teams than on poor ones. He's off to a nice start this season, which may make him an attractive trade candidate.

Wesley Matthews: Twenty-three-year-old undrafted rookies are not supposed to make much of an impact, but Matthews took over a starting job midway through his first season with the Jazz and parlayed that into a nice contract with the Blazers where he’s been one of the league’s most dependable players for the notoriously star-crossed franchise. If the Blazers can get back to the postseason, Matthews will get his due.

Corey Brewer: Unlike the rest of the players on the list, Brewer actually started his career as something of a building block as the seventh pick in the draft by the Wolves way back in 2007. It didn’t go well. But, a funny thing happened to him on the way to obscurity: after bouncing around from Dallas to Denver, he finally was put in the right position to take advantage of his skills. Now back for a second tour with Minnesota, Brewer is a key contributor on a dangerous squad and a role model for anyone whose career got off to a slow start.

He was born on fourth-and-long. Mom drank when she was pregnant with him. Traded sex for drugs while he was in diapers. State authorities dragged him out of a crack house closet when he was 4 years old. Threw Mom in prison. Dad? Dead before the kid met him.

Start most kids off like that, they're looking at 15 to 20 by the time they're 18. Unless they learn to catch a football in traffic or cut down a running back behind the line. That's what Ra'Shede Hageman learned to do, which opened another path — one he followed to the University of Minnesota — where he's a 23-year-old senior defensive tackle on the watch lists for this year's Outland Trophy, Bronko Nagurski Trophy and the Chuck Bednarik Award. And that could lead to a first-round selection by the NFL. But his past could still outrun his future.

* * *

Saturday, Oct. 26, Ra'Shede trots down the darkened tunnel and onto the sun-drenched turf of TCF Bank Stadium, home of the Golden Gophers. He's huge. The program lists him at 6'6 and 311 pounds, but he's bigger in person. His bare calves ripple like the quadriceps of most men, his thighs scream power, and  his hands are thick as catcher's mitts. His shoulders and chest form a solid mass with only a slight paunch above his belt, the No. 99 stretched across his white jersey, front and back. He's topped by a large maroon helmet, his expression shielded by a tinted visor, scratched on the side.

This is the face of Minnesota football. His photo shines on the cover of the Gophers' 2013 media guide, a color shot with fists clenched in celebration, biceps flexed, his head tipped slightly back, but his expression invisible behind the dark visor of his helmet. He and the Gophers are up against long odds this afternoon: No. 21 Nebraska. Minnesota has not beaten Nebraska since 1960 ("A long time — you do the math," Ra'Shede says at the post-game press conference); in the last dozen meetings, the Cornhuskers have outscored the Gophers, 568-86. But the Gophers have won five of their seven games. Ra'Shede's having an excellent season, piling up tackles for a loss, sacks, hurries, pass deflections and blocked kicks. Against Northwestern, he even picked off a pass.

Ra'Shede and his teammates jog past the cheerleaders, the band, the television cameras. The fans, especially the students in the section surrounding the tunnel, greet them with enthusiasm. It's a perfect Minnesota autumn afternoon for collegiate football, crisp and sunny, a day ripe with possibilities.

* * *

they all say the same thing: great future, as long as he stays on track.

(USA Today Images)

Ra'Shede has all of the measurables. Benches 465 pounds, squats 500. OK, you might expect that for a guy as big and powerful as he is. Get this, though — the 6'6" 311-pound lineman also leaps 36 inches on his vertical, can windmill a dunk and clocks 1.57 seconds in the 10-yard dash. On Bruce Feldman's 2013 physical "Freaks List" for CBSSports, Hageman is No. 2 (behind only Jadeveon Clowney). After eight games, the Gopher often referred to as a "monster" and "beast" slid up on ESPN draft analyst Todd McShay's rankings from a projected third-round pick to the late first round. "He's got a tremendous future," Gophers' head coach Jerry Kill says. "He's a guy a lot of people will want to get their hands on, as long as he stays on track and does what he's asked to do here."

That's the refrain. Ask past coaches, current coaches, his parents, they all say the same thing: great future, as long as he stays on track.

He can't escape the caveat. Because what drives him could also destroy him.

Talk about two roads, that's the story of this kid's life. He's had false starts along both — fits and lurches down the one that ends for so many black American males born into impoverished, drug-addled families in early death or lifetime incarceration, and leaps and slips down the other toward athletic stardom, generous paydays and Sunday glory. Seems every step of the way he comes back to the fork, where he has to choose his path all over again.

That's where the anger is. All the hurt from having a crackhead for a mom, a dad who died when Ra'Shede was a toddler, of bouncing around foster homes, not having birthday parties like "normal" kids — all that is distilled into a fierce pilot light of anger in his belly. Only football licenses him to release his rage, a powerful force that he consummates in crunching hits. "When I'm on the football field, I always have that anger I had as a child," he says. "I don't want to talk to nobody. I'm ready to go all the way."

Off the field, his anger has cost him, flaring into altercations that could have sidetracked him, ending his career — or even his life — before it got started.

On a weekday morning, he shuffles slowly, as though nonchalant, through the wood-paneled halls of the Gophers' football complex. Clad in a maroon Golden Gophers hoodie and black sweats, he molds his bearded face into a blank expression. Some guys have emotion bubbling all over their features; Ra'Shede's doesn't give away anything, his expression hardly changing. He is playing the role of the elite athlete dutifully reporting to his next interview, but there's an ambiguity in his step, something markedly hesitant in the splayed gait of his Nike sneakers on the maroon carpet.

He's so big he was never small, not even when he was a child. Without his helmet, his head seems to have outgrown his ears, small stubs pushed to the sides. Ra'Shede's always been the tallest guy in the room and on the field. And he's acutely aware of his size, something he embraces, for better or worse. He picked the biggest number because it fits him. "I'm different, with my size, my background," he  explains. "I know wherever I go, I'm going to stick out. I'm not your typical human being because of where I've been."

* * *

The story started in Lansing, Mich., but his mom moved to Minnesota before he was old enough to form memories of the first place. When her addiction kept her from caring for Ra'Shede and his younger brother, Xavier, authorities placed the two boys into the state's foster care system. They bounced around to a dozen different homes. Ra'Shede finally thought he'd found his way out when they placed him in a "permanent" home, but then his new parents split up and he got dumped back into the system. "I missed that childhood I saw other kids having, birthdays, Christmas," he says. "I didn't have Christmas until I was adopted."

Enter Jill Coyle and Eric Hageman, two idealistic 20-somethings fresh out of the University of Minnesota law school, white newlyweds ready to start a family by adopting. They first saw Ra'Shede in a video where the 7-year-old said he wanted a family that would let him play football. Jill and Eric met him and Xavier, 5, soon afterward at Hennepin County's 1997 Christmas party for older foster children.

The social worker warned them: The boys had issues, learning disabilities. Ra'Shede's anger was labeled Oppositional Defiant Disorder and he had difficulty trusting others. But the boys needed a home, a family. Within two months, they had moved in with Jill and Eric. Their adoption was finalized by the end of 1998.

On the eve of the Nebraska game, the couple recounts Ra'Shede's childhood. Eric Hageman sits on the living room couch of their Minneapolis home. He's trim and bright-eyed in a light blue button-down Oxford. Jill sits on the other end of the couch, attractive with long brown hair and wearing fashionable leather boots. Their 6-year-old biological son lies on the couch between them, his head on Eric's thigh. A pair of dogs wrestle on the carpet nearby. Their other two biological children still at home (a boy, 11, and a girl, 8) busy themselves elsewhere in the red brick house across the street from Minnehaha Creek. Eric represents plaintiffs in personal injury cases. Jill is general counsel for a suburban school district. Their home has the feel of comfortable chaos.

"From the time we first adopted him, we envisioned he would be a Division I athlete."

Jill and Eric recognized the athlete in Ra'Shede immediately. For starters, he was tall and lanky, a head above his classmates. Faster and stronger, too. Able to perform backflips. Eric, who played cornerback for Dartmouth in the late ‘80s, saw something. "From the time we first adopted him, we envisioned he would be a Division I athlete," he says.

They signed him up for T-ball, football and basketball at the city park near their home. Other parents complained Ra'Shede was too big. Moms on the sideline grumbled they wanted to see his birth certificate. Jill and Eric placed him on teams with kids a year older. Ra'Shede still stood out as the biggest and best.

He dropped baseball after fourth grade, but in eighth grade had earned a spot on the high school's freshman basketball team and quarterbacked his youth football team — not that it was his natural position, it wasn't — but because he was the best athlete on the team, 6 feet and still growing. The high school football coaches scouted him - and discovered he was every bit as good as they heard he was.

It didn't take long for opponents to discover — and target — his Achilles' heel, the temper always throwing up that fork in the path before him. They hit Ra'Shede after the whistle, and threw dirty blocks. "He would always take the bait," says Eric.

School was no better. The suspensions started in second grade. Sitting in class didn't suit a kid like Ra'Shede with ADD, a modest IQ and all that anger simmering inside. He gravitated toward the troublemakers at the lily-white Catholic school. "Even before we came along, Ra'Shede struggled with making decisions," Jill says.

A predictable debate ensued, Jill taking the position that they should pull Ra'Shede from sports so he would concentrate on his schoolwork and improve his behavior; Eric countering that they couldn't take away the very thing that motivated him. The solution remained elusive.

By middle school, his issues became more complicated. He started to agonize over his skin. For many adopted kids, when they hit their mid-teens, the adoption story swings from, "You're special; we chose you," to "Your mom gave you away; she didn't want you," which translates to "I'm undesirable or undeserving or unlovable," and self-esteem spirals south. For black kids with white parents, it's even more complicated. His parents couldn't love away the difference in the color of his skin.

Jill and Eric transferred Ra'Shede to a public school with a more diverse student body so he could be around more kids that looked like him. His brother Xavier seemed to adjust smoothly, not as big and more content in the classroom. But for Ra'Shede, it seemed every time he looked at his mom or dad, their white faces reminded him he didn't fit in their family.

What does it mean to be a young black man? That wasn't a question he consciously articulated, but one that did haunt him. Eric couldn't show him, of course. Ra'Shede's own black father was gone. And black men like Michael Jordan and Will Smith — celebrity role models to his peers — didn't serve him. They hadn't come from where he did. "I was never like them (Jordan and Smith)," Ra'Shede says. "I was different, on my own path."

At Washburn High School, which straddled the city's economic divide, he felt the tug of the street, a world he glimpsed in the hip-hop lyrics and the sagging pants of classmates, but a world distant from the red brick colonial where he lived with his parents, who by now had children of their own that didn't look like Ra'Shede. He began hanging out and copped a street attitude. He mouthed off to teachers, skipped school, failed classes, played the tough guy, intimidating others with his size, sometimes taking them on. Girls were drawn to his swagger and he burnished that rep in the weight room, trying to impress them with how much he could bench in competition with his friends. Ra'Shede always won. In ninth grade he maxed out at 315 lbs. "I wanted to get their attention," Ra'Shede says. "I wanted people to think I was tough, basically because of being adopted."

Still, he couldn't find his place. He didn't blend with the street kids. Not in his Abercrombie shirts and new shoes. Not with 20 bucks in his pocket when they didn't have lunch money. He couldn't reconcile his upper-middle class status with theirs.

He also didn't fit with the other kids from affluent backgrounds — his skin was too black. And he didn't feel real kinship with his teammates — what did they know about having an addict mom and another who was an attorney? About a phantom dad and another, doting one? About so many foster homes you forgot your way to your bedroom and then living in a house your buddies envied?

So Ra'Shede turned on his parents. He blamed them for his situation. Resented them because other kids sometimes teased him about their white asses. He refused to be seen with them. At school conferences, he made his parents walk down the hall by themselves. In restaurants, he hung back until they sat down. Jill and Eric tried to accommodate their son, waiting for him after basketball games in the parking lot. They weathered his angry outbursts at home. But one public explosion terrified his mother.

Ra'Shede's sophomore year, Jill was driving him and a couple of teammates to football practice with his then 2-year-old sister and 2-week-old baby brother along for the ride. A car blew a stop sign and sideswiped their minivan. No one was hurt, but Ra'Shede was enraged. He burst from the van shouting at the man driving the other car, "You almost killed my baby brother." He terrified the man, who saw only an angry 6'6 black giant raging at him. Ra'Shede did not strike the stranger, but Jill worried about how his anger could menace others, and how their reaction could get him killed. This kid —their kid — was dangerous.

"We'd seen those outbursts at home when he challenged our authority," Eric says. "But seeing it out in the real world was scary. That's been there for him his whole life, trying to address the beast within."

The only place where the beast seemed at home was the football field, where he had license to lash out. Ra'Shede liked defense best, where he could crush opponents, but his coaches used him mostly on offense as a tight end, where he could use his strength and power both blocking and running after catching the ball. They recognized his unique talent, but through his freshmen and sophomore years, he only played sports for the hell of it, because it was fun. He did not know how good he might be.

Trouble brought him to Giovan Jenkins. They knew one another from the football team, where Jenkins was an assistant coach, but Hageman's academic and extracurricular screw-ups landed him in Jenkins' office in his other role as the disciplinarian, dean of ninth- and 10th-grade students. Jenkins had street cred, an African-American Washburn graduate who understood the challenges of being young and black. You're the one who's going to get busted because you're the biggest one around, the first one they'll notice, Jenkins told Ra'Shede. Stay away from trouble.

Jenkins believed in Ra'Shede. "I never really thought he would end up in a gang because of the support he had at home," Jenkins says. "He was raised right."

Ra'Shede respected Jenkins, but it wasn't as if he could just turn off the trouble, either. His anger could explode in an instant. Still, the more often he landed in Jenkins' office, the more he started to believe him. "He told me I wasn't like the other knuckleheads, that I had opportunities," Ra'Shede says. "‘Don't let your friends or other people decide who you are going to be,' he told me. Don't let them control my destiny. He made me realize I could do something with my life if I was able to overcome the obstacles."

* * *

Nebraska scores on its first two drives, but then the Minnesota defense buckles down. Midway through the second quarter, the Gophers trailing 10-7, Ra'Shede slides past a block and drops the quarterback. But there's a flag. The official saw his hand grip the QB's facemask. Instead of facing third-and-long, the Cornhuskers now have a first down 15 yards upfield. Anger replaces elation, but now it's channeled, focused, distilled and determined. Settling into his three-point stance, Ra'Shede knows he owes his team something to redeem himself. On the next play, he charges off the snap, bursts through the line and drops the quarterback before he can set up. The image on the stadium's big screen shows him flexing, his wrists at his waist.

Later in the quarter, with less than a minute remaining, Minnesota has gone up 17-10. Ra'Shede bulls past his blocker, wraps up the QB as he hurries an option pitch, and the ball sails past the running back out of bounds. Ra'Shede spreads his hands wide. He's made another big play. But there's another flag. Once again, the officials have caught him with his hands on the QB's facemask. The personal foul breathes new life into the Huskers' late drive, giving them the chance to tie the score or even take the lead going into halftime. That could hang on Ra'Shede.

But once again, he manages to turn his anger into his advantage. Thirty seconds later, Nebraska runs a screen pass. Ra'Shede doubles back and, with his quickness, catches the receiver from behind on the Minnesota 25, preventing what looked like it would be a big gain, maybe even six points. The play sets up third-and-11, and the best the Huskers can manage is a field goal. At halftime Minnesota still leads, 17-13.

* * *

Soon coaches from premier programs started calling, showing up at school, writing love letters.

The opportunities Jenkins saw in Ra'Shede became concrete when the University of Minnesota football coach Tim Brewster invited him to a prospects camp the summer after his sophomore year. Most of the other kids were a year older, but afterward Brewster, recognizing his potential, offered Ra'Shede a scholarship. That's when it hit Ra'Shede how good he was.

