Centers of the Attention

It was the half-joke that launched a thousand conspiracy theories, causing Laker haters and amateur NBAologists to scrutinize every syllable while trying to find an explanation as to why Derek Fisher was left with exactly four-tenths of a second in San Antonio -- just enough time to make a game-winning 18-footer physically possible -- and why referee Eddie F. Rush went to the scorer’s table in Game 6 of the Western Conference finals to ask how many fouls Shaquille O’Neal had.

On the eve of the playoffs, NBA Commissioner David Stern was asked by ESPN’s Dan Patrick to name the matchup fans most wanted to see in the Finals, and Stern’s cheeky response was, “The Lakers versus the Lakers.”

Ah-ha! cynics cried. True confession at last!

Or maybe not. Stern, and America, had seen what happens in a world without the Lakers in the NBA Finals, and for those who would prefer to forget, it was New Jersey versus San Antonio in 2003, resulting in the lowest average TV rating -- 6.5 -- since the Finals went prime time in 1982.

In 2002, when the Lakers won their third consecutive championship, the Finals drew an average rating of 10.2.

In 1980, when a Laker rookie named Magic Johnson won his first NBA title and CBS televised the games to most of the nation on tape delay at 11:30 p.m., the Finals drew an average rating of 8.0.

In other words: Canned footage of the Lakers in the Finals, tipping off against Johnny Carson near midnight, outdrew live New Jersey-San Antonio basketball, if you want to call it that, up against nothing but the league’s old higher standards of personality, star power and backboards not bruised by open 15-foot jump shots.

The Lakers draw. That much has been an NBA given for more than 30 years, from Wilt to Kareem to Shaq, from Jerry to Magic to Kobe. The team’s name is synonymous with glitz, glamour, Hollywood stars preening to be seen at courtside and classic bitter rivalries -- many of them within the Laker locker room -- and all the pathos and pettiness any network president and league commissioner could ever want from a marquee attraction.

If the Lakers didn’t already exist, they’d be a reality series in preproduction at Fox.

Stern didn’t mean to be taken literally, but “the Lakers versus the Lakers” has become high concept in the grandest sense this season, with the team’s 24/7 angst and absolute inability to keep dirty laundry behind closed doors ratcheting up fan curiosity and media fascination to record levels.

The Lakers versus the Lakers has been the biggest, craziest story in sports since O’Neal and Bryant turned October’s preseason drills into grade-school recess, with Shaq calling Kobe selfish and Kobe calling Shaq fat. From there, the infighting undercards featured Bryant versus Coach Phil Jackson, Gary Payton versus Jackson’s triangle offense, O’Neal versus the physics of foul shooting and Kobe versus the city’s desire to keep Bryant under contract until the franchise’s 20th league championship, give or take.

And that’s just the basketball stuff.

Trying to drag the Lakers to their fourth championship in five years is nothing compared with the season-long drama surrounding Bryant and his sexual-assault case.

“It’s been crazier than any preceding season,” said John Black, Laker director of public relations, who has worked for the club since 1989. “You add in whatever you had back to the Jerry West days, going through the ‘80s with Magic and Kareem and Showtime and all that, and you add the tremendously greater number of media people that cover us right now and the whole circus that we’ve become with Shaq and Kobe and Phil, and then you add into the mix the legal situation this year and Karl Malone and Gary Payton and you come up with where we are now.

“Unprecedented waters.”

Black paused, as if to catch his breath, then laughingly added:

“Which I’m drowning in!”

Tim Kawakami, a former Times Laker beat writer who covered the team from 1998 to 2000 and is now a sports columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, says the Lakers “are the biggest story in the NBA times five. Nobody is close.”

“First of all, it’s L.A. Then it’s L.A. with tradition. Then it’s L.A. with tradition with Shaq and Kobe. Then it’s L.A. with tradition with Shaq and Kobe and the weirdest season ever.”

In terms of media and fan interest, Kawakami says the Lakers now rival the New York Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys as the biggest teams in American sports. But the Yankees and Cowboys never reached the World Series or Super Bowl during a season in which their most marketable superstar stood charged with sexual assault.

