HoopsHype.com NBA Blogs - Roland Lazenby

What’s that definition of insanity?

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome?

A cynic might note that’s an apt description for the coaching career of Don Nelson.

He’s just begun his 30th season of NBA coaching (he’s doing a second stint with the Golden State Warriors), to which he brings a career record of 1,280 wins against 954 losses, about 57 percent.

And he’s closing in on Lenny Wilkens’ all-time record of 1,322 NBA regular season coaching wins.

You could say that on many nights Nelson has got what they call that 2,000-game stare, except that his hoops habit runs much deeper than that. Nelson also played 14 years in the league, another (1,200) games including playoffs.

So that’s 44 years and better than 3,500 games (including exhibition games and playoffs). That, my friends, is a a lot of basketball.

In all that time, Nelson has never coached a championship team.

In fact, he’s never even coached a team that advanced to the NBA Finals.

At one point in the 1980s, Nelson’s Milwaukee Bucks teams won six straight division titles, but they flamed out each year. If it wasn’t Dr. J and the Philadelphia 76ers standing in Nelson’s way, it was Larry Bird and the Celtics.

For all of his years of coaching, Nelson has a big “nada” when it comes to the playoffs.

He did play on five Boston Celtic championship teams (1966, 1968, 1969, 1972, 1976, a nice little ring collection), and this season marks the 40th anniversary of Nelson’s huge moment late in Game 7 of the 1969 championship, when Boston was leading the Los Angeles 103-102. The Lakers’ Jerry West knocked a ball loose, and Nelson picked it up and threw up a dubious shot that hit the back of the rim, rose high in the air and fell back through the hoop.

It has long been considered the shot that sealed the Lakers’ fate in their sixth championship loss to the Celtics. Forty years later and Jerry West still has a hard time when he sees Nelson or hears his name.

Anyway, Nelson has never been so lucky as a coach. Not even close. He’s wasted a couple of 60-win seasons, and a 59-win season, plus innumerable other good campaigns. All of them ended in playoff flame-outs.

The numbers suggest a reality that may have New York Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni waking up with night sweats.

Nelson has long been the ultimate “small ball” innovator in pro basketball. And D’Antoni has been a top disciple of that faith. In fact, Nelson’s Warriors team got up even more shots than the Phoenix Suns last season.

“He’s always been able to make other teams play the way he wants to play instead of the way they want to play,” triangle offense guru Tex Winter says of Nelson. “He sees the game and he has ideas about how it should be played.”

For those reasons, Nelson has long been considered an innovator. Winter lauds Nelson’s tremendous success over the long haul.

During the regular season “small ball” always presents opponents trouble as a “one-game philosophy,” Winter says. “But it becomes a question mark when you get locked into a seven-game playoff series. That changes things considerably for those teams that want to play small ball or run a lot.”

As a result, Nelson’s impact on basketball philosophy has been bigger than his ability to win the big one.

That’s almost a moot issue for the Warriors, a franchise that has struggled for years to get it together. Golden State’s ownership is quite happy with what Nelson has done in his latest stop there.

In 2007, he chalked up 42 wins, just barely got the eighth seed in the playoffs and pulled a stunning first round upset of the no. 1 seed, the Dallas Mavericks.

The playoff victory goosed a long-suffering Warriors fan base that knows basketball and frankly deserves better.

For 2008, Nelson boosted the team’s win total to 48 but the Warriors just missed the playoffs in the challenging Western Conference.

Still, it was the first time the club had had back-to-back winning seasons since 1991-92, when Nelson was in the midst of his first coaching tenure with the Warriors.

For rediscovering the winning ways, team president Robert Rowell recently gave the 68-year-old Nelson a two-year contract extension worth an estimated $12 million.

“We’re elated that Don has elected to sign an extension,” Rowell said in making the move. “He has proven to be one of the most successful and innovative coaches in the history of our game and his continued presence on the sidelines is certainly a prominent asset for our team and organization.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Nelson told reporters. “It was fine with me to weigh it year to year. But they came to me and wanted me to commit to three years and, uh, I’m pretty excited about it. It’s quite an honor really to be wanted. At my age, you’re lucky if anybody wants you. Hopefully your wife.”

In less politic moment, Nelson confided his true feelings to reporters recently, saying that “an ass-kicking veteran team that would have a chance to win a title is what I deserve at 68.”