Soon coaches from premier programs — LSU, Florida, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Nebraska — started calling, showing up at school, writing love letters promising him he'd catch 50 passes for them his freshman year. Yet none of that seemed possible. Ra'Shede knew he wasn't college material. He didn't have the grades. His test scores fell short. He had no ambition to study. The sweet talk of scholarships seemed more like a taunt, tantalizing him with something ultimately unattainable — offers more to be resented than pursued. He didn't want to reach out to accept their offer only to have it yanked away. He already knew how that felt.

So did someone else, his half-brother, Lazal Thompson, five years older. They had been separated when the state took custody of Ra'Shede and Xavier, but Lazal had found his younger brothers through the adoption agency shortly after Ra'Shede started high school. Lazal had not been placed with a stable family like Ra'Shede and Xavier. He had stayed in the system and taken the other path. By the time they reunited, Lazal, barely 20, already had fathered a couple of children and been in and out of jail for selling drugs.

He recognized Ra'Shede's confusion and attraction to the street, but also the opportunities he still had. Lazal drove his younger brother around the grimier areas of Minneapolis to erase the allure, pointing out the decay and desperation of thug life. "This is what you don't want to be around," Lazal told him. "You don't want to be a felon or fighting for no reason, joining a gang that doesn't care about you or locked up for domestic abuse."

What Lazal would have given to be able to go to school and play football like Ra'Shede. "But it's hard if you don't have the structure," he says. "You can't go to school when your clothes are dirty. You can't study at home when there's chaos. His parents gave him stability." He told Ra'Shede that. And, "Thank Jill and Eric for giving you the chance."

Gradually, his words sank in. Ra'Shede started to understand the perils of the street; the road to college became more appealing.

* * *

Jill and Eric knew football provided a backdoor route to a college education, something he would not pursue otherwise, given his academic stumbles and intellectual hurdles. But when they started researching the NCAA eligibility requirements, they realized that road included a steep climb. They hired a pair of tutors to work with him. They registered him for online classes to replace failing grades from his first two years of high school.

Ra'Shede accepted the challenge. He worked diligently with the tutors. He stayed after school to get help from teachers. He did the online coursework. He took the ACT test, over and over and over, banking each section he passed to boost his overall score. He sweated and agonized over his studies, gradually edging toward meeting the NCAA's eligibility requirements. Yet his fear of falling short and being humiliated by the public failure — the local papers and online ranking sites charted his prospects — offset his excitement about the possibility.

Football came so much easier. He started working out with a strength and conditioning coach, and he continued to tear it up on the field. Senior year, he caught 11 touchdown passes, earned All-State honors and was named the nation's No. 1 tight end prospect. But his anger sabotaged the season's grand finale, when his team played for the city championship.

The week before the big game, he exploded in the school cafeteria. Another student got in his face. Ra'Shede gave it back. The shouting escalated to shoving. And could have gotten worse — Ra'Shede far outsized the other kid — if Jenkins hadn't stepped between them ... Hey, hey, stop! Ra'Shede backed down and let Jenkins lead him out of the lunchroom.

Once he calmed, the remorse came. Ra'Shede wrote an apology to the other student. "He always wants to do the right thing, he just doesn't always do the right thing," Jill says. "He digs himself a hole, but crawls out of it."

His outburst resulted in a suspension from football; he couldn't play in the city championship game. The incident reminded everyone just how close to destruction his anger could take him.

* * *

Third quarter, Ra'Shede lets up after the quarterback releases a pass — and the Nebraska lineman Jeremiah Sirles, 6'6 and 310 pounds himself, decks Ra'Shede with a late hit, the very thing that can set him off.

He's used to opponents talking smack in the trenches. They know he has white parents and call him "Uncle Tom." They tell him he's garbage. That he's soft. In high school, he couldn't let it go. He yapped back. Got lured off his game. "Sometimes it goes deep," he says. "Like, ‘You're not going anywhere.' I want to yell and scream at them, but I have found other ways to be disruptive."

But he's not used to being dumped on his ass after the play. Sirles stands over him. A reflexive wave of tension rushes through those watching.

Then Sirles reaches out his hand. Ra'Shede takes it and lets Sirles hoist him up. Ra'Shede pats his shoulder pad and returns to the line. Another dangerous moment diffused. Another right turn.

* * *

Despite his suspension from the city championship game, Ra'Shede did play that January 2009 Under Armour All-American game in Orlando, Fla., and the colleges were still interested. Yet with national signing day approaching, he couldn't see himself in Gainesville or Columbus. He didn't feel right representing a tradition like Nebraska's, one he knew nothing about. He had offers from a dozen schools, but in the end, it came down to just one, Minnesota, because it allowed him to stay close to his parents, and Jenkins and Lazal and others who knew his story and stood by him. So on Feb. 4, 2009, he walked into the Washburn gym, past the media and cameras, donned a maroon cap with a gold "M" on it, and signed a letter declaring his intent to play at the University of Minnesota.

Inking his name did not decide Ra'Shede's fate. It only magnified his angst. After 18 months of tutors, online courses and retaking the ACT, he had moved much closer, but still fell just short of meeting the NCAA's eligibility requirements. He had to take the ACT test one more time in April before he managed to raise his score in the reading section high enough to clear the bar. Finally, he could exhale with relief and celebrate the fact he was headed to college. Now he just had to crack the Gophers' lineup. And stay on the path.

* * *

Coach Tim Brewster had recruited Hageman to play tight end, but one day during practice early on, while in line for reps with the receivers, Ra'Shede was distracted, watching the defensive line run its drill. The receivers coach had to shout at him when his turn came, but after practice, he told the D-line coach of Ra'Shede's interest, and Ra'Shede switched to defensive end. "Tight end was a high school thing, just beasting over kids and catching balls," he says. "On defense, you have to have that inner dog in you, which works for me with the aggression I have and the past that makes me a dominant lineman."

He thought he might see action the first game against Syracuse, but by the third quarter, he figured out that he was going to be redshirted for the 2009 season. There were too many other guys ahead of him at defensive end. He dressed for every game, but spent every minute on the sideline, just watching, another tease and frustration.

Tubby Smith, the Gophers' basketball coach, had scouted Ra'Shede at Washburn and attended the high school tournament game when Ra'Shede led his team to the state basketball championship. He invited Ra'Shede to walk on. He was tempted, but he couldn't. College already overwhelmed him. Practice, lifting, meetings, classes, study sessions. Living on his own. He couldn't do it. Couldn't squeeze basketball into his schedule; couldn't handle the distractions.

Oh, those distractions. The parties. The girls. He didn't think it was a problem until a girl told him she was pregnant and planned to have the baby. His one-night stand turned into another person. He was in shock. Scared. How would he tell his parents? How would he care for the child? "I'm too big to be working in a grocery store," he says. "I had to stay with football, keep working on that."

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Jill and Eric were concerned — here was another hole Ra'Shede had dug himself — but supportive, as always. They were ready with advice, acceptance and money, whatever he needed. The 2010 season, Ra'Shede's first, he played in eight games, made five tackles, but he landed in yet another ditch. He moved off campus and lived in a house with the other defensive linemen, a place nicknamed "The Zoo" for the parties they hosted. When the police crashed one, everybody ran. But not Ra'Shede, who was rarely one to back down from a confrontation. He was cited for hosting an "uncontrolled party" where minors consumed alcohol. He had to perform community service and endure the embarrassment of the incident going public.

Worse, The Zoo didn't exactly nurture academic rigor. He missed study sessions. Arrived late to class. Let his grades slide. Late that season, after Brewster had been fired, interim coach Jeff Horton told Ra'Shede to get serious about school and forget the last three weeks of the season. Technically, it wasn't a suspension, but the message was clear: His size, talent and potential couldn't save him if he didn't improve his grades.

New coach Jerry Kill underscored that point. It seemed half the team was academically ineligible and Kill intended to clean house. Three days after he arrived in December 2010, the new coach summoned the problem child, his parents and a couple of academic advisors to his office. Kill had done his homework, talking to Giovan Jenkins at Washburn, who convinced him to take a chance on Ra'Shede. One chance. Kill, about as subtle as a blacksmith, gave it to the kid straight. "You stole the university's money. That's going to change or you're gone. This is your last shot." He laid out the expectations: Ra'Shede would get to class on time, not miss study sessions, stay away from parties, move out of The Zoo and into student housing on campus.

Ra'Shede knew Coach Kill was serious. He had jettisoned other players, including Ra'Shede's friend, roommate and fellow defensive lineman, Jewhan Edwards. Edwards had led the Gophers in tackles for a loss and sacks, he had a year of eligibility remaining and NFL prospects, but he hadn't been willing to do things the new coach's way. And knew he was gone. One minute a DI football player with a future, the next, nothing but a washout with a past. If the new coach could dump the team leader in tackles, he wouldn't hesitate to boot Ra'Shede. That shook him.

"It was the first time I saw my life flash before me," he says. And he didn't like what he saw. By then, some of the kids he had run with in high school had landed behind bars or in graves, done in by drugs and violence. Without football, that could be his fate, too. "If I didn't get things right, I would become that statistic of somebody who went to college but didn't make it."

* * *

Five weeks after his meeting with Coach Kill, Ra'Shede became a father. His son Zion was born Feb. 4, 2011. Zion's mother let Ra'Shede visit only when she wasn't mad at him, which seemed to be very seldom. Still, he felt accountable to someone beyond himself. For the first time, perhaps, he started to understand a moment could have irreversible consequences.

In the spring semester, he got serious about school. He attended his tutoring sessions and made it to classes on time. He was never going to be a candidate for the dean's list, but he managed to keep his cumulative GPA above the required 2.0 mark.

In the fall of 2011, his sophomore year, he switched to defensive tackle, played in all 12 of the Gophers' games and made 13 tackles, flashing the promise inherent in his size. In the final game of the season, on a cold and rainy November day at TCF Bank Stadium, Ra'Shede sacked the Fighting Illini quarterback twice in the first half and forced a fumble that set up the Gophers' first touchdown in a 27-7 victory. "He hadn't had any sacks all season, but that game was a ‘Whoa, look at him' moment," Eric says.

The expectations mounted, but the path did not become any smoother. Coach Kill had to track Ra'Shede down when he did not show up for a mandatory study hall during finals week. Kill found him asleep in his dorm room and dragged him back to the football complex to go over flashcards with an assistant coach past midnight, until Ra'Shede knew the material well enough to pass his final. Not long afterward, he again found himself in the wrong place, though this time less innocently.

In the wee hours of May 10, 2012, Ra'Shede tried to break up a fight outside a campus bar, where some of his teammates tangled with a group of guys from the North Side that Ra'Shede had played hoops with. When the cops arrived, they confronted Ra'Shede, who stood in the thick of the melee. He snapped back. They locked him up. Within days, they dropped the charges of disorderly conduct, but not before the night hit Ra'Shede with another reminder of how close his anger put him to the edge. What if someone had pulled a knife? Or a gun? A bullet doesn't care how much you can bench.

* * *

Junior year, Ra'Shede showed Kill he hadn't squandered his faith. Number 99 earned a starting spot and came up with one big game after another. He recorded 35 tackles (20 solo) and six sacks. His breakout season earned him honorable mention All-Big Ten honors. Not bad for a kid recruited as a tight end who nearly was tossed out of the program. Amazing for a kid discovered in a crack house closet.

The expectations escalated after that. Ra'Shede's on everybody's watch list, pictured on the media guide, projected to go early in the draft, yet he is determined to rise to their level. This season he's watching more film on his own, analyzing his play and scouting opponents. He's resolved not to take any plays off, to come off the ball with more urgency. But he remains a work in progress. Despite his natural size, strength and power, he's still a newcomer to his position. "He's trying to understand when it's time to be a power player and when to use more finesse, coming off a block or on the pass rush," says Jeff Phelps, the Gophers' defensive line coach. "He's just beginning to learn those things and come into his own as a defensive lineman."

This year the big plays have been harder to come by because he's frequently double-teamed. That gets old, two 300-pound hogs in your face every play. He's had his share of personal fouls trying to compensate, like a play against Michigan when he meant to jam a guard in the throat, but his fist caught the guy's facemask and nearly snapped his head off.

Off the field, Ra'Shede speaks softly and can even appear docile. Teammates have called him a "gentle giant," and Phelps describes him as a "teddy bear." Bah, says his mother, who knows his temper as well as anyone. "He doesn't deal well with people getting in his face," Jill says. She remembers a time this past summer when they were in Manhattan and a homeless woman told them to get out of her way. The rest of his family moved aside. Not Ra'Shede. "He took her on," Jill says. "Why can't he just step around her like the rest of us? He's always got that trigger."

* * *

Normal evades him. He's a father but can't see his son as often as he'd like to.

Normal evades him. He's a father but can't see his son as often as he'd like to. Zion is 2 1/2 now. When his mom is communicating with Ra'Shede, he picks up Zion in St. Paul and brings him back to his dorm to watch television or play video games. "He's into ‘Caillou,'" Ra'Shede says. "And he's tall and lanky, like I was."

Ra'Shede is one class away from graduating with a youth studies major, which — given his background — could be his most amazing achievement, but an astronomy class stands between him and his degree. "Dumbest thing I ever did," he says. When he registered for the class, he thought it would be easy. It's not. "You've got to know math, physics, geology — and all those planets."

Hageman is trying to be a role model to other kids. He recently participated in a clinic at McRae Park, several blocks from the house where he grew up, where he played eighth-grade football himself, and next door to St. Joseph's Home for Children, one of the foster homes in which he lived. He laughed with the kids and encouraged them in a scrimmage. "He's a voice for a lot of African-American kids who are going through things he's gone through," his brother Lazal says.

* * *

Still third quarter, Minnesota has the ball on Nebraska's 1-yard line. Ra'Shede sits on the end of the heated team bench, his eyes on the big screen in the end zone. When Gopher quarterback Philip Nelson carries the ball across the goal line to put Minnesota up, 23-13, Ra'Shede pumps his right fist into the air. They could win this one.

Stranger things have happened in life. Ra'Shede knows that better than anyone does.

* * *

Eric pulls his cell phone from his pocket and plays a video of Ra'Shede's surprise interception against Northwestern. Ra'Shede had dropped back into coverage, a scheme the Gophers' defense uses sometimes to foil their opponents' plans to double-team him. Ra'Shede leaps, grabs the ball with one hand and runs 10 yards with it before he's bumped in the leg, stumbles and falls.

Ra'Shede watched the film with his teammates the next day. Phelps showed the play several times, so Ra'Shede could narrate his moves, point out how he switched the ball to his far hand to protect it. His linemates couldn't help teasing him about how easily he went down. Despite his boasting and their roasting, the clip highlights his extraordinary athleticism in leaping and snagging the ball.

That athleticism in a body his size has NFL written all over it. Ra'Shede hadn't dared think it possible earlier. He hadn't wanted to "overdream." Getting to college had been unlikely enough; staying there a major challenge. But now, deep into his final year at Minnesota, he risks having a dream. Weekend nights he stays away from the bars, sometimes walks by himself along the Mississippi River, which winds through the campus, his Beats by Dre pumping, and thinks. About where he's come from, where he's going, what's left to get there. He's come so far, gotten so close; he wants that next step.

Once the Gophers' season ends — he hopes with a bowl game of substance — he plans to go off to train. "I'm so hungry to go away and just starting training 100 percent for the Combine," he says. Someplace without any classes, without any study halls. Someplace where it's just him and his anger, channeled the right way, pushing his body to its limits. "That's like the ultimate vacation for me, to be by myself and train."

So much of what has defined him to this point are things he didn't have any control over. He had no choice about his birthparents, being taken from his mother, staying in foster homes, being placed in a white family. He had no say over his size or even what sport he pursued. That's why training for the Combine, the gateway to the NFL and final stop of his dream — he has no Plan B — holds such appeal. For that short time between the end of his college football career and his audition, he will be completely and wholly responsible for shaping his future, finally given the chance to direct his destiny.

* * *

Fourth quarter, the clock ticking down. The big screen scoreboard shows Minnesota leading improbably, 34-23. Nebraska has the ball. Ra'Shede had come out moments earlier when he got the wind knocked out of him. But now he's back in the game. Pressuring the quarterback — who puts up a pass that Minnesota picks off with only 16 seconds remaining.

