Editor Ira is here today to walk us through some of the shortest careers in NBA history.

Sports fans have a special reverence for players who manage to hang around for a long time. LeBron James is still putting up elite numbers during his 20th season of NBA basketball. NFL fans still speak with awe about George Blanda's four-decade-spanning career. Taj McWilliams-Franklin cemented her rep as one of the most beloved players in WNBA history when she won a title at age 40. Just last week, we ran a question about Chicago White Sox legend Minnie Miñoso, who, along with fellow Hall of Famer Satchel Paige, is remembered as much for playing professional baseball well into his 50s as for his on-field accomplishments.

For every one of these athletes of iron, though, there are hundreds of others who got the briefest taste of professional sports glory and never got to drink from the cup again. Those stories don't get told nearly as often, but they're probably a lot more relatable to the real-life experiences of us working stiffs. With that in mind, I'd like to take a look into the short-lived careers of three players who can truthfully tell folks that they were in the NBA, and then hope that there aren't a lot of follow-up questions.

Let's start with the longest-tenured of our profilees, and also one who holds a bona fide NBA record. Bubba Wells was a standout small forward for Austin Peay State University, a small Division 1 school in Tennessee that's best known (by me, at least) for being one of those funny-named schools that frequently makes the NCAA Tournament as a low seed and gets knocked out quickly. At 6-foot-5, he was somewhat undersized for a forward, but he was selected by the Dallas Mavericks in the second round of the 1997 NBA draft.

Wells played sporadically for Dallas that season, even putting up a 21-point game against the rival San Antonio Spurs, but more often than not he was relegated to the end of the bench. On December 29, 1997, however, Bubba Wells ensured his NBA immortality. In a game against the defending league champion Chicago Bulls, Mavericks coach Don Nelson sent Bubba in with one express mission: foul Dennis Rodman. Rodman was both a famously bad free-throw shooter and one of the best rebounders in the game, so the logic was to keep sending him to the line to miss shots that would be hard for him to rebound.

Bubba did his job and then some. In two minutes and 43 seconds of playing time, he fouled Dennis Rodman six times, thus setting a new record for fouling out of an NBA game faster than any player before or since. Unfortunately, the strategy backfired when Rodman made nine of his 12 free throws, meaning that Wells had basically sacrificed himself to give the opposing team nine extra points. At the end of the season, he was traded to Phoenix along with several other players in exchange for future Hall of Famer Steve Nash, but Bubba Wells never played another game in the NBA. (He did get another brief moment just shy of the national spotlight in 2006, when his fiancée was a contestant on "Deal or No Deal" and brought Bubba along as one of her boosters.)

Now let's turn our sights on another guy who committed almost as many fouls with even less to show for it. Trevor Winter is about as Minnesotan as NBA players come. The 7-foot-tall center grew up in the tiny southwestern Minnesota town of Slayton, played four years of college ball for the University of Minnesota, and kept it homegrown when he signed with the Minnesota Timberwolves as a free agent in 1999.

NBA fans might recall that season as one of the strangest in league history, as a dispute between team owners and the NBA Players Association led to a bitter lockout that delayed the start of the season until February, roughly three months later than usual. Winter spent the first month or so of the shortened season on the injured list, but finally got his big break on March 16. Timberwolves coach Flip Saunders informed him that he was going to be activated specifically to go up against unstoppable Los Angeles Lakers big man Shaquille O'Neal.

It wasn't Winter's size or defensive prowess that earned him the court time, however. According to Winter, Saunders told him, "You have five fouls to give, and for every foul you don't use, we'll fine you $1,000." Like Rodman, Shaq was a notoriously bad free-throw shooter, to the extent that fouling him excessively became a standard strategy around the league known as the "Hack-a-Shaq" defense. Winter was up to the task. He played five minutes, committed five fouls, and never took the court in an NBA game again, becoming one of three players in league history to record as many fouls as minutes played. He didn't get fined, though, so all's well that ends well!

And finally, let's take a look at another record-holder whose name probably isn't on the tip of most stat-heads' tongues. JamesOn Curry was one of the most legendary athletes in North Carolina high school history, setting a career varsity scoring record in a state that also produced Michael Jordan. (The unusual capitalization of his name, incidentally, is an elegant portmanteau of "James" and "Leon," his great-uncle and his father, respectively.) He had a successful college career at Oklahoma State before entering the NBA draft in 2007, going to the Chicago Bulls in the second round. Unfortunately, the team waived him before he played a game for them.

Curry bounced around the NBA Developmental League and various European leagues for a few seasons, eventually becoming a leading scorer for the D-League's Springfield Armor. He generated enough buzz that he eventually got a 10-day call-up from the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers. The Clippers were second-to-last in their division when they traveled to Boston on January 25, 2010, to take on the first-place Celtics. It was a fairly inconsequential game for everyone but JamesOn Curry.

In the third quarter of that game, Curry stepped onto the court as an NBA player for the very first time. 3.9 seconds later, he stepped off the court as an NBA player for the very last time. Curry played less than four seconds, recorded no stats, and went down in the record books as the most briefly tenured player in NBA history. He made sportswriter/national treasure Jon Bois' "10 Least Consequential Athletes of the Decade" list, which includes a four-second gif of Curry's entire NBA career and notes that he's fond of saying that he "probably got paid more per second than anyone else in NBA history."

That seems like the right attitude to me. In fact, from what I've read, all three of these fellas regard their sips of coffee in the pros with wry good humor. If there's a moral to these stories, I suppose it's that getting to the top doesn't always mean staying there for more than the blink of an eye, or doing anything more glamorous than landing half-a-dozen slaps on a guy bigger than you. Is that a valuable lesson in any way? Probably not, but heck, I'm a trivia writer. My job is coming up with good questions. The answers are your responsibility.