FanHouse John Kuester

Until last week, the last time the Detroit Pistons played a game in which neither Rip Hamilton or Tayshaun Prince started was the 2001-02 season -- when Prince was a senior at Kentucky and Hamilton still coming into his own playing alongside Michael Jordan in Washington.

Needless to say, adapting to life without those two mainstays -- Hamilton suffered a high ankle sprain in the season opener, and Prince joined him on the trainer's table with a back injury two games later -- has been an unexpected hurdle for first-year head coach John Kuester, who's now tasked with helping a starting lineup featuring four new additions to the team develop chemistry.

AUBURN HILLS, Mich. -- The arrivals of Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva in Detroit made headlines across the entire NBA this summer. The return of Ben Wallace, on the other hand, was barely a footnote.

In a way, it makes perfect sense. Overlooked and ignored at the start of his career -- Wallace spent four anonymous seasons bouncing around the league before emerging as one of the most dominant defenders of his generation in Detroit -- it's only fitting for him to be written off yet again as he nears the end.

But what first looked like a purely sentimental signing by the Pistons might prove to be so much more as Wallace makes his case for a starting job -- something that even Wallace admits has caught him by surprise.

"I had absolutely no expectations at all," Wallace told FanHouse after Sunday's win against the Hawks. "I didn't even come back here expecting to get a jersey. I'm just coming in here and working hard and whatever happens, happens."

John Kuester has agreed to terms to become the next coach of the Detroit Pistons.

Kuester wasn't Joe Dumars' first choice. (That'd be Doug Collins, who kept his hat in the ring just long enough to know that he was wanted.)

And while we're being frank, Kuester clearly wasn't Dumars' second choice, either. (That'd be Avery Johnson, who used the leverage of being owed $8 million over the next two years by the Mavericks to demand more than Dumars was willing to give.)

But at the end of the day, there's still a good chance that Kuester was still the right choice.

The Pistons' head coaching search has narrowed, with the former favorite to secure the job now apparently out of the running.

Avery Johnson was perceived as the leading candidate for the position, considering the fact that Joe Dumars had said that after the Michael Curry debacle, he wanted someone with more experience to run the team this time around. But after two days of negotiations, ESPN is reporting that contract talks have broken off, and now two assistant coaches are believed to be the front-runners for the job in Detroit.

The Cavaliers have only played a single playoff game but they're already picking up the hardware: Mike Brown presented with the Red Auerbach Award honoring him as the NBA's coach of the year at a press conference in Cleveland earlier this afternoon.

FanHouse previews the first round of the NBA Playoffs.

The Pistons and Cavs have a lot of history together, which is fortunate, because that's the only thing that makes this series the least bit compelling. The Cavs finished the season as the most dominant team in the NBA, leading the league with a franchise record 66 wins and terrorizing opponents with an 8.9 point differential. The Pistons, on the other hand, posted their first losing record since 2001, winning just 18 times in their last 50 games. This could get ugly.

The Rotation is a weekly study on the NBA by one of our All-Star voices. In rotation this week is Tom Ziller.

An annual tradition regular as daybreak, as the season ends a pack of coaches are mercilessly hacked to pieces by fans, media and often their own bosses. A parade of potential replacements jumps aboard the carousel. They dance, they preen ... one of them wins. A year or two or (fingers crossed) three later, said doll gets torn apart. The cycle continues.

There was a switch this season, though: the bloodletting happened during the season, as a record eight coaches met the iron maiden between opening night and Valentine's Day. Is there anyone left to execute at season's end?

Well ... yes. Of course there is. After the jump, we tell you whom and guess their replacements.

The Magic and Cavs couldn't have picked a better time to play each other for the first time this season than last night. As if a game between a pair of teams with two of the top four records in the NBA wasn't enough, there was also the individual matchup between Orlando's Jameer Nelson and Cleveland's Mo Williams, two point guards vying for one spot on the Eastern All-Star bench.

The All-Star reserves were officially announced shortly before tip-off, and despite Williams' initial attempts to congratulate Nelson, Williams clearly felt the coaches got the vote wrong.