(The comment brings to mind that Clint Eastwood quote from “Unforgiven”: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”)

Yet Nelson’s comment reveals just how badly he wants to win one, just how badly he feels cheated by the circumstances.

Ah, the circumstances. They’re a bit complicated with the Warriors. First, June 30 brought the shocking news that point guard Baron Davis was opting out of the final year of his contract and walking away from $17.8 million. He stunned Nelson by signing a five-year, $65 million contract with the Los Angeles Clippers a week later.

“When you lose someone of his talent and stature, it’s hard to replace,” said Chris Mullin, the Warriors’ executive vice president of basketball operations.

The organization figured it would have talented young shooting guard Monta Ellis to move to the point. But Ellis was injured in a summer moped accident that infuriated ownership and left him suspended during his months-long recuperation for violating his contract provisions.

On the plus side, Corey Maggette (22.1 ppg, 5.6 rpg) signed a free agent contract with the Warriors after spending the past eight seasons with the Los Angeles Clippers. But the net for Golden State means that the bulk of Nelson’s roster is under 25.

Instead of a veteran team, he’s got a young one, a roster with no proven point guard, no real power forward, just the circumstances for Nelson to do what he does best: Innovate.

“Our philosophy has to change a little bit,” Nelson had said even before Ellis was injured. “I played mostly my veterans last year, trying to get to the playoffs, and we didn’t do it.”

Long known for letting his players play, Nelson admitted he was going to have to become more of a teacher. And he had plans to require his players to become better students of the game, more video study, more fundamentals, etc.

It wouldn’t hurt if they rebounded and defended better too.

Nelson’s immediate answer has been to put the ball in the hands of Stephen Jackson, to make him more of a point forward, and to align him with one of the several unproven young point guards on the team. In the early going, the results have been mixed.

The turmoil has begat more turmoil. Forward Al Harrington, never seemingly comfortable in Nelson’s system, opened the season by demanding a trade.

The developments all make it easy to predict that the Warriors are heading into what appears to be another winter of their discontent, and apparently the job of team executive Chris Mullin hangs in the balance. Team president Robert Rowell, upset over the handling of the Ellis issue, appears reluctant to extend Mullin’s contract, which is scheduled to end after this season. And there are stories circulating that Mullin had negotiated a new contract with Baron Davis only to have Rowell reject it.

Yes, things are pretty much a mess with the Warriors, with some observers speculating that Nelson is making moves to gain control over the front office by replacing Mullin, the loyal friend who hired him.

“No. No. Don’t want to be. No,” Nelson told the San Jose Mercury News. “I’m not interested in general manager, or coach and general manager, or anything else. I’ll support Mully the whole way. I hope he gets his deal done as well. I love working with Mully. I’m a coach. Period.”

A coach indeed, one with a determination to keep on rolling and looking for better things in the world to come.

It’s been 10 years since Jerry Krause, Phil Jackson and Michael Jordan parted company in a hail of spite and anger after winning six championships together with the Chicago Bulls.

It’s unlikely that the three ever posed together for a photograph, even in their sunnier days, but if they had Krause would have been the short dumpy guy looking entirely out of place.

The caption for that photo might have noted that Jordan was the one with the fierce presence and incredible talent and Jackson was the one with the cunning.

And Krause?

Well, he was the one with big enough balls to stand up to both of them.

It’s unlikely that Krause will ever join the other two in the Hall of Fame, but if he does, the display might well be a huge set of cojones.

Jordan, you may recall, was the most intimidating presence in the history of the game, on and off the court. That was his gift and his curse, all rolled into one. It was his gift because he rode that Alpha Male nature to the heights of the sport, scaring everybody in his path along the way. The curse was that his talent transformed those around him into fawning groupies and sycophants. Everywhere Jordan turned, he encountered people eager to tell him what he wanted to hear.

Even Jackson, hugely intimidating in his own right, chose his words carefully and stepped softly around His Airness.

Krause, on the other hand, charged right in like the bull that he was, cocksure in his own view of things.

Krause was the one who just knew the Cinderella Bulls had to have Bill Cartwright to upgrade their center play with smarts and toughness. So he traded away Charles Oakley, Jordan’s dear friend and partner in crime, to get Cartwright. It was just one of several Krause acts that Jordan never forgave.

