Full-Court Depress

The Lakers arrived from New York on Monday morning.

All of the Lakers, except for guard Ron Harper, who flew in Sunday night to attend his birthday party.

They arrived in a gray and dreary town, where the weather was not pleasant either. So it was an appropriate day to consider the worst possible scenarios for the Lakers, currently conducting a lifeless championship defense.

It seemed time because Laker Coach Phil Jackson himself wondered aloud when it might brighten, when his players might play together again.

“We just don’t do that with a selfless bent that it takes to be a good basketball team,” he said. “I don’t know what that’s about. Maybe it’s the personnel we have and we have to shake it up or whatever. But at this point it doesn’t look like it’s going to turn around right now, with the way it is.”

The possible season-end themes, any one of which could kill the season along the way:

* Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant have so little respect for each other they are willing to let the organization fail because of it.

* J.R. Rider is a distraction and emotionally unpredictable and the Lakers already have plenty of guys with their own agenda, thank you.

* Horace Grant, 35, Harper, 37, and Brian Shaw, 34, are too old.

* Mark Madsen, 25, Slava Medvedenko, 21, and Devean George, 23, are too young.

* Mitch Kupchak has neither the personnel resources nor the financial backing to pursue a trade that would significantly enhance the team.

* The Lakers have not played defense for 42 games. Any reason to think that will change in the 43rd? The 53rd? The 63rd?

* And, most frightening among the worst possible Laker scenarios, Jackson has no idea how to fix any of it.

Jackson leaned against the scorer’s table at Gund Arena as practice wound down Monday. He crossed his arms. He smiled, despite the reporters that gathered, a process he despises.

He again appeared not to be bothered. But O’Neal is injured. And Bryant is off, offensively and defensively. They remain enemies. Still, nothing from Jackson.

He said he would not rush the unnatural, no matter the desperate pleas from players and other figures to force a resolution between O’Neal and Bryant, to sit them down, to do that Zen thing or whatever, and expedite an end to the Cold War that threatens the season and, ultimately, the good of the franchise.

“I think that people who allow karmic things to happen, let me use that word, usually are better served by it,” Jackson said. “If they allow inspirational things to happen, rather than trying to mastermind or plan things, a lot of times things happen that create situations that look very positive.

“I don’t want to put my index finger, the gun, to the head of either one of those young men. I still want them both to be determined and tremendously confident in what their ability is. Yet, I want them to understand that the team is bigger than the individual efforts. That’s what I’m getting across to them.

“Whenever an individual puts himself ahead of the team, he runs aground of what I’m trying to do. That’s my territory. That’s where they run afoul of my basketball club. I don’t even know if they’ve fouled the water. I don’t know if they fouled it up. But the feeling I’m getting from this team is they’re playing in a depression. They’re playing depressed basketball. That’s a symptom you get when too much energy is released around a situation like this.”

Jackson is, of course, expected to fix all of this. He did last season. He did it six times in Chicago. Laker fans await--wave the wand, sprinkle some feng shui, something, they ask.

“This is a day-by-day process,” Jackson said. “You don’t look at long-term stuff. One day at a time you go after it and try to make progress, so we at least have something to build on. I don’t care if Shaq’s out 10 games and we go 2-8. It doesn’t bother me one way or the other. Records are not anything you can hang your hat on in the playoffs, except that you get home-court advantage. In that regard, what we have to do is build some kind of team unity.

“OK, we have two guys on the All-Star team, but the other three guys who are on the floor with them are not making up a greater sum of those two individual parts. If one of those parts isn’t there, we still have a team that’s supposed to respond and play well together. The energy is just not there. They’re not playing with the kind of energy I’m pleased about, the tenacity I think is required to play good basketball.”

Jackson claimed to be “firm, decisive and determined” in communicating with the players. They have not responded. The Lakers are 27-15, as many defeats as they had all last season. The defense is atrocious and the offense, while occasionally dynamic, is not consistent either.

“We’re not youthful. We’re not quick. We’re not athletic,” Jackson said. “When the two athletic players you have on the team--one has not been athletic this year and the other has been athletic but only on one end of the court--it changes a lot about how the team is going to play. So it’s a combination of speed versus moxie, is basically what this team is built on. Or, dominance and savvy. Our savvy players have been in a midseason slump. Our dominant players have not played the way we expect them to make our good players better.

“That’s the mark of a star, when you make teammates better than they’d normally be. So they appear to be very good basketball players all of a sudden. We’ve looked smaller than we are. We’ve diminished instead of increased our stature at this point. We have to try to rebuild that function of a basketball team.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Status Woe

Comparing the Lakers this season to last season’s numbers:

2000-01 Category 1999-2000

27-15 Record 67-15

100.8 Points PG 100.8

97.8 Opp. PPG 92.3

.469 FG% .459

.442 Opp. FG% .416

.645 FT% .696

44.3 Rebounds 47.0

26.9 O’Neal’s PPG 29.7

.412 O’Neal’s FT% .524

29.4 Bryant’s PPG 22.5