THE PHIL TREATMENT

Two and a half months into the season, Phil Jackson has decided to coach the Lakers.

By winning a championship last year, the Lakers showed that they might be worthy of responsibility, like the first time your parents felt you were mature enough to be left at home without a baby-sitter.

The Lakers were on their own.

“I told them that,” Jackson said. “They were going to go at their own speed.”

Jackson came home to find the living room a mess, the dishes broken and the cat tumbling around in the dryer.

The Lakers have neglected their duties of running a deliberate offense and playing stifling defense.

Finally, Jackson has had enough.

“I think Phil is the type of guy who, he’s going to try to let us work ourselves out of it,” forward Horace Grant said. “Now he’s to the limit: ‘These guys are not where I want them to be, so I’m going to put the whip out a little bit.’ That’s what he’s doing. And we need it.”

Do they ever. They are not the elite team this season, and have done little to distinguish themselves from Portland, Sacramento, Utah or any of the other teams with a good shot at the NBA championship.

The biggest disappointment has been their lack of effort.

So Jackson has been “more expressive, I think, in terms of his dislike for certain things,” Rick Fox said.

“I would say ornery and disappointed,” Grant said.

Is it too late? Can Jackson undo the damage and attitudes that have set in?

He allowed the Shaquille O’Neal-Kobe Bryant feud to grow from an annoying buzz in the background into a high-decibel story making national news.

His rotation--the one, real criticism of his ways in Chicago--has been indecipherable to players. At times he has kept Brian Shaw out of action until the fourth quarter, then thrown the 34-year-old in and asked him to sort out the offense. Jackson hasn’t reacted quickly or felt the incentive to match lineups, as when he sat and watched Portland’s Damon Stoudamire eat up Mike Penberthy like a pop tart in their two losses to the Trail Blazers.

Portland’s 2 1/2-game lead over the Lakers in the Pacific Division is hardly insurmountable. The Lakers led the Trail Blazers by 3 1/2 games at this time last year and coughed it up before regaining control in March.

The Lakers would not have won the championship without home-court advantage last year, and there’s no way they’ll get another banner without playing at home this year.

That’s one reason Jackson is pushing the panic button a little early--for him. He doesn’t have as much confidence that this team can win on the road as easily as some of his Chicago teams did. (The Bulls won the NBA championship without home-court advantage in the conference finals or finals in 1993 and the finals in 1998.)

It’s curious that Jackson would be as willing to let the team lose games early on to make a point; there’s little margin for error with this group.

Jackson had hoped enough close calls and embarrassing defeats (one of each against the Clippers alone) would do the trick.

“There’s an old saying, you can only throw so much [stuff] at the wall and hope that it sticks, right?” Jackson said. “Some of it’s got to stick. So as much . . . as I give them, some of it’s got to stick at some level. In that regard, I think they’ve got the idea. We’re not going to be satisfied with leading the league in scoring and yet not having the ability to play defense.”

Maybe the realization will kick in eventually, but it hasn’t so far. Jackson put the Lakers through a hard practice last week, in the midst of all the Shaq and Kobe sound bites, and they barely beat Cleveland. Then they lost at Utah Saturday and won a game they really didn’t deserve to win against Vancouver.

“I had a message that I tried to get across last week, and it didn’t sink in,” Jackson said. “Saturday and Monday, it really didn’t come into their heads, what I was looking for.”

At least Jackson’s week wasn’t as bad as New York Knick Coach Jeff Van Gundy’s. Van Gundy tried to stop Marcus Camby from swinging at San Antonio’s Danny Ferry, caught a head butt from Camby and collapsed to the floor with a bloody gash that took 13 stitches to close.

Who would’ve thought the Knick player least likely to do physical harm to his coach would be Latrell Sprewell?

Jackson had a humorous mix of compassion and continued little shots at his longtime rival, Van Gundy.

“He’s too little to be out there,” Jackson said. “That’s too bad for him.”

Jackson said he learned to stay out of fights long ago, when he was an assistant with the Bulls and he watched then-coach Doug Collins get tossed over the scorer’s table by Detroit Piston forward Rick Mahorn.

“I’ve been out there enough in my lifetime to know that you don’t run into something where you’ve got 250-pound guys,” Jackson said.

But coaches do belong in the middle of the action when their teams are adrift. Jackson’s preferred method has often been to send messages through the media or through some creative editing during film sessions. It’s going to take a more hands-on approach now.

It’s time for him to do his job.

*

LAKER REPORT

With team leading the league in scoring, emphasis will be on defense, and that means some changes will be coming in the rotation. D6

*

CLIPPER REPORT

Jim Todd, the interim coach for much of last season, has not had an easy time since the Clippers let him go after he compiled a 4-33 record. D6

*

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