Jackson Leads to Promised Land

Zen and the art of pushing the envelope:

“I felt comfortable there would be a big improvement,” Laker owner Jerry Buss was saying Monday night, drenched in sweat and disbelief. “But to think he’d take us all the way to the championship, I couldn’t imagine that.”

And so, the boss was surprised.

“I think we needed Phil to do it,” Shaquille O’Neal said.

And so, the star player was convinced.

It had come to this. One year and three days after Phil Jackson signed a contract to coach the Lakers at $30 million for five years, the man who backed up the money truck said he didn’t expect it. The MVP center said he was impressed, after the coach who had previously won six championships in the 1990s with the Chicago Bulls did it again in Los Angeles.

But, um, wasn’t it supposed to be like this?

Yes and no, thus the adulation and the accomplishment that came with another championship for the old coach and his new team. The expectations were there. Just maybe not this season.

That was also Jackson’s doing. He arrived, took over a team that had O’Neal and Kobe Bryant and immediately, masterfully, lowered expectations. Things could be slow at the start, he said. New offense, new players and all that. Who knows where they’d be.

Everyone fell in line, right up until the 16-game winning streak and then the 19-game winning streak, and then maybe the grand dreams didn’t seem so far off. When those became reality with the finals-clinching victory over the Indiana Pacers, the job was complete.

Jackson was a champion for the seventh time.

Jackson was only the second coach to ever win titles with two different teams, joining Alex Hannum.

Jackson was worth all the money and all the hype. As in, perhaps no one else could have pulled this together?

“Great question,” Buss conceded. “I guess the answer’s no. There’s some great coaches, but I think this took a very special combination of talents. Pat Riley, a long time ago, was able to knit together a bunch of superstars and make them into a team. Phil has been able to do that with this team. And at least in my mind, I’d have to doubt that anybody else could have done it.”

Said O’Neal: “Phil and his coaching staff was a staff that was going to bring this team over the hump. We always won 50, 60 games. When we got into certain situations in the playoffs, we could never get over the hump. We had home-court advantage but we made a lot of mistakes in the playoffs. But Phil was able to keep his poise and have us watch film.

“When you look at a guy like Phil, if you’re a leader, he’s not worried. Why should you worry? He prepared us very well. A lot of tape. Going to the practice facility two times a day, playing, watching film.

“And the thing I really like about Phil is how he got the other guys to play. That’s what I liked about when he was with the Bulls. I played with Steve Kerr one year. He couldn’t hit a shot. Could not hit a shot . . . When he was with the Bulls, guys like him, [Jud Buechler], Luc Longley, what they did [was impressive]. So Phil was a great motivator and a great people person and he did a great job with all the role players.”

As all the adulation was being heaped on him, Jackson said he was in no position to contemplate the larger meaning of the title.

“The first practice I had in October I stopped the practice and I said, ‘You guys can’t play with the kind of energy I demand as a coach and you have to lift that up.’ They found a way to do that. But that was the key to whether we could win or not.

“I didn’t think they could play with the kind of intensity defensively that it takes to be a championship team. From that standpoint, I’m very pleased they were able to bring that level up to a maximum effort this year.”

And the weight of the six previous rings?

“Wow, I don’t know if I can hypothetically go to that level,” Jackson said.

There was no need to, hypothetically or otherwise. Monday night said it all.