He’s lost a step. Maybe a step and a half.

He’s not even close to the pressure defender he used to be. And even back in the day there were those moments when he could be exposed. And not just a little. Sometimes he could be exposed badly by really quick young guards. And the league today is nothing but quick young guards.

Derek Fisher guard Rajon Rondo? John Wall? Derrick Rose? You can hear the chops slurping at nearly every stop around the league. These young people want a piece of that old man.

And finishing with the basketball? Fisher’s mix ups at the basket used to keep Lakers assistant and triangle offense guru Tex Winter grumbling, except when it came time to think about replacing him. Then Tex, like most everyone else on the coaching staff, turned strangely silent.

They knew.

No one else can do all the things that Fisher does for the Lakers. And absolutely no one can do them in the heat of the biggest battles, which is what Fisher has done time and again. He has proved himself every single day of his career, ever since he came out of the University of Arkansas/Little Rock as a late first round draft pick back in 1996.

Fisher has delivered so many big moments in so many games that … Oh, why go on? We could spend all day adding them up here.

Let’s just turn it over to Phil Jackson. Here’s what he had to say after Fisher hit the big shots to deliver the Lakers their 2009 championship:

“Well, it’s character,” Big Chief Triangle replied when asked about Fisher. “We’ve always said the character has got to be in players if they’re going to be great players.  You can’t just draft it.  It’s not just about talent, it’s about character, and he’s a person of high character, brings that to play, not only in just his gamesmanship but also his intestinal fortitude.”

But who cares about that stuff in these smart-ass days of pro hoops?

Yeah, it’s true. Fisher’s market value is no where near $5 mil a year. That’s a joke.

So, yes, for all the stat geeks out there with their calculators and formulas, Fisher is obviously past his prime and not worth the money. They say, “Don’t pay that guy, Dr. Jerry. He’s not worth it.”

Some of these jerks send me messages too. Fish doesn’t fit the XYZ, they say, and if Phil Jackson really knew anything about basketball he’d bench the guy.

Never mind that Fisher just delivered the most amazing performance of his career to secure the 2010 NBA title for Los Angles.

To the stat geek naysayers, Fisher is the joke who’s time has passed.

The Lakers seem to subscribe to that XYZ geek talk because they’re reluctant to bring him back unless he cuts his $5 mil salary in half.

Besides, the Lakers need to save money this year. Things have just gotten too tight financially.

Yes, Mitch and Jerry, you can certainly buy that line of thinking. You can start to believe that Fisher is a luxury for this very talented team.

But that’s sadly narrow thinking. Fisher is an essential. Remember when you brought him back to the Lakers in the 2007 off-season? People said he then he was washed up, a joke.

All he did was play a giant role in three straight trips to the NBA championship series and two titles.

Derek Fisher is a proud, determined man. That pride and determination are the bedrock of his heart. Pay him for that.

Screw these ignorant people who want you to get rid of him. Screw ‘em. They’re just a bunch of booger eaters in my book.

Really it’s very simple, Mitch and Jerry. You must make the smart play. You must reward that pride and determination. Do it, and you will look very smart.

Just Pay Derek Fisher. Please.

Do yourselves, do all of us, that favor. Don’t buy that conventional thinking about market value. The market doesn’t know shit.

Pay Derek Fisher. Please. He’s earned every penny. And he’ll keep earning.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

Don’t hold your breath.

Although Buss could have lauded Jackson any time over the past two years as the Lakers won back-to-back NBA titles, the owner’s silence on the matter has been deafening.

I’ve been pointing this out for months, by the way. And Mark Heisler of the L.A. Times, who just this week has offered a ringing endorsement of Byron Scott as a Jackson replacement, has repeatedly taken me to task for it.

But the truth that insiders have been telling me for months is clear.

If Jackson’s going to return as coach, he’s going to have to do it to despite the stony silence of the owner. And he’ll likely have to take a pay cut despite his success.

If Buss doesn’t want to pay Jackson the unheard of price of $12 million per season to coach the team, then he should never have agreed to such a deal when he gave Jackson a pay raise two years ago. You wanted and needed a championship so badly back then that you agreed to boost his money, Dr. Buss?

And now you don’t need a title very badly? That’s what you’re saying with this silence.

To complain about money now that Jackson has delivered two championship teams is unheard of. Win titles and take a pay cut? That’s a low blow, Dr. Jerry. And it’s not just me saying that. It’s your remarkable team captain, Derek Fisher, who discussed the issue in an interview with Ramona Shelbourne.

“As much as it is about his quality of life and how he’s feeling, his energy levels,” Fisher said, “I think his decision could be easier if he wasn’t maybe feeling as though he’s not being fully appreciated, which is how it ultimately makes you feel.

“It’s sad to me,” Fisher told Shelbourne recently, “when you think about what he’s accomplished in his career, that he still always has to deal with these type of scenarios where there’s a question of whether or not he’s the best person for the job, or he’s not really coaching because of the players that he’s had. He’s just a remarkable human being in terms of his approach to managing and coaching the team.

“I think not even just the Lakers, but the NBA as a whole, would lose a big part of what this game has been about the last 20 years if he’s not back. If he’s not back, it changes the whole landscape.”

Fisher, of course, is a free agent guard and will turn 36 in August. Has there ever been a braver, more forthright NBA player? The guy not only laid his heart on the line for the franchise’s 17th title (yes, Lakers won one in 1948 in the old National League), but Fisher is speaking up right now, even though it could cost him dearly.

Teammates Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol have also spoken up, although their contracts are secure and in place. They’ve made it clear where they stand.

Some Lakers fans may let you off the hook for this one, Jerry. It’s obvious you’re gambling that your season ticket holders won’t protest if you let Jackson and Fisher slip away.

I’m not asking you to pay Jackson. I’m just calling for you to speak up and declare publicly how important he has been to the franchise.

I know that you don’t like that Phil’s an odd, distant kind of guy.

I know you don’t like the triangle offense he runs.

I know you don’t like paying him so much money.

I know you’re eager to prove that you can win one without Phil.

I know you’re not elated that he shacks up with your daughter and sometimes offers his disrespect in all those subtle little ways.

I know you like showing that it’s you, not Jackson, who is in control of the franchise.

I know you think your reputation and image are secure with all those championships you have in your pocket.

I know you’re a proud, stubborn man, but does this have to come down to ego and pride?

Yes, it’s a poker game. Lakers assistant Brian Shaw, one of two top candidates to replace Phil, is “close to accepting” the Cleveland Cavaliers job, according to his agent. What’s the last time an agent made such an announcement? And Byron Scott declared that he’s not waiting around on anyone, another obvious bluff. Are Phil, Scott and Shaw all trying to out-bluff Jerry Buss?

Does it all come down to yet more tiresome games?

Is that what you want as your legacy?

You have a chance to eclipse the Boston Celtics as the team with the most NBA titles, and you’re going to let ego and pride get in the way?

Say it ain’t so. Speak up and ask Phil to return. Show us you’re bigger than these silly games.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

It’s been 10 years since Bryant and Phil Jackson embarked on a remarkable run that would net seven trips to the NBA Finals and five league championships.

In the wake of the Lakers’ 17^th title in 2010 (the franchise won one in 1948 in the National Basketball League, which was far superior to the early NBA), I’m publishing excerpts of a private conversation I had with Kobe Bryant right after the 2000 title, his first with the Lakers. Portions of this interview were later used in the paperback edition of my book about a young Bryant’s hard adjustment to pro hoops, “Mad Game, The NBA Education of Kobe Bryant.”

In that key Game 4 in 2000, Phil Jackson and Tex Winter ordered the Lakers to spread the floor wide to confuse the Indiana Pacers defense. This , and the Lakers’ surprise use of the screen and roll, freed up Bryant to score down the stretch of the key games in the series.

