The Mag's Ric Bucher sent this note from courtside in San Antone.

I'm here to write about the Spurs -- they're the best team in the league, yet they're receiving scant attention, in large part because coach Gregg Popovich went to spy school and apparently learned how to camouflage entire franchises along the way. That's my premise, anyway.

I've known Pop since he was an assistant coach under Don Nelson with the Warriors, so our relationship is unique (in that I'm part of the media and we have one). Pop, an Air Force Academy grad, has a militaristic way of showing his affection -- he gives you flak. Friendly fire, as it were. So when he sees me, he yells, "Stay away from my assistants! I don't want any more of them getting hurt."

He is referring to the last time I was in town, when I played pick-up hoop with assistant coach/video coordinator Joe Prunty, who, as a result, needed a couple of stitches to close a gash over his left eye. (I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say we were on the same team.). Assistant coach Mike Budenholzer would have played as well, but he had broken his foot hooping without me several months earlier.

There are few teams I'm as familiar with from top to bottom as this team, which makes interviewing them hard. I sit down next to Derek Anderson to chat before a game against the Sonics and Tim Duncan immediately mimics how surreptitiously I sidled up to DA, as if we already were in mid-conversation. How do you get serious after that? The Spurs demonstrated by walloping the Sonics, who were in disarray after the suspended-not-suspended circus surrounding Gary Payton. The Sonics hung tough early on with Payton playing well and clearly determined not to open his famous piehole no matter what. When a couple of calls went against him, he paced around the court with his lips tightly sealed, his head looking as if it were ready to burst from the unreleased torment.

The Spurs, meanwhile, flaunted their new balanced look with six players scoring in double figures, led by Malik Rose and his newly developed jump shot. This team could sneak its way right to a title.

Ric Bucher is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine.