After Break, Lakers Still Issue-Oriented

As more than half the team and an entire coaching staff hurtled toward free agency, the Lakers took their fight off the national stage and back into their little practice gym on Monday afternoon.

After a busy weekend, Shaquille O’Neal called in sick, but everybody else showed, including Kobe Bryant and the man he respects as a coach, Phil Jackson.

After three weeks of inactivity, Karl Malone was cleared by his personal physician to return to the clump of exercise pieces that rest in the corner of the gym, and by early afternoon he’d happily logged several miles. Though the team said Malone’s doctor, Ralph Venuto, predicted a mid-March return, Malone raised his eyebrow and grinned, and no one would be surprised if he secretly had his heart set on March 8, in Utah, even if it were medically unrealistic.

“Today was a good day for me,” Malone said. “A really good day.”

When the Lakers were last seen together, Jackson’s contract negotiations had been suspended and Bryant didn’t seem to care much, the evidence arriving when he said, “I don’t care.” It led to a rigorous inspection through the All-Star weekend of Bryant’s plans, particularly as they related to Jackson’s and O’Neal’s, leading eventually to the admission that he doesn’t care much for Jackson the human being.

By Monday, Bryant was back to the topic of the team and what it would take to break out of its 13-16 funk, its record since Dec. 12, the second-half push starting tonight against the Portland Trail Blazers. Jackson, conversely, was led back along the path of his postponed negotiations and Bryant’s feelings toward him. Not surprisingly, he grinned and flushed only faintly, having been through these kinds of awkward moments quite often since signing on almost five years ago.

“I feel very good about it,” he said of his contract. “It’s kind of liberating for us as a basketball team just to go ahead. There’s a term I use that I won’t use in public, but it’s a good term about just playing it out.... It doesn’t affect how I’m going to coach. In fact, if anything, it probably makes me a better coach in a lot of ways, because I have no residual hanging over from trying to keep guys happy or trying to keep guys pleased in the organization. And just go for it. Play it out.”

Jackson would seem to have enough friends, so he dismissed the news that Bryant had little use for him “as a person,” as he told The Times last weekend. In fact, Jackson said he’d gotten that sense from Bryant before.

“One of the things we tell these ballplayers, and it should go both ways, you know, professional respect is really what’s important,” he said. “We don’t care if ballplayers really like each other. We don’t really want to be liked as a coach. I’d be worried if a ballplayer liked me as a person. I don’t mind being adored, but being liked, I don’t like.”

He laughed.

“The reality is, it’s professional respect,” he said. “You can coach, and they can accept coaching. And the roles are correct, so they can come back to you with information and the players feel that communication flow they have to have.”

If it makes Jackson feel any better, or worse, Malone said he appreciated Jackson as a man as well as a coach, and that it could affect his decision to return next season.

“I want him here,” Malone said. “I had one coach for all of my career. Now I have two. I would like for him to be here.

“As a coach, I have respect for him. As a person, I have respect. Without a doubt.”

Meanwhile, the Lakers psyches have rarely seemed quite so scattered. Contract talk -- Bryant, Malone, Gary Payton, Derek Fisher and Horace Grant, among others, can be free agents -- is everywhere. Jackson also said Monday he’d spoken at some length with Bryant about Bryant’s upcoming legal hearings on March 1 and 2. In particular, he’d asked Bryant how his basketball might best be served in that period, a subject Jackson previously had avoided. Bryant also has hearings scheduled for March 24 and 25.

So much of what the Lakers hope to do this season and beyond appears to revolve around Bryant, and a three- or four-year extension remains unrecognized by him. It leaves his free agency, his whim, a decision for which he has said he has kept his general manager aware.

“I’m not comfortable,” General Manager Mitch Kupchak said. “I’d prefer he sign the extension that’s been on the table now for over a year. That would make me most comfortable. It’s out of our control. You can’t make somebody do something they don’t want to do or aren’t ready to do. All we can do is continue to do the right things for Kobe and for the team. At the end of the year, we’ll sit down with him, and hopefully he decides not to opt out or he decides to sign an extension or opt out and sign a new agreement.”

For now, there’s basketball to play, for which the Lakers occasionally find time.

As Bryant said Monday, “It’s back to business.” Then again, it never left.

*

TONIGHT

vs. Portland, 7:30 p.m., Fox Sports Net

Site -- Staples Center.

Radio -- KLAC (570), KWKW (1330).

Records -- Lakers 31-19, Trail Blazers 24-27.

Record vs. Trail Blazers -- 0-1.

Update -- The Trail Blazers have cast off Bonzi Wells, Rasheed Wallace and Jeff McInnis, they’ve suspended players and fined them and wagged their fingers at them, and now they’ve got 31 games to make the playoffs. A week ago, General Manager John Nash traded Wallace and Wesley Person to Atlanta for Shareef-Abdur-Rahim, Theo Ratliff and Dan Dickau.