“We didn’t win until we got Bill Cartwright,” Krause told me in a long conversation a few months back. “People today don’t realize how good Bill Cartwright was.”

Cartwright was the key to the Bulls’ first three championships from 1991-93, Krause said.

“Then the second group of three (1996-98) started when we got Dennis (Rodman). Without Dennis, we wouldn’t have done that.”

Jordan signed off on the Rodman acquisition, but there were plenty of other times Krause didn’t hesitate to run afoul of the team’s star.

Jordan lobbied hard for the drafting of Joe Wolf, a University of North Carolina star. Krause ignored him and drafted Horace Grant, another key in Chicago’s long, strange run of success.

Since the glory of his playing days ended, Jordan has struggled to find success and happiness in the game he virtually owned as a Bull.

Jordan has never phoned Krause, although he did contact him through an intermediary for the pivotal 2001 NBA draft. Jordan was an owner/executive for the Washington Wizards, and Krause was still working for the Bulls. They were both trying to sort out which big men to take among Tyson Chandler, Kwame Brown and Eddy Curry. Jordan made Brown his infamous selection, while Krause scooped up Chandler and Curry for Chicago.

“Michael didn’t try to pick my brain,” Krause said. “Michael didn’t have any respect for anybody’s brain. He did have Rod Higgins do a lot of his talking.”

Since his Bulls tenure ended a few years back, Krause has returned to his original love, scouting baseball.

Although Jordan is in charge of basketball operations for the Charlotte Bobcats these days and he could probably use Krause’s counsel on personnel issues, it’s not likely that the two will ever mend their differences.

And Krause scoffed when asked if he and Jackson would be getting together any time soon for a reunion of those great Bulls teams.

“I haven’t spoken to Phil since the last day he was with us in 1998,” Krause said.

Like Jordan, it would probably behoove Jackson to slice off a huge piece of humble pie and give Krause a call. After all, Jackson is in Los Angeles trying to duplicate the incredible feat they all accomplished together in Chicago – to build a championship team around a 2 guard.

Krause is quite a student of the game and he loves to point out that Chicago holds a distinction among all the great basketball teams.

“We were the only ones to build a championship team around a 2 guard,” he offered, adding that even attempting such a thing is almost silly. “That’s what I’m proudest of. It’s the hardest thing to do, really, really hard to do.”

WINTER

Their differences are enough to make you wonder how Krause and Jackson ever came to work together, but that in itself is the bittersweet heart of this story.

If Krause ever writes an autobiography, he plans to call it “One Million National Anthems.” That’s because he’s knocked around the games of baseball and basketball for years as a scout, taking bad flights, eating bad food, hanging out at practice, always looking for the hidden truth.

Even before that, when he was a student assistant charting plays at Bradley University, Krause caught his first glimpse of Tex Winter, then the coach at Kansas State. Krause was intrigued by the triangle offense and Winter’s intelligence and integrity.

“I liked what Tex did. I thought, ‘Boy, if he ever got good players that offense would be something.’”

Winter moved around in his coaching career as Krause moved into the netherworld of scouting, all the while keeping an eye on Winter and his teams. When Winter took the job at Northwestern, “we became better friends,” Krause said.

Winter recalls that he spent a lot of time with a projector, going over film, showing Krause a lot about the triangle.

“I wanted to learn about it,” Krause said. He also had hopes of becoming an NBA general manager someday and he offered promises that as soon as he did, he would hire Winter.

“I want you with me,” Krause told Winter. “I want you to teach the big people and to coach the coaches.”

“I always said, ‘I’m gonna hire him as an assistant coach, and I’m not gonna worry who the head coach is going to be,” Krause recalled.

In 1985, Krause’s labor came to fruition. He was hired as GM of the Bulls as Jordan was entering his second season. Sure enough, one of the first calls he made was to Winter.

First, Krause hired Stan Albeck as head coach. But Albeck didn’t want to listen to Winter and didn’t want to use the offense.

Krause also wanted him to hire a goofy young assistant named Phil Jackson. Krause had discovered Jackson, a lanky big guy at the University of North Dakota, while scouting small college ball. Krause had quickly come to believe that Jackson had a bright future. But Albeck absolutely refused to hire Jackson, who was viewed as something of an oddball back in the 1980s.

Krause fired Albeck and promoted a bright young coach, Doug Collins.

