Zach Haper of CBSSports.com's Eye On Basketball has a nice video tribute to Portland Trail Blazers forward Nicolas Batum's 5-5-5-5-5 performance against the New Orleans Hornets on Sunday night. Remember, Batum joined a selected group of players by registering at least five points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks in the same game. He finished with 11 points, 10 assists, five rebounds, five steals and five blocks in 42 minutes.

Here's the video.

Kelly Dwyer of Yahoo's Ball Don't Lie offers his two cents.

It's the long ones like Nic that tend to make these stat lines come alive. He's athletic enough to pull off the tougher parts - doubling the amount of blocks and steals it takes, on average, to lead the league in that particular category - and also skilled enough to toss the odd assist (or 10) and score enough. All the things that you need to put in place to earn the sort of four year, $46 million contract that Portland and Minnesota (who wanted to sign him, last summer) fought to hand the guy.

...

I guess. Though he is frightfully brilliant down the stretch of games. Weirdly, I've turned into a needless Nicolas Batum obsessive.

Big thanks to conspirator5 in the FanShots.

-- Ben Golliver | benjamin.golliver@gmail.com | Twitter