When they coached the Bulls, Winter and Jackson would always wait for key moments in the playoffs to use their spread floor or “open court” look. The Bulls soundly beat the Miami Heat in the 1997 playoffs by spreading the floor and later did the same thing to the Utah Jazz in the championship series that year. Spreading the floor is one of the subtleties in Tex Winter’s triangle offense, just one of the reasons that  Bryant fell in love with it.

Q: Phil Jackson often had long, deep conversations with Shaquille O’Neal. But Phil never had such conversations with you. You kept expecting to talk with him the whole season, but you never got that opportunity to sit down and talk about life with him?

Bryant: No, not to that extent. But I’m sure we’ll have one before next season starts.

Q: Tex Winter’s offensive system has some surprises that worked well for you in the playoffs.

Bryant: The system worked out well for us. In the fourth quarter, the triangle offense sometimes kind of goes out the window a little bit. The system in itself allows us to spread the floor toward the end of the game and penetrate. That works because with the triangle offense everybody is a threat throughout the ball game. So the defense is scared to leave off of guys to try to stop me. They’re scared to leave off of Robert (Horry) and they’re scared to leave Rick (Fox) alone to try to stop me, because they know those guys will make shots.”

Q: In Game 4 against Indiana at the end, that spread floor worked well?

Bryant: “In Game 4 it worked really well. We were able to spread the floor, and I hit a couple of jump shots for us and took us to the brink. Now we are champions.

During the season, I wanted to use the spread floor. I told him, ‘Phil, man, why don’t you open the court?’ He said, ‘We’re not ready for that. We’ll get to that.’ I say open it up. That’s when I can go to work. But I’m glad that we waited till the playoffs to use it.

Q: On the night you won the championship, in Game 6, you also went to a different look at the end of the game. That time you went to screen and roll action, which is something the Lakers hadn’t done all year until the playoffs. It surprised the Pacers?

Bryant: “Yeah, we went back to the same thing that worked for us in Game 4, spreading the floor and penetrating, and then attacking them. I was able to get to the free throw line and knock down some free throws.”

Q: Have you ever had a more emotional day than the day you guys won the championship?

Bryant: The whole day was just emotionally draining. You know what though? It was fun. Emotionally draining, but a lot of fun. Just going through it. Stepping up to the challenge and responding to it mentally. It was a lot of fun.”

Q: What was the main thing you learned? I know it was a long season with a lot of lessons, but what was the most important?

Bryant: The biggest thing, from a basketball standpoint, was learning when to attack.

Q: From a personal standpoint, was your main lesson about sacrifice?

Bryant: Not really. Other people had to sacrifice on this team. I think my teammates did a good job of sacrificing, allowing me to be myself and allowing me to grow. I really didn’t have to make that many individual sacrifices on this team. I just continued to play my game, and my teammates understood that and they played around me.”

Q: How important has Ron Harper been to you in learning to be a better defender?

Bryant: I learn more from Harp about position defense, because he doesn’t really have the ability to move like he used to. He plays position defense very well. Ron helps me out a lot, though.

Q: During games if you started doing too much, Harper would get in your ear and tell you to slow down. How important was that?

Bryant: It was important because we’re communicating. He’s been there before. He knows what to do in certain situations. A lot of times we just talk strategy. He’s like a player/coach. He’s been there with Phil before. He knows what Phil likes to do. He knows what to run when the shot clock is going down,, whether it’s a three pass or a four pass or whatever. Harp has been instrumental in my growth. He’s helped me this year as a basketball player figuring out my teammates, understanding them better.

Q: Harper has been greater for you than any other player you’ve ever played with?

Bryant: Absolutely. Harper has definitely been more of a mentor for me than other players I’ve played with in the past. No question about it.

Q: How was your relationship with Shaq this year?

Bryant: We’ve always had a mutual understanding. Shaq is more vocal than I am, and he knows that. Me, I lead by example. We just do it our separate ways. That’s all we did all season long. It just depended on what we needed in certain situations. So even though we go our separate ways, it all linked up in the end.

Q: Did you guys have a better chemistry this year than in the past?

Bryant: Oh, hell yes. Now we understand one another. We grew up together. We came here together, grew up in the spotlight together, took our knocks together.

Q: What was the problem with other Laker coaches in the past? Did they seem to doubt themselves?

Bryant: I don’t think they were as sharp and had as much confidence as Phil has with his coaching staff. Phil and Tex Winter have been real demanding of me, because they wanted me to figure out about this game. It’s important for somebody to give you the direction. And the coaching staff we have now makes it a lot easier. You can go to them for advice, for game film, anything for improvement. It’s good to have that information from them. You don’t have to seek it out.

Q: Why did the triangle work for you guys?

Bryant: The concept is a team game. Hit the first man that’s open. That makes it harder for teams to guard you, because they can’t key on one man. There’s constant movement of the ball. When you have players with the athletic ability of myself and Shaq, it makes it easier for the other guys on  our team. It’s cool, man. It makes it very difficult for defenses because they cannot relax. As soon as they relax, boom, we’re gone. We’re moving with a purpose.

Q: When you decide to drop out of your offense, to move without using the triangle, do you have to explain that to the coaches later?

Bryant: (laughs) With Tex Winter, yeah. Tex is so pure with the game. ‘Move the ball! Swing the ball!’ We’re like, ‘Tex, man, chill.’ It’s hilarious. But Phil’s assistant coaches are as sharp as Phil is. They don’t play around. They know what needs to be done and they do it. They sit there watching the game like hound dogs, making sure you do everything fundamentally correct. Especially Tex. Look at Tex. He’s always the only one with a worried look on his face. He’s got that look 24 hours a day. He’s a perfectionist.

Q: You had said that you hoped to be coached by Tex before that ever happened. It was strange that you sensed Tex Winter would coach you long before it ever happened. That was almost a mystical thing with you.

Bryant: It’s kind of weird. I had always had this feeling that I was going to play in this system, with the triangle. I had a feeling I would. I told Eddie Jones that when we played together here. I told him, it would be nice to get this triangle here.

Q: When you first met Phil in his hotel room after he was hired as coach of the Lakers, what was it like?

Bryant: I was like, ‘Let’s go.’ I don’t want to talk. Let’s do something!’

Q: What did you think of adding Brian Shaw to the team last year? What did you think when he arrived? Did you know him?

Bryant: I knew he owed me a pizza. I shot his lights out when I was like 12. He played for an Italian team in Rome back then (1989-90), and my father played for another Italian team. We got to shoot, and I shot his lights out. That was the first thing I said when I saw him with the Lakers. Because I didn’t know he was coming to our team. Then I saw him at the gym, and I was like, ‘Yo, Brian, where’s my pizza, man?’ He started laughing.”

Q: Kobe, who plays you the toughest, makes you play your best game?

Bryant: Eric Snow in Philly, he makes me play tough. He pressures me a little bit, has quick hands. The Sixers in general play me solid defensively. He won’t this next year, though.

Q: When you came back from injury last fall, a lot of people figured Phil was going to jump in and try to tell you what to do. But he didn’t do that?

Bryant: He let me do my own thing. It was important because he understood that’s how I am. I  like to do my own thing. He knows and has the trust in me that I’m gonna be prepared.

Q: Some players on the team said he was allowing you to change yourself?

Bryant: I didn’t even think about it. I just went with it.

Q; Phil brought in George Mumford, the sports psychologist, the Zen teacher and tai chi expert, to work with you guys. How was that?

Bryant: It was good because it gave people a chance to talk about things that might be on their mind, the hype, the pressure. I think it’s good for them to talk about those things. It increased our performance a lot. It really has. I’m surprised other teams don’t do that kKind of stuff. Working with George helps us to get issues out of the way before they even start.

Q: The pressure of performance, of the playoffs, can be destructive to players and to teams?

