The Premier Basketball League, I learned 10 minutes ago, is a pro hoops minor league that's been around for about three years. A couple awesome facts about it are that Michael Ray Richardson was once its Coach of the Year and it used to have a team called the Vermont Frost Heaves, which wins the award for best franchise name of all time in any sport. Go Frost Heaves!

Like any good minor league, the PBL looks at the NBA lockout and sees an opportunity to gin up some pub and maybe attract a desperate, basketball-starved fan or two. To that end, as Scott Schroeder of Ridiculous Upside reports, they recently held a locked-out player draft. Apparently fans voted online for which players should go where, an American Idol-ish exercise in direct democracy I personally think the NBA should consider. And guess who the top overall pick was? That's right: Kwame Brown . Kobe Bryant. M-V-P!! M-V-P!!

The Rochester Razorsharks, three-time league champions (COUNT THE RINGZ, SON), have acquired the exclusive rights to Kobe's soon-to-be-epic PBL career. According to a press release from the league office:

The Premier Basketball League will now contact the agents of these players with contractual offers to play in the upcoming season. In addition, these players will have the opportunity to play on an all-star lockout team that will travel across the country in November or December of this year. The all-star lockout team will play in cities where an NBA team does not exist but has plenty of basketball fans.

That's all well and good, but if the PBL really wants to play with the big boys in terms of Kobe-related publicity stunts, they need to take a few pages from the Besiktas playbook. It goes something like this....

1. Announce that you're interested in signing Kobe and that you've had contact with his representatives.

2. Tell the press that money will not be a stumbling block in bringing Kobe on board.

3. Declare that your team president will soon be meeting with Kobe and is confident he'll sign.

4. Don't worry about it if no one can corroborate the claims in items (1) through (3). That's unimportant.

5. So what if Adrian Wojnarowski tells the world that Kobe is "nowhere near any kind of deal" with your team? Who's this "Adrian Wojnarowski" anyway? (*fingers in ears*) I can't hear you LALALALALALALALA.

6. Make sure to mention "Kobe Bryant" and your team name in the same sentence at least once every day in the presence of a reporter.

7. ?????

8. PROFIT.