laker basketball

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LAKERS REPORT

Bryant called 'questionable to doubtful' for the opener

By Mike Bresnahan, Times Staff Writer

October 27, 2006

The exhibition season has ended for the Lakers. Now the Kobe Bryant watch begins.

He did not suit up for the exhibition finale Thursday against Denver and was called "questionable to doubtful" by a team official for Tuesday's season opener against Phoenix.

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Bryant worked out individually on the court before the exhibition in Anaheim but watched the game, a 126-108 Lakers loss, from behind the team bench.

He has said he wants to play, but whether his knee will be fully recovered from off-season surgery is another question.

"I don't know. We'll see," Bryant said Thursday. "I worked out really, really hard [Thursday]. We'll see how it feels in the morning. This is the hardest workout I had. I ran about an hour straight, just doing line drills and things like that. Then I went and shot the ball. It was a little sore afterwards, a little sore now, but nothing major. The big thing is always the next day."

The Lakers aren't pressing him to play in the opener, or the next day against Golden State, keeping in mind the 82-game season.

"We as an organization, we're not going to gamble and try to bring him back too early," assistant coach Kurt Rambis said. "If he feels like that's all the time that he needs and it responds well, and he goes out there and stresses it the way that it needs to be stressed to handle the rigors of playing an NBA game, and it doesn't bother him the following day, he can make that decision."

Bryant is entering his 11th NBA season. He has played 126 playoff games, the equivalent of another season and a half.

He has been known to be a quick healer in the past, although he is behind schedule in returning from mid-July arthroscopic surgery. He was expected to be back in eight to 12 weeks. Saturday marks the beginning of the 16th week.

Thus, the Lakers have been preparing for life without Bryant, just in case.

"In a lot of respects, without knowing it, that's what we've been doing the entire training camp and preseason," Rambis said. "We've been saying all along that we want the guys to learn how to play together. It's going to be the easiest thing for Kobe to come in and assimilate himself."

Maurice Evans has been starting at shooting guard in Bryant's absence.

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Andrew Bynum continued to play well in the exhibition season, scoring 14 of his 23 points in the first quarter against Denver.

Bynum, who turns 19 today, showed polished moves in the post and made nine of 12 shots. He also had seven rebounds and five assists in 34 minutes.

"I think when [bryant] gets back, we'll be that much better," Bynum said. "Up until then, I think we'll start off pretty well. We've got a lot of home games to start with. We should go, like, 15-5, at the least."

The Lakers finished 4-4 in exhibition play.

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The Lakers waived Von Wafer and rookie J.R. Pinnock, trimming their roster to 16. They need to be at 15 by Monday afternoon. Devin Green is the only other player with a non-guaranteed contract.

Wafer, a second-round pick last year, averaged 1.3 points in 17 games last season. He played only one exhibition game this month before being sidelined by a bruised heel.

Pinnock, a second-round selection out of George Washington, averaged 1.8 points in six exhibition games.

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bryant will play

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Transition game for Lakers

As the Lakers get set to start their 28th season under his ownership, Jerry Buss talks about gradually handing over the team to son Jim and daughter Jeanie.

By Mike Bresnahan, Times Staff Writer

October 30, 2006

Jerry Buss sat back in his jeans, casual shirt and an unlaced pair of high-tops, perched comfortably in his living room and flanked by an army of Remington statues as he discussed the future of the Lakers.

He acknowledged starting the gradual process of transferring control of the team to his daughter, Jeanie, and son Jim. He said he wanted the recently repaired Phil Jackson to stay beyond the length of a contract that ends after next season. He spoke glowingly of General Manager Mitch Kupchak and firmly maintained he is two-thirds of the way to a championship blueprint with Kobe Bryant and Lamar Odom in the fold, lacking only a "dominant center."

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The Lakers begin their 28th season under Buss' ownership when they open Tuesday against Phoenix. There have been eight championships and five other NBA Finals appearances, a legacy whose future the 73-year-old Buss has begun to ponder.

