Can Rondo prolong the careers of the Big Three? Garnett just turned 34, Pierce 33 in Oct, + Allen 35 in July. Prolly not much past this year.

Note: Question should include Doc Rivers? Can the rewards of coaching Rondo keep him in the job?

Dwight Howard has gotten better in the post, but the truth? He’s still a year or two away, and that’s if he works insanely hard.

But his post play has been one of the glaring weaknesses for the Magic. Hell, post play has been a glaring weakness for the league. Teams that have it fare well. Teams that don’t ultimately get embarrassed. Want to win, LeBron? Get yo ass in the posts. Don’t believe me? Ask MJ.

Watching Celts/ORL is like watching 1 of those horror flicks where the monsters pull out the victims’ hearts and eat ‘em raw. It’s bloody.

This offseason is the grandest game of pickup basketball in the history of hoops. Who knows how to pick a side? Gonna take mucho smarts.

Now’s the time for young free agents. It’s pickup. Get your team together and u can play Bill Russell for a decade. Hesitate + lose. Pickup.

I don’t think Jerry Buss will sit with a pat hand after the season, but you have to wonder because he isn’t rushing to sign up Phil Jackson. That’s letting personal get in the way of business.

Celts’ message to LeBron + others: Don’t waste time; band together; build a force. It’s pickup. Get your team together. Can’t do it alone.

Truth: If Michael Jordan had been a free agent with the power to pick his own team, he’d have Joe Wolf + other UNC blood. Gotta be careful in pickup.

Truth: MJ is lucky he had Jerry Krause helping him play pickup, even though Krause was far from perfect and pretty whack a lot of times.

Some years the playoffs go on and on like a bad joke. This feels like one of those years, but we’re all hoping for a great punch line June 1

Jerry Sloan says it’s a simple game if you lay your heart on the line every night. What happens when a team like Boston takes your heart?

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

LeBron James’ management team, led by his former teammate Maverick Carter, has officially announced that his decision on which team he picks as a free agent this summer will be based entirely on the opportunity to win championships.

Money will not be an issue for LeBron James. Repeat, money will not be an issue.

That should be great news for the Los Angeles Lakers, because no team has had success over the past decade like the guys in Forum Blue and Gold and their coach, Phil Jackson.

Nothing more dramatically points out just how badly team owner Jerry Buss needs to dispense with all this drama about Jackson’s status.

Not only does James badly want to join a winning organization, but he sorely needs a coach who will not hesitate to coach him.

PJ will not hesitate to coach him. Only a person like “ten rings,” as he is called in Lakers online circles, can truly stand up to James and coach him like any supremely talented player needs to be coached.

Critics have long crowed that the main reason Jackson has always won is that he has always coached the best.

Well, here’s the bare and harsh truth. There are so many ass kissers and uncertain creatures populating the ranks of coaching and management today in the NBA that it’s hard to find someone who can do what needs to be done and say what needs to be said.

Jackson is that rare guy who can coach a superstar. It is the bedrock of Jackson’s rare and special ability.

Tex Winter was a retired college coach with a great career record when he came to the Chicago Bulls in 1985 to help coach a young Michael Jordan. Winter, who has never backed down from aggressively coaching stars and role players alike, once told me how intimidated he felt the first time he watched Jordan in practice.

Once he got over that sense of intimidation, Winter was the kind of guy who wouldn’t hesitate to get on Jordan about any little detail, from fundamentals like his chest passing to team things like ball movement. Winter often spoke of how he admired Jackson’s ability to work with and coach the game’s very best. In that sense, Jackson and Winter used to feed off each other. That’s what made them so special. They actually coached the superstars.

But the NBA is a players’ league and its best players, especially the elite players like James,  have long intimidated those around them. That’s why their coaching staffs become coddlers and their personal managers become Yes Men.

LeBron James is on just such an island right now. He’s 25 and has just come off the most disastrous season of his career. He must make an excellent choice as a free agent. Very much is as stake. He and Carter know that they face wasting his immense talent if they have many more seasons like 2010.

All of which means Lakers owner Jerry Buss needs to drop the mind games he is playing with Jackson and offer the coach the contract he deserves. If he can’t offer a contract immediately, Buss could still quell all the media speculation by reassuring Jackson and Lakers fans that the coach will be welcomed and rewarded for his work.

There has been talk that Buss wants Jackson to take a substantial pay cut from his humongous $12 million a year salary. Jackson has already indicated he’ll make concessions.

These two giant egos — coach and owner — need to settle their differences so that the Lakers can compete for James. Signing such a player would obviously secure the franchise’s future.

Yes, the Lakers are about to return to the NBA Finals for a highly challenging series against the Boston Celtics.