In just seconds, the game will end, and the players will rush to the big M at the center of the field to rejoice in the school's first victory over Nebraska in 53 years. The student fans will spill over the walls and crowd around the players in a spontaneous celebration. But now, with 16 seconds remaining and victory certain, Ra'Shede skips off the field like a carefree kid.

And it looks like he's smiling.

Arron Afflalo hates to lose. The very thought consumes him. It bothers him at night and it frustrates him during the day. Winning to him is little more than a temporary solution. That doesn’t make Afflalo unique in the NBA. Nobody makes it to the league because they’re comfortable with losing.

Yet circumstances beyond their control can thrust players into difficult situations, like the one Afflalo is in with the Orlando Magic. For the first five years of his career, Afflalo was part of a steady winner in Denver. As part of the Dwight Howard trade, he has had to adjust to lowered expectations and the reality of a rebuilding process. He understands that, but does he accept it? No.

"I don’t think I will ever grow into accepting losing. It’s just not my makeup," Afflalo said after the Magic were crushed by the Celtics on Monday. "People can tell you to harness your frustration or it’s a process, and those things are very true, but day in and day out I’m just a person who doesn’t like to lose."

Scattered among teams like the Magic are veterans like Afflalo who are trying to make the best of their situations. He’s the player who sets an example, both on the court and off, for his younger teammates to emulate. It’s part of the game and a cruel one at that.

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Afflalo is in the prime of his career and playing excellent basketball. In the offseason he altered his diet and got in peak condition. Primed for a big season, he came into the weekend averaging better than 21 points a game while shooting over 50 percent from behind the arc. Known as a quintessential 3-and-D player, Afflalo has increased his rebounding percentage and playmaking numbers. Put him on a contender and he’d be a household name.

Just 28, Afflalo is not old in any conventional sense, not even by the standards of the NBA that fetishizes young players and potential more than experience and results. But on the Magic, he’s an elder statesman on a team where six of the Magic’s top nine rotation players are 24 years and younger.

"Sometimes that’s the reality of the situation," Afflalo said. "In my eyes, I expect to win no matter what team I’m on. I expect to be in the playoffs. I don’t care if I’m the first or eighth seed, I just expect to be there. Last year was a first for me and that was tough to handle. I don’t want to play basketball that way again."

It’s paramount for teams like the Magic to have veterans like Afflalo and Jameer Nelson around to show the young players what life is really like in the NBA. For years teams have tried to get away with simply letting the kids run wild and, unless there’s a Kevin Durant on hand, the results have generally been disastrous. The key is getting vets who 1) can still play and 2) handle their business like pros.

"We have a good mix where the young guys see veterans who have been there before and we have really good veterans who have a really good influence on our locker room," Magic coach Jacque Vaughn said. "Their approach to the game, how they carry themselves, has been great for our young guys to see. But our young guys have been able to play and it’s nothing like playing. You can’t duplicate that except by being on the floor."

No, you can’t. And that’s the trick. The veterans can help, but they can’t do so at the expense of the younger players who need time on the court to develop. While Afflalo, Nelson and Jason Maxiell all start, Vaughn has received solid contributions from second-year players Moe Harkless and Andrew Nicholson. Center Nikola Vucevic established himself last season as a double-double machine and rookie Victor Oladipo is getting quality minutes off the bench.

That’s the core of whatever the Magic will be in the future and, Monday night’s loss to the Celtics aside, they have been more competitive than last season thanks in large part to a defense that has tightened up considerably. That’s a huge part of the learning curve. While the focus is on the lottery for many fans and observers, there’s work to be done during the season and the draft is the furthest thing from veteran players’ minds.

Take Charlotte forward Al Jefferson, who has been part of multiple rebuilding projects throughout his career. Once he was part of the Celtics’ youth movement that bottomed out in 2006-07 with a 24-win team."I try to forget about it," Jefferson said when the Bobcats came through Boston. "It was a rebuilding year, that’s all I can say. It was a lot of long nights."

The specters of Durant and Greg Oden hung over the Celtics that season from start to finish. Everyone knew it, including the players who didn’t want to hear about losing games and ping pong balls.

"Professional guys don’t go out and play to lose," Jefferson said. "I know that for a fact. Everybody wants to win."

The Bobcats got Jefferson because he can score, but they also got him to help their young players improve. It’s not just about getting minutes and scoring points. Development has to take place at a team level, as well as a personal one.

"That’s one of the misnomers about player development," said Charlotte coach Steve Clifford. "People look at player development like a guy shoots better, or his ballhandling gets better. There are a lot of guys who have the talent to play in the league but they never grasp the team concept. Although their skills may get better, it doesn’t matter if they can’t function with the other four guys on the floor. To me it all goes together."

Jefferson helps make the Bobcats a functioning team and Clifford has been encouraged by what he has seen from the big man, who returned to the lineup after missing the first five games with a sprained ankle. It’s not just on the court, but behind the scenes as well. He likes how his team practices and prepares, which may not sound like much, but it’s actually an important first step in creating a culture.

"In this league, with your best players particularly, it’s a partnership," Clifford said. "These guys are pro players. They’re men, grown men. How well you practice, how hard you work is dictated much more by their outlook than how much impact a coach has on them. You have your role in setting a tone, but it’s the relationship you develop so they will embrace the work part of it. You’re relying on the better players in the locker room so they will set the tone."

Of course there’s nothing better than leading by example on the court and in games. In a win over the Celtics that put them at 4-4, Jefferson went for 22 and 11 and was the best player on the court.

"He's an elite low-post scorer," Clifford said. "He’s a much, much better defender than I had realized, but the thing that’s coming through now is his competitiveness. He badly wants to win."

Back in Orlando after the disappointing loss to the Celtics, Afflalo scored a career-high 36 points, making eight of 11 three-pointers on Wednesday in a win over the Bucks. Vaughn praised his player’s effort, calling it "courageous" after the Magic came out with low energy. It was a reminder to his young teammates about professionalism from a player who hates to lose.

Over the summer, Damian Lillard took a long look at his game. On the surface there was a lot to like about a season that saw him average 19 points and six assists en route to a unanimous Rookie of the Year selection. He was a precocious rookie who walked right into Portland’s starting lineup and took control with a veteran’s mastery of the pick and roll. But Lillard was looking deeper than raw numbers and highlights.

"I saw that I was pre-determining with a lot of things," Lillard said after a pregame workout in Boston. "I’m coming off to score this time, or I’m coming off to pass this time. I think now I’m better at coming off and making a read and feeling the game out. Last year I was like, man I got to make an impact. Just try to help win games. Now that I’ve got a year under my belt, now I understand what I need to do to make us a good team. I understand what I do to make myself effective. It all comes a lot easier this year."

Not all improvements are made in the gym. The step he felt like he had to make was more mental than physical. If last season was about working through situations, this year is about making things easier on himself and for his teammates.

"The game is a lot slower." Lillard said. "Last year was in a rush for me. I was using my speed and my quickness. Now it’s more change of pace. I don’t have to work as hard because now everything is slowing down and I see things faster than I would have last year."

It helps that Lillard has been with the Blazers’ core group of players for a full season. It also helps that GM Neil Olshey brought in reinforcements in the offseason to beef up a bench that was one of the worst in the league. Better depth means slightly fewer minutes, but it also means fewer difficult minutes.

"He’s a smart young man and a smart basketball player," Blazers coach Terry Stotts said. "Last year I think he did it out of sheer will and this year he’s taking more of a cerebral approach to it. He willed himself last year with the minutes he played and the level he played and the way he bounced back from a subpar game. He was criticized for his defense, which I think was not as deserving as it was built up. He gave good effort but he had to play a lot of minutes and he had to give a lot on the offensive end."

Not that there weren’t tangible things that Lillard sought to improve. He worked on his mid-range game and added a floater. He wanted to cut down on his turnovers, which he has done through the early part of the season, and also improve his efficiency. That last part is a work in progress, but while his field goal percentage is down, his three-point accuracy is up and he’s trying to take better shots within the flow of the system.

"Last year I was looking for my shot," he said. "Not in a selfish way, but I was trying to impact the game. Now I’m getting easier shots because I’m coming out and getting other guys going. My rhythm gets easier being more of a floor general to start the game and letting it come to me."

MONDAY Blazers at Nets

Is it too early to worry about the Nets? More specifically, at what point do we begin to worry seriously about Kevin Garnett? KG is barely shooting 30 percent and looking very much like a player who is on his last legs. Having lived through the last half-dozen KG years, there is never a good time to declare that Garnett has lost it. See: 2012, "I hear you all calling me old." Garnett will always get the benefit of the doubt from this corner, but concern? There’s always concern.

TUESDAY Hawks at Heat

The Eastern Conference is top heavy, weak at the bottom and larded with mediocrity in the middle. Somewhere in that mix are the Hawks, who boast an excellent player in Al Horford, a decent supporting cast and a top-10 offense and a better than average defense. There’s an opening here for Atlanta to emerge, but the Hawks are perpetually stuck in neutral.

WEDNESDAY Pacers at Knicks

It’s funny how things work out in this game. Chris Copeland was a cause celebre during last May’s playoff series, the fulcrum on whom all debates about Mike Woodson’s lineups revolved. Indiana gave him a nice chunk of change to be a floor-spacing big, but he has been buried behind Luis Scola in the rotation. At least there’s a reason he’s not playing.

THURSDAY Clippers at Thunder

Petition to have the Clippers play every Thursday night … oh wait, they already are.

FRIDAY Spurs at Grizzlies

Speaking of getting worried, the Grizzlies have been a shambles to start the season. Their offense is still stuck in a morass of poor shooting, spacing and lack of playmakers. But it’s their defense that’s been an even bigger problem, ranking in the lower fifth in points allowed and fouling way too much. There’s no room to take even a tiny step back in the West.

SATURDAY Blazers at Warriors

The Warriors are the best thing to happen to late night TV since Letterman started doing Stupid Human Tricks and becoming more than just a cult favorite. Should we take them seriously? Considering their lights out shooting, strong depth and top-five defense, a better question is, why aren’t you taking them seriously?

SUNDAY Suns at Magic

If you’re going to rebuild, play your young guys. If you’re going to play young guys, play fast on offense, sound on defense and let them learn from their mistakes. Basically, be more like the Suns and Magic.

Everyone loves lists, especially completely arbitrary lists like this one. This week: Top five tanking teams.

Note: This is not about lottery positioning. This has nothing to do with losing games. This is about making the most of what many expect will be a lost season.

1. Phoenix: In the offseason, new GM Ryan McDonough traded every veteran he could and loaded up on draft picks and rookie contracts. He turned the team over to Eric Bledsoe and the results have been eye-opening. Bledsoe is thriving in first-year coach Jeff Hornacek’s free-flowing system and Markieff Morris been a revelation. McDonough is building something in the desert, but not at the expense of the long-range goal.

2. Orlando: There will be some bad nights of course, but the Magic are going about this the right way with six of their top nine rotation players under 24 years old. If the defense holds, this is a team that will catch a few people by surprise and continue to develop. It’s not just about getting that transcendent talent, it’s also about putting the right players around them. The Magic are figuring out what they have.

3. Boston: The best thing about the Celtics is that first-year coach Brad Stevens has been as advertised. He’s calm, cool and collected on the sidelines and is generating positive reviews from his players for his practice methods and gameplans. The C’s lack the top end development talent that Phoenix and Orlando have, so getting Stevens up to speed is the top priority this season. The most encouraging sign? A top-10 defense, emblematic of a team that plays hard and together.

4. Philadelphia: We all have jokes about the Sixers’ early-season success, but let’s be clear about one thing: There is no upside to losing 70 games. None. It’s demoralizing, horrible and can set a franchise back years. The Sixers have to be encouraged by rookie Michael-Carter Williams and the play of Evan Turner, who is turning himself into a potential trade possibility. That’s the idea. Those potential lottery picks at the end of the year are the bonus.

5. Charlotte: Steve Clifford has done a fine job with this Bobcats crew that for years lacked organization, direction and a clear purpose. Already he is getting solid production from Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and has the Cats playing an entertaining style. Given time and talent, Clifford can turn this thing around, but the talent has a long way to go.

After eight frustrating years, four controversial fights, 42 contentiously scored rounds, with over 500 punches landed from more than 1,800 thrown, after two grueling hours of opportunity under the spotlight, on Dec. 8, 2012, Juan Manuel Marquez finally landed the punch of a lifetime against Manny Pacquiao. It happened with just one second left in the sixth round of their mythic saga. Pacquiao charged forward to land one final blow before the bell, and instead added his own momentum to Marquez's immaculately-timed, coup de grace right-hand, which landed flush against Pacquiao's jaw. On TV, when the punch landed, Pacquiao's back was to the camera. The reverberations of the impact were only detectable through the sudden jolt of Pacquiao's wet hair on the back of his head.

But isn't this a staple of wrestling, meant to fool? Since the punch itself had landed with such comic book emphasis, the traction of the unfolding human drama, along with reality, became unhinged and, for an instant, suspended. In confusion and disbelief, many people watching around me in a New York bar laughed in horror. As Charlie Chaplin famously pointed out, from a distance, a man slipping on a banana peel or stumbling down a manhole is funny. It's something altogether different up close. And since Pacquiao had fallen face-first and remained motionless, almost fastened to the canvas, there were no cues.

Marquez was the first person in the world to understand the night was over. No matter how much anyone had paid to watch in the sellout crowd at the MGM Grand or the millions around the world watching on pay-per-view, they had to wait. We'd seen the punch; he'd thrown it. As the referee rushed over to the fallen man, time stood still, postcard-like, while Marquez gazed down at Pacquiao like an anxious, nervous kid staring at Christmas presents under a tree.

One of the oldest sayings in boxing, the first warning every aspiring fighter hears long before they've ever entered a ring, is that the most dangerous punch, the one to fear most, is the one you never see coming. While the cliché is certainly true at the start of a career, it rarely holds up toward the end. This is because almost none of the great fighters in history ever stopped after that punch — and the history of the sport suggests that few can ever escape it. Pacquiao, despite earning a reported $174 million since 2009 from boxing and endorsements deals, is no different.

Why? Because, of course, boxing's not so well kept dirty secret is that, financially, most fighters can never stop. No matter how outlandish a fortune they've earned inside the ring and out, most greats not only never get ahead, few can even manage getting out from under. They never put much distance between themselves and where they came from. With few exceptions, they all end up desperately needing one more payday. And then another. And then another. Most are forced to hang around so long their endings are consummated by the uglier, more sinister punch that they all saw coming a mile away. Joe Louis, at 37 years old, was never blindsided by the physical punches that Rocky Marciano landed to knock him helplessly out of the ring and the sport. No, the punch he never saw coming and what set him up for Marciano's right hand was debt — in his case, to the government. Louis owed the IRS $500,000 and had nowhere else to go and get it but back into the ring.

Nearly all the greats were forced to stick around for those last final beatings, the ones that did lasting damage to their souls as much as their brains. If "protect yourself at all times" is boxing's most vital rule to obey, surely the most devastating blow in the sport is the one you do see coming, the one you're simply helpless to escape its impact.

Why is it so many of boxing's greatest heroes — Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson — were forced to stare down this last tragic fate and await their inevitable descent into boxing's latest cautionary tale? In the so-called "red light district of sports," the only jungle where, as Don King's biographer Jack Newfield once pointed out, "the lions are afraid of the rats," why can so few great fighters walk away undamaged with any money in their pocket? Will Pacquiao be any different? And why, despite the millions, should we expect him to be? Maybe in the sport of boxing, "cautionary tale" is too generous a title for a fallen champion: They end up just another punchline.

