Lakers.com’s Mike Trudell sat down with forward Matt Barnes following Super Bowl XLVI to talk about the team watching the game together and what positions each guy might play if they had chosen football over basketball.

Kevin Durant was named a starter on the 2012 Western Conference All-Star team after receiving 1,345,566 votes, second most in the Western Conference, the NBA announced today.

This will mark KD’s third career All-Star appearance and his second as a starter. During last year’s game played at STAPLES Center in Los Angeles, KD was the game’s second leading scorer after recording 34 points to go along with three rebounds and two assists in 30 minutes.

This season, KD has helped lead the Thunder to a NBA-best 17-4 record while averaging 26.6 points (3rd in the NBA), a team-high 8.1 rebounds and 3.1 assists in 37.1 minutes. Through the first six weeks of the season, Durant has recorded eight double-doubles and he became the first player in franchise history to open the season with four consecutive 30-point scoring efforts.

The 2012 NBA All-Star Game, which will air live at 8 p.m. ET on TNT and ESPN Radio in the U.S., and reach fans in more than 200 countries and territories in more than 40 languages, will be played at Amway Center in Orlando – on Sunday, Feb. 26, 2012.

After being bought out of the last year of his contract by the Oklahoma City Thunder, Nate Robinson landed with the Golden State Warriors. The 5-9 guard, playing for his fourth team in seven seasons, is finally a significant contributor again, averaging 11 points and five assists in 26 minutes, his best statistical season since 2008-09 with the New York Knicks.

Robinson talked with USA TODAY’s J. Michael Falgoust:

Are you always the team prankster?

When we have timeouts, water breaks, it’s good to crack a laugh because you don’t know what teammates are having a bad day. You got to pick their spirits up. For me to always be positive, I try to have that energy bounce off to them in the best positive light.

Being small by basketball standards, you have taken joy in challenging and dominating big guys?

I just love to succeed. I love to be the best. I love to win at everything. As a kid, going against the big guys and playing a big man’s game, it was fun to embarrass them and be better at their sport. I’ve played three sports my whole life. I never played just one sport, and there’s so many guys in the NBA who have only played basketball. I started playing basketball only when I was a sophomore in college. That’s the only time I wasn’t playing three sports. I made it pretty far. I did pretty good.

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OKLAHOMA CITY — Kevin Durant wasn’t sure at first that he wanted to be a movie star and a basketball star.

It took some peer pressure and some encouragement from his mother, but now Durant is bringing Hollywood to Oklahoma City for a few days. The two-time NBA scoring champion filmed scenes from the upcoming movie “Thunderstruck” Tuesday at the team’s home arena, including the pivotal sequence when his basketball skills are magically switched with a clumsy teenager to throw the Thunder’s playoff hopes into question.

Durant plays himself in the movie. Nickelodeon star Taylor Gray misses a halfcourt shot so badly that it hits Oklahoma City’s mascot, Rumble, in the arena tunnel and he tracks down the ball at the same time as Durant. He says he wishes he could play as well as Durant, and the Thunder superstar says he wishes he could help.

The wish magically gets granted, with the downside being that Durant suddenly has the skills of a kid who couldn’t make his own high school basketball team.

“It was pretty cool. I’m going to be nervous about how people view the movie and how they think my performance was,” Durant said. “I really don’t care now. I did it, it was fun, I enjoyed myself, I made some friends along the way, so I think it was a success.”

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Nate Robinson, the Warriors’ 5-foot-9 (maybe) backup guard, sat out Monday’s fourth-quarter meltdown against the Memphis Grizzlies. Earlier he played nearly 12 minutes and had six assists, five points and three rebounds. But…

“Nate made a couple of careless plays, which is why I took him out,” coach Mark Jackson said Tuesday. “In hindsight, Nate is probably the one guy I should have kept in, whether for Steph or in there with Steph, because of Nate’s energy and the way he was competing.”

Before Wednesday’s game against Portland, Coach Mark Jackson was asked if he would have put Robinson in that fourth quarter for Ellis or for Curry.

“I don’t know,” Jackson said. “I told Nate, ‘It might have been at the five (center).’ ”

Of course you were kidding, someone said. “No, I wasn’t,” Jackson said, adding, “I liked his fight, I liked his commitment, I liked his no-back-down approach. That’s what he is and that’s what he gives us.”

Wednesday, Robinson played a relatively minor but useful role in the Warriors’ 101-93 win over the Trail Blazers.

Robinson played the entire third quarter, and 14:46 in all, including the last 47 seconds of the game, when he hit two game-clinching free throws. For the game: four points, four assists, no turnovers.