Buss ultimately wants to shift all of his holdings to his children, a process he began recently by transferring to them a small portion of his shares in the team's privately held stock. On Sunday, with a view of Playa del Rey spilling through the bay window behind him, Buss singled out Jim, the team's vice president of player personnel, and Jeanie, executive vice president of business operations.

"That process will continue," Buss said of the stock transfer. "I cannot foresee the fact that anybody but our family will have the Lakers. In terms of passing the torch, Jimmy is certainly taking a much more active role in the basketball fortunes. I think you can lay at his doorstep the fact that we gambled and took [Andrew] Bynum. He was the one out of all of us that said, 'Hey, let's not fool around. We've got to go with this kid.' Some of the others wanted Channing Frye, but Jimmy kept going, 'Bynum, Bynum.'

"Slowly, I would like to turn it over to Jim to see how effective my strategy is while I'm still alive and have time to correct it. Of course, for the business aspect of the Lakers, Jeanie's been doing that for a long time and I have every confidence in the world, and she seems to do a phenomenal job, so I've got no problems there. I'll give Jimmy more and more decisions every few months from here on out until he's making all of them. But I'll always be right there by his side to make sure that I'm in agreement, let's put it that way."

Buss also revealed he was hoping to reach an agreement on a contract extension with Jackson. Sitting in the same room where he told Jackson he wanted to go in a "different direction" after the Lakers' 2004 Finals collapse against Detroit, Buss conveyed a newfound respect, if not need, for Jackson, who is in the second season of a three-year, $30-million contract.

"We hadn't brought it up because of the hip surgery, but now that's done and when I see him walking around, we'll talk to him and see what his wishes are," Buss said. "If he wants to coach longer, then we'll certainly want to have him.

"I think once and for all we might have ended the myth that he only can coach when he has great players, although he has Kobe, who's a great player, but he wasn't deep at all [last season]. The job he did in turning Kwame [brown] around is an example and getting Smush [Parker] to play much better than he had in previous years, I think you begin to see the real Phil Jackson there."

Buss floated similar compliments toward Kupchak, who is in his seventh season as the team's head of basketball operations.

"I'm really pleased with what Mitch has done," Buss said. "If you look at the entire Laker roster, I think that the best we had in terms of a draft choice was a No. 10, for Bynum. Smush was not a high draft choice, [Jordan] Farmar wasn't a high draft choice, Luke Walton wasn't a high draft choice, Ronny [Turiaf] was not a high draft choice, Sasha [Vujacic] was a low draft choice.

"In other words, I guess what I'm saying, outside of the Shaq [shaquille O'Neal] free-agent thing, we haven't had any draft choices better than 10. If you look through the league, that may well be unique, and therefore, my hat's off to the front office. I think Mitch has done an absolutely incredible job."

The Lakers lost to Phoenix in the first round of the playoffs last season, becoming only the eighth NBA team to lose a series after leading, 3-1. Buss sat down with media members a few months before last season, saying with optimism that the Lakers could be in the Western finals "in a couple of seasons."

He remained bullish Sunday about the franchise's future.

"I think to be a championship team, you've got to have three really great players," he said. "Probably one at each position  guard, forward, center, that seems to be the best formula. Now you're saying, well, how far can Kwame come or will Bynum be that missing ingredient? The last couple of [exhibition] games, where I saw Bynum, I was pretty impressed. With Kobe and Lamar, I think we've got enough ingredients that if we get the dominating center, I think we could win it."

How soon?

"With Phil Jackson, I think you have a chance any year," he said. "I think we were a lot closer to it than people realized last year, just that last nine seconds [in Game 6 against Phoenix]. We would have won that series and we would have played the Clippers after that, who the last game of the year you probably remember, we dominated. Dallas, we had beaten two out of three. There's some luck involved and some skill involved, but I like to put my money on Kobe and Phil."

The Lakers remain hemmed in by the salary cap until the summer of 2008, free to try to improve themselves via trades and the draft but facing the reality that an impact free-agent signing probably won't come for another two years, if at all.