For a minute there, Dec. 8, 2012 might have become boxing's equivalent of Nov. 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was killed. One second Pacquiao, the 21st century's most beloved fighter, was ahead on the scorecards and charging. The next he disappeared under Marquez's fist just as the bell tolled to end round six. At first, arrestingly, it wasn't clear just how far down Pacquiao might fall. The referee certainly saw enough of the damage up close that he never bothered to count. Then, it began to register on those watching ringside that they may have witnessed what amounted to a public execution in the ring. Pacquiao remained motionless, possibly lifeless, until his cornermen rushed the ring in tears, followed by a doctor. Marquez jogged away from his fallen opponent, fist aloft, leaping atop the opposite turnbuckle as the Las Vegas crowd detonated into hysteria, flexing his biceps in vindication for three previously contentious battles. Whatever battles Pacquiao had won in their three previous contests, Marquez had now, with perhaps fatal finality, won the war.

Death isn't without precedent in the ring. It happened again only recently, when boxer Francisco Leal died of a brain injury at the end of October. A week later, on Nov. 2, at Madison Square Garden, Magomed Abdusalamov's was so badly damaged after 10 rounds he suffered a blood clot in his brain that forced doctors to put him into a medically induced coma. Abdusalamov suffered a stroke soon after and, with the help of a machine, still fights to survive today from his hospital room.

But no one with Pacquiao's visibility has died, let alone in a fight of the magnitude he fought against Marquez, one broadcast around the world. The first widely televised ring death dates back to 1962, with Emile Griffith battering the life out of Benny Paret until he collapsed into a coma and died 10 days later. An even larger audience watched Duk Koo Kim endure 14 rounds of punishment from Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, only to succumb to brain injuries four days later. With reporters in press row parsing "lifeless" from dead in most of their ledes, it seemed possible that Pacquiao's name would be the latest name added to boxing's most sinister list.

"Yeah, he laid there too long for me," Freddie Roach told me this summer, back at his Wild Card Gym in Los Angeles. "He laid there too long for me not to move. I says to myself, ‘Is he fucking dead?'"

And Roach certainly wasn't alone in his reaction, based on the sound of Pacquiao's wife, Jinkee's, agonized screams from the front row in Vegas.

"I mean," Roach sighed, "it was scary. But, you know, he got up. He was fine. He talked to me clearly. You know, he knew what happened. And you know, that's part of life."

My first phone call after the fourth Pacquiao/Marquez fight was to filmmaker Leon Gast. Gast had been an extremely generous mentor and friend to me while making my first documentary about super bantamweight champion and Cuban defector Guillermo Rigondeaux, who had fought on one of Pacquiao's undercards in 2010. It was the first time I'd ever witnessed an entourage anything like the one that Pacquiao had following him around. It was said Pacquiao had an entire country behind him, but the sheer size of his mob convinced me he also carried a good portion of the entire Filipino population in tow (and on the payroll). Even then, Gast had pointed out that the entourage posed a far graver threat to Pacquiao's livelihood than any opponent in the ring. The Academy Award winning director of "When We Were Kings," a film on Muhammad Ali, a movie that culminated in the "The Rumble in the Jungle" in Zaire, perhaps Ali's career-defining victory. Gast had been working for years on a Pacquiao documentary, similar in scope.  Of course, Gast's documentary and most others omit the aftermath, Ali cruelly silenced and imprisoned in his body by Parkinson's disease. The film offered a coda where people discussed the consequences of Ali's career on his health, but it didn't let you see it.

Gast, like the rest of the boxing public, had made no secret of the desire to see Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. square off in a fight destined to serve as Pacquiao's defining moment. A week later, I interviewed Leon at his home in Woodstock, N.Y., where he's currently at work cutting the Pacquiao documentary. I asked Leon if the fight that now likely won't happen, the fight that disappeared when Marquez sent Pacquiao to the canvas, Pacquiao vs. Mayweather, could have been our generation's version of Ali and Foreman in Zaire.

"Bigger," Leon corrected, shaking his head. "There's no question in my mind it would have been the biggest, most important fight since Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fought in Madison Square Garden. I was there at that fight back in 1971. I know how big it was. The Fight of the Century doesn't begin to describe what the energy was like to actually be there that night. Forget the money people throw around, Pacquiao and Mayweather had that kind of potential for something important.

"But now we're crying over spilled milk. Floyd doesn't need it anymore and besides, I'm convinced [promoter] Bob Arum was never going to allow that fight to happen had Pacquiao survived Marquez or not. But Pacquiao sure might still need it."

That’s exactly how these guys get fucked up. God help us, here we go again.”

"So now you have to end the film with that fourth Marquez fight?" I asked. "Is that the ending for the film? Isn't that too much of downer?"

"Déja vu all over again," Leon laughed. "It's boxing. Muhammad Ali fought 14 times after Zaire. Fourteen times. And you know, that's exactly how these guys get fucked up. God help us, here we go again."

"Is the parallel that obvious?" I asked. "You see what's happening to Pacquiao as the same that happened to Muhammad Ali at the end?"

"Same old story. All of 'em on down. All the greatest — Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Ali, Tyson. All their careers ended with them either broke, busted up, or both. Ali had nothing left after Berbick and Holmes. Why did he take those fights in the first place? Nothing left. It's criminal he was allowed to take those fights in the first place. A medical board gave him a license in the state he was in? Forget about it. Totally criminal. And you know something, he got lucky after they were over. That licensing deal he was offered that he got millions off of? Ali was lucky. Without that deal, Ali was bust. As a country, our track record with these guys isn't pretty. Look at the rest of 'em in boxing. Where do they all end up? I just hope that after Marquez, Pacquiao doesn't get seriously hurt in his next fight. Or the one after that. I mean, he's one more knockout loss away from just becoming another name, just another stepping stone for whoever is on the way up. And for all this guy has done in the sport? I mean, how ugly is that?"

"Can he ever stop?" I asked.

"Never," Gast laughed. "Never, never, never."

"Can he come back from that knockout against Marquez?"

"Who knows? You saw what happened to Pacquiao after Marquez laid him out. Freddie Roach thought he was dead. He wasn't dead, but they'll still bleed him dry. To come back from that kind of loss and fight against a young, tough kid like [Brandon] Rios? That's a very precarious move right there. Not for anybody making it happen, of course, but for Manny. But then he can never stop fighting. They never can. Too many bills and expenses. The lifestyle destroys them as much as any opponent. And everybody with their hand in Pacquiao's pocket knows he can't escape. You know, for them, the more in debt the better. He has to keep going."

"What are the expenses?" I asked.

"You name it," Leon laughed. "Where do we start?"

"From what I've heard? Taxes? Political campaigns? Women? Jinkee's political campaign? Gambling —"

"You left out the Church," Leon cut me off and moaned. "You have no idea what kind of tithe is going their way now that he's tried to clean up his act. Everybody's hand is out. Manny can't say no to anyone. The entourage. The charities. Lawsuits. Taxes. The fucking presidential run in the Philippines is coming up. Jesus. All those taxes on his real estate in Los Angeles and everything back in the Philippines. He has staff hired just to say no to people who come at him with open hands. Why do you think he has to keep borrowing those advances from Bob Arum? Even with all those massive pay-per-view paydays and he's borrowing money? Boxing is just such a ... it's a wretched sport."

And that was before Typhoon Haiyan. How many hands will be out now, and how can he refuse? Pacquiao has released a "statement to the people," saying he will "send help to those who need it most," and his adviser Michael Koncz told the Associated Press, "Absolutely, he is dedicating this fight to the victims of this."

Maybe if Pacquiao either dies or suffers permanent damage in the ring, fighting for his people, perhaps he'll end up even more bankable. Before all this is done, martyrdom might be the most convenient justification for the sum of far too many foul parts that surround Pacquiao's lasting legacy.

Pacquiao was born the fourth of six siblings on Dec. 17, 1978 in the town of Kibawae, in the Bukidnon province of the Philippines. Pacquiao ran away from home as a child, leaving the day he discovered life had gotten so desperate that his father had actually eaten the family dog. He lived off the streets, often slept in a cardboard box, and sold doughnuts for a nickel to survive. As a 14-year-old, Pacquiao moved to Manila and continued his fight out of poverty by turning to boxing. He had a solid amateur career, winning 60 of 64 fights. After the death of a close friend and fellow boxer, Pacquiao, at 16, still under 5 feet tall and several pounds under even the lightest weight permitted to compete as a professional, turned pro anyway. To make his 105-pound debut, Pacquiao later confessed to hiding weights in his pockets when he stepped on the scales. Nearly 10 years later, Pacquiao finally arrived in America. On Nov. 15, 2003, he knocked out future hall of famer Marco Antonio Barrera in the 11th round to begin one of the most mythic decades in the history of boxing.

In his next 20 fights, Pacquiao accumulated 10 world titles and became the first man ever to do so in an unprecedented eight weight divisions, from light-flyweight to junior-middleweight. He knocked out Mexican legend Erik Morales twice, avenged a draw against Marquez with two subsequent victories, retired Oscar De La Hoya on his stool, pulverized Ricky Hatton in two rounds, moved up in weight even further to batter Miguel Cotto into submission, sent Antonio Margarito to the hospital with a fractured orbital bone, then dispatched Shane Mosley and Marquez once more. The remarkable run finally ended with a highly controversial loss against Timothy Bradley in the summer of 2012.

Despite earning nearly $200 million during his brilliant career, Pacquiao always hemorrhaged money. Gary Andrew Poole's 2010 biography, "Pacman," laid out how Pacquiao's contracts were split: After his manager's took their 20-percent cut, his trainer Freddie Roach took 10 percent, strength and conditioning coach Alex Ariza shaved off a few more points. There were also training camp expenses, tax bills in the U.S. and the Philippines, and his boundless, ever-growing entourage, all guzzling funds. According to a 2009 New York Times article by Greg Bishop, "Team Pacquiao has perfected the art of dysfunction. The entourage consists of trainers, assistants to the trainers, advisers, assistants to the advisers, cooks, dishwashers, car washers, publicists, gofers and security." For each fight, Pacquiao also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars flying his entourage to Las Vegas, buying hundreds of tickets, covering hotel rooms, and providing spending money. In the Times article, Michael Koncz, singled out Pacquiao's Achilles' heel: "The downfall of Pacquiao, if there is one, will be his kindness and generosity. At some point, I fear that's going to catch up to him." Beyond Pacquiao's generosity, he reportedly squandered millions from gambling. That doesn't even account for his fleet of cars and extensive property holdings, including houses, condos, apartments and such an intense desire to give his money away to the poor he had to hire people simply charged with the responsibility to apologize and prevent him from throwing money at all the open hands spread out before him.

I flew out to Houston to interview George Foreman, one of boxing's rare success stories. What was Big George's secret? After the success of his signature grill (the Times reported in 1999 that the George Foreman Grill had already earned him in excess of $150 million) and a second reign as heavyweight champion, Foreman is reportedly now worth nearly a quarter billion dollars. Yet, before we could start the interview, with a note of gentle caution, George's son, George V, asked me to avoid any slippery questions with dates and names. "His head's fine," George V smiled reassuringly, "Pop's just getting a little older is all."

Then George V's father strolled majestically into his living room in a gray suit wearing Crocs. His infomercial smile beamed hospitality until it broke into sudden concern, "Please folks, I jus' ask you, don't make me go back too far in my memory. I don't like to be reminded some of my best fights was 40 years ago."

"Why are you one of the few happy endings in this game?" I asked him.

"Boxing is the number one sport in every man's mind," George smiled. "Being champion of the world meant a lot to me. For a short period. You're up. You're famous. You're rich. Then you lose," Foreman laughed. "You lose a boxing match and you crawl into a hole and there's hardly anything that can get you out of that hole. Then you're on the verge of ‘I don't care anything about life.' I know what success is and failure is and success was short lived. Some of us had all kinds of riches, but that didn't mean we found any kind of happiness.  There's a loneliness to being the heavyweight champion."

"I know you came from a rough background," I began.

"What fighter didn't?" George snickered, glancing at his knuckles.

George was right. It was a poor man's game. Boxing has no middle class. You're either a millionaire or you need a second job. Whatever amount a fighter signs to fight for, no contract in sports bleeds more money in all directions faster than boxing. Don King used to ask many of his fighters to sign blank contracts. And they signed their lives away. Those same fighters would happily accept King's offer of $10,000 in cash up front against a million dollars next week. Most boxers have to keep going until the bones have been picked dry. Then, when they have nothing left, no place to go, they simply go back to where they came, with nothing.

It's not an accident Donald Trump names everything after himself. It betrays a central fact about the fundamental emptiness of the legacy that Trump will leave behind. Who else would ever name anything after him? Imagine how you'd feel about a society that did. What exactly has Trump achieved or owned that stands a chance of inspiring future generations to attach his name to anything? This is because outside of Trump's net financial worth, his ultimate value inspires nothing.

It's no different for fighters. The value of a boxer's legacy simply isn't determined by what he has; the greats are remembered for what they give of themselves.

This is the central difference between Pacquiao and Mayweather. No matter how much Mayweather out-earns Pacquiao financially, he can never buy his way out of the fact no great champion in history has been more willing to stink out a fight. Mayweather's legacy will be that he was one of the most exciting fighters in the history of boxing until he stepped into the ring. And none of Pacquiao's well-documented personal failings can erase how much of his life he risked and ultimately left behind inside the ropes. The easiest way to score a fight, as HBO announcer Max Kellerman once pointed out, is just to ask, "Who would I rather be?"

Pacquiao and Mayweather should have fought a trilogy by now, their battles as famous as those between Frazier and Ali or Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler. For the general sports fan, no fight boxing has offered since Tyson left the sport has escaped the shadow of Pacquiao and Mayweather facing each other. For the boxing public, in many ways their respective careers seem like opposite sides of Tyson's. Pacquiao's ruthless style reminds us more than anyone else of Tyson pre-prison, and Mayweather's promotional genius owes a great debt to Tyson post-prison.

Could it still happen? Could the two still fight? And, more importantly, should it still happen? Mayweather's ultimate victory over his nemesis is that for the time being, he no longer needs the fight. Mayweather seems to be coasting his way toward career earnings of half a billion dollars before his contract with Showtime is up, but he should keep in mind how quickly Tyson blew through even more money than Mayweather has earned. Pacquiao, on the other hand, has a lot more uncertainty with his future and innumerably more bills to cover in his present.

Pacquiao's upcoming fight on Nov. 24, just before his 35th birthday, against Brandon Rios, only 27, offers some interesting parallels to the champions of the past. Joe Louis was 37 when he fought Rocky Marciano. Muhammad Ali was a couple years younger when he went up against George Foreman, and a year older when he fought Leon Spinks. Mike Tyson was a year older against Lennox Lewis. Roy Jones Jr. was the same age as Pacquiao when his career took a new, sad course after Antonio Tarver pulverized him in the second round of their rematch. "You got any excuses for tonight, Roy?" Tarver famously answered the referee's query about any questions before the fight. Six minutes later a groggy Roy had a doctor's flashlight in his eyes seeing whether he needed to go the hospital.

Yet for all the parallels between Pacquiao and the ghosts of legendary past boxing champions in the ring, the similarities may be infinitely more corrosive outside the ring. Louis, still mired in debt over back taxes, spent the end of his life in a cowboy hat, coked out of his head, working as a greeter in front of Caesar's Palace. Sonny Liston died nearby, alone, a week's worth of newspapers and sour milk piled up outside the door. Ali's career has left the "Louisville Lip" barely able to mumble out a discernable word. In Philly, Joe Frazier spent his last days sleeping out of the office of his gym. Leon Spinks cleaned toilets at the YMCA after his fighting days were over. Iran Barkley was discovered homeless, sleeping the nights away on a New York subway train. While an aging, rumored to be broke, Roy Jones Jr. flew to distant corners of the globe to get knocked out for whatever money his name could offer, Arturo Gatti was found dead hanging from his wife's purse strap. Tyson, finally having salvaged some vestige of financial solvency and domestic happiness for the first time since declaring bankruptcy after blowing well over $300 million in his fighting career, recently confessed to relapsing. Evander Holyfield, house in foreclosure, a veritable village of children from multiple mothers to support, fights on into his 50s. Most recently, Tommy Morrison died at 44, succumbing to AIDS, the disease he perversely dedicated his last years to insisting he did not have.

