Counter-Point

Now that the Lakers have finally made the trade for Glen Rice, winning a championship this season went from a nice option to a mandatory requirement.

That’s what happens when you trade young for old and the known for the unknown.

And the problem with this trade is, the Lakers just stepped into a great big world of unknown.

Here’s what we know for sure: Rice is a great shooter. The Laker scouts who watched him work out Monday reported that still holds true even after he had surgery on his right elbow.

It could very well turn out that sending Eddie Jones and Elden Campbell to Charlotte for Rice, J.R. Reid and B.J. Armstrong (who subsequently was released) will be remembered as the move that led to an NBA title.

But if bringing in Rice answers the outside shooting problem, it raises many more questions in the short term.

After this team finally started developing chemistry, how will it adjust to such an important new piece?

Will it help to bring in a guy who wasn’t too enthusiastic about coming to L.A. when the deal was first proposed?

How many shots are Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant willing to give up to get Rice his chances?

Bryant has flourished at small forward, so is it wise to move him back to shooting guard?

How will this affect the defense?

These all need to be considered. This isn’t a rotisserie league. Bringing in a 22-point-a-game scorer doesn’t guarantee success.

Especially after the product the Lakers had was working.

Rice flourished in Charlotte and Miami by running his defenders ragged through a maze of screens. The current Laker offense doesn’t work that way. Laker Coach Kurt Rambis said they have some plays they can use for Rice, and now that Rodman has taught this team how to set picks they might actually work. Might.

This team keeps contradicting itself. They trade away Nick Van Exel over character issues, then bring in Rodman. They make this win-now move, then cut Armstrong, who is the type of veteran jump shooter this team could use on its bench. They kept rookie Ruben Patterson instead. Executive Vice President Jerry West likes Patterson’s athleticism and apparently thinks he can step in and defend opposing shooting guards now that Jones is gone. Maybe he can.

That’s the state of the team after this trade. It rests on mights, possibles and maybes.

“You knew what you had with Eddie and Elden,” Rick Fox said. “It’s always difficult [to change] when you play well. Things looked like they were going on the right path.”

West said even though the Lakers had won eight consecutive games before the trade, they weren’t necessarily playing well. While the victories did mask some of the team’s shortcomings, the fact that the Lakers were playing harder and smarter led you to believe they were getting their act together.

This Laker team already has undergone more alterations than Paula Jones. It’s absorbed a new coach in Rambis, signed “an unusual player” (those are General Manager Mitch Kupchak’s words, not mine), and now this.

With 29 games left and the number of practice dates limited because of the lockout-compressed schedule, the Lakers basically have to start from scratch.

It could take 20 games just for them to get back to the level they were at this past weekend.

Without Jones and Campbell and with the new players still en route to L.A., the Lakers had all kinds of new combinations on the court Wednesday night against the Clippers. The Lakers looked lost--confused over defensive assignments, ragged on offense.

One night after Rodman showed off the positive side of his signing by grabbing 20 rebounds, he showed the loose cannon side and got kicked out of the game in the third quarter after receiving his second technical foul--while seated in front of the bench. The officials probably have an excessively quick trigger when it comes to giving Rodman technicals. But Rodman should know that by know, just like the Lakers should have known he’d have meltdown moments like this when they signed him.

This probably made for good practice for the next time Rodman bails out on them. The Lakers need to practice all aspects of the game.

“We’ll have to mesh things together again,” point guard Derek Harper said. “It’ll be a little different . . . I think we have to see how it all works out.”

Now that Rice is coming, the pressure’s on West and Rambis and Shaq and Kobe. The brass came into training camp saying that their 61-win season and trip to the Western Conference finals were a pretty nice accomplishment. The team they had was certainly capable of an equivalent performance this season and should have only improved with time. Now, apparently, that’s not good enough.

The fans voiced their disapproval of this move by chanting “Ed-die, Ed-die.” Even Jack Nicholson weighed in with a silent protest, wearing a cap that had Jones’ and Van Exel’s names next to basketballs with wings on them.

All will be forgiven if the Lakers win the championship. If they don’t, this whole season will have been a waste and the Lakers will enter the off-season with a 37-year-old free-agent point guard (Harper), a 38-year-old free-agent power forward (Rodman) and a 32-year-old forward coming off elbow surgery whose focus will be on signing a mega-money contract (Rice).

That’s the worst-case scenario.

Actually, it could be even worse. They could be the Clippers.

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