Seven questions for the next seven days:
As the clock ticks down toward the Feb. 18 trade deadline, you have to wonder how much more of the bad blood drip, drip, drips out of the relationship between Andre Miller and coach Nate McMillan before the Portland Trail Blazers decide it just makes sense to turn the page.
It's difficult enough for the Blazers to keep soldiering on in the face of all those debilitating injuries. But there has to come a time when Miller's unhappiness with his role in Portland has an effect on the rest of the locker room. The latest episode came in a closed-door, open-floor meeting between McMillan and his team last week that disintegrated into a shouting match.
"We're almost halfway through the season and I still don't know what's going on," Miller has told reporters in Portland.
McMillan and general manager Kevin Pritchard say it's simply all part of the adjustment process Miller has had to make to the Blazers' culture.
If it's not one thing, it's another rocking the boat in the Orlando Magic kingdom. Once upon a time -- way back in 2009 -- it was supposedly coach Stan Van Gundy's constantly carping negative tone that was holding back last season's runners-up from reaching their potential. Now the alarm bells are ringing because the Magic don't have a vocal leader -- that's you, Dwight Howard -- to get them through the rocky parts of games and the long season.
Could it possibly be that the Magic won 59 games last season, surprised many by running the gauntlet through Boston and Cleveland in the East to reach the NBA Finals and then tossed the right formula out the window when they sent Hedo Turkoglu and Courtney Lee packing to Toronto and New Jersey? Of course, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
A four-game road trip to visit Sacramento, Denver, Portland and the L.A. Lakers will only further test the Magic's harmony.
There's no doubt that European royalty these days isn't what it used to be. But Dirk Nowitzki should hit the 20,000-point plateau -- he's 16 away -- on Wednesday night at home against the L.A. Lakers, further cementing his reputation as the best NBA player ever to come out of Europe.
Perhaps it's fitting that the achievement will come against L.A., because for all of the attention and credit that Kobe Bryant gets for being the tent pole holding up the Lakers, Nowitzki has shouldered the same burden -- and never with Shaq at his side -- for more than a decade.
OK, so the ink is barely dry on Pau Gasol's contract extension with the Lakers. But the hamstring injury that has kept L.A.'s power forward on the sidelines for the past week has only emphasized how critical he is to the team's success. While the Lakers bench continues to struggle to produce meaningful contributions on a consistent basis, the defending champs are only back-to-back material when the starters are all healthy. With Gasol in the lineup, the Lakers are a step above everyone else in the Western Conference. Without him, they're Kobe jacking up 30 and 37 shots a night and everyone else merely watching.
While it's just a meaningless exhibition game with more of the attention often focused on the courtside celebrities, shouldn't there be something done to protect the so-called intergrity of the All-Star Game if Tracy McGrady and Allen Iverson are voted onto the starting lineups?
While Iverson's play with the Philadelphia 76ers has been anything but his former All-Star level, at least he's often on the floor and trying to play. McGrady made just six cameo appearances -- 45 minutes total -- for the Houston Rockets before demanding a trade and leaving the team to continue his rehabilitation from microfracture knee surgery in Chicago.
You have outstanding players such as Utah's Deron Williams, who is caught in a logjam of guards in the West among Kobe Bryant, Chris Paul, Tony Parker, Steve Nash and Chauncey Billups, potentially losing out on an All-Star team slot to a guy who doesn't even want to play for his own team.
How many times do you see this many teams impressively turning around seasons that could have been going over the edge with mid-course corrections?
The Memphis Grizzlies lead the way -- after a woeful 1-8 start they now find themselves back to the .500 mark at 18-18. The New Orleans Hornets have picked up the pieces from coach Byron Scott's firing in November to now win six in a row. The Toronto Raptors have won eight of their last 10 to erase their losing record and climb back into the Eastern Conference playoff race.
For all of the improvement, there are disappointments at the other extreme and that would likely put Indiana's Jim O'Brien and Philadelphia's Eddie Jordan on the hottest coaching seats. O'Brien's Pacers have not been able to generate the kind of defensive attitude that was hoped for coming into the season and Jordan's Sixers have been an unadulterated mess since the middle of November. Even though Jordan is in the first year of his contract in Philly, GM Ed Stefanski refused to guarantee that he was safe through the end of the season. Pacers president Larry Bird vows O'Brien's job is safe and "the players are the ones that are probably going to leave."
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