It was 10 years ago tonight that the Pacers and Pistons came to blows, sparking the strangest, scariest, and still, today, the most improbable NBA happening of our lives. Players fighting fans in the stands; fans fighting players on the court. It was unforgettable.

Now that it looks like the cap-strapped Lakers are going to amnesty Metta World Peace sometime in the next week to save $14.8 million, Metta World Peace has reacted on Twitter in the most Metta World Peace way imaginable.

Update: This—part or all of it—is some sort of PR stunt, because in in this gilded age, even the most banal things are guerrilla marketing. A Deadspin staffer got this email yesterday, excerpted in part:

Next Media Animation, the Taiwanese animation company that produces short cartoons recapping the news of the day, has its best muse in sports, where the lines between good and evil lend themselves to pictures of angry video game characters, and events are just cartoonish enough to spark the overactive NMA…

Every morning, the fine folks at Sports Radio Interviews sift through the a.m. drive-time chatter to bring you the best interviews with coaches, players, and personalities across the sports landscape. Today: World Peace has come to terms with what happened that day.

I was one of those Internet people who participated in the rebranding of Ron Artest when he arrived in L.A. a couple years ago. I wrote a sidebar to this Maxim article that branded Artest as the NBA's most lovable goofball, an article included bullshit quotes like this one from Phil Jackson:

Metta World Peace earned an ejection from today's Lakers-Thunder game when his celebration after a second-quarter dunk included an elbow to the side of James Harden's head.

Our old friends at the Harvard Sports Analytics Collective took a long-overdue look at whether Ron Artest's early-career practice of drinking Hennessy cognac at halftime hurt his play. "Sure enough during the 2001 and 2002 seasons his free-throw percentage during the third quarter was 67.21% compared to 72.33% that he…

The former Ron Artest's game is slipping. His numbers are down, and even his trademark defense isn't what it once was. Is it because he's 32 now? It is because he arrived for training camp out of shape after spending the offseason changing his name, doing stand-up, and texting his dong? Nope. World Peace had just…

Every morning, the fine folks at Sports Radio Interviews sift through the a.m. drive-time chatter to bring you the best interviews with coaches, players, and personalities across the sports landscape. Today: how the Lakers communicate on the court.

Ron Artest's jersey now says "World Peace" on the back, and presumably he's become an entirely different person since the name change became official. But there's one Artest quality we can still count on: Metta World Peace is still totally insane.

Every morning, the fine folks at Sports Radio Interviews sift through the a.m. drive-time chatter to bring you the best interviews with coaches, players, and personalities across the sports landscape. Today: the former Ron Artest is still getting his new credit cards.

NBA players like rapping, and that is a fact of the universe that we are powerless to stop. The way that I have tended to deal this phenomenon is generally to ignore it completely. It is shockingly easy to do: Just as I do with Kreayshawn, I pretend that NBA rappers do not exist, that they have never existed, and that…

Not content to spend the lockout doing "hasty and shapeless" stand-up comedy, The Dong Texter Formerly Known As Ron Artest has gone one-and-done on "Dancing With The Stars." If you wish, feel free to view his effort here. The Los Angeles Times said his was a "stiff cha-cha" that was simultaneously "buckets o'…

Your morning roundup for Sept. 5, the day Arizona (against all odds) got a little bit worse. Photo of Artest at rehearsal via @LakerNation. Got any stories or photos for us? Tip your editors.

Where to begin? Ok, the cast.

"A court official said, 'Ron has to clear outstanding traffic warrants' before a name change can take effect. ... His next court date is set for Sept. 16." [Los Angeles Times, via SLAM Online]

From now on, he really is going to be known as Metta World Peace. And he's changing his number. No, not that one. [Yahoo]