Early birds get nothing in West

IT’S HAPPENING! IT’S HAPPENING!

If you didn’t think you’d live to see the Lakers and Boston Celtics on course to meet in another Finals, it’s official -- today, anyway -- with both teams No. 1 in their conferences.

Of course, the Lakers have already been bumped off course by Andrew Bynum’s injury with a line of big teams waiting to play them, starting tonight with the Phoenix Suns.

You may want to clip and save today’s standings, as we used to say, or save the file to your desktop, because these days things change fast.

Ask the Suns, once the game’s most feared offensive team, now supposedly fallen on hard times -- at 26-12, one of the four teams with the Lakers, Dallas and San Antonio within half a game of each other atop the West.

This is really exciting -- for the Lakers. For the old big three in the West, it’s just the regular season, which precedes the real season.

“The only thing that’s missing is that kind of euphoric feeling that you have when it’s new and fun and beautiful,” says the Suns’ Steve Nash.

“Like you see the Celtics and the Lakers to an extent, with their additions and their success, New Orleans. Some of these teams, it’s a lot of fun for them to turn that corner and be successful.

“We, in some ways, have been there, done that, and it’s not as easy to get up and do the little things every day.

“And to me, that’s what we’re fighting every day.”

Here’s what winning 60 games gets you in this conference if you’re not San Antonio, the only West team to win a title in the five seasons since the Lakers won their third consecutive championship.

Heartbreak. Expectations. Jaded fans. Restless owners. Managerial moves.

The Suns have had the full ride from their loss to the Spurs in the 2005 West finals -- with Joe Johnson out -- to their loss to the Spurs in last spring’s second round -- after tying the series in Game 4 in San Antonio and seeing Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw suspended for the pivotal Game 5 in Phoenix.

The Suns’ rise was the more remarkable, proceeding as the franchise made a bumpy transition from Old School paterfamilias Jerry Colangelo to new owner Robert Sarver.

In an awkward moment that looked as if it could split the organization, Sarver refused to extend GM Bryan Colangelo, Jerry’s son, in effect, showing him the door.

Instead, they skimmed past it, rallying around personable Coach Mike D’Antoni, who took over the basketball operation and became the bridge from the old organization to the new one.

Last summer Sarver gave the GM job to Steve Kerr, his partner when he began looking for an NBA team, who accepted his long-standing offer to run the organization.

As Arizona as the Wildcats for whom he played, Kerr’s personable too, but his background with the defense-oriented Spurs makes him D’Antoni’s philosophical antithesis.

Inevitably, when Kerr made suggestions about playing better defense and taking fewer three-pointers, they reverberated like falling manhole covers.

Kerr and D’Antoni deny any disagreements, but it’s clear that D’Antoni, so recently the organization’s golden boy, doesn’t have forever to win a title his way.

Aside from that, if the Suns have issues, they’re just their old ones: defense, Stoudemire’s shot attempts, Shawn Marion’s level of respect.

It’s not San Antonio’s never-a-nose-out-of-joint groove and, under enough pressure, it could be a problem.

On the other hand, if Stoudemire is higher maintenance than Tim Duncan, at this point in their careers Amare jumps higher too.

As good as the Suns’ widely copied style has been for the NBA, people have insisted they can’t win a title this way since they started doing it this way.

Of course, with the injured Johnson in the 2005 West Finals or Stoudemire and Diaw in Game 5 last spring, who knows what might have happened?

This is what big teams go through in the West, where there are so many. Last season two teams won 60 games, three were in the 50s and four of the five went home with nothing.

Not coincidentally, this season’s West race is tactical, with no team on a 60-win pace but six on a 50-win pace.

San Antonio Coach Gregg Popovich says he’s letting his veterans ease into this, although he has probably already written the speech he’ll make when he blows up and scorches them for not defending, coasting on their reputations, etc.

Dallas Coach Avery Johnson is taking chill pills with his Mavericks well off last season’s 67-win pace. Of course, if they don’t turn it up when they’re supposed to, three Mavericks could wake up in New Jersey for Jason Kidd.

West contenders who have been there and done that realize nothing means anything in January, February, March or the first two weeks of April.

“It’s kind of a silliness of our business,” Nash says. “We play 82 games and no one gets a trophy for that, but you get a trophy for two months’ work.

“So I think there’s some wisdom in not killing yourselves over whether you get 65 wins or not.”

Spring is coming but only one day at a time.

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mark.heisler@latimes.com

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LAKERS VS. PHOENIX

Tonight at Staples Center

7:30, TNT