Krause wanted Collins to hire Jackson, but the new coach was reluctant.

“I went around some things with Doug, but I finally got Phil on his staff,” Krause said.

Once there, Jackson soon began working with Winter and learning from him. But like Albeck, Collins didn’t want to listen to Winter. He even barred Winter from Bulls practices at one point.

Finally, Krause grew fed up, fired Collins and hired Jackson as his head coach.

At last, Krause had the two people he had dreamed of putting in charge. It was the beginning of a coaching partnership that would win nine NBA titles.

“Phil was the first person to understand how good Tex was,” Krause said. “I give Phil a lot of credit. Phil is the best brain picker I have ever known. Phil has picked Tex’s mind for years. I’m a great brain picker myself. I’ve picked Tex’s mind for years. But Phil is by far the best I’ve ever seen because he took a genius and picked his brain. I hired Phil because he was a brilliant defensive coach. When Phil said he wanted to use Tex’s triangle, I said, ‘That’s great.’”

Krause doesn’t take credit for it, but the two would become the core of a great coaching staff, that included Johnny Bach, Jimmy Rodgers, Frank Hamblen and Jimmy Cleamons.

“I do believe the coaching staff we had in Chicago is the best staff in the history of the game,” Krause said. “They were a tremendous complement to Phil.”

For several years, Jackson and his staff proved the perfect match for Jordan, Scottie Pippen and the assemblage of talent. However, Krause’s strong personality wore on Jackson season after season.

Winter grew to become a moderating factor between the two. He said Jackson spent several years bending over backward to please Krause, but by late 1995, Jackson had grown weary of the process and began to rebel.

That rebellion grew into open warfare by 1996. Some accuse Jackson of using Jordan’s and Pippen’s dislike of Krause to motivate the team and drive the Bulls along a bitter road to their last three championships.

Krause soon found himself caught up in the web of Jackson’s mind games and the coach’s ability to use the media to achieve his goals.

“He’s always operated that way,” Krause said of Jackson. “Believe me, he’s stirred the pot with me a number of times. That’s the way he does things. I know the act, believe me.”

Observers watched Krause’s own hubris feed into the end game in Chicago. The team and coaching staff broke apart after the sixth title in 1998. Krause’s vision of Jackson and Winter had been special, then it turned into his nightmare.

Jackson “rode off into the sunset” was how the media termed the parting. Krause says he was disappointed in 1999 when Winter told him he was leaving the Bulls to accept a job working with Jackson and the Lakers.

“I wasn’t happy about it when he left,” Krause said of Winter, one of the elite few whom Krause calls ‘Coach.’ “I told him that. But Coach is still Coach with me. I don’t call many people coach. You gotta earn that with me.”

Now in his late 60s and still living in the Chicago area, Krause offers a matter-of-fact view of the experience and shows some callouses.

“I’ve got tapes of every game that was played in that era,” he says. “I’ve never looked at ‘em.”

Jackson was voted into the Hall of Fame last year, which served to remind Krause of his frustration at not getting the Hall to recognize Winter as an all-time great coach.

Winter is one of the game’s ultimate “geniuses,” he says.

Krause himself was on the selection committee for the Hall several years ago and resigned in protest over the issue.

“I did everything I could do,” Krause said, adding that the politics of selection has made Winter’s recognition as one of the game’s all-time great coaches an impossibility. “It ain’t gonna happen.”

He has grown to accept that reality as he has everything else that came to pass. He says he has moved on to his new life in baseball and is enjoying it immensely.

Don’t expect a warm reunion of one of pro basketball’s great teams, he says.

“It’s past history. It’s done. Phil is a great coach. For a long time, he was very easy to work with. Then he was not so easy. That’s life. Things change. Phil is Phil. I’m proud I hired him.”

What to do with Lamar Odom?

That’s the nagging question that’s been hanging in the air for the Los Angeles Lakers for a while now, ever since 2004 really, when the team cut loose center Shaquille O’Neal and coach Phil Jackson and the slow-down version of the triangle offense that had won them three championships.

Lakers owner Jerry Buss admitted then that he really didn’t like the triangle.

Buss wanted to return to the glory days of yore, to Showtime, when he had the majestic 6-9 Magic Johnson snaring a rebound on the defensive glass, then running a fastbreak that left opponents dizzy.

