Team begins contract-extension talks with Jackson

Despite the chaos surrounding the Lakers’ recent free fall, time slowed down for a day and an eye turned toward the future when the Lakers began contract-extension negotiations this week with Coach Phil Jackson.

Jackson’s three-year, $30-million contract has one more season remaining, but Jackson’s agent, Todd Musburger, and Lakers General Manager Mitch Kupchak had breakfast Wednesday in Los Angeles to begin what is expected to be a lengthy but amiable process.

“We’ve made it clear we have an interest in extending Phil’s contract,” team spokesman John Black said.

“It’s fair to say that by the mere fact we’ve set a time to get together again, it’s an obvious inclination on both parties to further pursue the extension.”

It could take weeks, if not longer, to finalize an extension, although money is not expected to be a main sticking point. Jackson, who does not get incentives now, could get a slight bump from his annual salary of $10 million along with some incentives in the new contract.

The next meeting will probably take place after the season, at which time Jackson, 61, will include some additional items to his typical end-of-season checklist.

Health is not a concern -- “Personally, I’m feeling physically better than I did last year, so that part is a lot better for me,” he said -- but a more important issue to him will be the future direction of the franchise.

“There’s a bunch of things that go into it -- how we move forward as a team,” he said. “Personally, as an owner, does [Jerry Buss] really want to spend the kind of money he’s spending on me to have a .500 team? We want to do better than that, by far. How do we go about readjusting to make sure that something that happened this year doesn’t happen again in the future?

“We have to make changes. There’s just going to be natural things that happen. I’ve only been with one team that did not make a change. That team won 72 games and lost 10. That said it all right there.

“But when we came back this year with the same starting lineup boxed in that we ended the season with last year, I don’t know if that can happen next season. I don’t know if we can feel like we’re moving forward if we do that.”

The Lakers are already over the salary cap for next season, which places a premium on how they use their midlevel exception, an annual tool that allows teams over the salary cap to sign a free agent for about $30 million over five years.

The Lakers could also try to make trades, an unpredictable course of events that would begin in July.

“There has to be really a good dialogue,” Jackson said. “Mitch and I are really on the same page in all this stuff. I think we know that at one point during this year, we felt like we were a player away from moving into another group. Then when you have players injured, you see how vulnerable your team is when one or two guys go out.”

The Lakers won’t match last season’s 45-37 record and they aren’t exactly showing the same momentum as last season, when they finished with an 11-3 regular-season surge and pushed the favored Phoenix Suns to a tight seven-game series in the first round.

In addition to the losses collecting at his feet, it has been a trying season for Jackson, beginning with his hip-replacement surgery in October and awkward off-the-court events including Kwame Brown’s cake-throwing incident and Vladimir Radmanovic’s unsanctioned snowboarding junket.

From there, Jackson was saddled in February with the first six-game losing streak of his 16-year NBA coaching career, only to experience his first seven-game losing streak a month later.

More recently, his election to the Basketball Hall of Fame was tempered three days later when guard Smush Parker publicly criticized his substituting strategy. Parker, irritated he had been benched for the entire fourth quarter of a game, said of Jackson, “I gave up trying to read that man a long time ago.”

Jackson is not shy in assessing the capital being invested in him.

“It’s a lot of money to pay a coach,” he said. “You pay a coach that, you want to be in the playoffs a couple rounds. That’s a given.”

mike.bresnahan@latimes.com