Last year, they hoped Yao Ming and Amare Stoudemire would decline contract extensions and become free agents, but both players signed long-term deals to stay with their respective teams. This year, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade signed contract extensions with their teams.

"We were disappointed when all the big free agents re-signed," Buss said. "But the way the dice are loaded, the about-to-be free agent who doesn't sign the extension is taking a very big gamble if he should be injured during that period of time.

"It probably loads the dice where unless somebody's really unhappy where he's at, that most of the big players will stay with the respective teams. Therefore, I think our strategy has changed a little bit. But with certain things, you can create cap space too. You could take one of the players we have under long-term contract and large salary and we could trade him right away for people who have one-year contracts, so suddenly at the end of this year, we'd be up to $18 million, $20 million, just as much as it costs to sign a free agent. The strategy's not dead  it just means that we're not going to put all the eggs in that basket, as perhaps we did."

Of the highest-paid Lakers players, Bryant has five years left on his contract, Odom has three years and Brown has two years.

Buss said his relationship with Bryant "is closer now than it has ever been."

"I think we've always tried to keep all the great players here to finish their careers," he said. "I think he has subscribed to that. But you never [can] tell. In five years, that's when there will by flying automobiles and wrist telephones and all those kinds of things."

The Lakers were seeded seventh in the Western Conference playoffs last season and, despite the collapse against Phoenix, Buss said he was looking forward to this season.

"Being up on Phoenix … I was enjoying that, really enjoying that," he said. "I'd say I look forward to this season as much as I ever did. The summer seemed longer to me now in anticipation. I don't think my enthusiasm has waned at all."

mike.bresnahan@latimes.com

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LAKERS REPORT

Practice gets better for Bryant

By Mike Bresnahan, Times Staff Writer

October 30, 2006

Trust issues for the Lakers? Indeed.

Kobe Bryant answered "not much" when asked how much he trusted his surgically repaired right knee.

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"It's difficult turning the corner, being able to trust it, to be able to pivot and explode off it," he said Sunday. "It's still a little sore."

Bryant has told Lakers Coach Phil Jackson he will play in Tuesday's season opener against Phoenix, and he called Sunday's scrimmage his best so far during his rehabilitation from mid-July arthroscopic surgery. He was able to elevate better, jumping for rebounds more readily than any other time since the procedure.

But there are still issues with planting and cutting, obvious prerequisites for Bryant's game.

"You kind of put your foot in the water to see if it's cold, like trying to turn the corner but not really trying to turn the corner and then seeing what that feels like," he said. "If it's like, that felt OK, so next time I can turn it a little sharper, a little quicker. Just trying to gauge it like that."

Jackson, for his part, will rely primarily on one source to determine Bryant's playing status  Bryant himself.

"He'll let me know as to how it goes out there," Jackson said. "He's not, by his own admission, sharp, not making great plays or passes yet."

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Lamar Odom received a fairly large vote of confidence on Sunday.

"I believe Lamar could be as good as he wants to be," team owner Jerry Buss said. "He comes within one or two statistics half the time of having a triple-double. You have to wonder if he wanted to do it, just to get one more assist or another rebound or something, finish up the year with about 40 triple-doubles, then I think everybody would know what Lamar Odom's all about.

"I know that's what the coaches try to get him to do, to be more aggressive, take the role. I think Lamar definitely can do it."

Odom averaged 14.8 points, 9.2 rebounds and 5.5 assists last season.

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Vladimir Radmanovic, the main beneficiary of the Lakers' off-season shopping, made only 10 of 36 shots (27.8%) in exhibition play, primarily because of a sprained ligament between the pinkie and ring finger of his right hand, an injury that probably will require surgery after the season.

"Vlade has yet to really give us the kind of lift we expect from him," Jackson said. "He's been injured. It's affected his play. He's got to really step up. [saturday], he had a great practice, and it was good to see."

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The Lakers are expected to waive second-year forward Devin Green in order to get their roster down to 15 players by today's league-mandated deadline.