With Jackson’s firing, the team brought in Rudy Tomjanovich and began rebuilding the roster into a running team. The 6-9 Odom with the silky smooth open-court skills was a key acquisition for constructing the new-and-improved, up-tempo Lakers. Like the Magic of Showtime, Odom had the size to secure the defensive rebound and the ballhandling skills to power out on the fastbreak. Dude was born to run and feed the ball to teammates filling the lanes.

Only problem was, Buss’s dream soon derailed. First, the NBA of the new century is not the NBA of the 1980s. Jump-starting the pure running game proved oh so hard to do. Rudy T stepped down during a disastrous 2005 season, and that summer the Lakers rehired Jackson and his triangle approach.

All of a sudden, the elegant Odom was marooned. Like a racehorse hitched to a hay wagon.

With the behemoth Shaq gone, Jackson no longer insisted on running the triangle offense at a slug’s pace. Triangle guru Tex Winter had long been urging Jackson to run more, even with Shaq still around.

Odom gave the Lakers an opportunity to go, and to Jackson’s credit, he turned the team loose a bit and found some ways to take advantage of Odom’s gifts.

Still, the triangle features much half-court action, and the Lakers often found themselves slowed in the halfcourt, trying to move through the triangle options.

Lord knows that Odom has tried to get it. He’s always shown the team-first attitude. He’s a lovely, warm, genuine person. The Lakers adore him. But he has never been a good fit for the triangle. His hesitation in it feeds his inconsistency, Tex Winter has fussed over the past three seasons.

At first, Jackson likened Odom to Scottie Pippen, the versatile forward who ran the offense and set the table for Michael Jordan when Jackson coached the Chicago Bulls to six championships.

Alas, we knew Scottie Pippen, and Odom is no Pippen.

The Lakers front office has hemmed and hawed and kicked the tires, thinking about trading Odom several times over the years. But every time they thought about trading him they apparently got visions of what would happen if Odom fell into the hands of an evil genius such as Dr. Mike D’Antoni, once of the Phoenix Suns and now of the New York Knicks.

Basketball hell is giving up a talented player who then becomes the secret ingredient to the success of one of your sworn enemies.

Problem is, Odom’s such a talented, intriguing player that he presents a challenge for Jackson on how to use him. If the coaching staff could only harness that talent. …

The best answer the Lakers coaches could come up with was to move him to power forward, where he could rebound, defend and benefit from mismatches with slower opponents. That worked to a degree, but it left several things unresolved.

First, there was the open-court element of Odom’s talent just going to waste. That’s the kind of thing that keeps coaches awake at night.

Then there were the obvious things exposed in last year’s NBA championship series against the Celtics. Caught in the frontcourt playing in the triangle offense, Odom was often pretty damn good. But there were also numerous times he presented the figure of an unsure, inconsistent player.

The coaching staff was able to rationalize such inefficiency so long as the Lakers were winning and moving through the playoffs. But in the championship series, Los Angeles became a team exposed for its lack of mental toughness and inconsistency – and Odom became something of a poster child for those issues.

Plus the Lakers now face another head-scratcher. Center Andrew Bynum returns from injury this season, which moves Pau Gasol back to power forward. The Lakers hope to run a Twin Towers approach with the two 7-footers, although Winter has his doubts it’ll work in the “Small Is Beautiful” NBA of 2008.

Gasol at power forward would mean moving Odom to small forward, or so it seemed. (Actually, Odom remains an insurance policy. If the Twin Towers doesn’t work, he returns to power forward).

But as every single person in the Western World has learned by now, Jackson opened training camp this year by suggesting that Odom perhaps come off the bench. He made this announcement, of course, without discussing the issue at length with Odom himself.

Now, if you’ve ever played for Jackson, or played on a team that has gone up against Jackson, the last thing you want to do is trigger one of his mind games.

Unfortunately, it’s what Phil does best.

“Phil is the master of mind games,” Jordan said back in 1996 of the master manipulation that Jackson practiced.

Later, Jordan watched Jackson coach the Lakers and he declared, “He’s still the master of mind games, only better. He challenges you mentally. That’s his strong point.”

These mind games come in such variety that many times the people around Jackson proceed through the game without even being aware that they are participating, that he has engaged them in it and manipulated them. (He is magnificent at manipulating the media; reporters often seem least aware of his skill, perhaps because they’re easy suckers for the ego candy he feeds them).

