These Aren’t Those Lakers

AUBURN HILLS, Mich. —  Lakers’ world without end, amen.

It didn’t take the hiring of Coach Phil Jackson to show their continuing importance. After Game 1 drew a 7.2 rating -- second lowest for a Finals opener -- the league put out an amazing release, noting it compared favorably to “the last NBA Finals matchup not to feature the L.A. Lakers.”

That was the 2003 San Antonio Spurs-New Jersey Nets thriller, which drew an overall 6.5 rating, the lowest in NBA history.

Of course, as the league acknowledged, a series without the Lakers can’t be compared to one with them. The Lakers are the Lakers. Everyone else is only everyone else.

A lot of good things happened this season amid the bad, with the Phoenix Suns, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade emerging and Shaquille O’Neal going East to rebalance the conferences.

But one thing happened, the importance of which wasn’t widely understood but which was almost as inconvenient for the league as for Laker fans:

Those Lakers are no more.

That’s with or without Jackson, as Phil acknowledged last week while Lakerdom partied as if it were 1999 and he was arriving for the first time to coach O’Neal and Kobe Bryant.

It’s great for the Lakers to have Jackson back. As prominent season-ticket holder Jimmy Goldstein pointed out, 2,000 renewals will pay Phil’s $10-million salary. Without Jackson, they might have lost a lot more than 2,000 season-ticket holders.

However, it doesn’t signal a return to greatness. The only thing they’re likely to contend for is the last playoff berth. They’d be a longshot to make it out of the first round, but even that would be an achievement.

It’s great for the Lakers for a humbler but all-important reason: It’s a return to dealing in reality.

A Laker official insisted Jerry Buss knew it wouldn’t be the same without O’Neal. If that’s true, Buss just said the words without realizing what would happen when it didn’t turn out to be remotely the same: The world falling in on Bryant; fans venting their anguish; season-ticket holders sitting on their renewal applications (so the deadline was pushed back into July); no way to make the team better immediately; everything riding on a free-agent strategy that depended on adding no salary and was still two seasons away, unless Yao Ming and Amare Stoudemire signed extensions, in which case it was three seasons away.

The situation didn’t change when Jackson came back, only the person in charge. As he said, “It’s all about taking the first step

For starters, he wants to turn Bryant and Lamar Odom into Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. It might be possible, but because Bryant and Odom were simply two players who both needed the ball last season and didn’t complement each other, you can’t say it’s a lock.

It depends on two things:

* Getting Bryant to play within a team concept, as opposed to playing within it until things go bad and then abandoning it.

* Getting Odom to stop deferring to Bryant and becoming a 15-point-a-game role player.

Yet to be determined is whether the Lakers will retain their free-agent strategy, which means taking on no contracts that go beyond the summer of 2007, or if they think there would be no one there, the summer of 2008.

They might go another way, such as that deal they tried to make with Utah over the All-Star break, trading Caron Butler, Vlade Divac and Devean George for Carlos Boozer.

That really was discussed, even if lots of people (ahem) had fun with TV analyst Jack Haley, who reported it was imminent and wound up holding the bag.

Jazz owner Larry Miller thought Boozer had quit on them but wasn’t ready to give up on him. Now, however, knowing his no-nonsense coach, Jerry Sloan, is coming back, Miller is reportedly eager to get out from under Boozer’s five-year, $60-million deal.

The big question is, if the Jazz moves Boozer, will it be to the Lakers?

On one hand, Boozer, like Bryant, is a Rob Pelinka client and may ask to go to the Lakers.

On the other hand, the Jazz may find a better offer. With Andrei Kirilenko and Matt Harpring, the best part about the Butler-George-Divac package is that all their contracts would be up in a year.

The question for Jackson is whether he wants to pursue a free-agent strategy, limiting his acquisitions over the next two or three seasons -- when he’ll only be here three seasons?

By itself, Jackson’s arrival is exciting for Laker fans whose expectations are -- temporarily -- so diminished, they’d be happy just to be back in the playoffs.