Green made the team last season as an undrafted rookie from Hampton.

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Buss will receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame today at noon.

"A lot of time, I try to shy away from things like that," Buss said. "But this particular one, I guess because I spent a lot of my time walking up and down Hollywood Boulevard a long time ago, and I thought, 'Wow, wow, to have a star' … it has a special significance to me."

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.A. Adande:

What Jackson didn't say about Auerbach tells us a lot

October 30, 2006

The surest sign of the respect Phil Jackson had for Red Auerbach is the way he refrained from making derogatory comments about him. He didn't fire the shots, even though you knew he had them loaded.

Snarky comments come naturally to Jackson. It's almost as if they're an essential part of his being, like swimming to a shark. He has made dismissive remarks about opposing coaches, entire cities, even religions. But not Auerbach.

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He let Auerbach get away with blast after blast, all the while biting his tongue so hard it's surprising it didn't bleed.

Sunday, the day after Auerbach died, Jackson wouldn't even concede that Auerbach didn't value Jackson's accomplishments.

"That's not true at all," Jackson said. "Red and I had a conflict, always, because I was a New York Knick [player]. It was just a rivalry. That's the way Red was. It was an honor that he had that kind of attitude, actually. It was an honor to be named in the same breath [when] people talk about championships."

They're linked because Jackson is the only NBA coach to equal the nine championships Auerbach won while coaching the Boston Celtics. What moves Auerbach into his own special tier of NBA Hall of Famers is that he assembled the talent for those teams  and seven other Celtics championship squads.

And Auerbach made sure people knew the difference.

"How [Jackson] did it is a lot easier than how I did it, to be brutally frank," Auerbach said in a 2004 interview with The Times. "He has nothing to do with the organization of his ballclub. I had to do all my own scouting. I didn't have videotapes and four or five assistant coaches. And we didn't have the money to compete."

Auerbach used to say Jackson "picked his spots" because he took over the Chicago Bulls when Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen were in their prime, and won championships his first three years with the Lakers, just as Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant ripened.

But when Jackson returned last year to coach a Shaq-less Lakers team that had missed the playoffs the previous season, Auerbach told USA Today, "It's done for one reason  the money."

It was obvious that Auerbach would find any way to criticize Jackson. Maybe that's why Jackson treated Auerbach's comments like talk-show babbling. He knew Auerbach would invent a way to belittle him, if necessary, because to Auerbach anything not achieved by a Celtic wasn't truly an accomplishment.

So Jackson showed restraint. About the closest he came to what the political campaigners call "going negative" was in response to an Auerbach complaint that Jackson didn't send him flowers when he was hospitalized last year. Jackson responded that he tried, but there was a delivery mix-up.

Then he added with a smile, "It's probably a good deal I didn't send it, you know. [The flowers] probably would have died right away when they walked in his room."

Sunday, Jackson did recall what his mentor, Knicks coach Red Holzman, said to him when New York beat Boston in the 1973 Eastern Conference finals: "Sometimes you think good overcomes evil. And this is one of those times."

Auerbach didn't mind being hated. I'm sure he lighted those victory cigars as much to irritate his opponents as he did to satisfy a nicotine craving. And really, in hindsight, you have to appreciate it. Besides, the Lakers' breakthrough victory over the Celtics in the 1985 NBA Finals wouldn't have been half as enjoyable without Auerbach's involvement.

"That was good for the game," said Lakers assistant coach Brian Shaw, who was drafted by Auerbach and the Celtics. "It made that rivalry what it was. He was going to do whatever it took to give his team the edge."

Sure, Auerbach might conveniently forget to heat the visiting locker rooms in Boston Garden during the winter. But mostly he gave his team the edge through shrewd moves, including fleecing Golden State for Robert Parish and a first-round pick used on Kevin McHale.

"In a lot of ways [he was] part of the arrogance with which they played," said Lakers assistant Kurt Rambis, a veteran of the Lakers-Celtics wars in the 1980s. "It was what brought that competitiveness out in that ballclub. He was an integral part in assembling those teams. You look back at the talent they had on those teams, it was amazing."