Bryant: Yeah, once it creeps into your team and your teammates, it can be destructive. Some people know how to handle it, some people don’t. The pressure can get to you. You got to know how to suck it up.

Q: Most NBA players don’t want to even acknowledge pressure. It’s a macho thing.

Bryant: The pressure is there, the pressure is there. But it’s how you deal with it. When you feel it, it’s how you deal with it.

Q: NBA players have tremendous pressure on them during the playoffs. If they play well, their futures will be successful. If they don’t, their stars will fall.

Bryant: You just give it your best. You prepare yourself as well as you can. You go out there and execute as well as you can. Then you sleep at night. That’s all. Then you get up the next day and do the same thing. Keep it simple.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

On the good side for the Lakers, they’re older and wiser. They now have Ron Artest to help them defend Boston’s Paul Pierce, who is a major load.

And James Posey, Leon Powe and Eddie House no longer anchor Boston’s bench. They’ve been replaced by Tony Allen, Rasheed Wallace and little Nate Robinson.

More important for Boston is the growth of Rajon Rondo as a point guard. He’s fantastic and should cause Los Angeles plenty of trouble. Then again, the Lakers have played against an array of talented point guards in the Western playoffs and should have some confidence that they can at least stay in the gym with Rondo as Kobe Bryant will slip over and help teammate Derek Fisher deal with that headache.

But the things that worried Tex Winter then still play on my mind. Boston’s half-court defense is excellent, and their frontcourt still has the muscle to intimidate the Lakers.

Back in 2008, Tex told me that the Lakers couldn’t play well against the Celtics in the half court, that they needed to run, to get into the open court to have a chance to score more before Boston’s defense set up and smothered them. Some folks might think that’s funny, coming from Winter, the architect of the triangle offense.

Winter’s favorite method of attack is largely his controlled, half-court offense that stresses floor balance, spacing and team play. But he had always allowed for a break in his system, and he liked to use it when circumstances called for it.

Against the Celtics, circumstances scream for it.

He told me in 2008 that he thought Lakers coach Phil Jackson waited too long to try to get the break going. The Celtics got control of the series and the Lakers never recovered.

Of course, there was this other little problem. To run, you’ve got to be able to rebound, to get the ball and get it out and go.

The Lakers couldn’t win the battle against Boston’s frontcourt. The Celtics kept them bottled up for the series and wound up humiliating them.

Lakers forward Pau Gasol has stated many times this season the importance of rebounding. He knows what it means now. If the Lakers can win the rebound game with the Celtics, they should win the series in six or seven games. If they can’t win it, they’re going to have to come down the floor each time and play against that impressive Boston defense.

The Lakers do not want to do that.

Thus, the battle for the boards will be fierce and could well determine the champion this year. It’s obvious that Phil Jackson wants to do everything he can with his commentary to get Kevin Garnett and Kendrick Perkins to back off their physical play.

If the Celtics can control the boards and the tempo, they have a chance to win even though the matchups elsewhere are a mixed bag. Of course, rebounding is a team issue. The guards will have to do their part on both sides. Bryant and Rondo, in particular, have gotten to the ball a lot in these playoffs. They will join in the battle for the boards.

So it’s down to Pat Riley’s adage from the days of Showtime: No rebounds, no rings. Lamar Odom must be aggressive for the Lakers. And Jackson has to hope that Andrew Bynum can play through his injured knee to have an impact.

Bryant obviously is another huge factor. He is playing the best basketball of his life, less athletic, wiser. In a way, his knee injury and other ailments have been a blessing for the Lakers. Those things mean he usually hasn’t tried to do too much. If he gets impatient and tries to win it all and attack the Celtic defense off the dribble, he’ll play right into Boston’s hands this time around.

Obviously, Game 1 and 2 are huge. The Lakers were humiliated by Boston in 2008, and if they fail to hold home court in the first two games, their doubts will grow through the series. On the other hand, that humiliation could steel the Lakers’ resolve.

Either way, hopes are high for a classic series, one that folks will remember for years to come.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

Yet when he does make a mistake, it’s often a real lulu, a stupendous boner.

For example, there was the time late in his tenure with the Chicago Bulls that ole PJ decided to send a special lady friend some of that fancy Victoria Secret style underwear. The only problem was, according to team employees who laughed themselves silly over the incident, he allegedly put the wrong address on the package. When the carrier couldn’t deliver the underwear and returned it to his office, Jackson’s secretary assumed it was something he had purchased for his wife and directed the package to her.

A hard rain fell after that one.

Those same Bulls employees swore that the wayward underwear had originally been sent to a lady in Arizona.

You’d think that would have been enough to teach Big Chief Triangle a lesson. Leave the state alone, son.

But Jackson likes to get into those tweak-the-opponent modes during the play-offs, so now we have the great immigration caper. Jackson apparently forgot his bad karma with the desert and committed one of the silliest mistakes of his venerable career when he opened his mouth about Arizona’s controversial new approach to enforcing  immigration laws.

Worst of all, Jackson decided to address the issue just as his Lakers were about to take on the Phoenix Suns in the Western Conference finals. Strangest of all, Jackson, who has a progressive, liberal image dating back to his hippie days playing for the New York Knicks, seemed to support the hard-line approach of Arizona’s Republican governor, who has pushed the crackdown.

All of a sudden here’s PJ coming across like one of those angry tea-bagger militants, and like that he’s driven a wedge into a Lakers fan base that once worshiped the Zen Master. Instead, Jackson was greeted for Game 1 of the Western Conference finals by Lakers fans protesting his political posturing.

And that doesn’t even touch the miffed and hurt co-workers in the Lakers organization and on the roster (see Kobe Bryant’s wife) offended by his statements.

How bad is it?

Well, Jackson girlfriend Jeanie Buss and her sidekicks — I’ll call them the Jackson inner core — went to work soon after his blunder with a major damage control effort that included contacting all the media and spinning the situation as best they could. They employed that old Lakers PR flack John Black in getting the word out and phoned all their personal media connections.

Heck, they even contacted me, which suggests how desperate they are. They knew I’d probably do something like drag up the silly underwear episode, but, hey, they needed to control the damage with Jackson’s all-important base — Lakers fans.

Fortunately, Jeanie Buss is absolutely fantastic at damage control because all of the Los Angeles media are sweet on her, not to mention the fans themselves. Even I admit to falling under her lure.

“She’s some kind of gal,” Tex Winter once told me after he met Jeanie for the first time. If she can snare Tex’s affection, she can have mine any day.

So here I go helping the PJ cause with a bit of spin mixed in with my own observations.

One of the issues is that Jackson and Jeanie’s father, team owner Jerry Buss, have a stand-offish relationship that has left to question whether Jackson will return to coach the Lakers next year. His contract is up, and Jerry Buss doesn’t seem overly fond of Jackson, who has something of a history stirring up the shit with owners and organizations.

Jackson’s only true power against Jerry Buss is Jackson’s own popularity with Lakers fans. He and Jeanie used that popularity to help him get rehired in 2005 after Jerry Buss fired him in 2004.

So it’s not smart that Jackson offended his base with his stance on immigration. And it’s not smart that he would do so during the playoffs when the team is trying to build the tremendous championship focus that Jackson’s great teams have been known for.

Does all of this give Jerry Buss more leeway in cutting Jackson loose after the season? It sure seems like it could. If Jackson pisses off the fans, well, he’s in trouble.

However, that’s not entirely the case. To get a breakdown on the Jeanie spin and other inside dope, we’ll turn to my usual reliable source. He’s tight with Jeanie and Phil and always knows exactly what’s going on. They rely on him to get the inside word out, and he does. We’ll call him The Pernicious Phil Insider. Maybe this will make Mark Heisler of the L.A. Times happier. Heisler gets so frustrated that all the inside poop escapes him. Heisler runs around trying to throw water on all the Internet stories, which leaves him hardly any time at all for doing any real reporting. But I digress…

“I think he made a rookie mistake,” the Pernicious Phil Insider said of Jackson. “It’s a no-win situation all over the place. He misread the crowd and he misread the politics and he got outside of his game.”

