(Renaldo Balkman – 13 points, 12 rebounds in Stevie Franchise’s return from the dead the Knicks’ 104-100 OT win in Atlanta, and the owner of at least one well-trafficked MySpace profile)

The greatest (if not the longest) CSTB headline of all-time is supplied by Tim Cook, who upon reading the following rant from bizarroland (ie. The Seattle Times’ Percy Allen) muses, “At least I have closure on why I have been rotting in Ray Allen’s MySpace friend request queue… It would seem as if Allen’s been shut down for the balance of the season to improve The Sonics’ NBA draft lottery chances, or “bone spurs,” or whatever you want to call it, so hope remains!”

The night after hanging out with ‘Bron, DWade5 and KB-8, I sat down with Ray Allen before his game against the Los Angeles Clippers and told him about my new friends. That’s when the Sonics guard and Chris Wilcox, who was within earshot, began snickering.

“What?” I said.

“That wasn’t LeBron or Kobe,” they said.

“Whaddayamean? Of course it was them,” I countered. “And it’s ‘Bron and KB-8.”

“Man, I supposedly got a page, too, but I’ve never seen it,” Wilcox said.

“I got three or four of them, but they’re fake,” Allen said. “They claim to be me or people who know me, but never in my life have I been on that site.”

It’s true. Allen has three sites on MySpace. On one of them he purportedly writes: “I’m sorry if you have sent me a message and I have not responded, but I have a lot on with my hands with the All-Star stuff and all so if you do leave me a message my assistant manager is always on my profile so he’ll answer questions if he knows the answers … Ray.”

“That’s not me,” the real Ray Allen said. “I don’t have time for that stuff. I got a baby at the house. … Those things are for kids.”

Aw man. This MySpace is a waste of time. I should have known. That P.Diddy reference was a dead giveaway. Any true friend of the rap mogul knows it’s simply Diddy these days. But then, ‘Bron seemed so real. He, she or whomever knew everything about the real LeBron James. And the site claimed to be official.

So I called the folks at MySpace and left a message. No one has returned my call as of yet.

“And they won’t,” said Eric Goodwin, an agent who represents Nate Robinson and Jamal Crawford. “We’ve been working with them to remove some fraudulent sites, but it takes forever. Basically, they told us that they have no control over their content.”

Not to question Goodwin’s credibilty, but if MySpace have proven relatively cooperative in taken down fake band profiles, it seems reasonable enough they’d do the same for a global superstar like N8.

Then again, Percy’s research might be a bit dodgy, too.