SAN ANTONIO ? Rasheed Wallace gained a full realization of the depth of the friendship between coaches Larry Brown and Gregg Popovich when the Detroit Pistons were trying to come up with a strategy to stop a specific opponent.

“We were in the locker room, and he said, ‘I just got off the phone with ‘Pop.’ Let’s try playing these guys like this,'” Wallace recalled.

Strategies are only one of many things shared by the two coaches in the NBA Finals who have developed such a close friendship that Popovich was the best man at Brown’s wedding.

Brown was the head coach and Popovich the lead assistant for the U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team last summer in Athens, and they also spent the prior summer together with the Olympic qualifying team. They talk on the phone nearly every day, and they and their families have shared more meals than either can remember.

“They’re homies,” Wallace said.

“I’m sure tonight they’ll be together and go to dinner,” Pistons assistant coach Dave Hanners said Wednesday. “And I think Thursday when they throw it up, they’ll be competitors. And that’s what they love.”

The friendship between Brown and Popovich is one of the most compelling stories of the NBA Finals between the San Antonio Spurs and Detroit Pistons.

Game 1 is tonight, with tipoff at 8:19 p.m.

“I think they know each other so well, the chess game may be a little more interesting than it would be with other people,” Spurs assistant coach P.J. Carlesimo said. “With these two, they spend so much time together that they know how the other one thinks.”

The relationship between Brown and Popovich grew during the mid-’80s after Popovich was a college coach at Division III Pomona-Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., and took a yearlong sabbatical to observe coaching techniques, spending half the time at Kansas University and the other half at North Carolina under Dean Smith, Brown’s mentor.

Brown hired Popovich in July 1988, to be an assistant with the Spurs, and the friendship blossomed from there.

“When I was a college coach, my dream was to play against coach Smith in the finals of the NCAA. I always felt it would be a win-win, and I could probably say the same thing for (playing against) Pop,” Brown said.

The two grew even tighter over the past two summers, their Olympic roles taking them through Puerto Rico, Germany, Turkey, Serbia and Greece.

Spurs center Nazr Mohammed is one of two players in the series, along with teammate Bruce Bowen, who played under Brown in Philadelphia and now plays for Popovich in San Antonio.

“There aren’t many differences. You won’t play unless you play ‘D’ – that’s the biggest similarity,” Mohammed said. “They’re both teachers of the game, and I like the way they both get out there and they show you what they want you to do. It’s not just about ‘Do this’ and then don’t explain it to you.”