Ten minutes after I first met Freddie Roach in Hollywood in March of 2010, he matter-of-factly mentioned that Pacquiao was broke. Every boxing writer learns quickly that Roach loves to toss out juicy quotes, usually followed by a giggle and a, "Hey, but don't be an asshole and report that." I wasn't even there covering or asking about Pacquiao. But this quote? This was Pacquiao when all Floyd Mayweather could do to explain his dominance was hurl steroid accusations. I thought, even hoped, I'd misheard him. Given the toll boxing took on Roach's own health (he had lived with Parkinson's syndrome for many years at that point), it's not always easy to hear his thin voice over the racket in the gym. I thought maybe he'd referenced a prior injury Pacquiao had had — his hand or a rib was "broke" — but by Roach's sad expression, I knew I'd heard him correctly. Arguably the greatest fighter of the era, still at the top of his game, was already broke.

Arguably the greatest fighter of the era, still at the top of his game, was already broke.

Virgil Hill, former WBA light heavyweight and cruiserweight champion, walked into the gym. Nearly 50 years old, he still looked good. Then Roach said Virgil was training for a comeback himself. "Is he broke too?" I asked. Why else would he still be trying to fight? Roach shrugged his shoulders.

We stared at each other for a second until Roach was interrupted and asked for an autograph and a picture with a family from one of a constant stream of fans inundating his gym. Pacquiao's fame at this time, and by extension Roach's, was so enormous that Roach himself had a reality television show with HBO in the works. Crowds waited for hours in the parking lots satisfied with just a glimpse of Pacquiao exiting his sleek black Mercedes. Entire security details were engaged to navigate his arrival before adoring fans at Wild Card for sparring sessions. It was rare not to see celebrities or television crews at his gym hanging around for a piece of the action.

Virtually every profile and story written about Pacquiao celebrated how he was different, what he had, and what he could still accomplish. He could be more than a champion. He already was. He was an icon to an entire country, an actor, a basketball player, a singer, a politician voted to public office in a landslide. Becoming president of the Philippines wasn't out of the question. Yet few of them mentioned the cost, or what he didn't have, or what he was losing. Those stories weren't what people wanted to associate with a rags-to-riches feel-good story like Pacquiao's.

In recent years, Roach's fighters had run up a staggering number of victories and Roach himself had become, as the PR for his memoir announced, "the most famous white man in the Philippines." World champions were lining up to train with him, sing his praises, and get on the gravy train. And while Roach loved the action and attention, everyone appreciated that he was always generous with his good fortune in an unusually humble way. My hunch about that feature of Roach's kindness was that it betrayed an unusual trait, about him, mostly absent in the profession of boxing: Roach was the first to tell anyone that he wasn't sure how long any of this was going to last. But it sure was fun in the meantime. Even then, I wondered how the scene would change after Pacquiao hung around the fair too long.

"He's really broke?" I asked again.

When Roach noticed a few people had heard what he'd said to me, he spoke softer. "Sure. Those checks get split an awful lot of ways and he's living as if he gets to keep every cent before taxes and the split."

I tried to crunch the numbers on Pacquiao's reported earnings compared to what money he would have actually seen. In the two years prior, Pacquiao had laid waste to De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton, and Miguel Cotto. All were eight-figure paydays that promised even bigger paydays the next time he fought. Nobody had seen anything like this in boxing since the zenith of Tyson's reign of terror.

Not long after, according to figures Pacquiao filed as a member of the Philippine House of Representatives, he was worth 1.35 billion Filipino pesos — about $31 million. That's less than 20 percent of what he had earned by 2009. Where'd that go? Since then, riding the wave as the world's most exciting and beloved fighter since Muhammad Ali, according to Forbes, he has earned at least another $50 million.

At what cost? How much remains? Fast forward to Pacquiao's life today. Back-to-back losses. Another training camp to prepare for another younger, dangerous opponent with an even more menacing, largely unspoken possibility hovering around him each and every day: This might be it. Even if he isn't shot, most likely his best days are surely behind him, his earning power virtually guaranteed to drop dramatically. And how much is left anyway — any of it? Or is he just a Ponzi scheme? As staggering a résumé as Pacquiao has put together — surely enough to measure as favorably as Mayweather's in many people's eyes — he's paid a far graver price for it, and there may be still more debt to accrue.

“Is this a lonely sport?” I asked Freddie Roach a few months ago.

"Yep," he glared.

"Is that a part of every fighter that they're alone?"

"Pretty much. Yeah. You know, you have the support around you as long as you're winning, but when you stop winning? They fucking go away. The thing is, my mother was very honest with me. What goes up must come down. That was reality. That struck me. That was reality."

"If something goes really wrong with Brandon Rios, are you willing to tell Pacquiao you want him to retire?"

Roach put his head down and looked around his gym at the photos of fighters on the wall, at the mirrors on the other side of the ring, the bags hanging near his front desk.

"You're only going to retire from the sport when you're ready," Roach shrugged, raising a cup of coffee to his lips with a trembling hand. After Roach's own boxing career had ended without earning more than $7,500 for a fight, he found work as a busboy and a telemarketer before reentering boxing as a trainer.

"You're not going to retire when someone tells you," he said. "Because Eddie Futch told me I needed to quit. I says, ‘Well, what's the old man telling me that for? He needs to quit.' I got angry. And, you know, I went against my mentor, my idol, the greatest guy probably ever I met in my life. But the thing was I was frustrated. I put everything into the sport that I have. I don't know how to do anything else. Boxing, I put my whole life into it, and I got nothing out of it. And here I am, 27 years old, him telling me to retire. I'm crying in his office thinking, ‘What the fuck am I going to do with my life?' I fought five more times. On my own. I lost four of the five — so he was right," Roach smiled.

"Did you see this day coming," I asked Roach. "When a fighter like Pacquiao walks into your gym that first day and asks you to train him. Do you ever think about how they'll end up?"

"I was on such a roll there for a while as a trainer," he said.  "I hadn't had a loss in, like, I had like 26 wins and one loss.

I thought for a moment. "And now your three big-name fighters, Amir Khan, Julio Caesar Chavez Jr., and Pacquiao all had major losses. Khan and Chavez Jr. left you after their losses. What happens after Pacquiao?"

"I've asked eight to 10 people to retire, in the middle of their careers," he said. "Or not in the middle, but somewhere along the way. I don't want anyone to end up like me, with a disease that I have to deal with every day of my life. Only one fighter I asked said ‘Yes.' Everyone else told me to either ‘Go fuck myself,' or ‘I'll get another trainer and go on.' I says, ‘That's what you'll have to do.' If I don't think you should fight anymore, I won't train them."

"It's hard to imagine this boxing gym without Pacquiao being a part of it," I said.

"Right now they say, I read in Ring Magazine, ‘Who's In' and ‘Who's Off.' I'm out right now," said Roach. "You lose a couple title shots and, you know, your big guys are getting a little older and maybe a bit further in their careers, maybe on the downside of their careers and now, you're trying to rebuild guys coming up, of course. But, I'm still doing the best I can. Right now, they think I'm out, but I'm doing my best to make my fighters the best they can be. That's the way it goes, you know? That's part of life."

"Time is a vandal," Jimmy Cannon once wrote. Joe Louis was Cannon's hero and he watched Rocky Marciano beat his hero into retirement. Louis was Ali's hero and, in 1980, Ali's hero was pushed in his wheelchair to Caesar's Palace to watch Ali's former sparring partner, Larry Holmes, brutalize him until Ali's trainer, Angelo Dundee, mercifully stopped the fight. Eight years later, in 1988, when Tyson fought an aging Holmes, Tyson's childhood hero, Ali, was there to whisper in Tyson's ear, "Get him for me." And Tyson did, knocking him out in four rounds. Seventeen years later, on June 11, 2005, at age 39, Tyson, two years after filing for bankruptcy, was fighting the unknown journeyman Kevin McBride. He quit on his stool in the seventh round and retired from the sport.

So it goes.

And on Nov. 23, when he fights Rios, Pacquiao has his own date with destiny as our era's most legendary, fading former-champion.

"You know you're finished," Cannon wrote of Louis. "You knew it first. You understand what happened to you better than anyone. You're the guy taking the punches. You share everything in the fight racket but the punches. You have no partners in pain."

After Nike signed Pacquiao to an endorsement deal, in a puzzling marketing decision, Pacquiao frequently wore a T-shirt in training camp that stated: "Manny Knows." It was never made clear what this knowledge was referring to. The meaning, like so much of boxing, was just left hanging there. At this point, I'm not even sure Pacquiao's millions of fans around the world want to know the answer to the most pressing question concerning Pacquiao's career and livelihood. The question itself is pretty obvious and it's the same one all the great fighters eventually have to answer both inside and outside the ring.

How much does he have left?

Paul George started laughing before the question was even finished. Like an onrushing double team, he knew exactly what was coming and just as importantly, how to deal with it when it arrived. The question was about becoming a superstar, a label we’re quick to throw around even if we can’t really define what it means.

It’s a question George has heard many times in the last few months. It began late in the 2012-13 season among the basketball heads who had fallen in love with his silky game and the nerds who crunched the numbers. It helped that he looked the part. George plays an aesthetically pleasing game that is at once blindingly athletic and cooly smooth. He glides where others pound, unspooling threes from the top of the arc and throwing down dunks that are more aerial ballet than unrelenting slam dances. Yet outside of the afficionados, George was still something of a cult figure even after making his first All-Star team.

All that changed in the postseason when the Pacers reached the conference finals. The first round was an afterthought and the second round belonged to Roy Hibbert, but it was in that series against Miami and LeBron James that George solidified himself in the public’s mind as an elite player. He made huge plays and at times matched James shot for shot, an effort that was punctuated by a 28-point performance in Game 6 that helped the Pacers stave off elimination.

As the hype machine kicked in, the numbers still showed reason for caution. Despite shooting a decent percentage from behind the arc, George wasn’t an efficient enough scorer yet. He didn’t get to the line enough. He committed too many turnovers thanks to a handle that had improved from shaky to suspect but still wasn’t good enough to allow him to create his own shot at will. A star? Sure. A superstar? Chill.

Best of Sunday Shootaround

'Tank' is a four-letter word
Anthony Davis is already here
Bill Russell gets his statue in Boston
Stats, storytelling and Sloan
New Orleans dreams big
The rise of Paul George
Hawks try to attract free agents
The stories of 2012-13

Then this season began. By any measure -- be it analytical, observational or in the cold calculus of wins and losses -- George’s play has reached that magical superstar level. He’s averaging better than 24 points a game and almost seven rebounds while playing lockdown perimeter defense on a team tied for the best record in the league.

He’s also taken on a larger role in the Pacer offense, becoming the undisputed go-to guy on a team known for its collective approach. His usage rate has jumped and his PER has spiked from 16.8 to 24.5, while his free throw attempts have doubled and his turnovers have gone down.

So, does he hear the talk and does he buy into it?

"Not really. At the end of the day I let my play do all the talking," George said after the Pacers conducted a shootaround in Boston on Friday. "I don’t really have to worry about much. My team is 10-1 right now. I’m trying to play at the highest level I can. Everything else will take care of itself."

Savvy words from a 23-year-old, but George wasn’t so passive this offseason about his place in the game. Over the summer, he worked with trainer Jerry Powell on his ballhandling and for the first time he enlisted the aid of a shooting coach.

In a nondescript gym of a community college in Los Angeles, George toiled under Mike Penberthy’s watchful eye, getting up 500 shots a day at game speed. Penberthy went to work on his mechanics, insisting that every shot -- no matter where it comes from on the floor -- be taken with the same stroke.

George’s goal was to improve his mid-range game, which would allow him to become the kind of player his team could rely on in the closing minutes of games. He’s added a nasty pull-up jumper that is unblockable and has become his go-to move off isolations on the wing. That was the missing piece.

"Last year I was just unsure of that role as opposed to this year where I feel like, ‘That is my role," George said. "I think it was just maturity. Going through having to learn how to deal with pressure situations, now I’m expecting pressure situations. Learning how to perform when your teams needs you the most. That’s what I gained the most out of the playoffs."

Via NBA.com’s shot charts, George is shooting better than 50 percent from the area defined as the mid range, a skill that has become almost quaint in today’s NBA. But George heeded the lessons from former assistant coach Brian Shaw, who shared his wisdom from working with Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles. To be a go-to guy, a player has to have options. He has to use the whole court, and he has to be able to get a shot when his team needs one. This was a new and entirely different mindset for George.

"Last year he came into the season thinking that he was going to be opposite Danny Granger and potentially still a fifth option on offense," Pacers coach Frank Vogel said. "He was hoping to expand that role but not really understanding that he could be the first option. He grew into that last year toward the end of the year. Then you go into the summer and he went into his summer workout program with that in mind. ‘I’m going to be the number one option and I’m going to take another giant step with my improvement and development,’ and I think that’s shown."

On Wednesday night against the Knicks, George rescued his team with a 35-point performance. Twenty one of those points coming in the fourth quarter and overtime. After the game George told reporters that he might have deferred in that situation last season, but no more. Where once the big moments came at him quickly, now those situations happen in slow motion. "I completely believe in my abilities at that point," George told me.

"He wants the big moment," Vogel said. "He wants the ball in his hands. Last year when he was becoming our leading scorer and our first option, he wasn’t necessarily the guy we were going to late in games. He went into the offseason with that mindset that he’s going to have the ball in crunch time and he’s got to be able to create his own shot and make plays for us."

It’s been quite a remarkable ride for George in his short career. He went from unknown high school player to unheralded college player at Fresno State where he made himself into a draft prospect. Through his first 3+ seasons in the NBA, George has made slow and steady progress with a dash of spectacular thrown in, tantalizing with his talent and potential. Greatness wasn’t really thrust upon him. Rather, he grabbed it when it became available and then tried to make it his own.

Consider that at this point last season he was trying to find his way in the wake of Granger’s knee injury. He became a focal point by default as much as anything, and it was a struggle at first. But by midseason he had grown into an All-Star. By the playoffs he was becoming a genuine phenom. The only thing left was for him to take was that proverbial next step.

"It’s awesome," Vogel said. "You can’t say enough good things about who he is as a person. There’s a lot of talented guys in this league that don’t have the hunger, the drive and the determination that Paul George has, and the coachability. He’s just a refreshing guy to be around. He wants to learn. He wants to listen, everything you say to him. He’s a sponge. He absorbs it and he uses it."

That’s perhaps the most impressive thing about George. He’s on the rocket ride to stardom -- no matter how you choose to define it -- but still seems grounded. He’s also learned to adjust to new expectations and new pressures. Just like his team.

"We don’t feel like we’re the underdog," George said. "We feel like we have a target on our back. A lot of teams are coming after us. It’s fun. You’ve been the underdog for so long and you prepared being the underdog for so long, you’re ready for all opponents. That’s really how we carry ourselves now. We expect to get the best out of teams and we perform."

Sounds a lot like their best player, as well.

Over a half-dozen years studying Kevin Garnett, what always stood out more than anything was his consistency. No matter how much his minutes fluctuated or his position changed, Garnett’s per-minute numbers rarely deviated. His shooting percentages remained consistent, and his plus/minus was always in the black. This is, after all, a man who follows the same elaborate pregame routine right down to tapping his toes in rhythm during the anthem the same way every night. The only thing he hates more than a mouthy rookie is change.

Yet, there was one metric that seemed to be a bellwether of sorts for how Garnett was feeling: his defensive rebounding percentage. When he made his comeback from knee surgery in 2009-10, those numbers began to drop and he had his worst season in Boston. When he returned to form the following season, they went back up. Garnett looked like a shell of his former self following the 2012 lockout, yet his rebounding numbers picked back up once he got himself back into optimal shape.