Then the Insider started talking about Phil’s “nuanced” language being misunderstood.

Plus, the Insider said, Phil was just searching for something to tweak the Suns, because their organization had come out strong against the new immigration enforcement.

I told him I thought that was a silly defense for Phil. Why spin it?

Personally, I think that Phil should just come out and say, “Look, I’m a dope. I’m not really as smart as I try to act all the time. I did something really stupid by opening my mouth about this immigration thing. I have no idea what I’m talking about, so if it’s OK with everyone I’ll get back to what I do know, and that’s basketball.”

Yes, it would require Jackson humbling himself, which may be physically impossible with the size of his ego. But if he did that, people would forget all this in about three hours, less than a single news cycle.

Jackson, though, has been so goofy and coy in his news conferences that reporters seem intent on asking him lots about it and holding his feet to the fire.

As for the whole thing providing Jerry Buss with ample reason not to bring Phil back next year at his exorbitant salary of $12 million per season, the Insider did point out some things that make sense.

Jerry Buss has been reminded during these playoffs of just how good a coach Phil Jackson is. “With any other coach, they don’t survive that first round against Oklahoma City,” the Insider says.

After all, Phil uses Tex Winter’s triangle offense to get such a high degree of efficiency out of the team’s role players that he’s worth every penny of his big bucks.

Will Jerry Buss really want to gamble on another coach next season? That, of course, is the question.

Jackson himself seemed to be pouting a bit in the wake of the uproar over his comments and suggested to one radio interviewer that he just might retire after the season.

The Insider reminds us all that Jackson is cranky this time of year and it’ll take only a week back in Montana during the off-season before he’s bored and wants to coach again.

If that’s the case, Phil, do yourself a favor and leave immigration policy to people who understand the full range of human issues involved. While you’re at it, don’t send off any more fancy underwear either. And most important of all, look out for those Celtics. They got something nasty coming for ya.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

It’s just that the match-up issues are more profound in the playoffs.

So now we have a fresh four-team tournament before us, the NBA’s version of a super-sized Final Four. It’s fun to try to figure where things are headed.

As LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers can tell us now, the Boston Celtics look really scary. They can embarrass you. And the Lakers still carry that memory from two years ago, when the Celtics took their manhood in the ‘08 championship series.

Two factors make them so dangerous now. The rise of Rajon Rondo and the recovery of Kevin Garnett. Matching up with either of those guys is a nightmare for the other three teams left in the fray.

Then you throw in Paul Pierce, Ray Allen and the rest of the Boston roster, and the reasons for concern grow. Tony Allen makes their bench a threat, and folks are starting to speak of him as they did James Posey in 2008.

Hey, we’re not even talking Orlando here yet. It seems pretty simple in the Eastern Conference finals. If Orlando continues to make all those jump shots and three-pointers, they’ll give Boston a run for the money. Plus Orlando has a better means of attacking the basket this year in Vince Carter.

But if the jump shots don’t fall, the Celtics advance with their pack-it-in defense. Even if those shots do fall, Boston still might just outlast the Magic. Yes, Orlando is a fine team, undefeated in these play-offs. But if Boston has some gas in the tank, the Magic will discover they’ve met nothing this season like the revived Celtics.

In the Western Conference finals, the Lakers should advance because of their size and their triangle offense, which will help them control tempo. You do have to sit back and admire the Phoenix Suns, how hard they’ve played, and the fine job Alvin Gentry has done with them.

Plus, it’s not just about their older players. Jared Dudley is a player to watch among their youth corps.

But the Suns are only a feel-good story in this equation. Absent of a major development/injury, the Lakers advance to take on the Boston-Orlando winner.

If it’s Orlando, they’re a better team this year, but L.A. still wins those match-ups. It maybe goes six games.

The hoops world hasn’t gotten around to announcing it just yet, but everybody’s itchin’ for another Boston/L.A. thing in the championship series.

It has tradition, the promise of big markets, the allure to make the whole world take notice and to make David Stern wiggle with delight.

If it’s Lakers/Celtics, L.A. center Andrew Bynum and his fragile health become a large factor. If Bynum’s healthy and feeling all right, the Lakers fare much better in the match-ups. That means L.A. will have more depth to throw at Garnett with long-armed Pau Gasol and versatile Lamar Odom.

Lakers small forward Ron Artest looms large as well, with his ability to factor in lots places defensively. L.A. should be able to assure that Paul Pierce won’t be the MVP of the 2010 NBA Finals.

But does L.A. have an answer for the guy who has made himself the game’s newest force, Rajon Rondo? Kobe Bryant and proud old Derek Fisher will have their say on that one.

Surviving that mismatch will require all of Phil Jackson’s cunning. Phil sorts that Rondo thing out, and Lakers owner Jerry Buss has little choice but to re-sign him next year to another big contract.

When Jackson was an adolescent sitting around playing board games with his evangelist mother Betty, the stakes were high in terms of pride. Now it’s the time of year where Jackson, the old man, really gets to feel like a kid again. He’s locked in for the challenge, full of concentration, feeling totally alive.

Yes, we’re at the NBA’s version of the Final Four. Let the mind games begin.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

So how could you even consider him the All-Time MVP of the NBA Playoffs?

Well, you have to at least consider Baylor among the nominees along with Boston’s great Bill Russell (the centerpiece of 11 championship teams), Chicago’s Michael Jordan, and a select few others. By the way, the number of once and former Lakers on this list is strong: Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O’Neal, George Mikan…

Mikan? Hey, the dude powered Minneapolis to six championships back when the lane was shaped like a keyhole (yes, that’s why they still call it the “key,” although the lane was long ago widened and no longer looks remotely like a keyhole).

So you have to nominate Mikan, just as you have to nominate Baylor, who was the motherlode of talent that took extremely weak Lakers teams all the way to the league championship series. To look at Baylor, we’ll consider this brief excerpt from my biography, “Jerry West.” After all, West and Baylor teamed together to make the Lakers one of the most consistently good teams in the history of pro hoops. They just couldn’t beat Bill Russell and the Celtics.

ELEGANT ELGIN

The Minneapolis Lakers had made Baylor the first pick of the ‘58 draft, not long after he had led the little University of Seattle to the NCAA championship game against powerhouse Kentucky, coached by Adolph Rupp. Baylor was called for a run of fouls in that game and his little team lost that title game. It would start a run of frustrations for the Magnificent Elgin.

Baylor, a Washington, D.C., native, sent his uncle to negotiate the contract, a $22,000 deal. As a rookie he had averaged 24.7 points and 15 rebounds for 1958-59. He was second in the league in the most minutes played and led the Lakers in assists, scoring, and rebounding. Midway through that rookie season, he scored 55 in a game, the third highest total in NBA history.

The team clunked along to a 33-39 record, while the roster learned to play with Baylor. By the play-offs, his Lakers teammates had gotten the hang of it, and that’s when Baylor showed his true value.  First, Minneapolis dumped Detroit, then Baylor and company got everybody’s attention by beating defending NBA champion St. Louis for the right to meet Boston and Russell for the 1959 league title.

The Celtics promptly swept the Lakers, but everybody knew there was an amazing new force among them. “Baylor was clearly the most exciting player in the league,” said his coach, former Laker great Jim Pollard.

The Lakers quickly hustled to increase his money to $50,000 a year, a huge figure at the time. Baylor opened that next season by scoring 52 against Detroit. A few nights later, on November 8, 1959, he rang up 64 points against the Celtics, breaking the league’s single-game record set a decade earlier by Jumpin’ Joe Fulks.

