Before last night’s Game 4, Phil Jackson shot down the rumors about a possible return to Chicago.

“I have no, at all, desire to go back to Chicago and coach the Bulls,” Jackson said, responding to an ESPN.com report from Monday night that the Bulls had reached out to Jackson through back channels to gauge his interest in a return.

Jackson went on to say that the “probabilities are great” that he’d be coaching the Lakers next season, though the franchise has made it clear that they expect him to take a pay cut.

The timing of this is curious. The Lakers are still in the playoffs, and Jackson is fielding questions about his 2010-11 salary and a possible job change. Sometimes he gets caught up in using the media to tweak his players or tweaking the media just for fun, but there’s a possibility that this is becoming a distraction to a Laker team that came to Phoenix looking invincible and is leaving the Valley of the Sun knotted in a 2-2 series and licking its proverbial wounds.

With the media in a tizzy trying to predict the landing spot for LeBron James and several other big-name free agents, these questions are going to come up over and over again. Sometimes the best way to answer is just to say “no comment.”