“Just think if O.J. had gone through that while he was playing,” Kawakami said. “There’s never been something like that before. [Mike] Tyson stopped fighting during his rape trial. Think if Tyson had kept fighting at that point. That’s what the Lakers are now, and they were big by themselves....

“Every time I write about the Lakers, I get more response than any time I write about the Giants, say. No question. And any time I write about Shaq or Kobe specifically, I get a huge response. And this is not a market that is without stars, either.”

The Lakers’ return to the Finals has helped recover some of the league’s lost ratings mojo. The Lakers’ six-game triumph over Minnesota in the Western Conference finals, televised by TNT, was the most-watched NBA playoff series ever on cable, drawing an average rating of 6.3 -- a 38% improvement over the 4.6 rating earned by the 2003 Western Conference finals matchup between San Antonio and Dallas.

The Lakers’ series-clinching victory in Game 6 was watched by 6.5 million households, the second-largest audience in TNT’s 20 years of covering the NBA. Only Michael Jordan’s final All-Star game appearance in 2003 -- 7.1 million households -- attracted a larger audience.

ESPN also drew record numbers while covering the series that would determine the Lakers’ final-round opponent. Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals between Detroit and Indiana garnered a 5.0 rating, making it the most-watched basketball game, college or pro, in ESPN’s 25-year history. ESPN’s average rating for the series, 3.8, represented a 36% improvement over the 2003 Eastern Conference finals.

Still, a bottom-line comparison of the two conference finals illustrates the Lakers’ ability to drive ratings.

Conference finals with the Lakers averaged a 6.3 rating.

Conference finals without the Lakers averaged 3.8.

“There’s only one team in the sport that can pull in the casual fan or the non-basketball fan,” said Marc Stein, who covers the NBA for ESPN.com. “And it ain’t the Pistons.”

Stein covered the Lakers for the Los Angeles Daily News from 1994 to ’97. He remembers those years as “crazy days too,” highlighted by Magic Johnson’s comeback as a player and the team’s signings of O’Neal and Bryant within a matter of weeks during the summer of 1996.

“But the Lakers are off-the-charts huge now, and my theory on it is this: They mean so much more to L.A. than they did before.

“As amazing as [the Lakers] were in the ‘80s, L.A. still had the NFL back then. They still had a Dodgers team capable of winning a World Series, and an Angels team capable of going to the brink of glory before torturing their fans, and a Kings team with [Wayne] Gretzky. [Los Angeles] went more than a decade without reveling in a Laker championship, and by the time it arrived, the sporting landscape had changed.

“It’s so far and away a Laker town now, it blows me away when I come back. Everyone is a Laker fan these days.”

Such interest was evidenced in The Times’ unprecedented decision to double-staff the Lakers the entire season, sending two writers on the road with the team during the regular season and adding a third after the All-Star break.

“We knew going in, this had the potential to be beyond anything we’ve ever seen as an intriguing story,” said Times Sports Editor Bill Dwyre, who added with a laugh, “And it exceeded those expectations.”

Thirty years earlier, The Times did not always cover the Lakers on the road. During the team’s record 33-game winning streak in 1971-72, the story was impossible not to cover, so the Times dispatched Mal Florence to chronicle the streak. After the team finally lost, in Milwaukee, Florence was told by his editor to return to Los Angeles.

When Laker Coach Bill Sharman spotted Florence carrying two suitcases and checking out of the team hotel, he asked the writer, “Mal, where are you going?”

Without missing a beat, Florence headed to the door and quipped, “I don’t cover losers.”

A generation later, The Times closed out the Lakers’ 2003-04 regular season with three writers covering the team on the road.

“We positioned ourselves right away,” Dwyre said. “We had four people in Hawaii when they started practicing. I think that was the right thing to do, instead of waiting to see how this turns out. There was no waiting to see how this was going to turn out. It was going to be fascinating and chaotic and strange and weird and like a roller coaster right from the first day. Right from a year ago, when they picked up Payton and Malone.

“It hasn’t stopped. It hasn’t taken a breath. It hasn’t floated along. It hasn’t gotten boring. It hasn’t gotten normal for one-tenth of a second.”

