Destiny...Dynasty?

The Lakers aren’t much interested in perfection--yet.

Imperfection, pretty good to them all season, has brought them this far.

At the very end of their season of discontent, the Lakers are on a 19-game winning streak, an 11-0 playoff run, and are huge favorites in the best-of-seven NBA Finals against the Philadelphia 76ers, champions of the Eastern Conference.

Game 1 will be played tonight at Staples Center, mostly dark since the Lakers clinched the Western title 10 days ago.

Nothing lights up a city like an NBA title, unless it’s a few smoldering patrol cars. The Lakers had both a year ago, and then spent the season after learning to like one another again, until the process came to a rest here, on the verge of another final series, daring themselves to play for the first 15-0 postseason record in league history, and still perfectly happy with 15-and-anything.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” Shaquille O’Neal said. “Five times three, eight times two minus one, as long as we get to 15. We just have to keep on playing hard, be ready and know not to take this team too lightly.”

The requirements of greatness get steeper every year, though. O’Neal, at 29, and Kobe Bryant, at 22, are reputed to have the talent and the youth to launch a dynasty, to claim the first decade of the millennium in the name of one’s power dunks and the other’s slashing game, leading to an annual trip here, to Junes spent as Russell and Jordan and Magic and Bird spent theirs.

In one opinion, the bare minimum is two, and that’s only to start.

“You’re not a true champion nowadays unless you go back to back,” Laker forward Robert Horry said. “That’s just my opinion. But most true champions go back to back.”

The 76ers arrived Monday night, then practiced Tuesday at Staples Center, as the Lakers dressed and left the building.

Shareef O’Neal left over his father’s left shoulder, headfirst, dangling like a bag of laundry and squealing at zero gravity, exactly where the Lakers have been for 10 days.

Daddy Shaq balled his fist and tapped Shareef on the ribs, and Shareef giggled.

“Gotta prepare him early,” O’Neal said, smiling. “See? He likes it.”

The series could turn on the elder O’Neal, and on the 76ers’ Dikembe Mutombo, and who pounds whom in the lane. It could spin on Bryant and Allen Iverson, scorers from the perimeter, or at the basket, or finding teammates left open in the frenzy. Each has averaged more than 30 points in the playoffs. Either way, the end result seems dependent on the superstars.

Not long after O’Neal strolled past, Philadelphia Coach Larry Brown walked through the massive concourse at Staples Center and, crowded at his shoulders by reporters, pounded his forefinger into Tuesday’s edition of The Times.

The quote that perplexed him was from Phil Jackson, whom he has absolutely no memory of interviewing two decades ago for an assistant’s position with the New Jersey Nets. Now, either Brown really doesn’t remember meeting with Jackson, or this is simply a wonderful way of tweaking Jackson, who has a fairly sturdy self-image.

The quote was about Iverson, the game and skilled shooting guard accused by Jackson of routinely carrying the basketball, as if someone in the NBA doesn’t.

“We couldn’t find a way to officiate Allen Iverson,” Jackson had said, “so we gave him all the liberties to run with the ball and turn it over and do the things that he does and now he’s like a monster on the court.”

By “turn it over,” Jackson meant “carry it,” “palm it,” “put it in his pocket,” whatever the kids are saying nowadays. Brown just crinkled his eyebrows and pointed.

“My Carolina education doesn’t tell me what this means,” he said playfully. “And we’ve got a good school of journalism.”

It is the banter of the Finals. It won’t be long before Brown wonders exactly how long O’Neal will be allowed in the lane, seeing that there’s a three-second limit to loitering. And Tex Winter, to Jackson’s right, for sure will remind referees that Iverson often has his hand on the side of the basketball.

Meantime, the series seems set on establishing the Lakers as all-powerful and barely mindful of the 76ers, who lost seven games on the way to Los Angeles. The Lakers resist the image. After all, it wasn’t so long ago when they were reeling.

“I don’t think, if you ask the players who are going to play these games whether they believe, we’re the overwhelming favorite,” Laker forward Rick Fox said. “Really, that’s all that matters, the people that are out there on the court.

“Right now, we’ve got too much respect for the Philadelphia 76ers and what they’ve done all year to think we’re that big of a favorite. That’s a very dangerous mind-set to have right now.”

Mutombo has seen his teammates injured, and many of them return, among them Iverson.

“It’s been a war since Day 1 of the playoffs,” Mutombo said. “I don’t see how it’ll end differently.”

An afternoon with the 76ers is spent with many such references.

“I don’t really want to say ‘pressure,’ ” Iverson said. “Everybody’s got those guys figured to beat us. We’ll just relax coming in, play basketball and spread the war. We’ve been at war every series. So, we know what it’s all about.”

In the conference finals, the 76ers spread the war all over the Milwaukee Bucks, and the Bucks, in Jackson’s view, cracked.

“Obviously their defense is very tenacious,” Jackson said. “They get into you and create turnovers, and that’s the thing we’re really going to have to watch because they run well off the turnovers. It’s going to be a game of pacing and precision and execution and poise. We saw that some teams came apart. In that series they had against Milwaukee, they had players that felt the pressure and lost their poise.”

The good news for the Lakers is they’ve already done that. It’s what got them here.