But the future is now for Buss as well as it is for LeBron James. Lakers fans can only hope the owner is too smart to let his cool relationship with Jackson get in the way of securing a once-in-a-lifetime player like James.

Buss already has a once-in-a-lifetime coach. Perhaps the team owner will wake up during these playoffs and realize that.

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.

“Roland, I have a general NBA question that I would love to hear your opinion on. It seems most pundits this year feel that the Cavs are the favorite to take home the Larry O’Brien trophy. Their rationale is they have the best team and best player and therefore best chance to win. So what happens if the Cavs fail to win it or worse duplicate their performance last year and fail to even make the Finals? What if anything would this say about Lebron as a player?”

Brian, your question reminded me of a conversation I had recently with former Lakers team psychologist George Mumford, who worked extensively with that force of nature known as Kobe Bryant.

Mumford offered the observation that James and other top players benefited tremendously from being on the Olympic team with Bryant, because they were given the opportunity to observe his unbelievable dedication and work habits up close.

Just the Olympic experience wasn’t enough to show James and other top players the way, Mumford reasoned, but it was enough to help them get a clue as to what it really takes to be successful.

Mumford, of course, also worked with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen with the Bulls, and he considers Bryant their peer — if perhaps not even better, if that’s possible  — in terms of superhuman work habits.

This, in turn, reminded me of a conversation I had with Lakers assistant coach Brian Shaw four years ago, when he compared Bryant with another of his former great teammates, Larry Bird.

I had asked him how can a little rich kid like Kobe could possibly have the same hard, hungry edge that poverty had burnished into Larry Bird.

“He is a student of the game,” Shaw said of Bryant, without hesitation. “And it’s no accident he’s as good as he is. He’s the first person, when we get on the plane tonight after the game, he’ll want a copy, a DVD, of tonight’s game, as well as a copy of the tape on our upcoming opponent, so he can watch it and prepare for who he has to play next. He’ll watch what he did tonight. Not everybody in this league puts in that kind of dedication, that kind of effort. That’s what separates him from even the other superstars of the game, in my opinion, the Tracy McGradys, the Vince Carters, whoever else you want to name.

“Then there’s the time.” Shaw added, “that he takes tuning his body up, not just in the weight room, but working with our physical therapy guys to make sure everything’s adjusted, in alignment. The time that he takes stretching, the time that he takes studying his opponent, the time that he takes watching film of himself and studying how he can improve. That takes a lot of time. That takes a lot of discipline. That takes a lot of focus. Not everybody else has that discipline.”

I then asked what were the chances of Bryant’s intense competitiveness rubbing off on his young Lakers teammates? Not much, according to Shaw. “His teammates, I know they see him doing this. But most people aren’t willing to dedicate themselves to putting in that type of time.”

If you ever got the opportunity to watch Bird work through his shootaround before each game, you get the picture of Bryant’s focus.

For a young team, such a leader is a blessing and a curse, perhaps.

Strong personalities need someone equally strong to stand up to them.  “You have to discuss it with Kobe,” Shaw said of the challenge a coach faces in correcting Bryant. “And you have to tell him when he’s doing things wrong or things that you don’t like. Even if those things are sometimes miraculous. He respects those who will speak up, even if it’s against what he wants to do. He respects you more if you tell him about it.

“Kobe’s an alpha male.”

So are coach Phil Jackson and center Shaquille O’Neal, Shaw pointed out. That’s what was so difficult having the three of them on the same team earlier in the decade.

“That’s a lot of alpha males on one roster,” Shaw said. “When you have that, at some point, there’s a gotta be a breaking up.”

Bryant and O’Neal won three championships together but that run came to an end with an acrimonious parting after the 2004 NBA season.

That alpha male mentality still drives the Bryant package. “He’s the kind of guy, he can take a bad shot and make it,” Shaw observed. “It doesn’t matter if there are four or five guys on him, he feels like he can score on them. So as a teammate, I love to have somebody on my team like that, who thinks that way and feels that way and that no matter if we’re down 20 and there’s a minute left in the game he’s still thinking there’s maybe a way we can win. As a teammate you love to have somebody with that mentality on your team.”

Yet Shaw acknowledged that not every teammate appreciates the alpha male nature of a Kobe Bryant.

“If you’re a weak-minded individual, you look at it as if, ‘He’s taking all the shots, and I’m not getting to shoot.’ Well, that’s where you’re not gonna appreciate being on a team with a guy like that,” Shaw said. “You should look at it like, I know he’s gonna shoot the ball a lot, so I better go get rebounds and do these other things because I got to find another way to get my shot. Some guys he’s played with have understood that pecking order, like a Horace Grant.”