It’s big news around the league because of the soap opera angles: Will Phil and Kobe get along, dueling egos, blah, blah, etc., etc., gag me with a spoon.

“Jackson’s Biggest Hurdle Will be Bryant’s Ego,” said a Washington Post headline. ESPN Insider’s Chad Ford wrote, “With Jackson back in the saddle in L.A., the chances that Kobe stays in L.A. long term don’t look very good.”

With Bryant’s departure so near, Ford quoted an unnamed GM as saying, “I don’t think you can get equal value for Kobe. Maybe you get 80%, but is that enough? I think one of the lessons people have learned from this summer is that trading a superstar never turns out well for the team that decides to pull the trigger.”

Actually, people have been learning that lesson since 1965, when the San Francisco Warriors traded Wilt Chamberlain to the Philadelphia 76ers for Connie Dierking, Paul Neumann and Lee Shaffer.

I’m assuming Jackson and Bryant will get along, contrary to what everyone else assumes. If they don’t, it will be like the good, old days after all, just without the championships.

If Jackson gets out of the first round in three years, it would rival anything he has done. This is about not getting caught up in everyone’s expectations, but in leaving the franchise in 2008 in better shape than he found it in 2005.

Because it was going down the drain, that will be enough of a trick.

Faces and Figures

Buss was right (cont.): In his last season with the Lakers, O’Neal, upset at not getting an extension, said he would take three seasons (two plus the one he had left) from anyone else -- but only accept three plus one for a total of four from the Lakers. Now, Miami is getting set to give him a total of five seasons, through age 38. Said Heat President Pat Riley: “From my experience with big men, we did not start the dynasty in Los Angeles until Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] was 32 years old. From the time Kareem was 32 to the time he was 42, the team won five championships.” ... Of course, Abdul-Jabbar was a yoga enthusiast who was always in condition. Even after last summer’s unprecedented conditioning course, O’Neal still was hurt at the end of the season, gained weight while he was out and struggled through the playoffs, limited by his lack of stamina as well as his bruised thigh....

Comeback of the year: Dwane Casey, named coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves, was the University of Kentucky assistant who sent the Emery envelope with $1,000 in cash to the father of recruit Chris Mills that came open in the company’s office in 1988. Emery settled a $6.9-million lawsuit filed by Casey, who subsequently served stints as an assistant coach under Gregg Popovich in San Antonio and Nate McMillan in Seattle.... Whether Paul Pierce is traded or not, he’s out of favor. “Pierce turned off many Celtics fans with his behavior at the end of the sixth game against the Pacers,” Providence Journal columnist Bill Reynolds wrote. “Scratch a Celtics fan now and odds are they would love to see Pierce moved.” ... Yet another candidate for that Clipper shooting guard spot: Bonzi Wells, out of favor in Memphis after clashing with Coach Mike Fratello and being suspended in the playoffs. Mike Dunleavy coached him in Portland and likes him.

Despite leaguewide speculation that Milwaukee will take Marvin Williams with the No. 1 pick, Andrew Bogut says he thinks it will be him. Asked what number he would wear, Bogut said the Bucks have already retired the No. 4 he wore in college to honor Sidney Moncrief. “I just found out,” Bogut said. “I’ll have to think about that one.” ... Portland, which was focusing on high school shooting guard Gerald Green at No. 3, is rethinking its position after Green’s agent said he would work out for the Trail Blazers only by himself. GM John Nash called that a “sign of weakness and a lack of confidence. I asked his agent what the downside was and he said he could get fired. And I told him that a year from now the same thing could happen to me if I make the wrong pick here. I mean, I’m 58 years old and I can make a jump shot by myself, unguarded in a gym.”

Detroit’s Rasheed Wallace, who gets fined weekly, skipped a mandatory media session last week. Coach Larry Brown said he was angry that the Pistons’ starters and reserves were introduced separately before Game 1. The league didn’t announce a fine, either because Commissioner David Stern didn’t want to overshadow the Finals further, or realized it’s actually a blessing when Wallace isn’t talking.