His players are usually a bit smarter than reporters, so they have at least a dim awareness.

“There’s meanings in everything and why things are done not everyone always knows,” Bill Wennington, who played for Jackson in Chicago, explained. “Phil is a really deep thinker, and everything he says seems to have a lot of thought put into it. Most of the things he says have at least two meanings, and at times you have to figure out which one he means. But that’s part of Phil. He wants you to think; he wants you to figure out what’s going on. He doesn’t want you to do things just by rote, and he uses that term a lot. He wants you to think and know what’s going on and why you’re doing things.”

In the process of thinking about what Jackson has said to them, players sometimes discover that there was even a third or fourth intended meaning, Wennington said.

“At times you think back and you find a third or fourth meaning that you maybe didn’t see it right away. He knows how to push buttons and get guys going and get them to achieve goals that maybe other people can’t get.”

Odom, having played for Jackson for three seasons, is fully aware of his mind games. That didn’t stop the forward from complaining openly and vehemently about the idea of coming off the bench.

Perhaps Odom trumped Jackson by responding vociferously to the coach’s trial balloon.

After all, Jackson abruptly changed tactics. Now, it seems, the Lakers are ready to try Odom handling the ball and playing some point guard, or point forward, with veteran Derek Fisher moving to off guard and Kobe Bryant moving to small forward.

Just maybe, though, as Bill Wennington would allege, this is what Jackson wanted all along.

Some veteran Lakers observers might fuss that Odom can’t play point guard for the team because he still doesn’t know the triangle well enough.

Then again, Fisher has always been able to get the Lakers into their half-court offense. He knows the triangle well. If he’s there at 2 guard, he can easily take over in those half-court situations. And maybe, like Ron Harper did in Chicago, Odom will finally get the hang of the triangle.

And Bryant at the small forward? That’s where the Lakers like to play him on offense anyway.

Maybe Jackson had wanted to move Odom from power forward all along, so he simply challenged Odom’s status as a starter. Suddenly Odom was so worried about being a starter – he has been a starter his entire basketball life – that he didn’t bother anymore about being a power forward.

Maybe that’s what Jackson wanted all along, that, as usual, he was playing chess a couple of moves ahead of everybody else.

Fact is, with Jackson, you never really know. It’s only after he’s gotten his way that you’re left to figure out what really happened.

Across the continent in Charlotte, where he sits these days as an owner/operator of the Bobcats while keeping an interested eye on Jackson and the Lakers, Jordan is surely smiling.

He knows Phil usually manages to get what he wants.

I wrote a Kobe Bryant/Michael Jordan feature for Lindy’s Pro Basketball 2008 Preview, the magazine that I have edited for the past 15 years. I sat down with Jordan for about 20 minutes over the offseason, which is the basis for the article, titled “In Michael’s Image.” I asked Jordan about Kobe Bryant and the loud criticism directed at the Lakers star for being a Jordan wanna be, an imitator.

Jordan and Bryant are close, which perhaps explains why Jordan said he doesn’t see what all the big fuss is about. After all, human behavior is mimetic. That’s what humans do. They copy and ape another.

Jordan acknowledged Bryant is the best of a generation of players who have tried to be like Mike.

“But how many people lighted the path for me?” Jordan asked. “That’s the evolution of basketball. There’s no way I could have played the way I played if I didn’t watch David Thompson and guys prior to me. There’s no way Kobe could have played the way he’s played without watching me play. So, you know, that’s the evolution of basketball. You cannot change that.”

Phil Jackson and Tex Winter, who coached Jordan in Chicago and Bryant in Los Angeles, have long marveled at the alpha male nature of both players. What critics perhaps still don’t yet grasp is that the issue involves personality types.

It’s impossible to copy a personality type. That’s a genetic trait. Copying Jordan’s physical abilities would be nearly impossible to do. Then, to duplicate his uber mind-set? Such a constitution is rare indeed.

“I tend to think how very much they’re alike,” Winter explained to me. “They both display tremendous reaction, quickness and jumping ability. Both have a good shooting touch. Some people say Kobe is a better shooter, but Michael really developed as a shooter as he went along. I don’t know if Kobe is a better shooter than Michael was at his best.”

Forget about jumping as high or shooting as well, who could work as hard as Jordan? Who’s willing to live a life of day-to-day, unbending grind? Who has the fierceness? The relentless desire that wears everyone else on the team out?

