Life Is Very Good for This Laker Trio After Bad and Ugly

Just because things are good in Lakerland doesn’t mean every player has always bathed in champagne.

Rick Fox, Ron Harper and Brian Shaw have all played for bad teams. They have been around the league enough to have worn a total of 10 different jerseys among them.

Although the combination of Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant might make Laker championships seem inevitable, each of these three players once viewed the prospect of holding the Larry O’Brien trophy as unlikely.

The memory hasn’t completely disappeared, even as the Lakers are poised to win their second consecutive championship with one more victory over the Philadelphia 76ers in the NBA Finals.

“You don’t forget the past,” Shaw said. “That’s what makes it more sweet now, having gone through those days.”

Fox spent the first six years of his career in Boston. The Celtics still had some vestiges of greatness when he arrived in 1991. Larry Bird, Robert Parish and Kevin McHale were around for one last year together. They made the playoffs during Fox’s first three seasons, but, by the 1995-96 season, they were 33-49 and followed that with a 15-67 season.

The Celtics’ rich past only made it worse. He would look at the championship banners hanging above the court while he stretched before games, “wondering what it must have been like, knowing that we were going in the other direction.”

He came to the Lakers in 1997, one year after they signed O’Neal to a free-agent contract and drafted Bryant. The lure of playing for a winning team was so appealing that he twice turned down more lucrative offers to play elsewhere.

“I’m glad I got [losing] out of my system early on in my career,” he said. “When my youthfulness could withstand the pressure and fatigue of getting up every morning and going to work in a setting that was just . . . hopeless.

“After six years it really got old. I knew at that point, just for health issues, the way I was depressed and run down, that I needed to get out and get somewhere where winning would be the pinnacle again. Just having a chance to compete for the championship would be huge. I found it here, and for the last four years the potential of winning [one and] now a second championship, it’s been great.”

Fox was in Chicago for the NBA’s annual predraft camp when the Lakers played the Bulls in the 1991 Finals. And Fox checked out the Chicago-Seattle Finals in 1996.

“When you sit in the stands, it’s different,” he said. “You long to be a part of it. It seems so far away. You’re a part of it now, in the situation I’m in, where you’re part of a great team, with a lot of great players that work together. It’s sweet because it seems to be limitless. It seems that this could go on for a while.”

Shaw knows better than to gaze too far into the future. After playing in Italy, Boston and Miami, he thought he had stumbled upon the beginning of a dynasty when he joined O’Neal and Penny Hardaway in Orlando in 1994. The Magic went to the Finals that season but lost to the Houston Rockets in four games. No problem; everyone figured Shaq and Hardaway and the gang would be back for years to come.

Except O’Neal left for Los Angeles after the next season, Hardaway couldn’t carry the team on his own and it was soon time to break the Magic apart and start from scratch. Shaw spent the 1997-98 season with the perpetually bad Golden State Warriors and with a Philadelphia team that was far from its ascent to this year’s Eastern Conference championship.

“After going to Orlando and making it to the Finals and getting swept in the Finals, you can’t take anything for granted,” Shaw said. “I definitely count my blessings every day to be able to be in a position that I’m in right now. It’s been a long journey, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. It’s a great thing once you’re able to find it.”

Harper has experienced the heights and depths of the NBA in the same cities.

On his first stay in Los Angeles, he played for the Clippers--enough punishment for one career.

It was such a traumatic experience that he is trying to repress the memory.

“The Clippers?” he said when the subject was brought up. “What’s that?”

Karma caught up with him after he joined the Bulls when Michael Jordan returned for another go-round and the Bulls began their second three-peat. Then Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and Phil Jackson left, reducing the Bulls to rubble again for the lockout-shortened 1999 season.

But when Jackson came to Los Angeles, he reserved a roster spot for Harper, who hopped back on for the ride again.

Down and up, up and down, back up.

“It means that I’ve been around way too long, I think,” the 36-year-old Harper said. “I’m still here, I’m having fun. I’ve played on some very good basketball teams and some horrible teams, but I’m still here.”

After the Lakers beat the Indiana Pacers in the Finals last year, Harper asked Phil Jackson: “Can I retire now?”

“He said, ‘No, come back,”’ Harper said.

“If we do it Friday night, I’m going to hug him again and say, ‘Can I retire now?’ And he’ll say: ‘Please do.’ ”

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a. adande@latimes.com.