These days Bryant is attempting to lead the Lakers to a second consecutve NBA championship.

Having the opportunity to observe Bryant up close would provide James with key clues that he seems to lack, Mumford observed.

Perhaps he’ll figure those things out on his own. But of all the talents an NBA player needs, a superior work ethic is one thing that sets apart the truly great.

To answer your question, Brian, what will happen if the Cleveland Cavaliers lose again this season?

LeBron James will have to start over in his quest to figure out the riddle of greatness.

His best clue will come from observing Bryant up close. He does a lot of his winning in the wee hours, studying tape, or during other peoples’ down time, when Kobe is still at work.

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

When Jerry Buss lays his cards on the table, you have little choice but to sit back in awe.

The Lakers owner has re-signed Kobe Bryant for Jordan-level money. MJ made $30 mil per season over his final campaigns with the Chicago Bulls.

Adrian Wojnarowski and Marc Spears of Yahoo! Sports report that Bryant today signed for three years and roughly $90 mil, an extension that will take him through the 2014 season and into his mid 30s.

In his day, Jordan did the extraordinary by proving that a guard could still dominate pro basketball in his mid 30s. Bryant has neared many of Jordan’s mileposts, but this will clearly be the most daunting of those challenges.

And Buss is willing to pay to see if Bryant can do it. It is an astounding show of faith in a competitor for the ages. It suggests an almost unprecedented relationship between an owner and a player.

Even Jordan has to envy such a relationship, such respect. And it’s not a gift. Kobe Bryant has earned every penny of it.

In fact, with Artest and Gasol back for the same duration, Buss had made a huge commitment to talent. He has given Bryant an opportunity to establish an unrivaled legacy.

Even so, Bryant will need good fortune in the coming seasons to achieve it. But the big thing here is the show of support and respect from Jerry Buss.

There’s little wonder that Buss can sit back and wait to read the situation with coach Phil Jackson. As he nears his 80th birthday, Buss has the talent in his pocket. His hand is as strong as any ever played by any owner in pro sports.

Even Phil Jackson has to survey this table in awe. No wonder he has begun hinting recently about taking a pay cut. In Jerry Buss, Jackson has met his match. His longtime mentor Tex Winter always said that Jackson is such a strong personality, so brilliant, that he needs someone around him to stand up to him.

For years, Winter has been that person, but Winter has been slowed by a stroke. It’s clear now that Buss stands up to Jackson in a fashion that no one else can come close to matching.

Buss has a lineup that any coach would die to lead.

If Jackson walks away from this team, or is denied the opportunity to coach it to another title in 2011, Buss has assured that he will be able to pick from the top coaching talent in the business as a replacement.

When Jackson was sent packing in 2004, the team erred stupendously in signing Rudy Tomjanovich, a setback that cost it dearly competitively and financially.

It’s a smart bet that Buss won’t repeat that error.

By signing Bryant, Buss has set the capstone on his era in Los Angeles. He has assured his own legacy and silenced any critics (such as me ;0).

My hat is off. There has never been such an owner in the history of American sports.

If Bryant and his Lakers find good fortune, they will win championships during this three years.

And if they don’t, no one — not even I — can say they missed it due to a lack of commitment.

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

The big guy is giving in. He’s not going to go tit for tat with team owner Jerry Buss over his coaching contract for next season and beyond.

Speaking to the media this week, Jackson acknowledged that he has a chance to come back next season. The only way of assuring that, he pointed out, is for the Los Angeles Lakers to win this year’s NBA title. And the odds of that are long, Jackson added.

“Odds wise, I serve at the behest of the Buss family,” Jackson said, then quipped that he serves Buss’ daughter Jeanie “all the time … ”

(Jackson can never resist a little dig at Jerry Buss, who has long disliked the fact that his coach dates his daughter, who also handles marketing duties for the team.)

Then Jackson added, “But (right now) I’m serving this basketball club as a coach. I think it’s the best way to approach it right now. Where this team is, the way it’s built, the way we’ve been going along this season, the direction the NBA is going right now.

“A lot of these things fit together,” he said. “If we win it’s almost imperative that (I) give it another shot, but that’s a lot of ‘if’s’ in there. Winning is a really big (challenge). There are four playoff (series) that you have to get through before you can say that ‘We won’ and then have a chance to do something special again, unique.

“So, that’s a long shot.”

Earlier in the season, Jackson had begun publicly nudging Jerry Buss about his contract for next season. The coach began the effort in front of the New York media with comments implying that the team was making an effort to get him to take a cut from his $12 million salary each season.