With almost no help, Baylor couldn’t lift Minneapolis to the championship series for 1960, but that off-season the club drafted Jerry West and announced that it was moving to Los Angeles for the 1960-61 season.

If people in Los Angeles didn’t know much about pro basketball, Baylor gave them the first big clue that November 15 when he scored 71 points, a new NBA single-game league record, against the Knicks in Madison Square Garden. The news would hit Los Angeles like a lightning bolt, giving sports fans the idea that they needed to get out and see this talented Lakers team.

The veterans around the league, though, weren’t surprised by anything Baylor did. “You couldn’t defend Elgin,” explained Detroit guard Gene Shue. “He had such good outside shot. He could stare you down. He had a quick jab step. He would catch the ball at the top of the key or further out and he’d get you going back and forth. He’d just explode by you. He had a nervous twitch. He was very, very hard to defend. Not only was he a good outside shooter, but he had a good deceptive first step. He had incredible strength and could hang in the air with the ball. When you put all those things together you couldn’t stop him.”

Baylor supposedly had gotten his name at birth when his father glanced at his wristwatch and liked the sound of the name on the face. And later, his college coach, John Castellani would say, “Elgin has more moves than a clock.”

Driving to the basket, he would leave the floor, often not quite sure what he wanted to do, simply relying on his hang time to open his options. Because he was an excellent passer, he could usually find someplace to put the ball for a teammate. Failing that, he could resort to a lay-up, as he seldom chose to dunk.

Even so, Baylor was no gliding featherweight. He was 6-foot-5 and 225 pounds, a powerful rebounder with another special gift for following his own shots and correcting the misses.

“Elgin was very strong,” said John Radcliffe, the Lakers’ longtime scorekeeper. “He would get bumped all the time, but it never seemed to throw him off stride. Even in the air, he would get bumped a lot, but his concentration was so good that the shot would still go where he wanted it to go. He used the glass a lot. I never saw him dunk. It wasn’t the thing to do in those days.”

“Baylor was really the first to have body control in the air,” former Laker and longtime NBA broadcaster Hot Rod Hundley said. “He’d hang there and shoot these little flip shots.”

“He just might be the best player I ever saw,” Chick Hearn offered. “He was doing things that Dr. J. made famous 20 years later, the hang time and so forth. But Elgin didn’t have the TV exposure. Nobody did in those days.”

Added to Baylor’s dynamic mix was the curiosity of his nervous tick, a twitching of his face, leaving defenders confused as Baylor headed around them to the basket. “We used to kid about it,” recalled Johnny “Red” Kerr. “If he gave the nervous tic to the left, he was going left. If he gave it to the right, he was gonna go to his right. But when he shook both ways, that’s when you fell on your ass, and he was gonna go around you.”

“Some players, they struggle when they score,” Gene Shue said. “Elgin, his instincts were so good. He kept you off balance. There wasn’t one forward in the league that wanted to play Elgin. Elgin was one of those players that could embarrass you. He could do 60 on you. And you couldn’t stop him.”

The opportunity to play with a talent like Baylor was one of the major strokes of good fortune in West’s career, something he would genuinely cherish. West came to rely on his multi-talented teammate that first year.

“It was an honor to play with him,” West said later. “I never considered Elgin Baylor as someone I competed against. He is without a doubt one of the truly great players to play this game. I hear people talking about great players today, and I don’t see many that compare to him, I’ll tell you that. He had that wonderful, magical instinct for making plays, for doing things that you just had to watch. I learned from him, from watching him. I was young, wanting to learn. I had an incredible appreciation for other people’s talents. It was incredible to watch Elgin play.”

Baylor’s performances seemed to entrance his less-talented Lakers teammates, especially the forwards, Tommy Hawkins and Rudy LaRusso. Which left little doubt that the Lakers were Baylor’s team, on and off the court.

“Tommy Hawkins was the hardest worker on the team, but he always had trouble getting the ball to go in the hole,” said John Radcliffe, the Lakers’ longtime scorekeeper. “He was a tremendous leaper but he had small hands. He and Rudy LaRusso worked so hard for Elgin. They’d battle and battle, setting picks, getting rebounds, whatever it took.”

Baylor’s mastery extended far beyond the floor with those young teams in Los Angeles, explained Merv Harris, who covered pro basketball for the old LA Herald Examiner: “It was fascinating to see the domination of his personality over that team. Elgin was the boss. He was the most physically dominating player, and his status began with that. Whenever Elgin wanted to play poker, they played poker. Wherever Elgin wanted to eat, they went to eat. Whatever Elgin wanted to talk about, they talked about.”

And in that age before trash talking became an art in the NBA, Elgin pioneered that element of the game, as well. “Elgin knew he was good and he’d let you know,” Gene Shue recalled with a chuckle. “He did it out on the court. He was really an unstoppable player.” “Our nickname for Elgin was Motormouth,” Hot Rod Hundley said. “He never stopped talking. He knew everything, or he thought he did. We had a lot of fun.”

For the Baylor and the Lakers, 1961-62 was one of those golden, fun-loving seasons in which almost everything seemed to go right.

“It was an enjoyable year,” Baylor remembered. “Our camaraderie was great. On and off the court, we did things together. We enjoyed one another. As a team we gave the effort every night.”

Baylor turned in one of the most remarkable performances in NBA history — and he did so while serving his country in the armed forces.

After opening the season on another scoring tare, Baylor was called into reserve duty with the army near Fort Lewis, Washington. As a result, he was able to appear in only 48 regular-season games. He made the lineup mostly on weekends or with an occasional pass, and when he did, he was fresh, ready, and virtually unstoppable. His 38.2 scoring average was second only to that of the prodigious Wilt Chamberlain, who averaged better than 50 points per game that season.

Even with Baylor’s intermittent schedule, the Lakers won the Western Division with a 54-26 record, 11 games better than Cincinnati and Oscar Robertson, and whipped Detroit 4-2 in the division finals series. For the league championship they faced the Celtics, who had ousted Chamberlain and the Warriors in the Eastern playoffs.

The series opened in dank, smelly Boston Garden, where the smoky haze hung over the floor. In that diffused light, the air took on a green hue. It was clearly Bill Russell’s lair, and the Celtics emphasized that in Game 1 with a 122-108 victory. The Lakers’ edge was that their legs were younger, and they used that the next night to deliver a 129-122 upset in Game 2.

A record crowd of 15,180 packed the L.A. Sports Arena for Game 3 on April 10. The Lakers had never seen the place so crazy. All night the noise fed their adrenaline. In the closing seconds, the Lakers were down 115-111 when West scored four points to tie it. Then Boston’s Sam Jones tried to inbound the ball to Bob Cousy with four seconds remaining. Guarding Cousy, West laid back, then surged into the passing lane, stole it, and drove 30 feet for the winning lay-up, 117-115. Boston coach Red Auerbach complained to the refs that it was impossible for West to dribble the distance to score with only four seconds left. The Lakers bench had feared as much. Everyone there shouted for West to pull up and shoot. But he kept digging for the goal and laid the ball in. It fell through the net as the buzzer sounded.

“I had deflected the ball on the run,” West recalled. “I knew I would have enough time. Most things in my life have been instinctive. I played basketball that way. I always knew what the clock was.”

Unfortunately, the Celtics never allowed dreams to linger. They promptly killed any thoughts of prolonged jubilation in LA by taking Game 4, 115-103, and headed back to Boston with the series tied at two. There, it was all Baylor in Game 5. Despite fouling out, he scored 61 points (the record for an NBA Finals game) and had 22 rebounds, while the Celtics’ defensive specialist, Satch Sanders, contemplated another line of work.

“Elgin was just a machine,” Sanders said later.

But his was the kind of performance that elevates Baylor onto the list of nominees. Unfortunately, his Lakers fell short in overtime of Game 7 of that 1962 title battle.