Jackson always pointed out that Jordan’s personality was great for winning games, but it tended to grind on the teammates around him.

Jordan sees these traits in Bryant and admits to being more than a casual observer. He’s fascinated by Bryant’s career, even able to relive some of his own experience by watching Kobe. After all, he too played for Jackson in Winter’s same triangle offense.

Perhaps nothing emphasizes the alpha male traits they share better than their similar reaction to injury.

Bryant, of course, was diagnosed with a torn ligament and an avulsion fracture last season. That means that the ligament pulled away from the digit and took a chunk of bone with it.

The injury isn’t so much continually painful as it is a source of numbness, unless someone strikes it during a game. Then it can become quite painful. It immediately raised questions about how the injury would affect Bryant’s shooting, a question that gets bandied about on the Internet.

Bryant could have had surgery during the season, but he wanted to keep playing.

He could have had it over the summer, but he wanted to play in the Olympics.

He could have it late in the offseason, but he has a serious agenda for the Lakers for 2009. That agenda doesn’t allow him to miss the early months of the season.

So he’s going to play on.

“I have always felt that I can still focus and play at a high level even through various injuries,” Bryant explained on his website. “That’s really just part of the game. When the doctors told me recovery from a procedure could be 12 weeks, I just decided now was not the time to have surgery. What it really came down to for me is that I just didn’t want to miss any time ‘punching the clock’ for the Lakers, given all we are trying to accomplish as a team this NBA season. I am just really excited and looking forward to being there with the guys when camp opens in a few weeks. That is a real bonding process and if I can avoid being on the sidelines for that, God willing, I will.”

Old-timers will recall that just three games into his second NBA season, Jordan suffered a broken navicular tarsal bone in his left foot, an injury that had altered or ended the careers of several NBA players. He missed the next 64 games, then insisted on coming back to play at the end of the season, even though doctors explained that he risked perhaps a 15 percent chance of ending his career.

Jordan didn’t care. He was determined to play.

“That’s the way Mike was,” Mark Pfeil, who was then the Bulls’ trainer, told me. “If he didn’t think something was gonna hurt him, he’d focus past it and play. Sprains, groin pulls, muscle spasms, flu, Michael’s first question always was, ‘Is it gonna hurt me to play?’ If I told him no, it was gone. He’d focus past it.”

“I didn’t want to watch my team go down the pits,” Jordan explained. “I thought I was healthy enough to contribute something.”

With Jordan back in the lineup, the Bulls went 6-7 over their last 13 games and despite a 30-52 finish somehow made the playoffs. In the first round of the playoffs, the Bulls encountered the Boston Celtics, who were on their way to their 16th world championship. Boston swept Chicago, but not before Jordan set the NBA abuzz with a 63-point performance in a double-overtime loss on in Boston Garden.

“That’s God disguised as Michael Jordan,” Larry Bird said afterward.

Critics want to make much of Bryant’s decision as some sort of PR move, or perhaps yet another attempt to mimic Jordan.

Actually, it’s pretty simple. Bryant and his Lakers got their butts kicked by Boston in the league championship series. Bryant and his team lost Game 4 after holding a huge lead.

Winter, a longtime Bryant mentor and observer, noted that he outcome was a huge setback for someone with the stated goal of becoming the game’s greatest player.

For Bryant, the agenda is to get into training camp with his team to get ready to compete in 2009. He wants to win, and he can’t do that sitting out in September, October and November. He’s got a young team that he needs to lead, to drive.

After all, that’s what alpha males do.

Faced with a “weird” situation with center Andrew Bynum, the Los Angeles Lakers are toying with the thought of bringing back Kwame Brown, a free agent.

No, this is not a joke.

Yes, this is the same Kwame Brown who rode out of town to a chorus of fan boos in a trade last February that brought Pau Gasol to the franchise. Brown is the former No. 1 overall pick that many consider the biggest bust in league history. Why would the Lakers want him back?

Think about it.

The Lakers made it to the NBA Finals last season and found themselves in a collection of dire mismatches with Boston. For starters, Los Angeles had no one to contend with Celtics center Kendrick Perkins’ size and strength. “They could have used Kwame in the Finals,” said one Lakers insider.

