Payton Still Has Swagger

Gary Payton returned with his head cocked, ever defiant, and between booing the Lakers, the people here cheered that.

The Seattle SuperSonics are in flux, the general manager insisting in Friday’s papers the coach would be back next season, the coach, according to insiders, not sure if he wants to be. Ray Allen, the new franchise player, is due for a contract extension, though most believe the summer will pass without a deal being struck.

The organization is about to miss the playoffs for the second consecutive year, and it will have back-to-back losing seasons for the first time since 1986 and 1987, the players now unhappy that the owner runs his basketball holdings like a coffee shop.

So Payton represents the better times, when the playoffs were a lock and a long run in them wasn’t out of the question.

The Lakers arrived Friday night seeking the top seeding in the Western Conference, Payton the only one among them to have played all 76 games.

Yet, it is Payton’s game that has drawn the scrutiny.

Has he slowed down? Or has Payton’s game been swallowed by The Other Three? Phil Jackson said most of the Lakers’ front-line players have given up parts of their games for the benefit of the rest.

“Everybody has,” Jackson said. “Kobe’s the only one that sometimes has a green light to do things that are spectacular in moments of the ballgame. But most everybody plays under the wrap of teamwork or under the auspices of playing within the team system.”

When Jackson recruited Payton from his motorcycle last summer, he said he had the same questions.

“I asked him that last year when I talked to him before we picked him up. I said, ‘I think defensively maybe you’ve lost a step, maybe offensively you can get to the basket. But, how do you feel about it?’ ” Jackson recalled. “He said, ‘Naw, I can still beat anybody out there on the court.’ It’s basically what he told me.”

Most of a season later, Jackson said, “He still has that muster at the end of a ballgame where he can cover what has to be covered. I do think there are times in the course of the season when you get some of these young kids out there that can get through a space they normally wouldn’t have been able to get through four or five years ago.”

If he’d heard the talk, Payton paid little attention.

“I wasn’t really thinking about that,” he said, “because I know what I can do. Now, everybody’s playing together. This is what I came here for.”

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Sometimes, Karl Malone mans the low post and Shaquille O’Neal is on the wing, a role reversal with which the Lakers began to experiment recently.

Malone doesn’t mind, because he likes all the elbows and rough stuff inside. And O’Neal is for it, because he’s always considered himself a guard in a center’s body.

Some of the parts of the triangle offense are meant to interchange, but for years O’Neal hasn’t been more than a few steps from the basket.

Jackson’s hope is to make O’Neal a moving target for defenses that surround him even before he receives the ball. O’Neal is a deft passer away from the basket, where he finds cutters and weak-side shooters over the heads of his defenders.

It also means O’Neal is on the move through the lane, often with his assigned double-team, which amuses Malone.

“When he cuts through,” Malone said, “the whole team goes with him.”

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Individual playoff game tickets will go on sale April 10 at 10 a.m. at Ticketmaster outlets, ticketmaster.com and at (800) 4-NBA-TIX.

There will be a limit of four tickets per person, per game. Tickets will not be available at Staples Center.