2008-09 NBA CHAMPIONS

By BILL PLASCHKE

June 17, 2009 12 AM PT

FROM ORLANDO, FLA. — The cameras didn’t catch him. The champagne never touched him. The team partied far from him.

Late Sunday night here in Amway Arena’s loud visitors’ locker room, a tall, paternal figure stood with his family in a distant corner.

He watched the Lakers pour champagne on one another with the satisfied smile of a father watching his children play in a sandbox.

He listened to the Lakers howling and screeching with the satisfied silence of a father who knows there is nothing he needs to say.

The Lakers acted as if they didn’t need him.

The Lakers know they would not be NBA champions without him.

Another night, another title for Mitch Kupchak, the unassuming architect of a team that has brought him three rings yet few plaudits in his years as general manager.

“I think this is a great triumph for the Buss family,” Kupchak said Sunday, deflecting credit the way Lamar Odom deflects in-bounds passes.

Which is why right here, right now, the record needs to be set straight and a perception needs to be fixed:

Mitch Kupchak, more than anyone else in the organization past or present, is responsible for building the 2009 champions.

“I didn’t bring all these guys in,” he said quickly, emphatically. “I did not bring all these guys in.”

He paused.

“There was one guy who has been here since I became general manager, and he is a pretty good player,” he said.

See? There he goes again. Kupchak not only gives all credit to the Buss family, but he also makes sure we don’t forget it was Jerry West who made the draft-day trade that allowed them to acquire a certain Finals MVP.

OK, fine, we’ll try again.

Mitch Kupchak is responsible for building the 2009 champions except for Kobe Bryant.

“Yes, but it’s not one person doing this, it’s an organization working together,” Kupchak said.

Yes, but in his 22nd year as a club executive and ninth as general manager, it is an organization that has slowly been built in his image.

Solid, smart, with a willingness to work selflessly and later share the credit.

Everyone still wants to thank West, but c’mon, nine years is nine years. Kupchak not only built the team, but he guided it through one of its roughest patches.

He has been ripped by his best player, ridiculed by fans, compared unfairly to West at every angle, yet he has carried it all while usually making the right decision at the right time.

He may not have drafted Kobe Bryant, but he certainly didn’t blink when the Lakers’ franchise player demanded to be traded during the spring of 2007, allowing Bryant to settle down and get back to work.

Kupchak started the healing process by bringing back Derek Fisher when few wanted him -- because he knew Fisher could be Bryant’s buddy and buffer.

“It’s not the easiest thing in the world to play with Kobe. Sometimes you’ve got to be willing to stand up in the locker room and say something that others will not say,” Kupchak said. “Derek was that guy. Kobe respected him for it, and still does.”

Kupchak traded for unheralded Trevor Ariza because he had watched him since Ariza had played for Westchester High and knew he could play defense.

“Trevor is an L.A. kid, a gym rat, and very tough,” Kupchak said. “He’s a lot tougher than people think, but we watched him for a long time, we knew that.”

Kupchak brought in Lamar Odom in the Shaquille O’Neal trade because he thought even underachievers can shine in the right spots.

And he plucked Pau Gasol from Memphis because he knew the Grizzlies couldn’t afford him.

He filled this team with good guys and hard workers who, despite living around Hollywood, behave more like they play in Kupchak’s college town of Chapel Hill, N.C.

“They’ve always had that reputation,” Fisher said of the Lakers’ front office under Kupchak.

“Players that make a difference, players that have an impact on the team, players that the city feels good about. . . . Those are the guys that they’re going to take care of.”

Kupchak also helped engineer the return of Coach Phil Jackson after owner Jerry Buss blew him off for a year, even though Jackson sometimes steals Kupchak’s player personnel thunder.

“Mitch has gone ahead and really mined what level of talent we have,” Jackson said. “He’s been very cooperative in working together as far as a collusion of ideas in this system that I run.”

It’s Jackson’s system, but Kupchak’s culture -- from the lack of showboating to the scarcity of trash talking to the way the players help one another on defense.

Remember how, early in these playoffs, on the sideline during the fourth quarter of Game 3 in Denver, Fisher famously implored the Lakers to step into their destiny?

From the moment he was ordered to trade O’Neal in the summer of 2004, Kupchak was offered that same opportunity, and has taken it.

He has since stepped out of West’s shadow and into that destiny, carrying a franchise in his stride.

The quiet general manager of the NBA’s resounding champions is, indeed, sometimes hard to find.

But without him, it is the Lakers who would be lost.

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Follow Plaschke on twitter at twitter.com/billplaschke.