League Needs a Rebound

Wait, come back, it’s not over yet!

The postseason from hell just swallowed up the conference finals too. They looked great -- until they started, without Joe Johnson in the West and with Larry Brown in the East.

Happily for the NBA, and little has been recently, it still has one act left, the Finals. They could still turn out to be good, in theory, anyway.

According to those commercials by the hot Portland agency Wieden & Kennedy, the Finals are “Where Legends Are Born.”

Actually, let’s face it, for six years, they’ve been “Where Drama Went to Die.”

For six seasons, the Lakers or San Antonio Spurs came in as heavy favorites and for the first five, that was how it went: Western Conference 5, Eastern Conference 0 by a combined score of 20-6.

Then came last spring’s surprise when the Detroit Pistons stunned the Lakers, who were so upset, they went out of the business of being the Lakers. Unfortunately for the league, that went only five games, too, making it yet another non-event.

To summarize, since 1999 the NBA has now lost Michael Jordan, the Chicago Bulls’ dynasty, the Lakers’ dynasty, the notion of the Finals as a marquee event and its cachet in the Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Boston markets.

There was also a lockout in there with the looming possibility of yet another one. The surprise isn’t that the NBA is struggling but that it’s still in business.

Not that you can’t see the toll the bad news has taken. Last week there was surprise, and some consternation, when David Stern, marketing genius and outspoken liberal Democrat, hired conservative Republican campaign strategist Matthew Dowd.

Suggesting the cultural clash this represented, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Bryan Burwell mused that ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith would be replaced by Ann Coulter.

Of course, we know that couldn’t really happen.

Could it?

Personally, I think Dowd will have to do a lot just to make up for the damage done to the NBA’s image by the very act of bringing in a high-profile hired gun to help Stern run his own league.

Of course, I don’t believe in marketing the way Stern does. It’s great for building on success and creating “alternative revenue streams,” as when the Lakers start wearing white uniforms and your kid pleads for a white No. 34, to go with his gold and his blue No. 34s. Oh, right, he’s not here anymore. Make that No. 8.

However, when it comes to fundamental perceptions, like “The NBA has been nowhere for six years,” no one is good enough to make that go away, I don’t care who he got elected. As far as I’m concerned, the first rule of marketing is, “If people don’t want to buy something, there’s no stopping them.”

The game is still the thing. The problem is not with the NBA’s image but its product. Before office pools became popular and took it to a new level, the NCAA finals produced a decade of thrillers (North Carolina-Georgetown, North Carolina State-Houston, Villanova-Georgetown, Indiana-Syracuse) after the 1979 Magic Johnson-Larry Bird shootout, the highest-rated basketball game of all time.

With its best-of-seven format, rather than an elimination game every night, the NBA lacks the NCAA’s drama. However, when the Finals go six or seven games, the drama builds.

Of course, when they go four or five -- annually -- people tune out.

Jordan or no Jordan, five of the Bulls’ six Finals in the ‘90s went six games. All of the Showtime Lakers’ five titles in the ‘80s went six or seven. Their monumental series against the Celtics went seven, six and six.

Happily for the NBA, there is the prospect of a competitive Finals, and perhaps even one with Shaquille O’Neal in it. He may not be the Shaq of old, but he still talks like him. The NBA has a lot of great players but only one who’s larger than life.

A good Finals would be timely, to say the least. The first and second rounds were eclipsed by Stern’s threatening to banish Jeff Van Gundy and breaking off talks with the union. The vaunted Phoenix-San Antonio matchup in the Western Conference finals became one-sided after the Suns lost Johnson. That one was fun compared with the Eastern Conference finals, which were eclipsed by the Brown circus.

Aside from his comings and goings, Brown is one of the great people who ever worked in the NBA. His presence ennobles an event like the 2001 Finals when he gushed about the thrill of playing the Lakers, even as they ran over his Philadelphia 76ers. Four of his former assistants are general managers, three are coaches and they’re all gracious, such as San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich and R.C. Buford and Indiana’s Donnie Walsh.

If Brown’s teams always crashed in his last season -- often while his agent, Joe Glass, was out lining up his next job -- everyone loved Brown anyway. In the spring of 1981, a year after his stunning achievement of taking UCLA to the NCAA finals, his Bruins crashed.

The administration bristled at reports he was already negotiating with the New Jersey Nets, who subsequently hired him, even before leaving.