For a few minutes of the third quarter, Robinson, Ellis and Curry played together in the all-mighty mite package. A small package, but efficient and, on this night, not soft.

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Check out KD in this new Nike #MakeitCount spot. Nike+ has something big planned on 1.19.12. Make sure to stay tuned for the announcement.

Candace Parker is perhaps best known for her role as forward for the Los Angeles Sparks. When not playing for the WNBA, Parker spends the off-season playing for UMMC Ekaterinburg in chilly Siberia. As a professional athlete, Parker spends much of her time traveling the globe for games — even winning a gold medal during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Not a bad souvenir.

HuffPost Travel caught up with the 25-year-old basketball player on her Christmas break back in the States to talk travel, her favorite spots and just how cold it really gets in Siberia.

Huffington Post Travel: Where do you travel most often while playing in Siberia?

Candace Parker: I play for UMMC Ekaterinburg, which is east of Moscow via a two-and-a-half-hour flight. We travel constantly to play the EuroLeague and the Russian Premier League — we go to Spain, Istanbul, France, Germany and Poland. One of the big problems with playing in Russia is that every flight is 6 to 7 hours. When I go back to Russia [in January], we play in Istanbul and I’m so excited.

HPT: What do you enjoy most about playing in Russia?

CP: I love that everyone from my team is from a different place, so I just sit in the back of the plane and chat with my teammates about where they are from.

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Normally everyone forgets about tragedies a few weeks or months after they happen. Not so with this group.

Despite it being two full years since the 7.0 magnitude earthquake leveled the capital city of Port-au-Prince, more than 40 high profile personalities will use their Twitter and Facebook accounts this Thursday, the 12th, to rekindle interest in helping Haiti.

The lineup, which includes Maroon 5, Sting, Alicia Keys, Lady Antebellum, Hugh Jackman, Sheryl Crow, Tim McGraw, Martha Stewart, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Don Cheadle, Deepak Chopra and NBA stars Kevin Durant, Paul Pierce, Blake Griffin, and Chris Paul, has a combined total of 125 million social media followers.

“Before the earthquake, Haiti was already the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere,” explains Hunter Payne, producer of the campaign and President of Aid Still Required. “The last thing it needed was a disaster.”

The earthquake exacerbated ever-worsening conditions on the island. The number of orphaned and abandoned children has doubled since the quake, the incidence of rape has increased markedly, and Haiti’s floundering education system took a severe hit when schools toppled.

“On our trip there this past summer it was difficult to see much progress,” says Andrea Herz Payne, Chairman and co-founder of Aid Still Required. “At the same time we saw how eager the Haitian people are to improve their situation. There was no way we could come home and forget about them.”

Haiti was once a lush, thriving paradise. A few hundred years ago it provided France with about a third of its domestic product. But after gaining independence from France in 1804, the populace turned to subsistence farming, deforesting the countryside in the process. Today 98% of Haiti is barren, and the resultant flight to the cities has left urban areas impossibly overcrowded.

When the earthquake hit Port-Au-Prince, it destroyed hospitals, air, sea and land transport facilities, and communication systems, and left over a million survivors homeless and hundreds of thousands starving and without proper sanitation or clean drinking water. Today, the people of Haiti continue to live in a state of emergency.

“The usual pattern is for the public to contribute generously in the moment of a disaster and then forget about it,” says Hunter. “But disasters don’t heal themselves – they take time, energy and resources over a protracted arc. We hope this campaign will go a long way to engendering this kind of thinking not only about this tragedy but all others as well.”

Proceeds from the campaign are funding reforestation projects, infrastructure and teachers for orphanages, and trauma relief programs for PTSD and rape victims.

Donations – http://aidstillrequired.org/donate

Campaign Sponsor – Snoball – ‘Empowering change through social giving.’ https://snoball.com/

Contact info@AidStillRequired.org for more information.

Voting for the 2012 NBA All-Star Game started last week and DeMar DeRozan and Kevin Durant are both on the ballot. You can vote for DeMar and Kevin by texting their last names to 69622 or going to NBA.com/ASB.

In a season full of adjusted practice schedules and roster shuffling, the Lakers provided one element of clarity during their 90-82 victory Sunday over the Memphis Grizzlies.

After seeing Matt Barnes play in what he called a “whale of a game” with 15 points on five-of-nine shooting, 10 rebounds and three blocks in 35 minutes, Lakers Coach Mike Brown granted Barnes the permanent starting spot at small forward.

“He’s my small forward for the foreseeable future,” Brown said. “He earned it, has held onto it and has played the right way for us at that position.”

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