Compiled by Chris Bernucca 

• SIXERS: He wasn't in the gym yesterday when the 76ers resumed practice after their West Coast swing. No one could say definitively whether he would be in the gym again. But Allen Iverson, in his own way, remained a presence. The Sixers continue to say he is out indefinitely as he copes with the illness of his youngest child, Messiah, 4, who, by all accounts, continues to battle a problem that has yet to be specifically diagnosed. When will Iverson be back, if at all? Apparently not for tonight's game with the Orlando Magic in the Wachovia Center. Phil Jasner in the Philadelphia Daily News 

• BOBCATS: A source close to the Charlotte Bobcats confirmed Sunday that Michael Jordan made a huge personal financial commitment to cut a deal to buy the team. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the process, said Jordan's decision came just before a Friday-night deadline to make a deal or lose his right of first refusal. Had he lost that right, Bob Johnson likely would have accepted an offer from a group led by former Houston Rockets president George Postolos. Now Jordan's challenge will be recruiting investors to share the risk of owning the Bobcats, once Jordan is approved as controlling owner sometime in the next two months. As the source said, Jordan won't want to risk possibly "losing $30 million a season," all by himself, as Johnson has of late. Rick Bonnell in the Charlotte Observer 

• BULLS: Despite a lifeless performance in a 100-90 loss to the Indiana Pacers in their last game on Saturday, the Bulls (31-28) went 6-2 during a stretch of eight games in 12 days following the break. Maintaining that momentum will be a challenge with the slew of quality opponents on the homestand and the remainder of the month. Of the Bulls' 15 March games, 10 are against teams with a record of .500 or better. John Jackson in the Chicago Sun-Times 

• CAVALIERS: Cavaliers center Shaquille O'Neal will have surgery on his sprained right thumb on Monday morning in Baltimore, which likely will mean he will be out for the remainder of the regular season. Though the Cavs did not place any timetable on O'Neal's return, injuries of this nature that require surgery typically take six to nine weeks to heal. In 1995, O'Neal suffered a torn ligament in the thumb that caused him to miss 22 games for the Orlando Magic. There are seven weeks remaining in the regular season. Mary Schmitt Boyer in the Cleveland Plain Dealer 

• CELTICS: As they stand now - wobbly as the aftershocks of Saturday’s loss to the New Jersey ne’er-do-wells still reverberate - the Celtics [team stats] are masters of their own fate. Or demise. Ray Allen noted that no cavalry is coming over the hill to the rescue. About the only substantive change the club could make now would be, in anticipation of greater doom, to fire team physician Brian McKeon and replace him with Dr. Jack Kevorkian. But Rasheed Wallace thinks such talk is unwarranted. He still believes the Celts will engage their parachute, break their fall and regain their place in the championship discussion. He is sure of this, citing the Celtics’ experience and heart. As a guy much wiser than the apparent crazy man arguing with referees, however, Wallace understands that all these points must be corroborated by actions. Steve Bulpett in the Boston Herald 

• HEAT: There might have been only two people at Amway Arena on Sunday night who weren't surprised by Heat guard Dwyane Wade's unexpected return from a four-game injury absence. One was Wade. The other was the coach Wade just loves to torment. ``He's played well against us,'' Orlando Magic coach Stan Van Gundy said when informed before Sunday's game of Wade's return. ``So I just figured he would [play].'' Wade was back after missing four games with a strained left calf, and he was in typical attack mode against a team he has tortured with a 30-point average, his highest against any team in the league. But Wade's return wasn't enough to rescue the Heat from its struggles. Michael Wallace in the Miami Herald 

• JAZZ: For Wesley Matthews, just making an NBA roster as an undrafted rookie was an amazing feat. Earning a starting spot on one of the top teams in the league for a coach notoriously tough on rookies is an even more impressive accomplishment. But to have that Hall of Fame coach, Jerry Sloan, running offensive plays to get you the ball — as an undrafted rookie — is almost enough to make Matthews feel like this season is a dream. If it is, though, he doesn't want to wake up just yet. Matthews, now the Utah Jazz's starting shooting guard, was the No. 1 offensive option on several occasions during the Jazz's 133-107 shellacking of the Houston Rockets on Saturday night at EnergySolutions Arena. Loren Jorgensen in the Deseret News 