His LA teams also lost Finals series to Boston in  ’63, ‘65, ‘66, ‘68, and ‘69. His Lakers teams also fell in seven games to the New York Knicks in the famous 1970 championship series.

Baylor suffered what was thought to be a career-ending knee injury in the 1965 playoffs, but he defied doctors’ expectations and worked his way back to compete the next season.

Baylor finally retired early in the 1971-72 season, the year the Los Angeles Lakers finally won a championship.

Time has obscured Baylor’s major performances early in his career, especially his superb showing in the 1962 championship series. But he deserves to be considered among the game’s all-time best when it comes to playoff performances.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

Jerry West’s grandmother, Salena Kile West, died in 1910 at age 41, having been worn down by a succession of troubled maternities amidst a world of toil. She had birthed nine children in fourteen years, a succession of labors that defined the wretchedness of subsistence farm life in rural West Virginia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It was a life wrought with unrelenting difficulty for women in that age before rural electrification. Pregnant year after year, all the while faced with the staggering work load of a farm woman, the cooking, washing, cleaning, cutting wood and tending stove fires seven days a week. Salena had somehow raised the brood of children needed to scratch out a life from the thin soil of the West Virginia hills in rural Roane County northeast of Charleston. Like so many women of the period, her life had been an act played out in drudgery and isolation. Her first six pregnancies had brought the supposed blessing of six boys to help with her husband’s work, but that also meant that for much of her life she had been the only female to support a family of seven farming males.

The troubled life of Salena Kile West sprung from circumstances all too familiar for generations of rural women. “Living was just drudgery then,” a farm wife from that era recalled. “Living — just living— was a problem. No lights. No plumbing. Nothing. Just living on the edge of starvation. That was the farm life for us.”

The history of the American frontier — and make no mistake, West Virginia remained a fixture of that frontier in 1910—has been written as a man’s story yet the history itself was borne and endured by women like Salena Kile West. Likewise, the story of her grandson, basketball legend Jerry West, would seem to be a man’s story, yet in so many ways, his success was a product of the strong and enduring women amongst his forbearers.

Stories passed down through the West family say that the birthing process over the years had been particularly hard on Salena, a typical problem of that era. One federal study said many farm women of the early 20^th century had almost no access to medical care, particularly during child birth. As a result, a large percentage of them suffered from tears of the perineum, the area between the anus and vagina. These tears, many of which were third degree and left unrepaired, according to the report, were so bad, so painful long after birth, that it was difficult to see how farm women “managed to stay on their feet.” And of course many didn’t.

It was this cumulative effect of the nine births and the harsh life that brought Salena to an early grave, according to family legend. She apparently continued to bleed long after the last birth.

Her early death and the harshness of farm life were routine to the world that shaped Jerry West’s highly strung competitive nature.

I found my first clue to the feminine influence on West in a 50-year-old photograph, both comical and telling in its intensity. The photo is from signing day, 1956. Local high school star Jerry West was signing to play college basketball with West Virginia University. There have been literally thousands of photographs taken of West over the decades, yet this is the one, found in the long-ago pages of a small Mountain State newspaper, that says so much about who he is and the family chemistry that wrapped him so tightly and made him, to use his own words, “so crazy.”

He’s standing there with his parents, Howard and Cecile West, and WVU’s handsome young coach, Fred Schaus. Of the four, there are two sets of eyes that emit the same quiet fury. Their energy and indignation are absolutely radioactive. Mother and son, eyes burning like Blake’s tiger, obviously share something unspeakable, something far away and deeply troubling. The occasion should have been joyous. Just weeks earlier West had experienced what he has often described as one of the true moments of delight in his entire life — leading his East Bank High School team to the state basketball championship. But here he is, still buzzing at his success, and yet as the shutter snaps his eyes radiate this stern message: this is no time to smile, not even a goofy 18-year-old, I-rule-the-world-in-this-moment sort of grin. For mother and son, the visages are fixed fiercely, because there are things to be done. Houses to be cleaned. Clothes to be washed. Porches to be swept. Shots to be hoisted. Games to be won. Discontent to be nurtured. Unhappiness to be endured.

His face reflecting immense parental pride, Howard West poses there with his wife and son, enjoying this moment seemingly in ignorance of just how alienated he is from both of them. The elder West, a non-descript guy in the slightly worn suit of a 1950s working man, was said to be a nice person, one who had survived a harsh upbringing to become a community figure known for his warm deeds toward friends and neighbors. Yet there is something deep within him that is profoundly unfulfilled, something almost sinister that neither he nor his family can ever quite contend with.

On his father’s side, Jerry West’s English ancestors landed at Jamestown, and later helped settle the wild, bloody frontier that would become West Virginia. Yet this photograph suggests just how much of his persona Jerry West drew from his mother. Cecile Sue was a Creasy, a forthright clan that settled in West Virginia’s magnificent Kanawha Valley in the 19^th century, hearty people who made their living on the keelboats that hauled salt and other goods along the Kanawha River down to the Ohio.

With his long frame and 38-inch arms, West would seem to have been right at home amongst the keel-haulers, pushing and pulling those boats in the hearty, hard-scrabble milieu along the river a century earlier. Like the keel-haulers before him, the brooding and sullen young man in the picture appears preoccupied with the constant and distressing need to find a place to employ his seemingly boundless energy.

“I’ve always been a nervous person,” West would admit many times. In fact, his restlessness before games is almost as legendary as his jump shot.

He and his mother would share a psyche often driven to distraction by this nervous energy. Later in life, this no-nonsense woman would greet warmly the occasional strangers who traveled to the family home in the little village of Chelyan (Shill-yan) to worship her son. She would serve cold home-made lemonade and even pull out scrapbooks to revisit his glory days. But, beyond such moments, there was little charm about Jerry West’s mother.

Patience was not her virtue, nor was it her son’s. An unadulterated demand for perfection was their shared burden. The mother saw it in her son at an early age, because she recognized it in herself.

“He’s always wanted perfection,” she would confide to sportswriter Bill Libby in 1969. “I think he’s come closer to it than most. But I doubt he’s satisfied. He’s still the boy he always was, who wants to be perfect and just can’t understand why he can’t be.”

The expectation of perfection is a gnarly and contentious quality, impossible to endure yet essential to greatness. It is the central quality in basketball’s select few, the truly great players, according to Tex Winter, who coached basketball brilliantly for six decades and intensely followed every detail of the game in the process. “That’s the one thing about those rare players like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan and Jerry West and Oscar Robertson—they want to be the best and they are never satisfied with anything less. That’s what makes them what they are. They’re all very complex.”

Such complexity would remain the core of West’s anxious persona his entire life. At age 70, reflecting on his career and trying to explain it, he said, “I’d like to see a perfect world in basketball. It’s not perfect, and that drives me crazy.”

Cecile West kept order in her limited world by focusing on cooking and cleaning her house. She kept her most developed relationships with her sisters, her cousins, and her closest neighbors. Sometimes they all got along famously, sometimes they didn’t.

“On my mother’s side, the Creaseys all lived together in Cabin Creek,” Charles West recalled. “Sometimes among one or another of the sisters there’d be some animosity. It had to do with my grandmother, who in her late age was having some difficulty. Her youngest daughter and her oldest daughter were  fighting over who was taking the best care of her. But for the most part they all got along.”

James Creasey recalled that his own mother would join the tight-knit group of Creasey girls and their sisters-in-law for regular gossip sessions on the Wests’ back porch. “You’d have trouble getting a word in between the group of them,” Creasey remembered with a laugh.