The UCLA administration hired him back in 1988. That was the time Brown accepted the job and gave it back days later.

Oh, by the way, every time the Bruins are looking for a coach these days, Brown’s name still spreads like wildfire.

This episode was outrageous, even for Brown, even if the situation was awkward, on both sides, from the start.

Brown didn’t really want to be in Detroit. Neither, it turned out, did his family. However, he needed a job after leaving the 76ers in 2003 and the 50-win Pistons looked better than the 17-win Nuggets.

Piston boss Joe Dumars, who wanted to play his young guys, grabbed Brown, wanting an ace after ownership made him fire Rick Carlisle. Brown then went two seasons with Dumars’ prize No. 1 pick, Darko Milicic, chained to the bench.

Brown won them an unexpected title, which should have squared all accounts. However, after welcoming advances from other teams at midseason, making Dumars and his players crazy and then, against all odds, seeing them come together at the end, Brown should have put all suitors on hold.

Instead, Cleveland’s Dan Gilbert, who wanted him as president, gave him a deadline. Brown should have told him to take a hike but was worried his health wouldn’t let him coach next season and is always terrified at the thought of not having a job.

Just why Gilbert would want Brown as president is another question. If Brown does take it, I’ll bet he’s coaching -- elsewhere -- in a year. As far as personnel goes, he has always been a disaster. As Walsh, a lifelong friend whose job Brown saved in the ‘90s, once said, “If you made every deal Larry wanted, you’d wind up trading all your players and getting them all back.”

Finally, after a week of denying he had talked to Gilbert and giving new dimension to the words “half truth,” Brown said they had talked, after all.

Meanwhile, Dumars was reportedly lining up Brown’s replacement -- Flip Saunders -- which would explain why the Flipper hadn’t taken one of the five available jobs.

With the media asking the players daily how they felt about Brown’s “situation,” their poise wore thin. They finally melted down in Game 5, led, of course, by Rasheed Wallace, who scored two points, ran out the old conspiracy number (“They want Game 7”) and guaranteed a win in Game 6.

The Pistons were lucky Stern didn’t forfeit the series right then and there, just to keep their whole comic opera out of the Finals.

Yet to be determined is whether anyone will watch the Finals, even with O’Neal in it. A network source predicted a 9.0 rating to the New York Daily News’ Bob Raissman, down from last season’s Laker-inspired 11.5.

Real drama might change the equation, and a big finish makes up for a lot, just as bad ones have for six seasons. In 2002, the Lakers and Sacramento Kings got a monster 19 rating for Game 7 of the West finals.

Then the Lakers swept the Nets and the ratings nose-dived to their lowest level in 20 years.

The Finals mean more than everything that precedes them all together. For the NBA this spring, that’s a distinct break.

*

Phil and Kobe, a Love Story?

It’s hard enough to believe Phil Jackson might take the Laker coaching job. However, without a satisfactory meeting with Kobe Bryant, can anyone imagine Jackson coming?

And if Jackson has gone halfway, asking to meet, and Bryant doesn’t want to, as sources told The Times’ Mike Bresnahan, that doesn’t sound too constructive.

To be sure, Bryant is entitled to be angry and Jackson owes him an apology for selling him out in his book. Jackson can’t claim to have been misquoted so it should be something honest such as, “I was really upset at the time.”

Bryant should not worry about getting blamed if he meets with Jackson and Jackson turns the job down. Of course, Bryant would be blamed. He’d also be blamed if he doesn’t meet with Jackson. If he hasn’t figured it out yet, Bryant will be blamed for anything that goes wrong with the Lakers.

His image within the league has been completely trashed. Last week Andrew Bogut, the University of Utah center who isn’t even a rookie yet, dared to rip him, telling the Washington Post’s Mike Wise, “Kobe is probably one of the guys that, everybody knows it, he’s got that cocky arrogance to him, everything has to surround around him the whole time. Otherwise, he doesn’t function.”

The only thing that will save Bryant is winning games, and the only one on the horizon who has a ghost of a chance of helping him do that is Jackson.

The question isn’t how Bryant got to this point, but how he’s going to get out.

Moreover, if they do sit down, Bryant would find that this time it would be different.

Their first time around, Jackson’s primary task was to jam Bryant in line behind O’Neal. This time, Bryant would be Jackson’s first concern.

Take the meeting, Kobe. You need this guy. Otherwise, get ready for more of the same.