UPDATE: Dwight Howard's technical from Game 4 against the Cavaliers -- his sixth of the playoffs -- has been rescinded.

As much as today is one of the greatest days in Magic history -- up 3-1 on the mighty Cavaliers -- there is a dark cloud, and it is the technical foul on Howard.

That's his sixth of the playoffs. If he gets a seventh, he'll be suspended for a game, which could be monumental, given the time of year.

Dwight Howard made this bucket, had some kind of celebration, and got his sixth technical of the playoffs. If it's not rescinded, he'll be one technical away from being suspended for a game -- and the only games left this season are either elimination games or Finals games, so they all matter. (Photo by Fernando Medina/NBAE via Getty Images)

(Insane idea: Howard almost should have gotten himself another one at the final buzzer last night, so that he would have assured his ability for Games 6 and 7, if necessary. His next suspension wouldn't come until his ninth technical.)

The consensus among TV commentators and Magic fans was that this technical was a weak one -- Howard seemed to be doing nothing more than emphatically celebrating a tremendous bucket. He fended off a double-teaming LeBron James, drove the baseline, and scored through a pretty serious intentional foul (pictured) by Anderson Varejao. Then he gave a quick flex of his big muscles, and shouted something or other.  

But of course we don't really get to know what the technical was for. It's entirely possible there is more to the story than what we the public got to see on TV.

Wouldn't this be a good case for the referees to explain themselves to the media, as they sometimes do? Perhaps there was a really good reason for the technical.

Or, perhaps there wasn't. 

And that possibility, I suspect, is why the NBA handles these things so quietly. Don't we all suspect there's an excellent chance Howard's technical will be rescinded, as so many have throughout the playoffs?

Howard has blogged about the technicals, and sounds genuinely baffled:

Speaking of fighting, how about those tackles that Varejao put on me a couple of times during the game??? And I'm the one who gets the technical foul!!!! I was just playing with emotion. You get in the game and you score a big bucket, you let your emotions take over. I wasn't taunting Varejao or anything. My thing was, it was a tough play, he grabbed me around the neck and I made the shot, so hopefully they will look at it. ...

This thing with the T's is bugging me pretty bad right now, but I can't let it take me away from my focus on helping us get the job done. I can't believe that I've had six of them called on me so far, and some of them have just been crazy. I'm not a dirty player, I don't talk a lot of trash and I don't curse the officials, so I can't figure out why I keep getting them again and again.

Hopefully, the league office will look at this one and realize it was just the heat of the game. There was no taunting. I've already had to miss one game because of my elbows, and I made a promise to myself that I'd never have that happen again with my elbows. The thought of me having to miss another game is killing me, so I've got to keep my mouth shut and my elbows down.

Several people echo Howard's notion that Howard has been the victim of a quick technical whistle in these playoffs. TrueHoop reader Steven did the hard work of looking up the times of all of Howard's technicals, and I just watched them all on Synergy Sports. Here is a rundown:

• April 22, Game 2 vs. Sixers, 4:33 Third Quarter: Clearly a Technical
  Howard get the ball in the post against Theo Ratliff. Ratliff crumples to the floor, almost certainly flopping, but gets the call. In anger, Howard fires the ball at the photographers on press row. No, he wasn't passing it to the referee. He was angry, and this was a technical that would have been called on anyone.
• April 28, Game 5 vs. Sixers, 9:15 First Quarter: Double Punishment
  One of the scariest plays of the playoffs, where Howard nails Samuel Dalembert with a hard elbow to the head. The rules call for an automatic ejection.
• Instead he got a technical from the referee and a subsequent one-game suspension from the league office. The irony is that if he had been ejected he would have missed part of one game. By getting the seemingly milder technical, this play could contribute to Howard missing two. Another point: He served his time for this crime already, right? Seems odd to have this technical still count. Hasn't the NBA essentially decided that there was contact, for which the punishment was a suspension. And doesn't that mean the technical was a bad call? Odd to have both punishments in effect. You could make the case that technical should still be rescinded.
• May 14, Game 6 vs. Celtics 7:46 First Quarter: Taunting Scalabrine
  Somehow Dwight Howard is guarded in the post by Brian Scalabrine, who flops. After scoring, Howard drops the ball onto a fallen Scalabrine. Perhaps he says something, too. This is the kind of thing that has often been considered taunting and punished with a technical.
• May 20, Game 1 vs. Cavaliers, 9:42 Third Quarter: Heated at the Referee
  LeBron James, as a help defender, blocks a Howard shot at the rim. Very hard to tell if there was contact or not, but Howard certainly thought there was, and as he turned to get back on defense, he threw an angry "air punch" in the direction of the nearest referee, while screaming something or other. It's something you see in every NBA game, and often it's not punished with a technical, but I'd want to know what he said before saying this was a bad call. Another case where it might be nice to hear the referees' side of the story.
• May 24, Game 3 vs. Cavaliers, 2:49 Third Quarter: A Mystery
  Howard was battling with Ben Wallace in the lane, and was called for a foul. Wallace went flying out of bounds on the play, either because Howard shoved him, or because he acted like Howard shoved him. After the play, there's a timeout, and nine players head to the huddle, but Howard stays behind, holding the ball above his head on the baseline, distraught at the call. Here's where my video lets me down, because I can't see what happens next, but I do know he was whistled for a technical immediately afterwards.

Put it all together, and what do you get? You get extremely important calls -- owing to their potential contribution to suspensions -- that are a little hard to understand. Technicals are rescinded by the League at a high rate, which gives the impression that referees have tendencies to be overly aggressive handing them out.

I understand the the league's top priority is eliminating bench-clearing brawls, and the seeds of those brawls are in some of the kinds of things that Dwight Howard does, like elbowing Samuel Dalembert, or dropping a ball on a fallen Brian Scalabrine.

But as for a heated moment of screaming at a referee, or being emphatic after a big made bucket ... I'd hate for a tremendous series to be decided by something like that. (Playing without Superman in the Sixer series, the Magic romped. So maybe the prospect of a suspension shouldn&
#39;t be quite as dire as it seems to Orlando. But you'd hate to count on it.)

I'm also, now, for the first time, baffled that his swung elbow could be punished by both a suspension and a technical. It seems that couldn't possibly be proper. The suspension was a bigger penalty -- an entire game vs. a partial one -- than what the rule book calls for. A technical in addition seems to be going well beyond the rulebook.

And if technicals are going to be so important in the playoffs, shouldn't fans and players have a clear understanding of what is and what isn't a technical? In the regular season, I really don't care. But in the playoffs, with so much on the line, I find myself hungry for real explanations of what happened in each case. I also can't help but wonder why all this stuff is so secret. I don't know why, but am certainly aware that the secrecy lets the league office do whatever it wants in such situations, without possibility for second-guessing. In an age when everything is available on internet video, and evidence is available to support anything fair and true, secrecy just seems weirder and weirder by the year.