Flee Market

Bon voyage, Lakers.

With their owner on vacation, their soul in Memphis, their coach on the beach, their center on the trading block, their golden child in retreat and their future in doubt, the Lakers embark on the free-agent wooing period today.

They’re still shopping Shaquille O’Neal, hoping to hang onto Kobe Bryant, but assured of nothing. They can begin talking to Bryant but so can the Clippers.

Bryant reportedly had expressed frustration at the Lakers’ direction, with Phil Jackson gone, O’Neal available and a roster of six players, two rookies and a second-year man.

Intent on staying in the area, Bryant has narrowed his focus to the local teams, expressing no real interest in seemingly viable options such as Phoenix or San Antonio.

The Clippers are clearing cap space for a maximum slot and have been since last fall, when they heard Bryant would actually consider coming.

Needing a point guard during the season, they passed up good ones such as Travis Best. They just dumped Predrag Drobjnak’s $2.8-million salary and renounced Keyon Dooling. If Bryant comes, they’ll drop Quentin Richardson.

According to tampering rules, the Clippers couldn’t even speak Bryant’s name until today, but as General Manager Elgin Baylor said last week, “We’ll leave no stone unturned, I’ll put it that way.”

Teams can talk to players until July 14, when the actual signing period begins.

Richardson, a restricted free agent, has already said he’ll “definitely” visit Denver, which last season signed former Clipper Andre Miller. Clipper officials believe an offer sheet will follow quickly.

The Clippers then will have 15 days to match. By then, they’ll have to know if Bryant is coming. If he is, they’ll let Richardson go to free up the cap room for Bryant; if not, they say they’ll match on Richardson.

The Lakers, of course, might want to know Bryant’s intentions before they actually move O’Neal.

Not that the Lakers’ three titles represented a stroll in the park, but the organization is apprehensive, to say the least, facing the possibility of a meltdown.

Nor were Laker officials sure what they could do about it. As one said this week, “We’re not in control.”

Having considered the alternative by putting O’Neal on the market and discovering what they would be offered, the Lakers found themselves looking into a chasm.

If they had thought it was better to rebuild without O’Neal, it now looked like no package they were offered would keep them at their present level and they wouldn’t have any cap space to improve from there.

The same thing may have occurred to Bryant, when he began wondering where the Lakers were going.

Now Laker management didn’t know whether to trade O’Neal, hoping Bryant would like the package, or to hang onto O’Neal to await better offers, or to bring Shaq back for the last season before his opt-out, whether he wants to return or not.

Not since 1991, when Magic Johnson’s retirement rang down the curtain on Showtime, had the Lakers been thrown for such a loop.

The missing link, of course, is Jerry West, their peerless leader who was as sharp as they came -- and sometimes just lucky, as in 1999 when he seemed set to bring Kurt Rambis back until O’Neal’s recommendation led them to Phil Jackson.

Most of all, he was Jerry West, “the Logo,” which gave him cachet with owner Jerry Buss and around the league that no one else could match.

It’s easy to idealize West. In his later years here, he had no appetite for going downstairs to put out fires. In 1998, when speculation that Coach Del Harris was in trouble swept through the press, West went to Las Vegas to scout the Big West tournament and settled for sending the players an incendiary letter, after which they finished the season 22-3.

On the other hand, West would have had open lines of communication to O’Neal and Bryant, both of whom revered him.

West was a Laker consultant who did no consulting in the spring of 2001 when Bryant’s agent at the time, Arn Tellem, brought Kobe over for dinner and counsel, heralding the end of the season-long feud with O’Neal.

O’Neal was no less devoted. In 1998, when West mused about retiring in his annual rite of spring, O’Neal announced that if Buss let him go, “I’ll be upset to the highest of upsetivity.”

Mitch Kupchak was West’s friend and protege, but he could never be West, even if everyone seemed to blame him for West’s departure. Somehow, O’Neal decided it was Kupchak’s fault that his extension wasn’t coming through and zinged him in the press. That would never have happened with West.

By the end of the Finals, Buss was muttering darkly about O’Neal, as if disinvesting in him.

Word now is that Buss didn’t like it when O’Neal yelled “Pay me!” in Hawaii, but if the brass couldn’t handle stuff like that, Shaq would have been gone long ago. It’s what people come up with when someone leaves, as when Jackson was said to have become “stale.”

It’s still an open question whether Bryant would consent to play again with O’Neal, and it would be no small trick to turn Shaq around.

It’s also an open question if it had to come to this, and if there’s anything the Lakers can do about it now.