Lakers Hog the Spotlight Again

“Believe it or not,” ESPN’s John Saunders said from a seat in Auburn Hills, Mich., a couple thousand miles away from the real news in the NBA on Tuesday, “there is actually a game of basketball to be played tonight. It is Game No. 3 of the NBA Finals, San Antonio coming on the road with a two games to nothing lead over the defending champs.”

It was mid-June in the NBA, and Los Angeles was the place to be. Never mind the Spurs and the Pistons and David Stern’s he-doth-protest-too-much assertions that he is thrilled to have the Spurs and the Pistons in the NBA Finals. Never mind too that the Lakers ended this season further away from the NBA Finals than the Clippers, sitting out their first postseason in more than a decade.

Phil Jackson was back as coach of the Lakers, which meant the Lakers were back on top of the NBA news cycle, regardless of whatever else was on the prime-time schedule.

This is life in the NBA in the early 21st century: You can take the Lakers out of the Finals, but you cannot keep the Lakers from overtaking the Finals.

Of course, by Tuesday afternoon, America already had seen two rounds of Pistons versus Spurs, which, most of America had to agree, were two too many.

By comparison, listening to a bunch of loudmouths, even Stephen A. Smith’s, shout out opinions about Jackson and the Lakers and Kobe Bryant and Mitch Kupchak sounded like the essence of scintillating entertainment.

On this strange day when ESPNews swiftly morphed into the Phil Jackson Network, USA Today readers were greeted by this blaring front-page headline: “Jackson free.”

Talk about yesterday’s news. One day, Michael Jackson is free. The next, Phil Jackson is back in shackles, chained once more to the ball of confusion known as Laker basketball.

Perhaps with too many Jacksons and too much Jackson news on his mind, ESPN “SportsCenter” anchor Fred Hickman made this mistake when advancing the Phil Jackson story:

“Phil Jackson [is] coming back to the Lakers. And as you know, he is the lord of the rings -- nine championships, six with the Chicago Bulls, three consecutive with the Los Angeles Lakers. Of course, those first six, Michael Jackson was around, the last three Shaquille O’Neal was around. It’s a much different scenario he’s moving into now.”

Michael Jackson is still around, but it’s unlikely Phil would have won any of those championships in Chicago with Michael Jackson in his backcourt instead of Michael Jordan.

The will-Phil-return story has dominated these Finals, much to the embarrassment of ABC, which built an over-hyped Game 1 pregame show around an “exclusive” interview with Jackson last Thursday that was supposed to produce the news that finally broke Tuesday. No go. Instead of a bombshell, poor Mike Tirico was confronted by Stonewall Jackson. The result was an awkward exchange that yielded little beyond Jackson’s “longest pregnant pause in history” comment that left many, Kupchak included, disappointed and confused.

Tuesday, the Jackson story soaked up even more of ABC’s pregame air time, but this time, Tirico sounded happy and relieved to announce that the evening’s “other story is the man who coached his last game in this building 364 days ago, Phil Jackson with the Lakers.

“Of course, he left, the Lakers dissolved, Shaquille O’Neal traded to Miami, Kobe Bryant re-signed as a free agent, Jackson coming out with a book with a lot of criticism of Kobe in there. Well, after all that and ‘will-he’ and ‘won’t-he,’ today it became official. Phil Jackson will return to coach the Lakers. A three-year contract.”

A contract worth reportedly $10 million a year, a number that quickly caught ABC analyst Bill Walton’s attention.

“Now we know Phil’s price on the player-coach relationship,” was Walton’s initial comment on the news. Then he added, “Kobe, for this thing to work, has to become a team player and allow Phil Jackson to do his job as the coach.”

Isn’t this where Jackson exited this time last year before heading home to write a book in which he called Bryant a lot of bad things, including, memorably, “uncoachable”?

Greg Anthony tried to lend Bryant a hand.

“Two things tell me that Kobe Bryant is starting to grow and mature,” Anthony said. “The first is the hard lesson he learned last season when it was quite evident that he alone is not good enough to take the Lakers to that championship level.

“Secondly, and probably more importantly, is the fact that he deferred and said, ‘Look, I will accept Phil Jackson as a coach.’ Because after all the personal issues that they had, this guy is looking beyond that. I think he wants to win.”

Walton was insistent about what he considered the crux of the story.

“This is about the money,” he said.

Scottie Pippen, longtime Jackson loyalist, believes it’s about the titles, saying on ESPN that his former coach is driven to break his tie with Red Auerbach and become the first man to win 10 NBA titles. “I think that’s definitely something that he will continue to challenge as long as he’s in the game,” Pippen said.

A quickie ESPN.com survey suggested Jackson’s second ride with the Lakers will end in disappointment. Of more than 65,000 respondents, 78% predicted Jackson’s second Laker stint would produce no NBA titles.

Online survey respondents can be so cynical. From the perspective of the NBA and ABC, currently mired in Pistons versus Spurs, there would be no raining on this parade. After moderating an afternoon round table on the Jackson signing, Saunders observed, “The fact that we have spent already about 40 minutes talking about this shows you that the biggest winner right now is the entire NBA. Because having Phil Jackson in it means the Lakers will be better. The Lakers being better means the NBA will be better.”

Or, the NBA hopes, at least better-watched.