Tex Winter, the longtime coach and team consultant, was in Las Vegas to evaluate the Lakers’ summer league team. Winter said he is totally out of the loop on personnel decisions with the team and hadn’t heard of the Kwame deliberation, but Winter said it makes sense, especially for Lakers coach Phil Jackson.

“Phil has always liked Kwame,” Winter said. “Phil’s always felt that defensively he’s pretty good.”

If he’s cheap enough as a free agent, Brown could serve as an insurance policy for Los Angeles. Brown also has experience running the triangle offense, a plus. He could be important following the loss of restricted free agent backup center Ronny Turiaf, who signed a fat deal with Golden State recently. The coaching staff loved Turiaf and hated to see him go, but his loss is just one of a series of extremely tough decisions the Lakers face in the offseason.

Another tough situation is the team’s relationship with injured center Andrew Bynum, who has long been a pawn in the internal battle between the children of Lakers owner Jerry Buss, who are competing for daddy’s love and control of the franchise.

There was a time last summer when the tension between Jim Buss, who “oversees” basketball operations, and Jeanie Buss, who runs the team’s marketing management, seemed like it would erupt into open warfare.

Long known as a party guy who doesn’t even come into the Lakers offices on a regular basis, Jim Buss was viewed by the Jeanie Buss faction as the villain who fired Jackson in 2004, traded Shaquille O’Neal and hired ill-fated coach Rudy Tomjanovich. The messy series of events cost the team millions when Tomjanovich stepped down after coaching only a handful of games. Jackson, of course, is Jeanie Buss’ longtime boyfriend who was rehired in 2005 after the magnitude of Jim Buss’ blunder became apparent.

Since Jackson’s return, it has been the mission of Jeanie Buss to try to control and limit the ineptness of her brother, a nice guy who is said to keep his bartender on the Lakers payroll. Jim Buss, however, is the person in the organization who insisted on drafting Andrew Bynum in 2005 when the front office leaned heavily toward Sean May. That one pick has worked out so far, which is the one thing that Jim Buss clings to as evidence of his competence.

Yet the Jeanie faction in the Lakers organization stays awake at night worrying about what Jim might do or say next.

It wasn’t too long ago, for example, that Jim Buss told Bynum that Jackson wasn’t really very good at coaching big men, so Jim told the 19-year-old center that he should find his own coaching. When she learned of the comment, sister Jeanie supposedly said, “Jim, I don’t think you should say crazy things like that. They could have disastrous results.”

Sure enough, the Lakers coaching staff was hit with a bombshell in the summer of 2007 when Bynum announced he was not playing with the Lakers’ summer league team but would instead work with his own coach and trainer in Atlanta.

Bynum knows he is the pet pawn of Jim Buss and has used that status to stay apart from the team in many regards. In fact, his relationship with the team is “weird,” according to another Laker insider, and a legacy of Jim Buss’ lack of understanding of the concepts of basketball.

This has come to have frustrating and perhaps disastrous results once the talented young center injured his knee in February. Rather than trust the team doctors, Bynum pursued his own medical advice on how to deal with the surgery and recovery from the damage to the medial collateral ligament.

Supposedly, team doctors wanted Bynum to “suture” the knee, reportedly a standard practice after MCL surgery. However, Bynum’s personal doctor opposed it. When Bynum’s recovery ran into trouble, he turned to a second doctor who reportedly also opposed suturing. Again, the knee remained slow to heal.

Now Bynum looms as a huge question mark for the team heading into training camp. Will he be ready to go?

Laker GM Mitch Kupchak announced vaguely recently that Bynum would be ready for training camp. But Kupchak didn’t make it clear if team doctors had been able to see and clear the center for participation.

“Jim Buss created this situation by saying to him, ‘Go get your own guys,’” said the Laker insider close to Jeanie Buss.

Jackson has patiently put up with the situation.

“What other choice does he have?” explained the insider.

Other conflicts loom as well. Owner Jerry Buss “is not sold’ on young point guard Jordan Farmar while Jackson very much likes Farmar’s play.

Then there’s Jackson’s fascination with Sacramento forward Ron Artest. Would the Lakers trade Lamar Odom to get him? Jeanie Buss supposedly insists that Odom is safe, but the Busses are moving through another summer of discontent, looking for an answer.

Who knows? Maybe Kwame will provide a voice of reason, or at least a little frontcourt muscle.