This strikes me as a pretty appropriate With Leather story to come out of WrestleMania weekend.

Sweaterpunch alerts us to the fact that LeBron James and Dwyane Wade met up with Rey Mysterio over the weekend. Ignoring for a moment the completely stilted and uncomfortable exchange between the three men, the visual hilarity of Rey Rey getting a picture taken with these two massive basketball players, and Mysterio’s weird piece-of-gristle-caught-in-a-garbage-disposal voice that no one ever seems to know how to react to, LeBron is wearing a very interesting Nike shirt.

See for yourself:

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Are you an NBA fan who hates watching his favorite player play basketball, but loves reading what he has to say about his day-to-day minutia and hashtag causes on the Internet? Then you’ll love the NBA Store‘s new ‘Has Handle’ t-shirts, the shirsey that replaces the ‘Lin’ on your back to ‘@JLIN7′. Oh, and they had a # to the immediately left of your team logo. To the left of the ‘Los’ if you’re buying the racist Spanish one.

NBA Store has six of these bad boys ready to go, and the only upside I can see to them is how much more awkward it makes me going into a team store to ask for an awful player’s merchandise and having to say his username outloud. “Uh, excuse me, you guys got any at-sign ianmahinmi shirseys?”

Take a look at the six they’ve got up now and try to figure out which one you’d like to order least. I agree with Andrew Sharp of SB Nation that an ‘@KingJames’ across your back would make you the absolute worst.

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He’s back, in pog Asian variety show form!

There isn’t a lot of available information about this video, courtesy of Outside The Boxscore, but all you really need to know is that it’s a guy dressed like Jeremy Lin on an Asian dance contest/’X Country’s Got Talent’ show.

My theory is that it’s an illustration of how sports writers saw Jeremy Lin all along, a look deep into the recesses of their brains, and that the casual racist tweets have evolved into this video of Lin speaking Chinese, pop-and-locking for the enjoyment of Asians and missing jumpshots. It also may or may not have been created by Next Media Animation.

Worst case scenario, this is the first video on the New York Post’s YouTube channel. I like it, though, and as I always say, “Lin-mitation is the Lin-cerest form of flatt-emy”.

Apparently people were surprised on Wednesday when New York Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni suddenly resigned, but something was obviously going to happen. The Knicks were 18-24, barely hanging on to a tie for the 8th playoff spot in the Eastern Conference despite last season’s huge trade for Carmelo Anthony and the addition of Tyson Chandler. Also, there’s that Jeremy Lin kid who was playing pretty damn fantastic for a while. Factor in Anthony openly talking about his displeasure with D’Antoni and nobody should be surprised.

What was surprising, though, was the team’s response on Wednesday, when the Knicks completely pummeled the Portland Trail Blazers 121-79 under the direction of new coach Mike Woodson. And that was just the first cannon fire of Woodson’s new campaign. The second? Putting D’Antoni’s Harvard boy in the backseat.

On Thursday things got tougher: Woodson ran his first practice and began to make it clear to his players that this is now his team, at least for the rest of the season, and not Mike D’Antoni’s.

That almost certainly means it will be a Knicks team that will slow things down on offense and run an isolation-heavy system more suited to Carmelo Anthony’s ball-dominating inclinations.

“It’s everybody’s ball club,” Woodson said after practice Thursday, when he was asked if the Knicks were once again Anthony’s team, as they were before Jeremy Lin briefly took over. “I want everybody to feel comfortable. When I put a guy in the game, if he’s got a shot, I want him to feel comfortable about making that shot.”

(Via the NY Times)

Well I suppose this makes a lot more sense now…

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Things are not going very well for the New York Knicks, as last night’s 104-99 loss to the Chicago Bulls extended their losing streak to 6 games and dropped them 6 games below .500 and into a tie with the Milwaukee Bucks for the 8th seed in the Eastern Conference playoff race. At the center of the drama is Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni, who is the target of both the wrath of fans and players alike. Can he and star player Carmelo Anthony continue to live together despite this divide?

Nobody cares. Because Jeremy Lin is still the Big Apple’s brightest star, and now, despite the losing and drama, Lin is being rewarded for his short career as a starter with his biggest endorsement deal yet. He’s going to be slinging Volvos over in China. I would have guessed Lincoln.

Lin, who blogs in both mandarin and English on his Chinese Twitter-style weibo, has 2.47 million followers on his microblog.

Volvo is betting Lin’s popularity may help the company make further inroads in China, the carmaker’s fastest-growing market, as it seeks to double sales to 800,000 vehicles in the 10 years to 2020. (Via Bloomberg)

Bloomberg also points out that the precursor to Linsanity – Yao Ming’s Dynasty – still nets Yao $36 million a year for his endorsements with McDonald’s and Apple, among others. So as long as Lin keeps people tuning into Knicks games and reaching into their pun reservoirs to come up with exciting new nicknames for him, people will surely notice which companies he’s endorsing, too.

And that’s great news for Volvo and eventually Intel, Infinity, Innovative, Intech, Inland Truck, Integrys, In N Out Burger, Linked In, Invisible Children and, toward the end, Digital Sin.

If it weren’t for the fact that the national sports media is like a small child, enamored with shiny objects, somebody might actually take a second to point out that the New York Knicks and “Linsanity” have reversed course with a 3-game losing streak to drop to 3 games below .500. Fortunately for them, the New Orleans Saints’ bounty system and Peyton Manning’s free agency are much sexier stories, so nobody really cares that the Knicks have about as much chemistry as an art school. *pushes up glasses, snorts*

But that’s not entirely fair, because while Carmelo Anthony, Amar’e Stoudemire and Tyson Chandler struggle to develop the three-headed monster that James Dolan craves, their teammates are still having fun. Particularly, Landry Fields, Steve Novak and Lin, who took the above picture (Tweeted by Fields) when the trio visited Novak’s alma mater, Marquette University, earlier this week.

And it got me thinking – what if Lin doesn’t mind the fortune cookies and the stereotype puns? What if he’s just like my good friend who is also Chinese-American and makes more jokes about his heritage than anyone else? Does that make it all better? Should that ESPN guy who writes the lamest apologies get his job back? Maybe we’ve been ignoring what matters most this whole time – Lin’s opinion.

But then I remembered it’s Friday, so here’s a very important Kate Upton GIF…

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