Sitting in the shadows on that porch, taking it all in was little Jerry. He would come to harbor a lifelong love of gossip. When West first arrived in Los Angeles to play for the Lakers, teammate Elgin Baylor quickly picked up on that gossipy nature and nicknamed West “Miss Louella” in reference to the L.A. gossip columnist Louella Parsons. Later, as a team executive, he would be known as a notorious gossiper in NBA circles, with reporters, fellow NBA team figures, anyone who knew the good inside stuff. Of course no one in the NBA has the inside scoop like the GMs. By virtue of their jobs, the team executives spend their lives on the telephone, incessantly chatting about players and coaches, sifting through a zillion tidbits of information to decide which players to trade for, which ones to avoid, which coaches to hire, which ones to fire.

In many ways, Jerry West was born and raised to fill such a post. Actually the “Miss Louella” tag doesn’t quite explain his skill. Gossip is very different in a small town than in a city. As Jim Creasey said of the Wests, “We could look out our front window and see in their back window, so everybody was pretty close in town.”

In a small town, all of your neighbors know your business as well as your name and your daddy’s name. That knowledge becomes the grist of gossip, and talk in a small town can be prying. True, city newspapers have long featured gossip columnists to reveal details about celebrities. But the individual city dweller is protected by the anonymity that comes with population, while people living in small towns are at the mercy of their neighbors. Respectful and friendly neighbors such as James Creasey’s family are often abundant. Small towns can be wonderfully relaxed. Yet they can also be invasive and cruel, because the gossip is based on the ups and downs of people’s lives. Thus, everything is magnified in small communities. In fact, one could argue that only in a small town is shame truly shame.

Plus, gossip is often the premier entertainment in a place where life can unfold slowly and with more than a bit of boredom. That ennui can produce a gossip plump with intriguing and often exaggerated details, the everyday comedy, heartbreak, drama, exposure, all of the elements necessary for a good mortification when serious things really do happen. Unfortunately for the family of Howard West, the 1940s would bring them far too many moments of deep humiliation. Cecile West may have been a shy mountain girl at heart, but like her son Jerry, she was possessed of tremendous personal pride. Humiliation was not something she did well.

Like her mother before her, she was “ramrod straight,” an erect woman, with her red hair now graying with resplendent distinction as she entered her forties. Howard often teasingly called her “Red” when the mood between them was agreeable.

“She was kind of a tall woman,” Jim Creasey said. “Her husband wasn’t that tall. Jerry got his height and everything from her. Back then everybody had to walk to the store. The store was at the end of our street. That’s where you’d see her. You’d see her walkin’ to the store.”

So the Creasey girls likely had plenty to discuss on Cecile’s porch. If Cecile truly enjoyed those moments on the porch with her sisters, they appeared to be the few in her life.

In addition to gossip sessions, the house’s big back porch was where the West girls spent many hours ironing the constant flow of laundry that came through the household and made its way to and from the clothesline. One of the big chores was ironing their father’s work clothes, which were steeped in the strong odors of the refinery. They had to be ironed just right to meet Cecile’s standards. This may seem like a minor detail, but in an Appalachia cut from the frontier, clean households could be scarce.

“Mother was a workaholic,” Patricia said. “Well, her whole family, they were Creaseys. And all those girls, I always told them they were nuts about dirt. They always had spic and span houses. Whatever they had was clean. You didn’t tear anything up, and you didn’t get things dirty. You might get dirty yourself, but you were always cleaned up. I always remember if you were lying on the floor and went to sleep, Mom always woke you up and made you go in the bed room.”

“Mother was a perfectionist,” Hannah agreed. “You were never supposed to do anything out of line. You were supposed to be perfect.”

Of all the family traits, this perfectionist strain would loom in Jerry’s profile. As a woman who had grown up in the rural narrowness of early 20^th century West Virginia, Cecile West’s idea of perfection was less grand in scope than that of her son’s, yet it embodied perfection’s every effort and element.

Her masterpieces were Sunday dinners. And the heyday of those dinners came in the thirties and forties before her family was crushed and broken by a series of events. Charles recalled attending Sunday services on his own as a boy, and as soon as he returned home Cecile would order her eldest son into action. “She’d say, ‘Get off those good clothes. We need three fryers.’ I’d cut the heads off with a hatchet, and she’d do the rest,” Charles remembered.

She would dress the birds immaculately, fry them to tenderest perfection, and plate them with an array of fresh vegetables, pole beans, carrots, peas, potatoes, all plucked fresh from the massive garden that Howard West tended and the chicken house that kept her family supplied with fresh birds and eggs. The main courses of the meal were all scrumptious, her children would recall decades later, but her fresh rolls and desserts, all made from scratch, were what qualified Cecile West. “My mother was the Van Gogh of rolls,” said Barbara West, the youngest of her six children. “She was an incredible cook but more important than that she was an incredible baker. She was a perfectionist.  You’ve heard about her hot rolls. Her hot rolls were like a masterpiece, the structure, the uniformity.  They were delicious.”

On the spot she could turn out from scratch a white cake with apricot filling, a three-layer cake with white meringue icing, Charles recalled longingly. “Her idea of recognition and praise was cooking a great Sunday dinner. That was an event at our place.”

As with so many basketball players, West also drew his size from his mother. She was red-headed, and almost 5-10, maybe taller.

“Mother’s family was always big-boned,” recalled her eldest child, Patricia West Noel. “The boys were big. My mother was bigger than the other girls. My mother was like a horse.”

And she was filled with contradiction. To begin with, her name was Cecile, and her family pronounced it “Cecil,” like she was somebody’s uncle or brother.

She had to have been an awkward teen, large, painfully shy, and profoundly unhappy, just as she was most of her adult life. Supposedly, her eyes were the giveaway. Photographs taken of her often caught her unhappiness, no matter what the occasion. Oldest daughter Patricia was struck by this while looking at an old family picture. “Mother had the most stern look on her face. I don’t think she ever enjoyed much of anything,” she said. “She never stopped to smell the roses. She just felt like she had to go at a terrible pace her whole life.”

Family members suspected Cecile’s many insecurities begat a coldness to her children.

“Her insecurities came from the way she was raised,” explained Barbara West, her youngest child. “I don’t think the Creaseys were warm as a family.”

“My mother was not a loving woman,” sister Hannah agreed. “She never said I love you, she never put her arms around you. Dad rocked you and told you he loved you. But her mother was kind of cold like that.”

Her children would struggle with the fact that she rarely, if ever, told them she loved them. Not any hugs or kisses, not a lot of coddling or cuddling from Cecile. And when they got kids of their own, she would warn her daughters sternly not to spoil them with kisses and sweetness. To modern sensitivities, this might seem grounds for psychiatric intervention, but there were mitigating factors. Cecile was a child of a harsh and unforgiving world. She was a machine of a female, a product of generations of conditioning, built and bred to withstand the brutality of the frontier. Her own mother and grandmother had lost three children each. Her mother would live into her nineties, but would spend her later years lost in a world of dementia where she often fretted and wanted to keep track of her babies.

So in a very real sense, Cecile learned her lessons well. She coddled no one. And for her children she required a standard every bit as rigid as her own mother’s. That was the pioneer way. Protect your children; protect your heart.

“Hannah didn’t think Mom paid much attention to the children,” said Patricia. “Now she took care of us. When we were growing up, we didn’t have much. I tell you one thing. We always were clean. We had a clean bed to sleep in. But she never really went anywhere with us or never really did anything with us. She was set in her ways. She liked to cook and keep house.”

“She and I we weren’t as close,” Hannah admitted. “She was a fault finder. And this is where I’m like my Dad, I need someone to approve of me and he did too. Mother was a perfectionist. You were never supposed to do anything out of line. You were supposed to be perfect.”

“I wouldn’t say that I was very close to my mother at all,” said Jerry’s sister Barbara. “She worked very hard her whole life. I think she was crippled by her insecurities. While my mother and I had a cold relationship, I appreciated her for her accomplishments and abilities.”