Garnett came into the weekend grabbing almost 33 percent of the available defensive boards when he’s on the court for Brooklyn, which leads the league and would be an all-time high. Unfortunately, that’s the only good thing on a stat sheet that includes an unsightly 36 percent shooting percentage. KG’s frustrations bubbled over in an awful loss to the Wolves on Friday night when he picked up a technical and a flagrant after jostling with Kevin Love, turning a double-digit deficit into blowout territory.

Considering the sorry state of the Nets and KG’s own game, his rebounding is admittedly not much to hold on to, but it’s reason enough to believe that he will turn it around before too long. Additionally the Nets have played slightly better defense when he’s on the court and hold teams to 50 percent shooting at the rim, as opposed to almost 60 percent when he’s on the bench, per NBA.com.

Make no mistake: KG has been dreadful and so have the Nets. They don’t score well or defend worth a damn. It’s jarring to not only see him and Paul Pierce wearing black and white, but also to watch them play for a team that gets beat repeatedly on the defensive end. It hasn’t helped that Deron Williams, Brook Lopez and Andrei Kirilenko have missed time with injuries or that first-year coach Jason Kidd has looked lost and out of his element on the sidelines.

At age 37 and with over 53,000 minutes on his odometer counting the postseason, there is little reason other than boards and blind faith to believe that Garnett has more left in his body. But we’ve been down this road too many times and seen far too much to write off Garnett after a dozen games. Give up on KG? Not until the retirement ceremony, and even then we won’t be fully convinced.

MONDAY Timberwolves at Pacers

The Timberwolves have a sturdy defense and a young emerging superstar to anchor an excellent starting five. They also have a shaky bench and very little depth. Sounds a lot like last year’s Pacers. That bench is the only thing holding back our optimism for the Timberwolves who have cooled off after a strong start. All those minutes begin to take a toll after a while and one injury could really derail the whole process. It’s imperative that Rick Adelman gets something out of Derrick Williams this season.

TUESDAY Magic at Hawks

Jeff Teague has made a career out of slow and steady progress. He was OK as a rookie, competent as a second-year player and solid as a starter in his third before showing tantalizing glimpses of stardom in his fourth. Now in his fifth year and still just 25 years old, Teague is really coming into his own as a playmaker. The Hawks are better than you think and Teague is one of the biggest reasons.

WEDNESDAY Spurs at Thunder

This was the conference finals matchup that should have been until Russell Westbrook injured his knee and the Grizzlies grit and grinded their way into OKC’s rightful place. As loaded as the Western Conference is -- and it’s stacked -- we keep coming back to these two teams at the top of our rankings. Honorable mention to the Nets-Laker game for the over-35 championship.

THURSDAY DNP-Turkey

FRIDAY Warriors at Thunder

Let’s talk about Klay Thompson for a moment. He’s averaging over 20 points with a True Shooting Percentage over .650. That’s absurd. Even more absurd is that Thompson ranks second on the Warriors in TS percentage. Even more absurd is that Steph Curry is third. The leader? Andre Iguodala. There is no good way to defend this team when everyone is on the floor.

SATURDAY Nets at Grizzlies

A couple of weeks ago the Grizzlies looked like roadkill. The spacing was horrendous, the usually reliable defense was in shambles and first-year coach Dave Joerger looked like he was in over his head. All it took was a four-game sweep of a west coast swing and a coaching adjustment by Joerger to get everything back to normal. Take heart, Nets fans. It can happen to you too.

SUNDAY Pacers at Clippers

We end where we began with the Pacers beginning a five-game road trip through the West that includes games against the Clips, Blazers, Spurs and Thunder (with the Jazz thrown in for kicks.) This is where we start to get a better feel for Indiana and how it matches up with the best in the business.

Everyone loves lists, especially completely arbitrary lists like this one. This week: In the name of Paul George, here’s a list of breakout players who are entering the superstar realm.

Kevin Love: In this age of over analysis and periodic rankings we are required to expand things like the MVP race into ongoing discussions; as in, "Kevin Love is in the MVP discussion even though we all know he won’t win." Well, maybe we should take him even more seriously. Small samples and caveats aside, Love is second in the league in scoring and rebounding with about five assists a night thrown in for effect. He’s not the defensive force that LeBron James is, but Love is no pushover for a team that ranks in the top five in defensive rating. He won’t win, of course, but there’s a strong argument to be made that Love has been the NBA’s best player in November.

Steph Curry: Thanks to better depth and a couple of blowout wins, Curry is playing about six fewer minutes per game but his per-36 scoring numbers are basically identical. What has improved is his playmaking. His assist percentage is up to 44 percent and whether it’s Klay Thompson on the wing, David Lee in the post, or giving up ballhandling duties to Andre Iguodala, Curry is playing with and off his teammates even better than last season.

Blake Griffin: Are we past the backlash yet? Can we instead focus on this 22 and 12 player who still mixes in a half-dozen jaw-dropping gems each game? The jury will be out on Griffin until he A) Gets his free throw shooting up to a respectable rate and B) performs in the playoffs when open space and fast breaks are limited. That said, Griffin is shooting over 57 percent from the field and cleaning up more than a quarter of the defensive boards. If he can get that free throw percentage up to say, 70-75 percent, he’ll be unstoppable.

Anthony Davis: We waxed poetic on Davis in the Shootaround a few weeks back, but let’s repeat the raw data: 20 points, 11 boards, 3 blocks, a 29.7 PER and more assists than turnovers. When the rest of his game catches up with his immense physical skills, there won’t be enough money to max him out in perpetuity.

It was an unseasonably warm night in Nashville when Nick Newell stepped into the cage last December to fight for his first championship belt. At stake was the 155-pound lightweight strap in the Xtreme Fighting Championships. His opponent, Eric Reynolds, was a far more experienced veteran. The oddsmakers had Newell as a 2-1 underdog, but being underestimated was nothing new for him.

The two fighters started out with an exchange of thudding kicks to each other's legs, shins digging into the thigh with a dull thump. As they circled, Newell delivered a quick left-right punch combo. Reynolds fired back with strikes of his own, forcing Newell up against the chain-link fence. They separated, and Reynolds fired a hard kick to the ribs.

Newell caught the leg against his body and used it to clinch up with Reynolds. He circled behind him, then lifted Reynolds high and slammed him to the ground with a suplex, drawing a cheer. Newell secured a position on his back and hooked his legs around Reynolds' waist. As Reynolds tried to stand, Newell slipped his right arm underneath his chin for the choke and secured it with his left.

Reynolds immediately tried to execute the standard defense, reaching back to peel off Newell's left hand in order to loosen the choke. But there was no hand there to grab. For a moment, as he pawed at empty air, a flicker of fear crossed Reynolds' face.

Newell was born with a congenital amputation, a shortened left arm that ends just below the elbow. It was a distinction which many felt would prevent him from succeeding in the fight game. Others argued that letting him fight two-handed opponents was downright inhumane, a freak show that shouldn't be allowed. But Newell never listened.

As Reynolds' face turned beet red, he finally secured a grip on Newell's right arm. "This is where it's an advantage," said the announcer, Pat Miletich, a former pro fighter. "He can't get hand control on that shorter arm. He's pulling down on the gloved hand but that's already trapped!"

Reynolds collapsed to the ground, squirming to escape the choke. A moment later he tapped out, submitting to the referee. Newell was now 9-0, a champion at age 26, and the only professional mixed martial arts fighter competing with just one hand. He raced around the cage to thunderous applause, collapsing to his back, kicking his legs in the air, overcome with delight.

On Saturday, Dec. 7, Newell will look to extend his unbeaten streak when he fights Sabah Fadai at the World Series of Fighting 7, which will be seen by a national audience on NBC Sports.

* * *

For Newell, the hardest part of fighting has always been finding opponents. He grew up in Milford, a working-class beach town on the Connecticut coast. His mother, Stacey, worked as a nurse and raised Nick on her own. "I always told him he was no different, never let him avoid a challenge or hardship because of his arm," she said. "The more we treated him like everyone else, the more he believed in himself."

These days Newell stands an imposing 185 pounds of chiseled muscle. But when he joined the wrestling squad his freshman year of high school, he was the smallest member of the team. "I was tiny, like literally 90 pounds, so it was tough to find someone my size." In one of his first matches there was just one competitor in his weight class, a girl, so Newell had to wrestle against her, and lost in front of his entire team and home crowd. "A really proud start to my fighting career," he says with a laugh.

The anecdote is classic Newell, whose personality outside the cage is that of a class clown not afraid to take potshots at himself. It's an attitude he inherited from his grandparents, who helped raise him. They live just a block from the beach in Milford, and Hurricane Sandy left their house submerged in several feet of water. Unlike other properties in the neighborhood, they didn't respond to the disaster by paying tens of thousands of dollars to lift their home on stilts. "Looks pretty silly to me," says Nick's grandfather, George. "If another storm comes along, we'll deal with that too."

That first year as a wrestler, Newell notched two wins and 22 losses. But he never thought about quitting. Wrestling became Nick's primary outlet, a place for him to focus. "For Nick, his coaches became sort of his father figures," explains his mother, Stacey. "They were the ones who helped to shape him and channel his drive."  Despite his small stature and shortened arm, Newell improved quickly. His physical handicap forced him to focus on his technique. By his senior year of high school, he set a state record with 53 wins, going all-state.

Newell went on to college at Western New England, where he was captain of the wrestling team. There he befriended a young man named Brian Myers who shared his passion for the theatrics of Pro Wrestling. In fact, Myers, better known as Curt Hawkins, went on to a successful career in the WWE. As college roommates, the pair would obsess over wrestling on TV. Just after Monday night wrestling finished, a mixed martial arts reality show called The Ultimate Fighter would come on. "Seeing that, I knew it was something I had to try," says Newell.

The sport immediately captivated him, in part, because it allowed fighters to blend different disciplines, to create their own style that emphasized their physical strengths and diminished their weaknesses. As a wrestler, Newell had to overcome his disability and forge his own path. It was an education that tied Newell's journey to the roots of modern mixed martial arts.

* * *

In 1904, a Japanese fighter named Mitsuyo Maeda left Japan, taking with him the knowledge of traditional martial arts known as Judo and Jiu Jitsu. He travelled the globe giving demonstrations and taking on all comers, intent on proving his style of combat superior to all others. Legend has him undefeated in his travels, earning him the nickname "Count Combat."

Eventually Maeda settled in Brazil, where he began teaching techniques of classical Judo and Jiu Jitsu to the two sons of Gastao Gracie, a Brazilian businessman. One son was named Carlos, a strapping young lad. The other was Helio, a chronically ill and weak young man. In order to compensate for his frailty, Helio adapted the traditional moves to rely more on leverage and position, avoiding anything that pitted him in a contest of strength. It was this evolution of the art form that birthed Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, now a central pillar of mixed martial arts.

The Gracie family became the country's most famous and devoted practitioners of Jiu Jitsu, and eventually brought their art form to the United States, where in 1993, Helio's son Rorion helped launch the Ultimate Fighting Championships. In the first tournament, Helio's youngest son, Royce Gracie, represented the family, taking on and defeating three fighters in a row to win the event. He went on to win three of the first four UFC tournaments, battling opponents who sometimes outweighed him by more than 100 pounds.

During the early years of the UFC, most fighters specialized in one form of martial arts, like players picking a certain position on the field. As a kid Newell looked up to Jim Abbott, the major league baseball pitcher who had his own congenital amputation. "He was a big hero to me, because there were basically no other famous people, especially athletes, with one hand," says Newell.

Abbott was able to find success because baseball is such a hyperspecialized sport. He could pitch with his good hand, then switch the glove over to that hand before the ball was in play. Since he stuck with the American League and its designated hitter rules, he never had to bat.

Mixed martial arts is the exact opposite of baseball. Instead of highly specialized athletes focused on one aspect of the game, modern MMA fighters must learn to blend a wide variety of sometimes conflicting disciplines. But that diversity allows athletes with very different skill sets and physical attributes to succeed.

Newell eventually began training under Andrew Calandrelli, a student of Renzo Gracie, grandson of Carlos, forming a direct lineage between a Connecticut wrestler and the creators of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. In his academies, Renzo hangs a portrait of Helio, a reminder of the everlasting emphasis on technique over physique.

Seven of Newell's 10 wins are by submission, and like the championship bout with Eric Reynolds, his shortened arm has played a role. "Nick took the great base he had as a wrestler and layered on a really dangerous Jiu Jitsu game," says Callendri. "Because of his shortened arm, certain moves work differently for him. His heel hooks and certain chokes come on a lot faster and tighter, with a different kind of leverage."

In certain positions, when Newell is on top controlling an opponent, the lack of a forearm means his opponent can't attack with submissions of his own. No one who had trained or coached Newell would suggest it's an advantage in the cage.  "But it's something his opponents can't really prepare for," says Callendri.

* * *

Modern mixed martial arts has come a long way since the brutal days of the early UFC events, which had no weight classes or time limits. But Nick Newell's first fight, an amateur bout in his home state of Connecticut, was a far cry from the bright lights and strict rules of the Las Vegas Octagon. "My first match was in a bar. They literally just pushed the chairs and tables back to the walls, threw this tiny cage in the middle, and called it a ring." Fans crowded around close, spilling beer onto the mats. "People kept reaching through the fence trying to grab me," says Newell with a shake of his head. His first amateur bout ended in a loss. It was to be the only blemish on his MMA record.

Especially during this early part of his career, before he had a reputation and status in the fight game, finding willing opponents was tough. "People didn't see any benefit in fighting him. If they lost, it was worse because he had one hand. If they beat him, it made them look bad because he had one hand," says Jeremy Libiszewski, Nick's trainer at the Fighting Arts Academy in Springfield, Mass. "It took him twice as long to find decent opponents."

In 2010, Newell got a chance to audition for The Ultimate Fighter, the reality show competition that had inspired his early interest in MMA. TUF acts as a feeder for the UFC, and while numerous mixed martial arts leagues exist, the UFC is far and away the most popular, featuring the best talent and highest salaries. Contestants on the show compete to win a six-figure UFC contract, and several former winners have gone on to become UFC champions.

Hundreds of young hopefuls lined up for their shot during TUF's East Coast tryouts. Inside, anxious combatants hit pads and grappled in front of the UFC's top matchmakers and talent scouts. Before he even got a chance to warm up, Newell stood out. While the fights on the show are never staged, TUF is also a reality television program keen to find characters with compelling life stories. His shortened arm turned heads, and his quick submission of a well-known competitor during the grappling section ensured he made the short list of potential cast members.

The UFC flew Newell out to Las Vegas to meet with its matchmakers and producers. His good looks and natural charm helped him ace the screen test, and it seemed to Newell that he was being offered a chance to be part of the show. But a few weeks later, the UFC informed him that it had decided not to include him after all.

For Newell, it was a painful blow. Dana White, the UFC's talkative, often controversial president, made the logic behind the decision clear in a subsequent interview, when he told MMA Fighting, "It's hard to fight here with two arms. Will the state of Nevada let him fight? Will the state of California let him fight? Would some of these bigger athletic commissions let him fight? Maybe he can get away with that in some of these other states. I don't know, fighting with one arm is just craziness to me."

In Newell's mind, White has concerns about matters that aren't even in play. "I've already been licensed in Nevada, so that's not really an issue at all," Newell told reporters. "It kind of disappoints me that someone that's such a powerful figure in this sport feels that way or looks at me that way."

In the meantime, he's continuing to prove he can hang with TUF-caliber fighters. In his last bout, Newell needed only two minutes to dispatch Keon Caldwell, an alumnus of The Ultimate Fighter series.

"Anyone else with my record, 10-0 with nine first-round stoppages, would be getting calls from the top organizations," says Newell. His upcoming match was originally slated to be against Gesias "JZ" Cavalcante, a very well-known fighter who has competed in all the top organizations, including the UFC. "After he beats JZ, the UFC would look pretty bad not to consider him," said Callendri, Newell's grappling coach.

But just a few weeks before the fight, JZ pulled out. It was another chance to climb the ladder deferred. Instead, Newell will face yet another fighter with little name recognition and a record nowhere close to his own. "I finish fights, I'm exciting, people want to see me compete," Newell declared recently. "I want to see where I stand among the world's elite fighters, and I feel like I've earned my shot."

