FanHouse Gregg Popovich

There's a loophole in the NBA's trading rules that goes something like this: one team will include a player in a deal -- usually a guy who's older, can still play a bit, but won't command a ton of attention on the open market -- only to see that player waived by his new team, and be signed a month later by the team that dealt him in the first place.

(Don't believe me? Just hop into your DeLorean and ask Brent Barry about it back in 2008.)

Many observers wondered if that's exactly what San Antonio was planning to do with Bruce Bowen, after he was included in the deal with Milwaukee that brought Richard Jefferson to town. But according to Gregg Popovich, it's not likely that Bowen will be back as a member of the Spurs next season.

In the dog days of summer, every NBA team is filled with championship dreams.

OK, that's a crock of Jerome James-flavored gumbo. Most teams are well aware that the only gold at the end of an NBA season's rainbow is named Jose. And I'm not talking about just the Clippers or Kings here. I'm also talking about the Hawks and Sixers and Hornets and Jazz. There are only a handful of teams that are genuinely in the hunt. And most champions will tell you it takes a precious combination of talent, obscenely hard work, and lots and lots of luck to cash in the ticket to immortality. Some teams expect to contend for a championship. Rarely does any team expect to win a championship, if it's not currently holding the ring (or waiting for it to arrive in the mail).

The San Antonio Spurs, of course, are a pretty rare team. And they have been for the last decade. And much of their success is due to their equally rare head coach.

Red Auerbach's record of nine NBA championships as a head coach -- a mark the Celtics legend has shared with Lakers boss Phil Jackson since 2002 -- finally fell Sunday night. I'm sure when Auerbach stepped aside to let Bill Russell take his title many thought Red's record would never be caught. That it took three threepeats and then some to get Jackson over the hump tells you how much fate plays a role here.

Will we ever see another coach surpass Jackson's new record (assuming Jackson doesn't add on in the coming years)? It seems really unlikely, given modern circumstances.

Here's a nice little mix from the NBA of some of the funnier highlights from this year's postseason press conferences. Besides the irony of LeBron James saying that "talking is what he really does," there's some good stuff from Gregg Popovich wondering if he's getting "punk'd," and Stan Van Gundy using the proceedings to ask a local high school to vote for his daughter for student council.

The real stars though are Ron Artest, Aaron Brooks (or at least his choice of attire), and Yao Ming, who in my opinion delivers the funniest line of them all as the clip comes to an end.

AUBURN HILLS, Mich. -- When Manu Ginobili didn't travel with his teammates to New York earlier this week due to soreness in his right ankle, speculation arose that he might be nursing a serious injury, especially when the team was slow to update his status. After all, with the league's trade deadline looming Thursday afternoon, why would San Antonio give up any leverage?

Once the deadline came and passed, Gregg Popovich spoke candidly about Ginobili's condition before Thursday's game in Detroit. "I just got official reports from the doctors, they say he's got a stress reaction in his distal fibula of his ankle," Popovich said. "Not a stress fracture, [but] a stress reaction, which is very different. A stress fracture goes all the way through the bone, and a stress reaction, I'm told, is just topical."

AUBURN HILLS, Mich. -- The trade deadline came and went without the Spurs making a move -- although, if you believe Gregg Popovich, it wasn't for lack of options. "Sure, there were like five or six things we almost did," Popovich said in his best deadpan. "Huge trades. And then at the very last second we said no to all of them."

OK, so Pop was kidding -- he had reporters in stitches a couple of times during his brief pregame meeting Thursday evening -- but there's no denying that rumors had surrounded his club all week. Among the Spurs who heard his name mentioned the most was Roger Mason, and hours after he learned once and for all that he was staying put, I caught up with him for a few minutes in the Spurs' locker room.

The Spurs are just two games into an eight-game road trip, and apparently, they're already too tired to compete. Because after a gritty overtime win in Golden State on Monday, Gregg Popovich decided to rest his three best players the next night in Denver, which, to the surprise of absolutely no one, resulted in a loss for the Spurs.

Manu Ginobili was said to be out with a hip contusion, and Popovich didn't specify why he held out Tim Duncan and Tony Parker, except to say it was "for a variety of reasons."

A report from the US Airways Center in Phoenix, where the Spurs faced the Suns on January 29th.

PHOENIX, Ariz. -- Shaquille O'Neal is having a resurgence this season. His scoring and rebounding averages are the highest they've been since his '05-'06 championship season with the Heat, and his play has earned him a trip back to the All-Star game, an honor he didn't receive a season ago.

Perhaps the most surprising of all of Shaq's improvements has come at the free throw line, where he's shooting a repectable .628 this season -- 10 points higher than his career average. So before the game against San Antonio, when Spurs' coach Gregg Popovich was asked if he would employ the hack-a-Shaq given O'Neal's improvement at the foul line, he gave a rather interesting answer.

FanHouse's NBA Guide gives you a daily look at all the games that matter ... and some that don't.

Headliner
Cleveland at Orlando, 8 PM ET, TNT

Isn't the headliner supposed to come after the undercard? Not in tonight's front-loaded TNT double-header. The Magic and Cavaliers each boast one of the top four records in the league, and while they've been lumped together with the Celtics all season as the only legitimate contenders in the East, we've yet to see these two teams actually go at it.

Today's release of the Pedowitz Report -- which, among other things, backed up the league's assertion that Tim Donaghy was the only one doing what he was doing -- prompted David Stern to take questions from the media via conference call. Here were some of the hightlights:

- The question was asked that if the report found that referees were not manipulating the outcomes of games, how were they able to win between 60 and 70% of their wagers? Stern answered simply, "I don't know," then questioned the reporter on that statistic. He added that he hadn't seen those numbers and that he didn't know if that was accurate. But he guessed that if you start by guessing and you're at 50-50, any additional piece of inside information would be likely to increase your odds of guessing correctly.

- Speaking of inside information, that was the reason the commissioner gave for implementing the game-day release of the names of which officials would be working which games. He said that the more information that's available publicly, the less of a gambler's advantage there is, because there would be almost no inside information anymore. Stern stated that the "gambler's edge would be blunted" by the release of more public information.