Each week, commenter Jon Marthaler bakes up a delicious batch of links for you. Other times, you can find him here. Jon?

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"In 1979, Michigan State beat Indiana State for the NCAA Championship, a game now remembered as Round One of the Magic vs. Bird battle. The two would battle for the NBA Championship for the entire next decade, before Michael Jordan dominated the 1990s. Other stars - such as Isiah Thomas and Hakeem Olajuwon - also won titles in that span. And now, LeBron James has finally won his first title, finally supplanting Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan atop the NBA!"

This is how the NBA's marketing machine would like to render the last three decades. For years, the league has been careful to market itself around superstars, rather than teams, the theory being that teams are interesting only to locals, but individual players can be interesting on a national level. And so we remember the 80's for Magic vs. Bird, the 90's for Jordan, and so on. The players themselves have bought into the hype; look at the quotes following LeBron's infamous Decision. "I'd rather play against Earvin Johnson than play with him," said Bird. "From college, I was trying to figure out how to beat Larry Bird," said Magic. "In all honesty, I was trying to beat those guys [Magic and Bird]," said Jordan.

It's so easy to buy into the cult of personality, especially when you're at the center. The ridiculous thing, of course, is that these guys portraying themselves as lone wolves, locked in hand-to-hand individual death matches, were surrounded by some of the greatest players in league history. Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Scottie Pippen, James Worthy, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - there's five guys who were voted as part of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History. Bird was greater than McHale and Parish, sure, and Magic was the key to those Lakers teams instead of Kareem and Worthy, but so what? We should remember the Lakers and Celtics, the Bulls and the Pistons, the Spurs and the later Lakers, rather than remembering individual superstars. I mention this because there are certainly many reasons to hate LeBron James - for his betrayal of Cleveland, for what's perceived as his arrogant attitude, for being young and absurdly talented atop the world.

But I find it ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous, to hate him for teaming up with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh - or at least, hating LeBron and not hating Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan for the same reason. All of them got the chance to play with other great players and took it, and the agency - whether that team was created by the player, or by some general manager or draft luck or otherwise - shouldn't matter. This year's NBA Finals was fascinating - for LeBron's dominance and for Kevin Durant's play, yes, but for Russell Westbrook's recklessness and Mario Chalmers' shooting and James Harden's disappearance, too. In the future - maybe even now - we'll remember it as LeBron vs. Durant, or maybe Round One of the LeBron vs. Durant battle. But we shouldn't.

On with the links: *Hey, you, guy who just caught a home run ball at Target Field! What are you going to do next? Commenter Stu has a helpful guide for you over at Twinkie Town, one you should commit to memory should you ever find yourself in this scenario.

*Playoffs appear to be coming to college football, a process that has involved much fighting between the conferences about what that playoff might look like. The great Spencer Hall reviews each conference's negotiation style, in one of the funnier charts I've ever seen. BONUS: Since much of the fighting has been between the SEC and Big Ten in this process, Hall attempts to bury the hatchet by confessing on behalf of the SEC. Spencer Hall is the best.

*Kyle Wagner, writing for Deadspin, reviews the current state of sports concussion research. The great hope right now is that we can discover chronic traumatic encephalopathy - the disease that has contributed to the deaths of so many former players - sometime before the person actually dies.

*At Baseball Prospectus, Professor Alan M. Nathan writes about the knuckleball - and how it's less like a butterfly, and more like a bullet, than we have previously believed.

*And finally: it turns out there are 13 positions in basketball, not five. Who knew?