Lakers Don’t Want Future to Go to Waist

Shaquille O’Neal did not meet with Laker coaches Saturday, and so he went end to end on the season, there at neither its start nor its conclusion.

Phil Jackson hadn’t expected his center. On Thursday night, as they mourned the end of their championship run, 12 of 13 players scheduled a few minutes with the coaching staff on Saturday morning, as Jackson had requested of them all.

Brian Shaw called to reschedule. Samaki Walker was a no-show. O’Neal went directly to summer.

“I’m not at all upset. But I am upset. In both terms,” Jackson said. “He’s not the only one who didn’t show up as a player, but it’s disrespectful to us as a staff. We wanted this and we felt it was important as a team. It’s important for closure. It’s closure. And it’s adult responsibility to do that.”

As the Lakers moved to rebuild around O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, so came the reminder that the organization turns, often, on one player, one personality, the one in the middle. In six weeks, General Manager Mitch Kupchak will embark on perhaps the most critical off-season of his career, a summer he hopes will bring the pieces that fell off the Lakers this regular season.

As O’Neal moves into his 30s and Bryant toward potential free agency and Jackson toward retirement, there is fragility to what the Lakers have started, a decade that began with three championships and became Thursday’s disappointment. Bryant said Saturday -- after he met with the staff -- that it was important to him what management accomplishes this summer, in all regards. He has swallowed parts of his game, so much so, he said, that he wondered what there was until Jackson came to him in midseason and requested more. He has passed to Rick Fox and stood back for O’Neal and served the triangle offense, and in return he expects players with whom they can win.

“I think they know that, absolutely,” he said. “Mitch, Phil and I talked about it a little bit, as far as what this team needs. We obviously need to get a little more athletic. Our [opponents] have made so many adjustments over the last few years to challenge us, to dethrone us, now it’s on us to make similar adjustments.

“I’ll leave it up to those guys. I don’t dwell on it too much. They asked me for my opinions, I give them to them, just let it unfold.”

On their way to their off-seasons, back to the routines of families and private lives, Bryant told O’Neal he’d stay in touch, that he’d get down to Orlando, maybe see him in New York sometime.

“So,” Bryant said, “we’ll get together and kick it. I’ll be in contact with pretty much everybody.

“Shaquille’s going to be fine. He’s going to be ready. Last season, with circumstances, he couldn’t really come in in the shape he wanted. He’ll be ready.”

As much as if the new power forward is named P.J. Brown or Juwan Howard or Karl Malone or not, the Lakers’ summer will turn, perhaps, in a gym in an estate in Isleworth, where O’Neal lives.

The organization is afraid he is too heavy, and Jackson suggested O’Neal needs to change his lifestyle.

“What is the key is that what Shaq could do when he was 25 -- stay up all night, come play a game and still get 25 [points] and 10 or 15 [rebounds] and five blocks -- just doesn’t happen anymore,” Jackson said. “Once you cross that age line, it just doesn’t happen quite like that. Our team needs the infusion of his energy back at a full force, full throttle, similar to what we had the first year I came here. To get back to where we feel we have a commanding feel about this league and this Western Conference.”

O’Neal is not known as someone who parties, but he is a night person.

Asked specifically about O’Neal’s waistline, Jackson said, “I’m not going to put it in terms of weight. Yes, possibly. It’s part of it. But, you know, as you’re aware, as you get older, you gain weight. It’s the natural process of aging. Conditioning is really going to be it. The dedication. It’s about discipline and dedication. Whether or not it results in numbers, I don’t care. I care about the discipline and the dedication.”

See, he missed what would have been quite an exit interview.

Sitting behind the same microphones as Kupchak had the day before, Jackson grinned wryly and said he would rehabilitate his body -- he had undergone an angioplasty procedure a week before -- alongside O’Neal.

“I’ll take it as my responsibility, along with Shaquille taking it as his responsibility, that we’ll try and get, together, back in the best possible health we can get in, physically, to start this next season,” he said. “So, when I personally get my trainer, I’m going to take Shaq to my trainer, and together we’re going to attend training classes to physically get there.”

He smiled. In Montana?

“No. It’s right here in L.A.,” he said. “I’m going to introduce him to someone I think can bring him along.”

Seriously.

“Serious as rain,” he said.

And they’ve talked about this ...

“No, we have not discussed it,” he said.

Of course, they couldn’t have. That would have been Saturday.