Lakers owner Jerry Buss said: "Auerbach was the deciding factor. You've really got to hand it to this guy."

And Auerbach did manage to find some good things to say about Jackson.

"In spite of all that, Phil's a good coach," Auerbach said in the 2004 Times interview. "He's in control, his players do what he tells them to do and his substitutions are good. But that doesn't mean I'll invite him to dinner."

I asked Jackson what, if anything, he incorporated from Auerbach.

"The fact that he played an up-tempo game, kept the pressure on the guard, was a believer in defense, those things are part of what I'll cling to all the time as part of what you have to do to win championships," Jackson said. "More than anything else, he set a standard that people want to achieve in this league and fought to try to duplicate."

And not to denigrate, which for Jackson is the ultimate compliment

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Suddenly, no rush for Bryant

By Mike Bresnahan, Times Staff Writer

November 3, 2006

Now that the Lakers are 2-0, all eyes turn back toward Kobe Bryant's right knee.

Or do they?

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The Lakers have done a good job without Bryant, who is almost into his 17th week since having arthroscopic surgery. Instead of being run over by the Phoenix Suns and nicked up by Nellie Ball, the Lakers are averaging 112 points a game

With results like that, Bryant can afford to hurry up and wait.

"Hopefully we can keep winning games to buy him some time, so he can get his knee ready and be 100%, instead of 80 or 85," Lakers forward Lamar Odom said.

Bryant might play tonight against Seattle and one-time rival Ray Allen, who called Bryant selfish two seasons ago after Bryant glowered at him in an exhibition game. (They have since made up.)

Or Bryant, listed as day-to-day, might wait until Sunday's rematch in Seattle.

He certainly wants to play now  "If I don't feel ouchy, I won't be grouchy," he said Thursday  and he had a decent workout in a light practice with the team.

"We'll see how it goes," Bryant said. "I had a good practice, felt pretty good, felt pretty live."

Lively enough to play? Coach Phil Jackson offered up a one-liner when asked if Bryant could take his time coming back.

"I would suppose, but then there's always the Wally Pipp theory," he said dryly, pausing a beat. "I probably wouldn't use that with Kobe Bryant."

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The "Lights Out" campaign has been given the green light.

The temporary lighting system that flooded the court in the home opener will be used tonight and at all remaining Lakers home games, with the exception of one or two that conflict with concerts at Staples Center. The Lakers wanted to gauge player and fan reaction before committing to an entire season.

"Given the overwhelming response of people who wanted it, we're going to keep the temporary system in place while a permanent system is designed and built," said Tim Harris, Lakers senior vice president of business operations. "During that interim time, there may be a game or two where we have to play under the old lighting system due to technical difficulties."

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After struggling to pick up the intricacies of the triangle offense last season, Odom is averaging 28 points, 11 rebounds and 7.5 assists in two games.

"I think last season was kind of a taste test for him," Bryant said.

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The Lakers' roster could go 12 deep by the time everyone returns. "I don't think I've ever been on a team since I've been in the league that did that," Bryant said. "We've got some young, talented guys." … The only Laker not to score this season is Sasha Vujacic, who has missed all seven of his shots. "He's pressing a little bit," Jackson said. "His shot got a little flat." … Jackson said he would travel with the team for its road game Sunday in Seattle. … The Lakers' Development League team, the D-Fenders, selected Devin Green in the first round of the league's draft on Thursday. Green was waived by the Lakers on Monday after averaging 0.9 points in 27 games last season.

TONIGHT

vs. Seattle, 7:30, FSN West

Site  Staples Center.

Radio  570; 1330.

Records  Lakers 2-0; SuperSonics 0-1.

Record vs. SuperSonics (2005-06)  2-1.

Update  The SuperSonics lost their home opener to lightly regarded Portland, 110-106, after allowing the Trail Blazers to shoot 54.8%.