FanHouse Kurt Thomas

The agent for Ramon Sessions has told FanHouse he does not expect Milwaukee to match Minnesota's four-year, $16 million offer sheet for the point guard. But a new trade rumor leaves open the possibility that Milwaukee is trying to cut enough salary to fit Sessions back into the equation.

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.

There was a lot of activity in the NBA this week, and we're not just talking about the draft. Some of the NBA's big names and better teams were in on it.

Here's a quick look at the trades that went down and what they mean:

The Deal: Phoenix sends Shaquille O'Neal to Cleveland for Sasha Pavlovic, Ben Wallace, a second-round pick in 2010 and cash.

The Thinking: The Cavaliers get an aging O'Neal, with the hope that he can have a productive year playing alongside LeBron James. The only way this trade is a success is if the Cavaliers are the 2009-10 NBA champions. For the Suns, trading O'Neal means that they are beyond tinkering and are leaning toward turning over the personnel of a team that missed the playoffs last season.

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San Antonio needed a major infusion of offensive talent this season, and it appears the team has found it. Multiple league reports indicate the Spurs have traded for Milwaukee's Richard Jefferson, sending away only bit players Bruce Bowen (age 38), Kurt Thomas (age 36) and Fabricio Oberto (age 34), according to Yahoo!'s Adrian Wojnarowski.

Jefferson has been in Wisconsin for one year, following last June's draft day trade which sent Yi Jianlian and others to New Jersey. Jefferson has always been a moderately efficient scorer, and he should provide some relief for Tony Parker and Tim Duncan in the Spurs starting line-up. He's not quite an ace defender, but he played hard for Scott Skiles last season and hasn't missed a game in two seasons.

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One question for the San Antonio Spurs: Now what?

Sure, it's possible the Spurs can put together a nice effort on their homecourt in Game 5 on Tuesday night and push their series against the Mavericks to a sixth game in Dallas.

And maybe the Spurs could even follow that up with an unlikely Game 6 win on the road and make their first-round series a seven-gamer.

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Biggest Reason You Should Watch: This match-up is the closest thing that the NBA has had to a consistent rivalry this decade. This is the fifth time since the 2000-01 season that these teams will meet in the playoffs: There's history here, people. The Spurs are also still the defending champs, and going through the top-seeded Lakers to get back to the Finals would be a pretty strong accomplishment.

San Antonio Can Win If: They can lock the Lakers up defensively. Since Pau Gasol's arrival, the Lakers' offensive efficiency has been off the charts. For the Spurs to have a shot, they'll have to make the most of their chances offensively and really slow things down to throw the Lakers off of their game.

Los Angeles Can Win If: They don't fall in love with the three point shot. When the Lakers' offense is clicking, it's because of the team's ball movement and their decisions to pass up good shots to get great shots. Sometimes they'll get open threes, and start taking too many of them, often resulting in long rebounds and easy transition baskets for their opponents. The Spurs are going to have a hard time matching the Lakers' offense in this series, L.A. doesn't need to give them any help by taking bad shots.

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

The playoff series between the Hornets and the Spurs has been consistently one-sided so far -- the home side. The local team has won each of the six games by at least 11 points, the first time such a statistical anomaly has occurred in NBA history. I think that's likely to change tonight though, because for all of the Hornets talent, the Spurs' collective experience is likely to be the deciding factor.

It's been argued that experience is overrated in the NBA playoffs, and Chris Paul was used as the poster boy and case study to prove the argument to be true. But playing well individually and winning home games is one thing.

The Hornets have really been the better team this entire series. They've largely stuck to what has worked for them all season, while the Spurs have had to make some substantial adjustments from game to game. But now the Hornets will have to prove they can evolve: For an upstart team to eliminate a team with a ring in a Game 7 -- even in your own building -- is something else entirely.

Donyell Marshall wasn't exactly excited about leaving the playoff-bound Cavaliers for the basement-dwelling Sonics, but in the weeks since being traded he's warmed up to his new team.

In the latest entry on his blog, Marshall explains how he found out about the trade (from a reporter calling his cell phone), his blown-out-of-proportion flap with P.J. Carlesimo (it was over by halftime) and what he sees his role being with his new teammates, since he's not, you know, actually playing:

It was difficult, but I believe one reason that they brought a guy like me here was to mentor the young guys. And just like I was close to LeBron – within the first week me and Kevin Durant and Jeff Green talked a lot. Kevin said he really liked having me here and a lot of the players really don't talk to him. I sit down and have conversations with the young guys, and I guess it really wasn't like that before.

I don't know about you, but reading that kind of depressed me. I can imagine that some veterans might resent Durant for being hailed as the franchise's cornerstone even though he's the league's youngest player, but it also shouldn't have taken until the trading deadline for an older player to get into his corner. I know the salary cap dictated most of the team's deadline deals, but hearing this makes me wonder to what degree Delonte West, Wally Szczerbiak and Kurt Thomas showed the rookie a cold shoulder.

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

The NBA has seen an unprecedented amount of player movement this season, including three deals which can only be described as flat out blockbusters. But as the choke-time Mavericks and suddenly atrocious Suns are learning, bringing in new, big name talent doesn't necessarily make your team better. It just makes it different, and different isn't likely to get you to the Finals. Now that the hype has blown over, it's clear that the Lakers have built themselves for a title, while the Suns and Mavericks are worse off than before they started. But why?

The trading-for-a-superstar craze began of course with the Celtics. Boston's off-season acquisitions of Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett -- along with the team running out to a fast start and the league's best record -- "proved" a couple of things to general managers everywhere. One, teams that aren't going anywhere are willing to move their superstars, for the price of young unproven talent and/or some players with expiring contracts. This creates immediate flexibility for future moves under the salary cap, and/or buys the GM years of job security while waiting for the young players to come into their own. And two, guess what? When you have a team stocked with All-Stars, there's a good chance that you can compete for a title.

With the NBA trade deadline looming, Trade Machinations rounds up real rumors (and creates fake ones) of moves that'd make the NBA a better, brighter place.

What does Orlando want? "In trade talks with various teams, the Magic have been looking to add a defensive-minded power forward, mostly using a variety of their players with expiring contracts as bait." What has Seattle got? Kurt Thomas. Now, yes, you can argue that Thomas has a monster 8 million dollar expiring contract. But I can argue that Orlando has a package -- James Augustine, Pat Garrity and Carlos Arroyo -- that makes more expiring contract money than Thomas. So the Sonics pick up a little extra cap room next year, and Orlando lobs them a second round draft pick as well for their effort. Or not lobs.

Thomas provides the Magic with the defensive power forward they want, Seattle gets to add to it's future cap space and Thomas, who is apparently expendable now that Robert Swift will be stealing his playing time, gets to not be an eight million dollar waste on a non-contender.

Will it happen? Yes. Yes it will. The only hold up here -- I would imagine -- is whether the Sonics and Magic want to consider anything that might involve either J.J. Redick or Chris Wilcox. Well, that and the full compensation for the swap: draft picks, etc.