If I had to rank professional sports fans in terms of craziness, I wouldn’t even think twice:

1) NBA fans
2) Everyone else

While NFL fans are certainly insane in their own rights and passionate about their teams, NBA fans have multiple layers of crazy that can be peeled back to reveal a molten core of manic lunacy that is the universe’s greatest natural source of irrational behavior. I think this is because the NBA, unlike the NFL and MLB, is a star-centric league, in that fans focus on the best players above the actual teams. People love LeBron James no matter what team he plays for, and they’ll go absolutely apesh*t if you try to tell them that’s wrong.

Additionally, the NBA has more frontrunner fans than the other pro sports leagues because the same teams always win. When those teams don’t win, those fans get even crazier, because they’re supposed to always win. But when they do win, these NBA fans become even crazier because they don’t understand how anyone can possibly hate their Lakers or Heat. How can you hate them? You have no reason. You’re just a hater. YOU’RE A HATER, DAMN IT!

Well, good news, you crazy ass fans. You can now anonymously submit your craziest thoughts and questions to “NBA Confessions” so you don’t have to deal with us haters and sane people who just don’t get you and your undying love for Kobe Bryant. Much like the Tim Tebow Confessions site that we’ve previously examined, the submissions are a delightful blend of standard inquiries and batsh*t insanity.

As always, I’ve included some of my favorites after the jump.

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I considered writing my normal wordy intro paragraph about how Taiwan Animation is the weirdest thing in the world, citing examples from the stories we’ve covered and wondering how two Taiwanese ladies with 3rd grade computer animation skills could get to the heart of a story better than a nation of aged sports reporters, but I’ll let this image do all that for me:

Additional highlights, if you aren’t already watching, include:

- Phil Jackson as the zen, levitating version of The Mandarin from ‘Iron Man’
- A swinging jazz soundtrack
- The Lakers having fruit thrown at them because they’re trying to play basketball with walkers (try to figure out which one’s supposed to be Steve Nash!)
- Slow motion fruit explosions
- Player-on-fan violence

They really got their money’s worth out of that “bus backing up” noise.

Last night marked the beginning of the 2012-13 NBA season, and it started pretty much the same way that I assume next season will begin – with the Miami Heat raising a banner. But I’ll save my season predictions for tomorrow and just stick to the highlights of what we saw in last night’s three games starting with the obvious – Steve Nash, WTF?

The Los Angeles Lakers point guard showed up to the Staples Center looking rather geeked up for his Hollywood debut, and he did not disappoint. Wait, yes he did. In fact, everyone on the Lakers except for Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol disappointed in one way or another. Scores, thoughts and bright, shining moments after the jump.

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With NBA Media Day out of the way, we can finally pay attention to the important stuff like Shaquille O’Neal still crapping all over new Los Angeles Lakers center Dwight Howard. After previously declaring that Andrew Bynum was a better center than Howard, Shaq is now telling anyone who will listen to him that Brooklyn Nets center Brook Lopez is better than Howard, too.

Can we just fast forward to the premiere of 30 for 30’s Broke 2: The Shaquille O’Neal Story?

“Listen to what I’m saying. I’m not talking about dunking, I’m talking about playing like a big man with the moves. My man, before he had the foot injury, was putting up nice, solid big man numbers. He don’t have a lot of flash, a la Tim Duncan, but he can play. If you put him with a nice team around him, you can get a lot from this big man. Like if you want to go to go to flash and dunking and the pick and roll, you gotta go with Dwight Howard. But me, the last true original dundaughta (slang for big timer), I’m going with Andrew Bynum and which Lopez? Brook. Brook Lopez.” (Via ESPN)

I give O’Neal credit for trying to make it sound like he’s being analytical and not just a dick. He is being a dick, though. We all know he is. But that’s the fun of Shaq being an NBA “expert” now for TNT – he gets a platform from which to make fun of Howard for completely replicating O’Neal’s career, sans the NBA titles and MVP trophies. Those may come in due time, though.

Howard, to his credit, remains all smiles since being traded by the Orlando Magic to the team that he said he wouldn’t play for, and that grin was ear to ear during Media Day. While he promised that he’d finally grow up and take the game more seriously, Howard did what he does best and hammed it up for the L.A. media, as he and his Lakers teammates provided some of the more colorful Media Day photos of the week.

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Yesterday marked the first meaningless burp of the 2012-13 NBA season, as players casually took their time arriving to their respective arenas to be prepped for clichés and generic positive statements about their chances this year, as part of the 2012 NBA Media Day. Basically, it’s a glorified way for teams to drum up last second season ticket sales and David Stern to remind Major League Baseball that it only has a few weeks left before a preseason NBA game will outdraw the World Series.

In some cases, though, there is some honest-to-Cthulhu excitement, as teams like the Miami Heat and Los Angeles Lakers introduced their newest players, while the Brooklyn Nets reminded everyone that HEY, WE HAVE NEW UNIFORMS NOW! COME LOOK AT OUR NEW UNIFORMS! THEY’RE NEW! For the Heat, the buzz was the addition of Ray Allen, whose departure from Boston is viewed as treason by many Celtics fans and players, and the Lakers, of course, introduced Dwight Howard and Steve Nash. Also, EVERYONE LOOK AT BROOKLYN’S NEW UNIFORMS! THEY WERE DESIGNED BY JAY-Z!

But all of the teams had their PR and social media people on full alert yesterday, as they Tweeted and Facebooked pictures of the NBA’s best and brightest awkwardly hamming it up for the local media. Some teams had a lot of fun, while some teams, well, you can’t expect the Charlotte Bobcats to pretend like they were at Disney. After the jump, I’ve gathered the best of the NBA’s Media Day so you can pretend like you were there for every team.

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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]