Chris Herring: The stakes are incredibly high in Los Angeles for multiple reasons. The Lakers traded the farm for Anthony Davis. He'll be a free agent after this season and there's no guarantee he'll stay in purple and gold if things go off the rails. (The Dwight Howard fiasco, in which this exact scenario played out, is still a raw memory for Lakers fans). Beyond that, James is on the downside of his career, even if he's still performing at a level we've never seen for his age. One...

Kevin Arnovitz: Andre Agassi's autobiography, "Open," eloquently shares the physical and mental anguish of the aging athlete. On the first page of the introductory chapter, Agassi introduces himself as a heaping bundle of bones, muscles and joints who now wakes up every morning as a "stranger to myself." "I'm a young man, relatively speaking," Agassi writes. "Thirty-six. But I wake as if ninety-six. After three decades of sprinting, stopping on a dime, jumping high and landing hard, my body no longer feels like my body, especially in the morning...