Topic: NBA

Nikola Pekovic is a working man who happens to have a bruising, difficult job. He is also a hooded warrior who wants your skulls. Both of those things. This is what makes him great. It's complicated.

Andrea Bargnani has been a professional basketball player for 10 of his 27 years on earth, and has the opaque and deeply unknowable personality to show for it. But he has also developed into a player as intriguing and quirky as he is outwardly blank, and he's about to get his best shot yet at leading a team into the playoffs.

Kirk Hinrich has never been much more than Kirk Hinrich, which is what made him valuable to the Bulls in the last decade, and readily available to the team as a stopgap in this one. But just because Hinrich has never been great doesn't mean he isn't an historical figure of sorts, both for Bulls fans and in a recognizable NBA way.

On a team of high-definition personalities, Luol Deng is a man who works, a masterwork of Socialist Realism. Watch him and you see this acutely: real people doing things at tremendous physical cost, a theater of humble punishment. He's a star, and he's a laborer.