Still a Dynasty, or Dead Ringers?

Chick Hearn, their voice, died in August. Jerry West, their cornerstone, took other employment a few months before. Magic Johnson, their personality in the last championship era, was considering buying into another team, leaving the Lakers behind.

Soon after, Laker owner Jerry Buss was sitting in a luxury box at Staples Center where in three years he had hosted three NBA championships, three parades through the heart of Los Angeles. His expression was of sadness.

“What’s happened to the old gang of mine?” he wondered.

And then the Lakers’ season began, and on many nights that question lingers.

Those who best know the Lakers, who watched them struggle to their first title, bicker to their second and slog to their third in a Los Angeles hoop-dreams era marked alternately by brilliance and distress, intuitively knew a fourth consecutive championship would not be a purely ceremonial exercise.

Before the banners were hung, they played through personality conflicts, through the strain of injury and ego, through old lessons not entirely mastered.

Their championships might have appeared predetermined, carried so elegantly on stringy legs and broad shoulders. But it has been work since Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant joined up in the summer of ‘96, three years before Coach Phil Jackson drove in from the Montana woods to bring harmony and diamond-crusted rings to their lives. He helped turn them back into NBA royalty, if at times with the dash of Mark Madsen, who dances at championship parties with absolute joy -- and as if stomping the flames of a fire.

Playing now to be held with or above all but one other NBA dynasty -- the Boston Celtics, who won eight titles in a row from 1959-66 -- the Lakers have won only nine of their first 22 games. With a quarter of the season gone, they had been in last place in the Pacific Division, behind even the Clippers, who share an arena but little else with the decorated Lakers.

Two victories over the weekend -- the first a stunning 30-point comeback against the previously once-beaten Dallas Mavericks, after being booed from their own floor at halftime -- soothed the fears of some Laker fans that the string of titles had run its course.

“They had a tough schedule,” Orlando Magic Coach Doc Rivers said. “They didn’t have Shaq. They had an East Coast trip.

“Did everyone think they’d start off that slow? No. But every year of the last three it seems like they have had a wake-up call.”

Indeed, by Sunday night, the hysteria was gone at Figueroa and 11th streets, replaced by the soberness that more often comes with the onerous NBA regular season. The Lakers were back playing with more typical assuredness. They had presumed their win over the Mavericks would propel them to an effort and a result more befitting their recent past, and their immediate expectations. A follow-up victory over the Utah Jazz confirmed it.

“I wasn’t curious,” Jackson said. “I was expectant they would.”

But strong and legitimate concerns remain.

O’Neal, the great mountain of a center, limped from the NBA Finals MVP presentation in June, his right big toe wracked by arthritis. Nearly three months later, he had surgery, and was not well enough to play until the Lakers’ 13th game. By the time he trudged to the floor, the Laker record was 3-9, among the worst starts in the history of a franchise that has won 14 titles dating to its birth in Minneapolis in 1948.

As Bryant, their other first-team All-NBA player, found it increasingly difficult to win without O’Neal hurling away defenders near the rim, speculation grew that the cast around the superstars had grown weak with age and neglect.

After a 26-point loss in Dallas in mid-November, Bryant said, “I look around the locker room and I don’t see any fire in anybody’s eyes. Everybody’s just kind of dozing off a little bit. I don’t know if they’re waiting for Shaquille to get back or whatever. I don’t know. But there’s just no intensity.”

Two weeks later, O’Neal huffed, “I just want eight guys out there with me who want to play.” Adding, “The problem is that the whole team is not playing with enough energy or enough fire.”

And so they remain the Lakers, flaws and all, on the verge of dynasty or collapse, depending on the mood, the moment, the bounce of the basketball.

They are dynamic and vulnerable, unbeatable and pathetic -- some nights all by halftime.

Just like last season.

Rick Fox, a mainstay at forward during these championship years, said Jackson recently gathered the team in a room at its training facility in El Segundo.

“Everybody is calling for our demise,” Jackson told them. “They’re saying, ‘Break up the Lakers.’ ”

Then Jackson laughed and said, “We do this every year.”

The most pressing concern is that O’Neal return to full health and fitness. The Lakers are 6-4 since he came off the injured list, the victories because he is among the largest, most nimble centers in history, the defeats because he is not yet jumping or running at his best, a serious problem as the Lakers try to rebound from their early poor record.

“Without Shaq, they’re just another team,” Dallas guard Steve Nash had said after the 26-point Maverick victory with O’Neal still on the bench. “With Shaq, they’re one of the best teams in history.”

Dirk Nowitzki, Nash’s teammate, said, “Shaq is the Lakers, pretty much.”

In the days before he returned to the floor, O’Neal warned, “Real life will be back soon. This is all just a terrible, bad dream.”

The Lakers have been slow to awaken.

The NBA’s economic structure -- revenue sharing, the salary cap and an expected luxury tax after this season -- is designed to promote parity and foster competitiveness. For years, it did.

But then along came Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen in Chicago. They were followed in Los Angeles by O’Neal and Bryant.

The Bulls twice won three consecutive titles in the 1990s, and then the Lakers went on their tear to start the millennium.

The common thread is Jackson, now 57, who is one title from surpassing former Celtic Red Auerbach for the record among NBA coaches. Both have nine.

Even as the Lakers gain popularity -- an ESPN poll recently tabbed the Lakers the NBA fans’ favorite team for a second consecutive season -- there may be issues too great for Jackson, O’Neal and Bryant to overcome.

There are ominous theories, espoused by Jackson among others, that three seasons played into late June (while most organizations pack up in April or May) fatigue the athlete’s body cumulatively. Perhaps the emotional and physical toll of so many playoff games -- the Lakers have played 58 in the last three years, or nearly three-quarters of another regular season -- cannot be healed in a single summer of rest.

“One of the things you see with teams that have success, they play so late in the season,” said West, now president of the Memphis Grizzlies. “With all the awards and plaudits they get, emotionally it takes awhile to get into it the next season.

“Other teams may win a lot of games in the regular season, but that’s not the playoffs.”

Jackson is most deft at pacing his teams so they are ready for the playoffs in April. He might have kept the Bulls’ run in Chicago going even longer had Jordan not retired -- twice (before coming back again to play for the Washington Wizards). But O’Neal’s absence and the Lakers’ inability to play through it probably have cost Jackson the luxury of pacing. When it comes time for the playoffs, assuming the Lakers are in the NBA’s come-one, come-all version of them, the old gang might be all tired out from making up lost ground.

“It’s going to be a challenge,” guard Brian Shaw said, even after their two latest victories. “It’s going to be a challenge, trying to win this fourth in a row.”