FanHouse Anderson Varejao

Some people never learn. D.J. Mbenga may be one of them.

Now, D.J. is a good guy and he makes a decent living as the backup center for world champion Los Angeles Lakers, but there's a reason he's a backup center. Besides a talent deficiency, Mbenga is not quick and therefore slow to rotate on help defense and recover on pick-and-rolls.

This often puts him in an awkward position, that position being Mbenga on a poster on his keister.

Such was the case again Friday when Nuggets rookie Ty Lawson went medieval on Mbenga.

(The pair of pliers and the blowtorch after the jump.)

Cleveland and Miami squared off Thursday night, and while the story leading up to the game was the unfathomably awesome possibility of Dwyane Wade and LeBron James playing on the same team, the story (at least microcosmically) coming out of the game is the following dunk that Wade threw down on Anderson "Flopsy" Varejao.

It is, as the Hoop Docs put it, "posterization."

Who doesn't like a list, especially on a Monday morning when that's about all you can handle?

The news isn't good on the NBA officials' front. The league has locked the refs out and it appears they're ready to go the route of replacement refs. We think that's a bad idea, but if it's going to happen, here's offering some help to the new guys.

Keep your eyes out for these players, the top-five foulers in the NBA:

Argentina, which won the Olympic gold in men's basketball in 2004 and took home bronze in 2008, is ... having a bad summer. Manu Ginobili is not playing with the team due to injuries. (Injuries aggravated by last summer's Olympic run, we should note.) Andres Nocioni is out. Carlos Delfino didn't have a contract until a couple weeks ago, so he demurred from national service. It's up to Luis Scola and Pablo Prigioni and ... it hasn't gone well at FIBA Americas.

Canada, meanwhile, lost Samuel Dalembert due to an internal spat early last summer. Steve Nash still won't give up his summer for a team on the third tier of international competition. There is one current NBA player on the Canadian roster: Joel Anthony, who lost his starting job on the Heat to a decrepit Jermaine O'Neal. Yet, here's Canada, 2-0 and through to the quarterfinals after blowing out Mexico and the Virgin Islands.

Who doesn't like a list, especially on a Monday morning when that's about all you can handle? From now till the regular season starts, we're going to throw our own Top Fives at you.

Since this is the first one, and it's the middle of the offseason, how about five players who look a lot better in August than they do in December, a lot better in the summertime than in winter? Here are five players who have had better offseasons than regular seasons in their NBA careers.

Overrated might be too strong a word here -- but it's time for these guys to start earning earning their money.

All has been fairly quiet on the Lamar Odom front for the past week or so -- too quiet, in fact, for those hoping that the Lakers would re-sign the heart and soul of their championship team to a new contract. Sure, there were reports leaked that Odom personally called team owner Jerry Buss to try to reopen the negotiations, (as well as a rumor that Kobe Bryant made a similar call to try to get the two sides talking), but nothing concrete for the hand-wringing masses of Laker fans to be able to hang their hats on.

Until today, that is. The L.A. Times is reporting that the two sides once again began talking on Wednesday. But with the Lakers likely offering less than they did at the beginning, is a deal any more likely this time around?

There's still some tidying up to do this free agent season. We still need to find out about Lamar Odom, David Lee, Andre Miller, Drew Gooden and a few more interesting names out there.

But there's already plenty in the books, so let's take a look:

Best offseason move: Celtics sign Rasheed Wallace.

Wallace is a perfect fit in Boston, playing alongside veterans Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen. If Boston stays healthy, they'll likely have the best interior defense in the league: Kendrick Perkins, Garnett and Wallace.

This is going to put Danny Ferry way behind in the 2009-10 Executive of the Year race.

Certainly he didn't just re-sign Anderson Varejao, the limited power forward, for six years and up to $50 million.

But apparently that's what he did, according to Brian Windhorst of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. And in the meantime, Dan Fegan is the early leader in the clubhouse for best performance by an agent in the offseason.

Rasheed Wallace is one of the last major free agent names to make a commitment, and if the reports turn out to be true (thanks to Hedo Turkoglu, you can never be too sure), he'll be suiting up to start the 2009 season as a member of the Celtics.

Our own Matt Steinmetz thinks that makes Boston the favorite to take home the title next year. But to me, that seems -- to put it as politely as possible -- a bit overly-optimistic.

The Cavaliers are going all out to try to win a championship next season, before LeBron James can even think about becoming an unrestricted free agent in the magical, mystical summer of 2010. They've already traded for Shaquille O'Neal, and are rumored to have interest in the services of the recently freed Charlie Villanueva.

The team's heavy activity this summer would lead you to believe that minutes on the court will be in short supply for Anderson Varejao in the coming season. And that might be a big reason why he opted out of a contract which would have paid him $6.2M, when it's pretty unlikely that any team would offer him much more than that once he hit the open market.