Those modest achievements would be reflected in the accomplishments of her children. And that would perhaps be a fair and final measure of Cecile Sue Creasey West. Through a haze of disappointment and profound heartache, she raised up a brood that would be known for intelligence and kindness, the fine fruit of a mysterious tree, a brood that also happened to include the one great player to become the NBA Logo, the symbol of a game that would grow to find fans and devotees all around the globe.

In that regard, she is like her famous son, emblematic of basketball mothers everywhere.

Take, for example, the use of the word “facilitator.”

In Winter’s complex triangle offense, you have to have someone who sort of pilots the machine, who gets the group into the offense, makes the key passes, helps the group through its reads and changes.

Someone who sets things up.

That’s the “facilitator.”

I first heard Winter use the word in explaining Scottie Pippen’s role with the Chicago Bulls back in the 1990s. Pippen had become the facilitator for that team. He played forward, but he ran their offense like a point guard.

Winter’s triangle offense was based on six principles of team play until Winter started working with Michael Jordan and the Bulls in the 1980s. Then Winter added principle no. 7, which basically says that sometimes there are players with such overwhelming offensive talent that you have to have a rule that allows him to override all the other rules.

That was Jordan. Principle no. 7.

As a young player developing in the NBA and in Winter’s offense, Kobe Bryant became a child of those two fathers—Pippen, the facilitator, and Jordan, No. 7, what I’ll call The Weapon.

Bryant has regularly flirted with facilitation during certain moments in his Lakers career, but it has been a process. Obviously his facilitation role developed gingerly during his days with Shaquille O’Neal in the post.

Bryant has long hungered to be The Weapon, of course. But it says much about his skill level and his mind that Bryant can be whatever he wants to be at any given moment.

He’s been called a ball hog by a lot of people over the years. Winter would get frustrated with him, but he never looked at Bryant in those terms. Having worked so closely with Jordan, Winter had gained an understanding of supremely talented players.

Like Jordan before him, Bryant could be overwhelmed by his own competitive nature, by his drive, by his “urges” to dominate.

Winter understood those. He could become frustrated by them. But he understood them.

Winter always considered the tension between No. 7 and the rest of the team to be that key area that made the triangle so special. After all, supremely talented players could often take off and leave the team behind at another level.

Also an extremely keen mind, Jordan himself understood this principle and the tension between the team and No. 7. He was often quoted as saying, “The triangle gave me a way to relate to my teammates.”

When he became an assistant to coach Phil Jackson with the Lakers, Winter’s offense offered the same tension—the same ultimate liberation—for Bryant as well.

We’re witnessing this long journey come to fruition during the Lakers’ current first-round series with the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Faced with a young, athletic team, able to get out in transition and run the Lakers out of the building on a given night, Phil Jackson has asked Bryant to become more of a facilitator in this fascinating first-round battle.

That request that Bryant do more by doing less seemed a miserable failure in Game 4 as the Thunder whipped the Lakers and evened the series at two games apiece.

Many observers figured that Game 4, where Bryant took just 10 shots and scored 12 points, was evidence of some highly questionable snit by Bryant who was again trying to prove a point to his coach and the team, that he needed to be No. 7, not the facilitator.

There were predictions that Bryant would revert to being No. 7 and throw down a huge offensive performance in Game 5. Instead, Bryant again played as a facilitator, allowing the Lakers to work the advantage of their superior frontcourt. For Game 5, Bryant took just nine shots, and the Lakers won in a blow-out.

Faced with carrying less of a burden on the offensive end, Bryant was freed up to make his superstar contribution on the defensive end, just as it had in the 2008 Olympics when he used energy and athleticism to set the tone for Team USA’s run to the gold. His play also reminded me of the tremendous tenacity that Pippen could bring on the defensive end.

Bryant also brought to mind his own play in the Lakers’ run to the 2001 NBA title, when he was young and struggling to find an identity between the two roles.

A long-time mentor and assistant to Jackson, Winter continues to deal with the effects of a debilitating stroke he suffered last April. But the 88-year-old had to be delighted with what he saw last night.

Once again, Winter was turned down for election to the Basketball Hall of Fame this spring. But Winter’s touch is all over the game, all over Bryant’s game.

When Bryant was a teen-ager, frustrated in the Lakers’ offense under coach Del Harris, he told me one day after practice that he’d always dreamed he would play for Tex Winter, who was then an assistant coach with the Bulls.

I told Bryant I would get Winter to phone him to talk basketball. It was a highly unusual move, for the assistant coach of one team to phone a frustrated and lonely young player on another.

As I watched Bryant play last night, I thought of that phone call, and how Winter’s assuring voice was a light in the darkness for Bryant, how Winter became Bryant’s mentor over the ensuing years, how he helped Bryant learn to deal with his own immense talent.

I could only think of how proud Winter would be of Bryant’s performance as a facilitator in a key moment for his team, how Bryant’s play summed up his greatness, a talent that all the fans and observers can catch thrilling glimpses of, but a talent we can never understand.

That, too, is part of Winter’s greatness, and part of Phil Jackson’s as well. Both coaches gained the genius to understand such rare talent. They know how to coax and cajole and encourage Bryant between those two roles, No. 7 and the facilitator.

Everyone knows Bryant has been a superb No. 7 over the years. But he’s one hell of a facilitator when the situation demands it.

It leaves me with full confidence that Bryant will accomplish another giant feat one of these days. By the tremendous force of his great nature, Kobe Bryant will put Tex Winter in the Hall of Fame.

Tex, you can rest easy on that one. Kobe wants you there and he will not be denied. In a big way, he’s making that statement with his play. He always has.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.

Oklahoma City is one of those places where true fans can actually find their way into the building. Ain’t it grand?

In L.A., most of the true fans can’t even afford nosebleed. They are destined to ache from afar, screaming and crying, sometimes weeping for joy at their TV sets, living and dying with each moment on the screen, tapping out their fears and joys in chatrooms, gathering in online enclaves to emerge full-blown in their fanatical alter egos. They go by the names of Troll Man, The Outlaw, Faith, Jon K., Tom, pfunk, GameFaceOn, Shivarising, yellofever, and whatever. You get the picture. If this was Oakland, they just might be an Angel.

For Game 5 against the Thunder, the Lakers need to take all those nice Hollywood folks with the court-side and lower-bowl seats and bus them out to a wine party in Brentwood and they need to replace those nice folks with the great unwashed, the true fanatics. Yes, make them put on clean T-shirts, but get the great mob of those who live their lives for no higher cause than the Los Angeles Lakers, folks who have been drinking Budweiser since breakfast, folks who maybe don’t smell so good, who froth and snort with anger at every Kobe no-call.

You know, folks who would donate a kidney just to be there.

Anyway, get those folks in Jerry Buss’s money seats for Game 5 Tuesday night. Even the playing field, or court, a bit.

Just once, banish all of that Hollywood Cool from the building — okay, you can keep Jack there, but he has to play it like The Shining — and let the Lakers have the true insanity of the faithful behind them for every second of a game, let them slobber and drool all over David Stern and intimidate the officials within an inch of their lives.

Make it so the TV guys want to get out their noise meters and marvel at the true potential for permanent hearing damage, like one of those Black Oak Arkansas concerts from the seventies, or old Chicago Stadium in the eighties when Bill Laimbeer was at the line.

In other words, Game 5 is time for Staples Center to get real, to become a no-gavotting zone.

And it has to start early. The Thunder have to hear it during warm-ups. Think how it would un-nerve the young fellas from OKC, to be greeted by some sort of snarling Philly, smelly pits, mindless horde of L.A.’s finest apartment dwellers who would yell things that would make even sweet Jeanie blush.

Now, that’s what I would call a Hollywood fantasy. But it’ll never happen. It would take Frank Capra to pull it off, and he died long ago.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.