Regardless of whether the UFC ever comes calling, Newell plans to continue competing as long as he is able. "I wouldn't stop if I won another belt. I'm the kind of person who is never content, no matter what I have," he said. "It's a blessing and a curse, but it's why I'm here today."

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The Celtics are 9-12, which is neither good nor bad. It simply is. They are the definition of mediocrity in a conference that is home to two great teams, a handful of lousy ones and a morass of meh. Thanks to geography and nothing more, the Celtics are remarkably in first place in their division, which makes them a "playoff team" roughly a quarter of the way through the season.

There are some coaches, maybe most, who would disregard the record and focus instead on the positioning. That’s totally understandable. This is a business in which they are judged by owners with outlandish expectations and fretful GMs who seem to be forever chasing one more piece to the puzzle that will get them an extension.

Brad Stevens is not one of them. It helps that he is working for a GM who has a bigger picture in mind and for owners who allow Danny Ainge to execute his plan. It also helps that Stevens has a 6-year contract in place and an expectation that he’ll be allowed to see this rebuilding project through to the end so he doesn’t have to worry about the day-to-day minutia that consumes so many of his colleagues.

This was his response to a question about whether he pays attention to the standings after his team beat the Bucks on Tuesday and took over the top spot in the Atlantic Division from the equally underwhelming Toronto Raptors:

Best of Sunday Shootaround

* Dawn of the Paul George era
* 'Tank' is a four-letter word
* Anthony Davis is already here
* Bill Russell gets his statue in Boston
* Stats, storytelling and Sloan
* New Orleans dreams big
* The rise of Paul George
* Hawks try to attract free agents
* The stories of 2012-13

"I know. I know. But it has no bearing on my life. Literally none. What it is, it is," Stevens said. "You can take a snapshot of where you stand versus the competition, but it has nothing to do with your preparation on your next opponent, it has nothing to do with getting better tomorrow, it just is what’s happened. And so, yeah, I do. I know, but I have no reason to know."

It’s worth noting that the Celtics are responsible for two of the three wins Milwaukee has earned this season. It’s also worth pointing out that until Friday night’s win over the Nuggets, they had beaten two other teams could be objectively defined as decent in Miami and Atlanta. Stevens understands that, and it’s the most important development for the Celtics so far this season.

When Ainge unexpectedly hired Stevens in the offseason from Butler University he wasn’t just hiring a talented young coach. He was trying to create a culture from scratch that in time will help attract other players to the cause. The Celtics had it all with Doc Rivers and their veteran stars, but when they left so did their identity. Stevens’ growth as an NBA coach is the first step in building a new one.

He has been exactly what was advertised. Stevens is prepared and focused. His demeanor is so calm and even-keeled that when he cracked a mild joke in his pregame scrum with reporters it took everyone more than a full beat to realize that he was being funny.

Stevens is all midwestern manners. He took the time to get to know the names of all the beat writers, even those that don’t travel with the team. He answers their questions in the same placid tone that reveals nothing at all but sounds nice all the same. This is an odd juxtaposition in a place as cynical as Boston. As Rick Pitino so memorably put it once, "The negativity in this town sucks."

The real takeaway is that Stevens has created a harmonious working environment in what could easily be a toxic wasteland. The Celtics roster is full of young players and veterans on their way to somewhere else, yet they all seem to like him. Even the ones that aren’t getting any time haven’t spoken up or tried to undermine him.

The trick is blending the talent on hand into a functioning whole without sacrificing the larger goal of development. That means starting rookie Kelly Olynyk when he was healthy and using Jared Sullinger as an undersized five, while bringing his veterans off the bench.

"I really like what they’re doing from a team situation by playing 10 guys," said Hall of Fame coach Hubie Brown who on hand Friday to call the game for ESPN. "By playing 10 guys they’re developing the young people on the first unit and backing it up with older players. When you put in so many young players you have to give them November and December to adjust to the coaching staff, to terminology to offensive and defensive philosophies. Then, how they handle close game situations from eight minutes down, all of that has to come from the head man."

Against the Nuggets, Stevens rode his reserves through most of the fourth quarter while they held off the Denver run. He turned it back over to the starters to close it out. It was a small move and an obvious one in the context of the game, but it also showed a flexibility that has been a hallmark of his tenure so far. An analytical mind doesn’t coach by the book. It adjusts and it adapts.

He made a smart decision early in the season when he inserted Jordan Crawford into the starting lineup and moved Avery Bradley off the ball. Crawford has been a revelation, averaging better than 13 points and 5 assists while keeping his turnovers to a minimum and his shot selection acceptable. It’s the best stretch of basketball he’s played as a professional.

The move also freed Bradley. Barely 23 years old, we are finally getting a chance to see him in extended minutes in a set role without the added point guard responsibilities that clearly don’t fit his skillset. He has good nights and bad nights like the team itself, but the effort is always there.

Lacking a viable center, Stevens has used Sullinger at the five and the second-year player has been the team’s best player. With Sullinger taking up more minutes inside, the team’s defensive rebounding has gone from woeful to encouraging despite their undersized personnel.

Then there are the forwards. Rather than shoehorn Jeff Green, Gerald Wallace and Brandon Bass into set positions, he has used them interchangeably and has them switching on screens to take advantage of their versatility. The player who earned the nickname "No Pass Bass" has even become an unlikely playmaker out of the post.

That’s the rough idea of what a Brad Stevens team looks like. It’s a team that moves the ball, pushes the pace and tries to take advantage of players’ strengths. Set positions are less important than skills. Space is everything. That’s the ideal, but it hasn’t always worked that way in practice.

They entered the weekend ranked No. 26 in offensive efficiency per Basketball-Reference and lack both 3-point shooting and a singular player who can break down defenses. They take a ton of mid-range shots and make them at about a 40 percent clip, which isn’t good enough. Aside from the occasional Jeff Green explosion, the Celtics are kind of boring offensively.

"We’ve got to really get better," Stevens said. "Offensively, I think we’ve done a better job in the last two weeks of understanding where our spots are and taking advantage of them. We go through lulls where we pass up shots and then we end up taking a shot that’s not as good as the one we pass up. We’ve gone through lulls where we’ve not screened or cut as we need to and we need to be good at all that stuff."

He added, "We’re going to be a team that has to score with our strengths. Once we get outside of those or pass those up, then we’re going to have trouble scoring points."

Stevens said all that before Friday night’s game when the Celtics went out and tore up the Nuggets for 39 first quarter points en route to 52 percent shooting and 25 assists on 43 made shots. Yet he was bothered by a six-minute stretch in the third quarter when the C’s allowed Denver to get back into the game. Their margin for error is extremely thin, which helps explain their tendency to give up big leads.

What we also know about a Brad Stevens coached team is that they seem prepared on a nightly basis, even when they don’t execute or have the talent to compete with some of the better teams. They have run a handful of gems in late-game situations that suggest a creative instinct with the clipboard in crucial moments. They rank in the top 10 in defensive rating despite not having much of an interior presence, which speaks to scheme and effort.

"What you like to hear is that people are happy with their effort on a nightly basis. That’s key," Brown said. "That’s coaching, making people accountable, and then he has an excellent demeanor about himself personality-wise. He’s low key. Right now he’s handling everything and he’s learning as he goes along. Any time you do this -- I’ve done this with young teams -- it’s a daily challenge to develop the talent, make them accountable and give them the discipline, which equals chemistry. That sounds simple, but it’s difficult to do."

And now we need to talk about Rajon Rondo, who has been a visible presence at practices and games and is scheduled for a checkup with Dr. James Andrews in the next few weeks. We will have a much better handle on Stevens and his team when Rondo is back to full speed.

We will finally get to see the Rondo/Bradley backcourt in action for extended stretches. We will finally get to see how Green and Rondo play off each other in the open court, and we may finally see how Sullinger acts as a pick-and-roll partner in the halfcourt. We will also see whether the Stevens/Rondo relationship will work. It’s been our feeling since last summer when Stevens was hired that the two are perfectly aligned in terms of temperament and philosophy to enjoy a long and successful tenure together.

"All of this will unfold as they go through November, December, January and then the All-Star game," Brown said. "Because what you’re looking for now is from the All-Star game to the end of the year, major improvement. Now you’ve added offensively and you’ve added defensively, but now everybody’s paying attention one through fifteen of who’s going where in the playoffs so now you can’t steal games. From February on, that’s when the push comes."

The standings? That’s not Stevens’ concern. At least not now.

At some point in life things stop working. Plans go awry. Grand visions of success give way to cold doses of reality. Limbs and ligaments stop functioning like they used to in the past. Kobe Bryant has come to be defined by his refusal to accept any of that.

In his prime he chased away Shaquille O’Neal and made do with Smush Parker and Kwame Brown. He validated his stance by winning two more titles and then clung stubbornly to the idea that they could do it again when everyone knew it was over. Rather than accept a secondary role and ride out the rest of his career next to one of the game’s remaining dominant big men, he refused to cede ground to Dwight Howard.

He is noble, stubborn, brilliant or infuriating depending on how you perceive him.

From the beginning of his career it’s been impossible to have a rational conversation about Kobe Bryant. Everything from his paycheck to his hero ball tendencies have spawned a million blog posts and think pieces about the nature of stardom in the modern NBA, and it’s a debate that’s become more tiresome than illuminating. He’s a force of nature and resisting it is akin to spitting in the wind and hoping you don’t get drenched.

As he prepares to return from a torn Achilles, Kobe’s career finally has a moment in time that resonates in a way that all the count the ringzzzzz arguments never could. It’s his refusal to give in to circumstances, time or even the harshest of injuries that mark him as a true original.

The game went on without him and it will continue to go on long after he’s really gone, just like it did for all the rest. But it is infinitely more interesting when he’s a part of it.

MONDAY Nuggets at Wizards

Let us take a moment during John Wall’s breakout season to remember the parade of knuckleheads that dominated the Wizards roster in his early days. In his rookie season, Wall ran a team comprised of Nick Young, Andray Blatche, Jordan Crawford and of course, JaVale McGee. All four have their talents and abilities. All four have found gainful employment in productive roles with other franchises. But having all four on the same team with your 20-year-old franchise savior is like … it’s a really bad idea, OK?

TUESDAY Heat at Pacers

With the exception of a few obvious ones -- Celtics-Lakers, etc -- rivalries come and go in the NBA as players change teams and teams change coaches and personalities. These days they are less about proximity than postseason history and there is none bigger in the East than the Heat and the Pacers. This has everything: The two best teams in their conference by far, an up and comer in Paul George against the reigning king in LeBron James and when you get down to it these teams really don’t like each other. So, why isn’t this on Christmas Day?

WEDNESDAY Clippers at Celtics

If you ask people in Boston who was most responsible for the Celtics’ success during the Kevin Garnett/Paul Pierce/Ray Allen/Rajon Rondo era, you’re likely to get a variety of responses. But if you ask people who was the enduring symbol of that team, my bet is most people would say Doc Rivers. He had his team’s respect -- and they were not an easy bunch. He had the media’s respect and we’ll turn on you in a heartbeat. He had the fans respect and they may be an even tougher audience. For those years Doc was the Celtics and now that he’s in LA, some people will try to turn this into a referendum on how he should be received when he returns to Boston. That’s easy: Standing ovation.

THURSDAY Rockets at Blazers

If you’re Darryl Morey, what do you want for Omer Asik? The smart money would seem to be a stretch four who can play alongside Dwight Howard, but considering the solid contributions of players like Terrence Jones and Omri Casspi, maybe the Rox already have that answer in house. Would a bonafide perimeter stopper be the better play to shore up that leaky defense? For all that he’s done to rebuild the roster, this is the deal he has to get right.

FRIDAY Timberwolves at Spurs

We’ve reached the point in the season where it’s officially time to worry about the Timberwolves. Their defense still rates reasonably well by most metrics, but their lack of depth and killer schedule has undone what had been a strong start. The always insightful Britt Robson respectfully put it on Rick Adelman a few weeks back, which underscores just how tenuous this whole team really is at this stage.

SATURDAY Lakers at Bobcats

Let us take the opportunity to offer more praise for Bobcats coach Steve Clifford. By most objective measures, the Bobcats have less top-end talent than the other rebuilding teams in the East. Even high lottery picks Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Cody Zeller are slotted for role-playing status as their careers develop. Even with Al Jefferson, Charlotte is the worst shooting team in the league and a tick above abysmal on offense. But the Cats are in most games and even winning their share because of surprisingly stout defense. That’s a reflection of coaching, preparation and of course, execution and trust. It’s amazing what a coach with actual coaching experience can accomplish when given a chance.

SUNDAY Warriors at Suns

Insert your own League Pass joke here.

It’s become all too easy to take LeBron James for granted, but James just keeps doing his thing and shockingly getting even better. His 3-point shooting is up. His free throw rate is higher than ever. His overall shooting percentages look like a 7-foot-6 big man who does nothing but dunk. So let’s give the man his due with a look back at his top five games this season.

1. Nov. 25, Phoenix: Scores 35 points on 11-for-14 shooting and helps the Heat pull away with a perfect 11-for-11 from the free throw line. He told reporters afterward that, "I'm in a very, very comfortable position right now with my game." No kidding.

2. Nov. 15, Dallas: Drops 39 on the Mavs in just 18 shots and clinches the win by backing down Monta Ellis and raining a Dirk-shot over the guard’s head. Maybe LeBron should imitate other superstars just to keep things interesting.

3. Nov. 5, Toronto: Scores 35 points, grabs eight boards and hands out eight assists against only one turnover. The truly impressive work happened early in the fourth quarter when James and crew held the Raptors scoreless for almost five minutes.

4. Nov. 16, Charlotte: Scored 30 points in 31 minutes on 13-for-18 shooting and could have had more if he wanted. That’s the thing with LeBron’s game these days. He waits for it to come to him and calls upon it at will.

5. Nov. 27, Cleveland: Just your standard 28-8-8 and oh by the way, he outscored the Cavs starters by himself.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, 12 miles from the Canadian border, the hometown Scobey Spartans prepared to kick off to the Wibaux Longhorns in an 8-man high school football game. The Spartans were 0-6 coming into that game, but they had not always been bottom feeders of Montana's Class C Eastern Division. Only 10 years ago, they won a state title and in the 1990s they regularly played close games against the Longhorns. Corey Begger, who played offensive and defensive end for Wibaux back then, remembers one game when the wind gusted so powerfully across the prairie, punts landed behind the kickers. "There were dust clouds blowing across that field," he says, gesturing north toward Canada. "People parked busses and trucks behind the end zone to block the wind." He says Scobey had more kids going out for football then. He says it "was very different." Wibaux only won by two.

Montana 8-man football is played on a field 80 by 40 yards. All but three linemen are eligible to receive passes, and most teams run far more than they throw. When either team is ahead by 35 points or more, a mercy rule takes effect, and the clock runs without stopping until the end of the game.

So far this year, Wibaux has mercy-ruled six teams in a row. None of the players or coaches or any of the 20 or so parents who made the three-hour drive north expected the game against Scobey to be any different, and soon after the Spartans kicker sent the ball end-over-end into the waiting arms of the Wibaux return man, the game was already over. Senior Jake Bakken, who also plays quarterback and safety, paused to let a wedge develop, and took off. His blockers slammed into Spartan players and kept running. Junior Trent Farnworth, who sports a mullet and who everyone calls "Boz," lowered his shoulder and flattened an undersized opponent. Wyatt Miske, a 235-pound lineman, did the same, clearing a route for Bakken, who seemed to glide through space. Ten seconds and 76 yards later, he was in the end zone. Two minutes after that, the Longhorns were up 16-0.  A quarter later, with nine minutes remaining in the first half, the score was 42-0.

Wibaux is like Scobey. It's the same as Plevna and Ekalaka and Hysham; a no-stoplight town on the extreme eastern side of Montana, the flat, dry side, where making a living solely from raising beef and growing wheat has proven more difficult with each generation tasked with trying. In a county with barely a thousand people spread across nearly 900 square miles, half live in Wibaux.

