Never a Del Moment

The best thing to say about what remains of the Lakers’ season is that at least it’s shorter than usual.

Only 38 games left, and now it’s more important to watch the calendar than the standings. After firing Del Harris on Wednesday, the Lakers are biding time from here on out, counting the days until they can bring in a coach who will get the most from these players.

Let one of the assistants--the pick here is Larry Drew--handle the duties for now. He could use it as an audition for somewhere else, a place where there’s less pressure and expectation, because there’s too much invested in this team to leave it in the hands of an unknown entity for too long.

If the Lakers have championship aspirations, then they must hire a coach who has proven he can win a championship.

The pool of active coaches who won titles as a head coach is a shallow one, and most candidates are easily weeded out. Here’s the complete list: Atlanta’s Lenny Wilkens, Miami’s Pat Riley, Houston’s Rudy Tomjanovich, Orlando’s Chuck Daly and Golden State assistant coach Paul Westhead.

Take away K.C. Jones and Bill Fitch--who both won titles with the Celtics, an automatic disqualification here--and there’s one other man who won rings since 1980. He has a track record of working well with Dennis Rodman to boot. Best of all, he’s there for the taking, with nothing on the agenda right now except making corporate motivational speeches and fund raising for his buddy Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign.

If Phil Jackson isn’t on the sidelines by the time the Staples Center opens next season, something went wrong.

The Lakers shouldn’t get sticker shock, because they ought to know right now that Jackson will want a salary starting at $6 million a year.

They shouldn’t worry about desire on his part, because he already wrote about his intrigue in coaching Shaquille O’Neal and the Lakers in a national magazine.

They shouldn’t worry about availability, because Jackson has not booked any speaking engagements past this summer just in case the right NBA team came calling.

Other teams have already called and been turned down. Would Jackson turn down the Lakers?

“We don’t discuss hypotheticals,” said Jackson’s agent, Todd Musberger. “We can honestly say that the Laker situation is only a hypothetical. We have not had any contact with them and we would never initiate any such contact.”

Even if the notion of Jackson coming to the Lakers is only hypothetical right now, it beats any other hypothesis out there.

If five championship rings are reason enough to justify signing Rodman and all his baggage, Jackson’s six championship rings as coach of the Chicago Bulls ought to be enough to have Jerry West on the phone to Musberger today.

If the players won’t respect Jackson, they won’t respect anybody. Just the fact that he got Michael Jordan to buy into his system ought to get Kobe Bryant’s attention right off the bat.

One area where the Lakers cry out for change is on offense, where they throw the ball into Shaq and then stand around and grow mold. That’s quite a contrast to the constant motion employed by the Bulls.

Then again, the Bulls never had an inside force like Shaq, so Jackson would have to adjust to that option. But if he can blend his Christian upbringing with Zen and Native American beliefs, he ought to find a way to incorporate motion with a low-post game.

Unlike the every-day-is-Game-7 Riley, Jackson knows that every season has its ebbs and flows--or, to put it in terms he would probably use, yin and yang. With the Bulls, he would place mini-breaks into the season, such as taking an extra day with no practice in Miami to let his players relax and soak up the sunshine before returning to Chicago in winter.

But that was with a veteran team that earned such perks. The Lakers would probably feel entitled to them before they even won a game.

One thing we’ve learned about the Lakers is there are no simple answers. Even if they brought in Jackson, who’s more likely to quote a Hopi saying than John Wooden, there’s no guarantee the players would buy into his mystic talk. Can you really picture Shaq, Kobe, Eddie Jones and Elden Campbell sitting cross-legged and chanting in an incense-filled room?

At least Jackson doesn’t drone as long as Harris. The Lakers had clearly tuned him out. He asked them to stop talking about trades or Rodman or any other distractions, and they went right on chatting.

Longtime Laker fans know this franchise has a history of firing coaches early, then going on to win championships with fresh faces, whether it was Westhead replacing Jack McKinney in 1979 or Riley replacing Westhead two years later.

History isn’t about to repeat itself.

The difference was those teams had players who knew how to win. The 1979-80 team had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Jamaal Wilkes, who had both won championships in college and the pros. And even though Magic Johnson was a rookie that year, he was fresh off an NCAA championship; that’s more than any current Laker could claim when entering the league. When Riley took over in 1981 he had the core of the 1980 championship team intact.

Harris had a team nobody wanted in 1994-95, and he took it to the second round of the playoffs and won himself a coach-of-the-year award. But this is a different team--only Jones and Campbell remain from that squad, and for how long is anyone’s guess--with a different level of expectations.

The knock against Jackson in the ‘90s, as with Riley in the ‘80s, was that anyone could win with that talent on the roster. We’ve seen that not just anyone can win with the talent on the Lakers. Phil Jackson is not just anyone.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: j.a.adande@latimes.com