With Some Patience, Phil Pill Still Works

Phil Jackson walks some days as though he were put together by a 7-year-old with an Erector set. Some pieces are too long, and others too short, and parts that should move don’t, at least not the way they should.

He straps ice to the places that ache, but otherwise pays them little mind. He conducts practices or shoot-arounds that in other organizations could be left to assistants, the melting ice running into his half-socks. He’s tougher than he looks, it seems, at 55, the square-shouldered man with a flat smile and the gait of a half-downed buck.

All of which makes decent sense, given that not long ago, the Lakers themselves appeared to be mismatched, beat up, and lurching to an unglamorous conclusion to the season that followed their NBA championship.

The assumption was surfacing that Jackson had traded in his mystical leadership powers for a closetful of suits and a Beverly Hills make-over, just about the time the Lakers were showing they would probably be a decent basketball team if they could only get their hands off each other’s necks. Jackson, of course, had to be the guy with the crowbar.

Now, six weeks later, the Lakers have won 15 consecutive games, the last seven in the playoffs, and stand on the verge of the Western Conference finals against the San Antonio Spurs, just as everyone was predicting six months ago. They are the team they were supposed to be and weren’t, until the end, when it mattered.

“He never panicked,” forward Rick Fox said. “He’s been Phil from Day 1. It’s composure.”

Now, if it looks as if Jackson had it planned all along, it also looks a little like the guy who stumbles down the stairs, lands on his feet, straightens his tie, spreads his arms and says, “Ta-da!”

“I thought when I first hired Phil, I would get to know him really well,” owner Jerry Buss said Monday. “In reality, he continues to amaze me. I have such fabulous respect for him. Last year, quite honestly, I didn’t think we had the team to win, and he did. This year, I thought we had a stronger team, that we were really it. But then, as the season went on, I thought, ‘We’ve got to get ahold of this sucker.’ And, bingo, they got it together. It was miraculous. The man seems to be able to get people working together in some fashion that I’ve never seen before. It’s amazing.”

When the Lakers were at their worst, when players straggled in late and didn’t work hard enough in practice and lost too many games, Jackson reworked the fining system, quadrupling the penalties for some transgressions. He had long talks about working together--and who knows what else--and then Derek Fisher and Kobe Bryant returned, injury-free, to the lineup.

“There’s an aerobic T-shirt that says, ‘No Pain, No Gain,’ ” Jackson said. “That’s a mantra that has also been used by Gandhi, who said, ‘Unless you’ve known suffering, you don’t know joy.’ There is a certain amount of joy in the fact we were picked on, we were challenged, we nit-picked among ourselves, we had little things that went on inside of our own domain that got out that we weren’t happy about.

“And yet, we knew among ourselves we felt positive about what we could produce as a team together. That’s what is important, that we put aside those challenges and focused on what was our job, and that was to do the best we can as a group. We got that accomplished.”

Or, as it is known in texts, The Richard Simmons-Mahatma Gandhi Convergence.

“Phil knew exactly what he was doing,” forward Horace Grant said. “He wanted us to solve [our problems] ourselves. He could have early on just sat Kobe and Shaq down and said, ‘This is the way it’s got to be.’ He didn’t and the rest is history.”

The relationship between Shaquille O’Neal and Bryant has rarely been better. Bryant passes to O’Neal in the game and O’Neal praises Bryant afterward. O’Neal scores 87 points in the first two games of the Western Conference semifinals, a four-game sweep of the Sacramento Kings, and Bryant scores 84 in the next two.

“I didn’t pull them into any room, if that’s what you want to know, and give them a discourse on friendship by Emerson,” Jackson said. “But, I have been generally talking about it, in terms of community and how you get to be better teammates by sharing the ball, by helping each other out. The general consensus has been we can’t go back to feuding, that’s for sure.”

As he does on most game days, Jackson on Sunday afternoon followed his public-relations man from the locker room into a corridor and to a waiting band of reporters, greeting them this time with, “Happy Mother’s Day to all you mothers.” And he meant it. One of Jackson’s strong qualities is knowing where the enemy, perceived or otherwise, lurks.

“The one thing people are starting to notice about our team now is how much composure we have in a lot of situations and how much poise we’re playing with,” Fisher said. “We’re not playing out of control. We’re not turning the basketball over a lot. I think those are trademarks of not only Phil but our entire coaching staff. Their personality.

“I think the way they continued to prepare for every game, regardless of what was going on with Shaq and Kobe or what was being said or what was heard or what supposedly had happened, they just continued to get us ready for every game and give us the opportunity to win. As players, we just didn’t handle it right, in terms of going out on the floor and leaving those things outside of the four lines for 48 minutes. I think that paid off for us, because at no time did they panic. They didn’t start feeling like we had to all of a sudden overhaul our team, start doing things differently.”

Jackson, of course, won’t be the NBA coach of the year. Those awards generally don’t go to guys with players named Michael, Shaq or Kobe on their rosters. But, he didn’t lose it, either, which was something. He did his usual bench number, left leg slung over right, leaning forward to whistle on two pinkies, occasionally pounding a thick forefinger on a grease board during a timeout.

“Emotionally we’re not the same team we were last year,” Bryant said. “We probably have more talent this year, but it’s an emotional game. We’ve been through so much sometimes, it was tough just to focus on basketball.”

The rest just worked out, and when it did there was just enough time left to play basketball, conveniently for everyone.

“Things work in very strange ways,” Jackson said earlier in the playoffs. “Players are willing to move forward. They’re feeling good about themselves. That’s important.”