Here’s a quick list of the worst things an athlete can do with his money during or after his professional career:

1. Fund an energy drink business
2. Make a mobile gaming app

“Get divorced because you can’t stop sleeping with strippers” is a solid number three. Anyway, free agent point guard Baron Davis tore is MCL and ACL in a Knicks game back in May, so he’s used a chunk of that 12-month recovery time to spearhead Getting Buckets, a … ugh, mobile gaming app that features basketball players doing basketball things, but nobody actually playing basketball. Not too late to make Getting Buckets an energy drink, Baron.

Getting Buckets is first gaming app from 5 Balloons Interactive, a collaboration between NBA basketball player and businessman Baron Davis and 15 year interactive entertainment producer, Sean O’Brien, which includes Baron, Steve Nash, Rajon Rondo, Brandon Jennings and Candace Parker. It is a 3D endless runner like you have never seen before routed in the sport and culture of basketball.

Because it’s routed in the sport and culture of basketball, Getting Buckets lets your character be a basketball player and hold a basketball while running down a city street, doing power slides under construction barriers, jumping over cars and collecting orange cans with ‘No Fear’ eyes on them forever for no reason. I thought they were cheeseburgers at first. Can I just put on a headband and play the race states in Battletoads instead?

I don’t write for Gamma Squad and have no real qualifications to talk about video games beyond “I’ve played a lot of them because I haven’t ever been cool”, but man, when did everything start looking like a shitty thing to do between rolls in Mario Party? Getting Buckets doesn’t need a junction system or class upgrades or whatever, but it’s 2012, guys. Our phones can do so much more than “Mario sliding down an incline and jumping to get coins, but non-stop until you put it down”.

And for the record, my favorite endless-runner is Wind Waker.

[h/t Sportress Of Blogitude]

As noted earlier this week at With Leather, Shelden Williams married WNBA star Candace Parker, and we had the good taste not to bring up the mental image of a zombie lookalike and a muscular Amazon getting it on with a third party. Not Michael Wilbon, though. For some reason on yesterday’s “Pardon the Interruption,” Wilbon’s idea of marital advice was to suggest a threesome for the newlyweds.

And yeah, technically, threesomes do keep it interesting.   But it’s really only kosher to bring it up in casual conversation when you’re talking about me and two girls.  It’s not the sort of thing you want to hear from Wilbon.  It’s about as sexy as listening to your parents do it.

[Awful Announcing]

News finally came out that WNBA star Candace Parker eloped in November…in Lake Tahoe. She married NBA scrub Shelden Williams, whom I’m guessing was too busy averaging 3 points a game for the Kings to give her a proper ceremony…

“We just decided that with both of our schedules, it would be better to elope,” Williams said.

The newlyweds live in Sacramento with their three dogs.

Parker and Williams had been engaged since last May, which is pretty moronic, especially since Shelden has only now disqualified himself from that ever-tempting waterfall of NBA road snatch. Seriously, even if you look like this, it’s like a perpetual flood of poo-nanny wherever these guys go. Why do you think Kareem was in the league for 20 years? For the socks?

[The Sacremento Bee (last item), via Game On]

Fans expecting a night of jumpers and bounce passes at last night's LA Sparks-Detroit Shock game were instead treated to an episode of the Bitchy & Scratchy Show, as the final five seconds exploded into a melee, ruining thousands of father-daughter bonding sessions and lesbian dates.  Well, maybe not the lesbian dates.  Superstar rookie Candace Parker — the woman who has dunked in a game twice as many times as everyone in the history of the WNBA combined — was at the center of the tempest:

Parker got tangled up with Detroit’s Plenette Pierson and fell to the ground. As she was getting up, Pierson intentionally ran into her, setting off the melee.  Parker threw a punch at Pierson before being tackled by Detroit’s Deanna Nolan. Players and coaches from both teams joined in, and Mahorn knocked Lisa Leslie to the court at one point.

Pierson, Parker, Mahorn, and DeLisha Milton-Jones (who shoved and punched Mahorn) were all ejected, at which point the two teams played the agonizingly slow final 4.5 seconds of he game.

From a spectator standpoint, I have to say: it's a pretty good scuffle.  Certainly not an all-out brawl, but definitely more serious than some dinky catfight.  I guess the WNBA finally showed they can play like their male counterparts.  "Malice at the Palace II."  Much better than the name for regular Shock games, Malaise at the Palace.

Candace Parker dunked for the Los Angeles Sparks in a 77-63 win over the Indiana Fever last night, becoming just the second person to dunk in a WNBA game since the league's inaugural season of 1997.  Teammate Lisa Leslie accomplished the feat, sort of, in 2002.

Excuse me while I'm sincere for a moment: Candace Parker is a great athlete, and while I prefer sexier women's sports like tennis, beach volleyball, and foxy boxing, I admire that the WNBA gives young women role models in sports who don't make headlines for their sex appeal.  Still, it's kind of sad that a dunk is such a huge deal.  Ordinarily I'd make some kind of joke about the drunk sorority girl bragging about peeing in a urinal, but I think the mainstream media has already been patronizing enough.