A healthy lineup gives coach choices

Coach Phil Jackson can look down his roster these days and actually smile.

It’s obviously not because of the Lakers’ end-of-season slide, but, rather, their stable of relatively healthy players.

“This is the first time in I don’t know how long I have 14 players to choose from before a ballgame,” Jackson said recently. “That’s a good feeling for us.”

With the regular season officially in the books, the Lakers lost a total of 228 man-games to injury. After a comparatively unscathed 2005-06, 11 Lakers lost time to injury this season: Kwame Brown (41 games), Lamar Odom (26), Vladimir Radmanovic (24), Luke Walton (22), Aaron McKie (10), Brian Cook (9), Maurice Evans (5), Ronny Turiaf (4), Kobe Bryant (3) and Jordan Farmar (2). Center Chris Mihm missed all 82 games because of ankle problems.

Brown’s sore left ankle remains the least predictable of the Lakers’ lingering injuries, but Jackson thought a recent MRI exam would soothe Brown’s nerves.

“I think he needed confirmation that he’s going to be fine,” Jackson said. “I think the pictures that we had taken -- diagnostic stuff -- was good for him. It was confirmation that he’s going to be OK.”

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The Lakers are expected to compete in the NBA-sanctioned Vegas Summer League in July, a move that would end their longtime presence in the Summer Pro League in Long Beach.

It seemed to be only a matter of time before it happened: Sixteen NBA teams competed in the nine-day summer league in Las Vegas last July, while only four NBA teams congregated at the Pyramid in Long Beach, a gradual decrease from eight teams there in 2004.

The Lakers had been with the Summer Pro League since it originated 37 years ago, but they were joined last summer by only Memphis, Dallas and Washington. The Clippers played in the SPL for 15 summers before leaving for the Las Vegas league in 2005.

mike.bresnahan@latimes.com