He’s Tweaking Noses Because He Can

Hi, Kings!

I guess it’s a little late to welcome you after Phil Jackson did it in his inimitable style. Of course, he was kidding, a distinction that seems to get lost these days.

You know what a kidder he is. I’m sure you’d love to see how funny he’d be if Shaquille O’Neal or Michael Jordan sprained an ankle at the wrong time, but just think of the meaning Jackson instills in so many lives. Just like George Steinbrenner and Al Davis!

In the spirit of the thing, I know your fans will have some surprises ready, too, like the guy who’s been hammering on that cowbell behind the Laker bench at Arco since Jackson’s semi-civilized/redneck crack.

Put it this way, Jackson had better be ready to see Rin Tin Tin sitting there this week, baring his teeth.

The bad news isn’t that Jackson’s still not impressed with your character, sophistication, etc. (Believe me, he can think of more. Of course, why you’d worry what someone from Deer Lake, Mont., thinks of your urbanity is your problem.)

The bad news is, he wouldn’t be plunking your magic twangers if he didn’t think he had you where he wanted you.

Jackson knows you’re a lot better than the team that scared the daylights out of the Lakers last spring. It’s just that he knows his team is better, too.

Remember that feud between Shaq and Kobe Bryant?

It’s over.

Now everyone here is running around asking the Lakers how they went from colossal busts to colossus. Bryant says it was “character.� O’Neal, who nominates himself for a new honor daily (today the MVP, tomorrow the Nobel Prize?), notes his exemplary leadership as team captain. Jackson says the other players stepped up.

Actually, it’s simple.

All season the other players were like kids in a troubled marriage, sniffing the air daily to see if their parents were getting along.

Jackson was getting beaten up all over town, including the offices of both superstars’ agents, for not sitting them down together. It was a good question--but it’s not Jackson’s way. Seven titles, including last season’s after he united Shaq and Kobe, suggested he’d earned the right to do it his way.

Jackson’s way was to go with the flow, nudging Bryant toward the light, often by zinging him in the papers. (Jackson’s actually an equal-opportunity zinger, who once suggested a Bloods-Crips motif for Los Angeles. He makes jokes at his own expense, too, although not often in public.)

Of course, Jackson never dreamed he’d have to go with the flow for so long . . . or that trade scenarios would reach the press, coming from Jackson intimates . . . or that Bryant’s agent, Arn Tellem, would send the Lakers not just one but two letters, demanding a formal apology for Jackson’s comments about Bryant in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Then in April, after they lost at home to the ostensibly overmatched New York Knicks and everyone, including Jackson, was sure nothing would ever fall in place, everything did.

The season turned two days later, April 3, in a victory at Utah, where Robert Horry came off the bench to score 20 points with eight rebounds and five assists.

Then they won the last three games on the trip as Horry failed to score.

Then Bryant, who’d been out for 10 games, returned in playmaker mode, turning them from decent to powerful, from dysfunctional to functional . . . just . . . like . . . that.

It’s hard to say why it took so long for Bryant to see the light. This wasn’t his first return from an injury this season.

Before this season, he had often wandered over the line but he had always found his way back. This time, however, he took his sweet time doing it.

He says it’s because he’s a better playmaker now, but he could always play that way, if he wanted to.

A better guess, if not one he wants to air, is he was upset--as intimates say he was--after being zinged by O’Neal in January and February and betrayed, the way he saw it, by Jackson in March.

In the end, however, Bryant reinvented himself--yet again--and now he’s the version they always dreamed of: Kobe 2001.

“If he can ever accept that responsibility for 48 minutes,� Rick Fox said after one of Bryant’s late, high-assist, low-turnover games, “I don’t think we can be beat.�

With the big guys finally cool, the little guys could stop taking hourly readings on their moods and go back to playing.

Remember when everyone said they missed Glen Rice?

Fox, Rice’s replacement, has averaged double figures since the All-Star break and is a better defender. It’s just that no one noticed when no one else was playing any.

Remember when people said they were too old and creaky to defend?

They gave up an average of 98 points before April, 92 in April and 89 to the Portland Trail Blazers in the first round.

The role players didn’t get younger or better and, except for Derek Fisher, they didn’t just learn to shoot. They were less distracted and got the ball more often.

“They are the two guys that lead us in so many ways,� Fisher says of O’Neal and Bryant. “Not just in points but in terms of their energy, their attitude, their mentality. And there did seem to be more focus on individuals than Laker basketball, team basketball. . . .

“And as we grew out of that stage and got more involved in winning games and not whose team it was, it did seem like things started to turn around. . . .

“That’s where our team starts. The rest of us feed off of them. The rest of us flourish off of them.�

Good luck, Kings, with them and Jackson. The series hasn’t even started up but he has.

Meanwhile, in the 6-9 and under conference . . .

Too bad Jordan didn’t come back this season. The way the East looks, he might have gotten the Washington Wizards into the finals and David Stern could have come out from under his bed when the TV ratings were released.

I recently suggested the East was better but I thought Miami was one of its leading teams.

