Let’s Make a Big Deal

Any of you Laker fans want to take a deep breath before you sail off the world?

Near as I can tell, Kobe Bryant is now likely to stay a Laker and, for good measure, almost traded the entire franchise for the Clippers.

OK, not the entire franchise, only Shaquille O’Neal. For Bryant, this deal would have posed the advantage of effectively making him a Clipper after all, playing alongside Elton Brand and Corey Maggette -- but without Donald T. Sterling!

Of course, for O’Neal, this would have been a fate even worse than his current one, so talks with the Clippers are off, although they continue with several other teams.

Not that this exactly represents progress for the Lakers, who only recently thought they were in mid-dynasty. Now it’s more about business and ego than basketball.

Keeping Phil Jackson, who asked for (gulp!) $12 million a year, would have been expensive. Bringing in Pat Riley, who would have wanted $6 million or so himself, would have been expensive.

Keeping O’Neal would have been expensive and risky because his real problem by the end wasn’t Bryant as much as the contract extension he wasn’t getting.

He and the Lakers were $4.5 million apart on annual salary, a gap they couldn’t narrow. You can guess which side would have insisted on weight clauses, had they gotten that far, and which side wouldn’t have liked it.

So it’s a new day in Lakerdom, assuming you can still call it that.

Tradition meant a lot in this organization, but with Jerry West in Memphis, Chick Hearn in The Big Press Box in the Sky and half the roster lined up to go, it looks more generic all the time.

Of course, Jackson was the quintessential outsider. He not only wasn’t a Laker, he seemed only marginally of this planet. But he won a title right away, captivating the organization.

Rudy Tomjanovich, the front-runner to succeed him, was a perfect fit -- in Houston -- having spent his entire 33-year career as a Rocket player, coach and assistant. Unfortunately for him, barring a change of heart by O’Neal and another miracle or two, Tomjanovich isn’t likely to win right away.

Eccentric and unconventional as he was, Jackson was a superstar. Tomjanovich won two titles, even if he wasn’t a fancy Xs and O’s guy, because he had good players who liked him and played hard for him.

Jackson, who actually was an easy rider for one of the elite coaches, was deemed too tough after five years of colliding with his superstars.

Rudy T is known as the players’ coach, which may be what Bryant wants, but then Kobe wanted Jackson once.

Bryant chafed at Jackson’s demands of him and finally went off in the press. However, as you may have heard, Kobe had a lot going on at the time and later warmed up on Jackson. Jackson’s contract demands might have been the reason he was shown the door at the end, more than anything Bryant said at midseason.

By the spring, Bryant was still saying the same thing -- he wasn’t crazy about Jackson personally but liked playing for him -- except the emphasis had changed. Now he stressed the like part more than the not crazy about him part.

In any case, there’s no denying Bryant is a better, more complete player than in 1999 when Jackson arrived, and there aren’t a lot of coaches who could have stood up to him.

Of course, teams are always replacing tough coaches, who are considered tyrants by the time they leave, with players’ coaches. Then the players’ coach will be said to have “lost the team,” making it time for another tough coach, etc.

Superstars being hard to replace, it would have been a good idea to keep the one the Lakers had, but that became a non-starter in the mind of owner Jerry Buss, who found it easy to write off his coach (and his daughter’s boyfriend) when Jackson asked for that ridiculous $12 million.

Because if Jackson really wanted to stay, couldn’t he have settled for a cost-of-living raise from $6 million to $7 million?

Superstars who can replace your departing superstars also are in short supply and the only one out there was Riley, who did have a Laker background.

Riley did talk to the Lakers, denials notwithstanding. However, he also hit them with a king’s-ransom salary request.

Buss owned the Lakers for a lot of years without having to pay his coach and general manager more than $1 million a year combined, even when the coach was Riley and the GM was West.

Thus, Buss couldn’t have been enchanted to learn he would have to pay Riley and Mitch Kupchak more than the $9 million per he’d been paying Jackson and Kupchak.

Nevertheless, the days in which Laker greatness was assured are over. Coming off five years of $150-million grosses, this wasn’t the time to become budget-conscious.

Since West acquired O’Neal and Bryant in one week in the summer of 1996, it was a matter of filling in around them, waiting for Kobe to grow up and finding the right coach. As it turned out, finding the right coach helped Bryant grow up.

If they trade O’Neal, they’ll learn how the other 29 teams live. This is a team that has no one under 30 who’s over 6 feet 10. Nor will it be rebuilt in a day, not even the day Shaq goes.