• KNICKS: Mike D’Antoni finally showed his infamous sensitive side which we’ve heard so much about - via coaches, players and fellow media members - prior to Saturday’s pounding at the hands of Zach Randolph and the Memphis Grizzlies. D’Antoni went on a diatribe about his philosophy concerning when and if to foul up three points in the final seconds. I’m still not really sure if I understand his philosophy but D’Antoni took issue with the fact that I had the audacity to question why the Knicks didn’t foul Washington’s JaVale McGee seconds before McGee set up Nick Young for a game-tying three in final seconds of Friday’s overtime win. Frank Isola in the New York Daily News 

• LAKERS: Pete Newell once told me that, even though he had such high regard for Jerry, he really was stunned about how much Jerry was tortured by all kinds of inferiority complexes. Pete said if you really wanted to understand Jerry West, you had to understand West Virginia. So that's what I tried to do, recreating how things were in the 1930s with the harsh story surrounding his family as he was just coming into adolescence. His father lost his job and went bankrupt trying to create another business. Jerry's brother was also killed in the Korean War, and he and his mother had a nervous breakdown over that. That led to a succession of events that resulted in beatings by his father. He identified most with his mother and really draws all his complexity from her. All these things, I didn't know. That's why it's so startling that he told me. I asked his sisters and brothers about it, and within 10 minutes, they were talking about it, too. It's very much an issue on the minds of his family members. I really wanted to solve the mystery of Jerry West. He's a very complicated guy who has had a huge impact and continues to be held in such high regard. I think he's probably the most influential figure in American basketball. Tom Hoffarth in the Los Angeles Daily News 

• LAKERS: While the Lakers are relishing their first victory over Denver this season, they may want to thank the Nuggets, too. For the bruises. For the cockiness. For the challenge. "They push us to the limit," said Lakers forward Lamar Odom, whose team has been honing a dangerous tendency for a couple of months -- playing just well enough to win. If that's just the way the regular season sometimes works in the NBA, Denver showed up Sunday at Staples Center to remind the Lakers what they can expect in the postseason. The Nuggets, happily, savor these matchups with the Lakers. It's Denver's chance to test itself against the team that took it out in the Western Conference finals last spring. It's Denver's chance to lay a foundation for a possible rematch. Gregg Patton in the Riverside Press-Enterprise 

• MAVERICKS: Sunday was the first game Caron Butler played without his now-famous straw chewing. He had his second-best scoring night since the trade (19 points) and had a hot start with eight points in the first quarter on four-of-five shooting. "Yeah, but I still need my straws," Butler said. And here's the agreement Butler and the league came to: he can chew the straws on the bench but he has to throw them away when he goes into the game. Butler estimated he went 15-20 straws Sunday against New Orleans. Eddie Sefko in the Dallas Morning News 

• NUGGETS: The Nuggets are on a mission, with Coach George Karl still on the sideline when he's not undergoing radiation and chemotherapy for cancer of the throat. It has brought them so much closer than the days when the Nuggets players were at his throat, such as their 4-1 first-round loss to the Clippers in 2006 when Karl suspended Kenyon Martin after a halftime screaming match.  "It is a major thing, but George's attitude has given us so much positive, man," Billups said. "He's so positive and upbeat, we see him like that and we have no choice but to be the same way. When we see him coaching games like this, coming out on the road, pouring his heart out for us, then we kind of owe it to him to return the favor." Mark Heisler in the Los Angeles Times 