You may have noticed the Heat isn’t with us anymore, having been swept by the Charlotte Hornets, who ascribed their turnaround to their headbands.

Now in Miami, you can’t turn on a TV without seeing some Heat guy skewering himself.

“If I was my boss, I would probably fire me, based on the results,� Coach Pat Riley said in a rare show of self-doubt. “We as a team--all five guys we paid $60, $65 million to and, also, the coach, who’s highly paid--simply failed. . . .

“I left the Lakers with a bag of rings. I never thought of myself as a coaching genius, contrary to what some people think. But I worked hard. This expectation went with me to New York. It’s like this disease I have. It’s supposed to happen in New York and it’s supposed to happen in Miami.

“My players get the brunt of it. We have not been able to handle the expectations. We have failed miserably at it.�

Said Alonzo Mourning, no longer this season’s courageous feel-good story:

“I might have come back too soon. I wanted to be the same old Zo, the same guy I was when I first stepped off the court. And I wasn’t--far from it.�

Said Brian Grant, who left Portland because he wanted to start, signed for $84 million and wound up . . . on the Heat bench:

“I started off tearing things up and then it just kind of subsided. I’ve just got to look at the year and say, ‘Why did that happen?’ I can’t blame anybody but myself.�

Riley was so gloomy, owner Micky Arison had to announce Riley is staying. It may have been a disappointment, after all the other disappointments, but it wasn’t incompetence, just too much transition in too little time, with Mourning’s late return, Eddie Jones’ late return, Anthony Mason’s late departure, in spirit anyway, and Riley’s beloved Tim Hardaway breaking down again.

“I’ve gone to the dance with Tim three years in a row,� said Riley, “and he can’t dance.�

Neither can the Heat, before next fall.

The East’s top team, the Philadelphia 76ers, was unimpressive against rag-tag Indiana.

The Milwaukee Bucks dispatched Orlando but not before Tracy McGrady let the Big Dog out, renaming Glenn Robinson “Puppy Dog,� while outscoring him, 110-59.

“I should probably tell you he’s not all that good and we can stop him,� Milwaukee’s Sam Cassell said of McGrady. “But, man, what a wonderful player.�

Meanwhile, in Toronto, home of McGrady’s cousin, Vince Carter, it was looking more and more like the Raptors had groomed the wrong cousin.

Last spring Carter swooned as the Knicks swept the Raptors. This time he opened with a five-for-22, 13-point game and everyone hopped on him in earnest.

Carter acted as if it was the silliest thing he’d ever heard of. Hating the incessant Jordan comparisons, he has swung so far the other way, he now thinks he just has to show up and try his best.

Talk about Tabloid Heaven. You had your clueless superstar . . . his fast-talking mother . . . and Oscar the Grouch.

Oscar was played by former Knick Charles Oakley, still on cordial terms with the New York writers and up to here with this new-age nonsense in which professionals are represented by their mommies. As far as the Gotham press was concerned, Oakley might as well have been a mole they’d planted among the Raptors.

In Game 3, Carter went five for 21, the Knicks won in Toronto without Marcus Camby and Carter issued the usual denial (“I’m not going to let anybody sit here and say it’s all about Vince, Vince, Vince.�)

To which Oakley replied, it always had been about Vince, Vince, Vince, so why stop now?

“All the plays go through Vince,� Oakley said. “The focus on Vince has been there all year. You can’t shy away from it now. This is the time you have to step up and be a man about it, you know?

“When he made the Dream Team, he went. All 12 of us didn’t go. When they do commercials, we don’t go. He goes.�

Fired up, Carter got 32 in a Game 4 victory, while his ubiquitous mother, Michelle, went after Oakley on the TNT telecast.

“It’s still a team game and Vince is right, everybody has to do their part,� she said. “Ironically, the people who are doing the talking the most are the people who are not doing their part tonight. But I’ll just leave it at that.�

Mrs. Carter, a personable retired schoolteacher, has raised a very nice young man and obviously has his interests at heart. But she’s still a stage mom who runs all, and mishandles many aspects of his career.

She chose agent Tank Black, who was ultimately jailed. Black signed Carter with Puma. He ultimately had to pay the company $13 million to get out of the deal.

Now she’s like Allen Iverson’s mother, who attends games in a 76er jersey with “Allen Iverson’s Mom� on it, except Mrs. Carter issues policy statements.

By now the Toronto Sun was calling it the “Mommy, Oak feud.� Fortunately for the Raptors, they didn’t take it seriously. What would any Mommy say?

They went back to New York and won Game 5, with Carter scoring 27 but point guard Alvin Williams taking over at the end, scoring nine points in the fourth quarter.

Coach Lenny Wilkens conceded Carter is “a little sensitive.� Teammate Chris Childs noted, “He’s a young kid. He’s fragile inside.�

Two years ago, Stern, asked about seeding the last four teams to avoid finals walkovers, explained this Western domination was just another cyclical turn.

It’s true, but it looks like we’re up to Year 3 in the cycle and counting.