By nearly any metric — population, school enrollment, the age of the people who live there — Wibaux and so many other towns in that part of the state are dying. But Wibaux is also different. Of the eight schools that originally played in the Montana Class C Eastern Division, seven of them are now too small to field 8-man teams and have either dropped to 6-man or quit playing altogether. Only one team has bucked the trend. In one way, at least, Wibaux still thrives.

***

Beaver Creek meanders through the center of town like a snake in tall grass. Wibaux was built around its curves, and there was a time when residents were sustained by its slow current. It's as wide as a tennis court and people say you can catch walleye and northern pike in the deep holes. It flows under Highway 7, past an old grain elevator, the fueling station and a dirt-pocked little league field with a rusted chain-link backstop. The creek comes within a block of downtown — its storefronts mostly vacant but not yet shuttered — and the trucks parked outside of the Shamrock and the Rainbow clubs, storefront bars where you can buy a box of bullets with your beer and where wall calendars track the birthdays of the regulars and their families.

Today, Beaver Creek is mostly used for cooling off in the summer. Wibaux is sustained by something else.

Veterans Memorial Field lies within the footprint of a dilapidated gravel and clay track on the opposite side of downtown. On the rare days when the wind doesn't blow, you can hear the growl of semis on Interstate 94, and the whistle of a coal train miles before it speeds through town without slowing down.

The week after beating Scobey, the Longhorns returned home for the final game of the regular season against a mediocre co-op squad from Froid and Medicine Lake (high schools combining student bodies to field teams is common practice in Montana Class C). As is usual during the regular season, no one in Wibaux expects much of a game — since 2001 they've only lost six times — but, like parishioners outside of their church, people still gather.

An hour before kickoff, Dodge and Chevy pickup trucks are backed up to the edge of the track, camping chairs unfolded in their beds. The adults, some parents of players, huddle around tailgates. Young girls sit in the bleachers and wear hoodies and lean into one another to fit under blankets. Younger boys roam the sidelines in packs. Behind the uprights, they play games of two-hand touch that seem never to begin or end.

The LaBelle brothers.

South of the field, below a soft rise at the top of which stands a statue of Pierre Wibaux — a prominent rancher, who in 1895 decided Mingusville was an unsatisfactory name for a place — a group of blue-and-gold faithful gather between trucks and under a party tent and eat sausage and chili. Among them is Tracy Bakken, wife of assistant coach Shane Bakken, and mother of Jake, Jeff and Joe, all of whom play or played quarterback for the Longhorns. She stands with her mother, Sally Witkowski, a self-proclaimed "sports buff," who has lived in Wibaux all of her adult life. When asked how a town that in most years has fewer than 30 teenage boys can win so often, Witkowski replies as if anyone who didn't already know wouldn't understand the answer. "They're winners, they all are," she says. "They take football real seriously."

Tracy responds by describing her family. She says that when her middle son Jeffrey was in junior high, he stood on the sidelines at games, heard the crack when his older brother, Joe, slammed his helmet into the helmets of his teammates and watched as he ran onto the field and led the Longhorns to victory after victory after victory. She says her youngest son, Jake, did the same. "It's just pounded into their heads," she says. "They don't want to let the older generation down by having a losing season."

Senior lineman Heath LaBelle knows this pressure. His teammates call him Vito — for his resemblance to the MTV reality star — and at nearly 300 pounds, he's of typical size for men in the LaBelle family. His oldest brother, Jordan, graduated in 2007 and played for a state championship in 2006. Their middle brother, AJ, played for three titles before graduating in 2010. When the three of them sit together, they make furniture seem like playthings and Longhorn football seem like the center of the universe.

"It's expected. It's weird to say, but Wibaux football is just expected," says their father Greg. "We're expected to do well, and it doesn't matter who's on the team," he adds, pointing out that this pressure gave all his sons an edge. "Jordan will always say he's better than AJ and AJ says Heath isn't as good as the other two. It's community wide — that's your competition."

No LaBelle boy has lost more than five games in four years of football. And while no LaBelle has won a state title, they continue to measure success on whether or not the team finishes as the best in the state. When asked if it's possible that the Longhorn brand may be changing — considering that in 2012, Wibaux High was the smallest high school playing 8-man football in Montana and three of the four teams that made it to the semi-finals that year drew from students bodies more than twice Wibaux's size — they are incredulous. "They've said it for years, ‘They're not going to be as good, they're not going to be as good,'" says AJ. "I think Wibaux has the mentality. I don't care how many kids are in your school. Being in Wibaux is different. We have the tradition. It's a football town."

Today, that tradition and the power it wields over younger generations is evidenced by other familiar names on the Longhorns roster. There's a Bakken and a Bertelsen, a LaBelle, two Miskes, two Nelsons, two Dschaaks, two Schneiders, and a Quade — Jhett — whose uncles were Longhorns. His father, Kevin, also played and is remembered by people in town as the consummate Longhorn fan. In 2006, during a semi-final home playoff game, he hired a plane and a photographer to take aerial photographs of the 3,000 people in attendance. In photos from that day, the field is unusually green and surrounded by people on all sides. It seems to be the only thing in town still growing.

***

The tallest structure in Wibaux is a water tower, at the center of which the word "Wibaux" is painted in red so that it faces the interstate. Second tallest is the grain elevator on the other side of Beaver Creek. Otherwise, Wibaux creates a squat horizon line of two-story buildings and trees. Driving south on Highway 7 or east on I-94, it's a matter of seconds before Wibaux disappears in the rearview mirror.

When head coach Jeff Bertelsen was in high school, he and some friends plotted to climb the tower. There was nothing much to see, they just wanted to see if they could get all the way to the top. Their plan, though, was foiled by a passing deputy sheriff, and the group scattered, running down streets and through yards to escape. Only a single member of his crew got to the top. Bertelsen laughs when he tells the story. The water tower itself is empty.

Bertelsen moved to Wibaux from the mountains and trout streams of western Montana when his dad got a job as a county agent in 1987. His freshmen year of football was the last year for then-coach Rob Bushman, the man who most Longhorn fans credit with inventing the Wibaux brand of football. "We ran the ball," he says. "Up the gut, hard-nose football." The next year, under a new coach, Wibaux suffered its first losing season since anyone could remember. It would be their last.

Everyone in town — including his players — calls him Bert. He has a face like Paul Giamatti, but he has the physique of someone you wouldn't want to mess with. He wears khaki cargo shorts to every game, no matter the weather, and when you ask him if he would change anything about his job with the Longhorns, it'd be painting the fields. He is not just the coach, but also the grounds crew. "That's the worst thing I do at this job. I measure and paint that field before every game," he says. "It used to take me six hours."

Thirty minutes before the Froid/Medicine Lake game, Bertelsen addresses the Longhorn players in a cramped locker room beneath Wibaux High's gymnasium bleachers. The game is meaningless; Wibaux has had the Eastern Division's No. 1 seed clinched for weeks. Some teams would take the starters out in the first half in a game like this, no matter the score, to preserve them for the playoffs. Not Wibaux. Bertelsen searches for a way to motivate — to remind his players that even in games that don't matter, final scores transcend win/loss columns. Complacency, not the opposition, represents the real challenge to Bert's boys.

"They're gonna come, and they're gonna come hard. You have to take that out of them. They got nothing to lose. This is their state title game for their seniors. It's the last high school football game they'll play," he says and reminds them that they, too, will someday take the field for the last time. "Think how'd you play that game."

Head coach Jeff Bertelsen in his signature khaki shorts.

Bertelsen knows what it's like to play that game, and unlike anyone else in the locker room, he knows what it's like to win it.  In 1991, his junior year, the Longhorns cruised to the school's first state championship. They did it again the next year, and although Bertelsen had already left to play at Dickinson State, the Longhorns did it again in 1993. Bertelsen was a star defender, and he still remembers the rush of bringing home the state title. "Once you know what that feels like, there's sort of nothing else like it," he says. "You want to have that feeling again. I want these kids to have that feeling."

The Longhorns won the program's fifth state title in 2001, Bertelsen's first year as head coach. Since then, they've gone 125-18 and have made it to the championship game five more times, but have yet to win again. "It's title or bust every year. I've heard people say, ‘Oh, he can't win the big one.' You feel the pressure and you know it comes with the job," he says. "I think sometimes I just try to be naive about it — to protect myself. Just do what we do every day and try to get better."

After Bertelsen addresses his team, Rob Bacon, a first-year assistant coach, speaks to the players. He played for the 2006 Longhorns, which Bertelsen describes as "the best Wibaux team to not win a title." After winning a semifinal game, the Longhorns lost the title in overtime. Bacon remembers returning to Wibaux late the night after the loss, the fire engine escort for the Longhorns' bus and the people who had stayed up to honk truck horns and welcome the boys home. "It was bittersweet," he says. "If you grow up saying you want to be good at football, that's one thing. But we grow up saying we want to win state. We know we're going to be good at football. We want to win state."

"We know we're going to be good at football. We want to win state."

When Bacon talks to the Longhorn players about their opponent, he channels the frustration that comes with coming up short in the face of extraordinary expectations. "They have a new coach this year and maybe he thinks things have changed, but they haven't. It's gotten uglier ... Take some pride in that, you are the guys who are going to be knocking their dicks in the dirt. Make them get it. Make every member of that team get it," he says. "Let them know what we're about."

The players stand up and touch hands and count to three. They march out of the locker room and turn right to exit the building and run across a parking lot onto the field. Turn left instead, stairs lead to the polished wood surface of the Wibaux gymnasium, where five state title banners hang from a cinder block wall: '91, '92, '93, '00 and '01. Most people in Wibaux find it disappointing there aren't more, but most people in Wibaux, like assistant coach Shane Bakken, also think it would be cheap to hang runner-up banners. He played quarterback in the '80s and has watched his sons play in four state title games. He believes there is only one way to measure a successful season. "Once you get a taste, that's the drive. You want to get back there again, and we have it. If you're not playing to win it every year, why play?" he says.  "No one remembers second place."

***

The Longhorns score on the first series of the game against the Red Hawks. They proceed to recover the ball on an onsides kick and score again. On the first Red Hawk possession, they struggle to crack the line of scrimmage and are forced to kick from inside their own 5-yard line. The punter receives a low snap as blue jerseys crash the backfield. He doesn't appear to panic so much as make a calculation and then a quick decision. He turns his back to the field, drops the ball to his foot and gingerly boots it out of the back of the end zone. The first quarter ends with the score 38-8.

When the Longhorns are playing well, it's like watching a video game between a committed gamer and someone who left the controller on the coffee table — something doesn't quite seem fair. On a special teams play, Chase Bertelsen, who has the same stacked-brick physique as his father, Jeff, draws gasps from the sideline when he topples a Red Hawk gunner flat on his back. Jake Bakken fields a kickoff and moves through traffic like a spooked antelope, his strides covering more ground than seem possible. The Red Hawks don't tackle him so much as shoo him out of bounds.  Although every team has its stars, not every team wins so gaudily game after game, year after year. Not every team is the Longhorns.

A few minutes into the third quarter, the score is 57-8, and Bertelsen begins to take the starters out of the game. Bakken and Bertelsen, LaBelle, Miske, Farnworth and Colton Tousignant, the starting running back who is as adept at breaking up passes as he is at running around tacklers, have their places taken by underclassmen.

Colton's younger brother, Chas, a 100-pound freshman, gets in at running back. He receives a handoff and is knocked over before he makes it to the end. He is promptly taken out. When he was younger, Chas watched his older brothers play football at recess. He remembers they would pretend to be Longhorn players of the day — Travis Bertelsen, Rob Bacon, Derek Hartse — and when his brothers got to high school, Chas played recess ball himself and pretended to be his brothers — superstar athletes playing on the biggest stage in the universe. As a ninth grader, he only sees the field when the Longhorns have mercy-ruled a team, if at all. But wearing that jersey is a dream realized, and he's already experienced the chemical surge of winning and the rush it gives him. "It just comes to you," he says.

Nearly to the end of his first season, he does not yet know what losing feels like.

***

The pavement of Hodges Road ends just after it passes the football field on the western edge of town. From there, the county uses crushed red rock to cover its clay surface. Four and a half miles west, Hodges intersects Ranch Access Road. Ranch Access winds over gentle rises and across dry creek beds for almost nine miles before dead-ending in a gulley of ash trees at the Tousignant family ranch. It is here, on land like this, land the family refers to as the "home place," where the boys who have always played football at Wibaux are born.

Bill Tousignant's mustache frames the corners of his mouth, and he is fond of telling the story of how he met his wife, Lisa, on horseback, a few miles from where they now live, just before a hailstorm. He says that despite the county's efforts, the road to his family's home is sometimes impassable. When it rains too much, the clay turns to wet cement and cakes on truck wheels until they no longer spin. When it snows, the road is sometimes unplowed for days, and his boys have to clear stretches of it themselves. It's not uncommon, he says, for his family to be stranded on their ranch "for a day or two."

The Tousignant brothers.

Hours before the game against the Red Hawks, Bill and his sons, Colton and Chas, woke before dawn. The boys each have a mat of tightly curled hair and electric blue eyes, which never shy from eye contact. That morning, a veterinarian was due at the ranch to do a pregnancy check on their stock of heifers. As dawn became day, the Tousignant men guided the 1,200-pound animals down a shoot of wrought iron fence, at the end of which each head of cattle was examined with an ultrasound wand. They had to work quickly, because the boys had a game.

Bill and Lisa are proud of their sons. As did their older brother before he left for college, Colton and Chas do every job the ranch demands. In February and March, they take turns waking up every two hours throughout the night to check on the pregnant cattle, and if one is in labor, they help relieve her of the 80-pound calf. They have never been on a spring vacation, and they spend their summers cutting hay and rolling it into enormous cylindrical bails. Some weeks, when the weather is right, and the grass is neither too wet with dew or too dry and brittle, they work for 20 hours a day.

On a recent Sunday morning, Bill drives his Dodge up a steep, dirt incline and gestures across a draw to where a church-sized stack of bails slumps in the wind. "That's no small feat," he says of the work his boys do each summer and adds that there are more stacks around the ranch. He says Colton and Chas cut 2,500 acres of grass last summer and put up 7,000 bails of hay. Sometime in the following months, when snow covers the ground, they will unfurl the bails one-by-one. The Tousignants' cattle will survive through the winter because of the work the boys did in the summer.

Ranch life is cyclical. Every task — preg-checking heifers, branding calves, trucking steers to auction — exists on the rim of a wheel, pushed around its axis by the changing of seasons. A job is completed only so the next one can begin, and some jobs, like mending the 40 miles of fence on the Tousignants' property, are never finished. The Tousignant boys aren't football fans — there is little time for that luxury, and these are not boys accustomed to sitting around. They show no allegiance to any team other than the one they play for. On weekends, when they are not playing football and if there is no work to be done, they'd rather play paintball or ride ATVs or hunt than sit and flick between televised football games. Colton doesn't care about Peyton Manning's comeback or concussions or who will win the Heisman. He'd rather show you the skin of a bobcat he trapped in a snare not far from his house. The pelt is silken and mottled tan and gray with dark spots. He says it's a female and rubs a hand over the teats on her belly. He says it might earn him $500 but a big tom could get $1,000. "They kind of dock you because she was milking," he says.

In Wibaux, the Tousignant boys are called "ranch kids," and while they are not the only ranch kids on the Longhorns, they are of a vanishing world. Corey Begger, the team's statistician, remembers just a few decades ago, when he was playing, there were more boys like the Tousignants, himself included. "There's not as many farm kids now as there used to be back in the early '90s. When I grew up, we were always on the farm," he says. "Wheat and putting up hay, working cows. We always had other kids helping us." He's not sure why, but he thinks that families are smaller than they used to be. And, he says, "Kids just aren't coming back to work on the farm." Wibaux, where nothing ever changes, is changing in this way.

The ways small towns die are unmistakable.