Dwyre concedes the saturation of Laker coverage has alienated some readers.

“I think there is an element of our readership that, somewhere along the way, got turned off by this,” he said. “I think that we have put so much emphasis on [the Lakers] -- and correctly so. I would defend that decision. This is the most amazing NBA story yet....

“It’s worn us out. It’s worn our readers out. It’s worn the newspaper out with newsprint. And it has alienated a certain segment of the readership that is tired of seeing the emphasis on Lakers, Lakers, Lakers. We get tired of it too. We’ve worn a lot of people out.

“And all that being said, we’ve done the right thing. It’s been worth it.”

Game and commentary coverage of the Lakers has become the most popular hit on The Times’ website, often drawing three times as many page views as any other story in the newspaper. During the week of May 23-29, these stories drew the most hits:

* Lakers-Timberwolves Game 3 game report: 37,918 hits.

* Lakers-Timberwolves Game 4 game report: 37,864 hits.

* Lakers-Timberwolves Game 3 column by J.A. Adande: 33,408 hits.

Outside the sports section, the most-read story on the website that week was a news report from Iraq that drew 17,712 hits.

Across the country, coverage of the Lakers has increased. Brian McIntyre, NBA senior vice president, said more East Coast newspapers than usual requested credentials to cover this year’s Western Conference finals.

Usually, he said, the league received more requests for the Eastern Conference finals “just because of deadlines. Because of the tight deadlines, it’s easier to go east than it is to go west. Although with the Lakers in it this year, I think we had more of our regular beat writers and columnists from beat papers go west than we have in quite a while.”

McIntyre said he would issue “about 1,600” credentials for the NBA Finals.

In 1991, equipped with a Laker-Chicago Bull heavyweight Finals matchup, the NBA issued 1,283 credentials.

In 1982, Lakers versus Philadelphia, the credential list totaled 397.

“It’s just grown exponentially,” McIntyre said. “The numbers of media, international media. We’ll have around 160, 170 or more international media.... In our ’84 All-Star game, I said we had four international media. We had somebody from Italy, Spain, Canada and Cleveland....

“It’s grown big, but it’s kind of stabilized. Could we let more people in? Yes. But to what end? There’s only a finite amount of space, and it’s borderline insanity now.”

During a conference call with reporters in mid-April, before the start of the NBA playoffs, Mark Shapiro, ESPN’s executive vice president of programming and production, said having the Lakers reach the Finals would be good for business.

“Our dream matchup would be the Knicks and the Lakers, complete with controversy surrounding if Kobe is going to come to the Garden next year,” Shapiro said. “That would drive interest everywhere.”

ABC, ESPN’s broadcast partner, will have to make do with the Lakers and the Pistons. ABC has yet to issue any formal complaint.

“The Lakers, let’s be honest, I think that’s who most people want to see because of all the different personalities,” basketball analyst Doc Rivers said during the same conference call. “I don’t know if anyone’s done it in L.A., but if they’ve kept a diary through this whole year, it’s going to be a bestseller next year. It’s a soap opera. It a great book.”

At least one is being written. Times NBA columnist Mark Heisler is working on a Laker book, which he describes as “a history of how insane they’ve been.”

Working title: “Madmen’s Ball.”

“Of all the zany, highly covered teams -- you know, the Oakland A’s, the ‘Bronx Zoo’ Yankees and the Bulls, who were tremendously zany themselves -- I don’t think anybody holds a candle to this,” Heisler said. “I don’t think there would even be a consensus who the second-craziest was.

“How do you top Kobe? The big surprise with this thing is that they’re actually going to win a championship. Normally, you would just think they were big and notorious but were going to slip below the waves and then break into their constituent parts and never be heard from again.

“Now they’re going to win a championship and may not even break apart.”

Heisler paused, considering his subject for a moment.

“Although we still have that suspense,” he said with a laugh. “Nobody’s committed to nothing.”

But that’s a story to be pounded into the Los Angeles asphalt for another day.

In the viewfinder at the moment is another final-round push for a Laker championship. It’s been a long time coming. Twenty-four whole months.

For media and fans, only four to seven more nervous breakdowns to go.