• RAPTORS: Team meeting in the morning? The last time the Raptors found themselves in a predicament something like this – the last time they had a three-game losing streak, one punctuated by a thumping administered by a hungrier young team – they held the now-infamous team meeting in Washington that turned the season around. And while the straits are not nearly as dire today as they were in early December, there was definitely something out of sync with the team Sunday night. A 119-99 pasting at the hands of the Oklahoma City Thunder pales in comparison to the meeting-prompting 146-115 thrashing in Atlanta but the three-game losing streak Toronto's on right now has shown some glaring deficiencies. Doug Smith in the Toronto Star 

• ROCKETS: A fisherman, above all, must be patient. So Jared Jeffries, who would happily begin each day with a line in the water, waited. He waited through the season that began with a broken wrist and another stalled by a broken leg. He waited as he was identified by his contract, rather than his play. Most of all he waited for the day he would no longer be labeled as an example of Isiah Thomas' spectacularly failed tenure running the Knicks into the ground. He waited for this opportunity, for another chance. With the Knicks looking to jettison another contract that extended beyond this summer's planned free-agent spending spree and Jeffries owed $6.9 million next season, Jeffries expected to be traded. But he could not know what a trade driven by economics would bring. With the move to the Rockets in the three-team, nine-player deadline deal, he landed with a team that needed not just his contract to make the money work, but needed him to help. “It means a lot,” Jeffries, a 6-11 forward, said of quickly moving to a vital role in the Rockets' rotation. “I really enjoy the situation I have here and I think it's something I can build on." Jonathan Feigen in the Houston Chronicle 

• SUNS: Jason Richardson crouched at the 3-point line and put his hand over his mouth, as if he had just witnessed a car accident. It was the first break in the action Sunday after he had missed an open, one-handed fast-break slam seconds earlier that would have tied the score with 41.8 seconds left. It was the only shot the Suns got to tie the score in the fourth quarter against the Spurs, because the game ended with Steve Nash passing up a shot that would have tied it. It seemed like another unique way to lose at San Antonio - a dunk-contest champ missing a dunk and Nash making a wrong choice. But it was the Suns' old ways of slipping defensively that let three quarters of back-and-forth action slide into a 113-110 road loss at AT&T Center. Paul Coro in the Arizona Republic 

• THUNDER: Before the NBA season began, I predicted the Thunder would win 35 games. Nailed it. Nailed it with 24 games to spare.  With Sunday night’s methodical 119-99 victory over Toronto, the Thunder now has a record of 35-23, which is considerably more impressive than my projected 35-47. The Thunder’s winning percentage has crept into the 60s (.603). Last season’s final winning percentage was in the high 20s (.280). This year’s team is on pace to win 49½ games, which sounds ½-crazy. Winning 50 games suddenly seems like a reasonable request. John Rohde in the Daily Oklahoman 

• TIMBERWOLVES: The Timberwolves accepted center Al Jefferson's apology on Sunday for alleged drunken driving after Saturday night's loss to Portland, but they suspended their leading scorer for the next two games as punishment. Jefferson was arrested on Interstate 394 just outside downtown Minneapolis at 1:08 a.m. Sunday, a little more than three hours after he scored 19 points in the Wolves' 110-91 loss, and booked into jail on a charge of fourth-degree driving while impaired, said State Patrol Lt. Eric Roeske. Dennis McGrath and Phil Miller in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune 

• WARRIORS: This team is all about Curry now, and rightly so. He's worth watching just for the brilliant work with his left hand. He occasionally finds himself a split-second behind on the timing of his passes, but there's no denying his stunning improvement in all phases of the game. Consider the plight of a rookie asked to run an offense designed strictly around the shameless gunning of Ellis and Corey Maggette (now injured, a real break for Curry and fans of a sensible half-court set). A lesser man would have cashed it in by now, the disillusioned victim of shattered confidence, but Curry kept his poise. He sees the floor as well as any rookie in an extremely talented class, and he'll prove to be an even better pure shooter (in game conditions) than his heralded teammate Anthony Morrow. Curry just knows things, inherently, and that's a quality that can't be taught. Bruce Jenkins in the San Francisco Chronicle