Jackson, of course, saw a scenario shaping up and wanted to change the direction that things were going. It was obvious he faced a scenario that forced him to win the NBA title this year to keep his job.

Jackson was really concerned about next year in that it provided him a window to win another championship. Jackson reasoned that if the Lakers didn’t win the title this year, then Jerry Buss and son Jim might decline to give him a new contract (they made a similar move in 2004 and fired him).

Jackson would prefer to have next season under contract, because it would still give him an opportunity to win one more title next year. Jackson believes the NBA is headed for contract troubles with its players union that could easily force a cancelation of the 2012 season due to an owner lock out.

Title opportunities this season and next are huge for the highly competitive Jackson, who has already won 10 titles.

Lakers coach Phil Jackson confirmed as much recently when he opened up about Jerry Buss, the team’s 77-year-old owner.

“He’s a gambler,” Jackson told reporters before a recent game in Los Angeles. “He knows the odds, he knows when to take the risks. I think he carries that sense of this is a risk/reward type of game, and what are the rewards with the risk I’ve thrown out there in each situation.”

Jackson, of course, is echoing something he learned from another owner — Chicago Bulls chairman Jerry Reinsdorf — who first taught him about risks and rewards years ago. Jackson also had his unpleasant moments with Reinsdorf yet was able to maintain a strong respect for him even through their nastiest showdown in 1998.

In his years on the bench in the NBA, Jackson has learned some difficult lessons about the mind-set of team owners. You could see those lessons reflected in his recent comments. Jackson has long been known for his masterful use of the media, for planting ideas with reporters and stirring the pot if it needs stirring. Jackson himself calls this “seeding” ideas with the media.

But as he’s aged Jackson has also learned to employ a more direct approach. You might argue that with his recent comments, Jackson was reaching out to Buss, telling him through the media that he understands the pressures the owner faces. (Thanks to the great Kurt Helin at http://probasketballtalk.nbcsports.com/2010/03/phil-jackson-says-jerry-buss-knows-when-to-hold-them.php )

“This year he took the big risk and brought Lamar (Odom) back, so we could get back to where we are the championship, that we could have a shot at that championship again,” Jackson said of Buss signing Odom in the off-season. “But that was a big pill to chew for an organization that has never lost money in the however many years he has owned the team, 30 years (31, actually). I know that was something he had to convince himself of. I had to convince him of, and stay after it that it was imperative for us to stay with this crew, this group of guys.

“I think Jerry was very close to his teams in the ’80s, the Showtime teams,” Jackson continued. “And I think he learned something from that. He learned that you can be friends with these guys, but time passes, a generation passes. There’s some heartache involved in that. There’s some pain involved in it the closer you get to the guys.

“I think he admires this team, I think he likes his athletes. He has an ability to stay removed and yet attached to them.”

These are somewhat difficult circumstances. Buss pays Jackson the exorbitant sum of $12 million a year to coach the Lakers. Jackson, in turn, has rewarded Buss by leading the team to last year’s NBA title, his fourth championship in nine seasons with the team. Yet Jackson’s contract is up after this season, and Buss has not offered him a new one.

In place of an offer, Jackson and his girlfriend — the owner’s daughter, Jeanie Buss — are left reading the master poker face of Jerry Buss. What is he thinking? What cards is he holding? What will he do?

These are serious questions, because Buss has already fired Jackson once in their time together in 2004. So it’s understandable that this poker face would privately unnerve Jeanie Buss and to some degree Jackson (and the team itself). After all, he is trying to coach his team to another championship.

Jerry Buss has been a tremendous owner in Los Angeles in terms of his success over the past three decades. But it’s not right. Jackson shouldn’t have to play this poker game and try to win a championship too.

Yes, Jerry Buss is a sly, tough owner who plays a sly, tough hand of poker. But passionate Lakers fans know this isn’t the time or place for a hand of poker. The Lakers have an opportunity to do something special here if they can win a title in 2010.

Then again, Jackson has won in tough circumstances before. That’s why he reached out to Buss with those almost tender comments.

Buss has indicated in the past that he doesn’t love the triangle offense that Jackson runs. Truth be known, he prefers the Showtime days of Magic Johnson. Well, who the hell doesn’t? As the recent HBO documentary on Johnson and Boston’s Larry Bird made so perfectly clear, the two players gave the NBA a truly wonderful era. But here’s a news flash: We will never see another Magic and Larry because you don’t turn out special players like that on demand. They were not the product of a system. They were magical players, once-in-a lifetime gifts from God.

In the absence of that, Jackson has helped create the next great era of pro basketball. The era of the triangle offense, if you will. Like the era of Larry and Magic, when this era is gone, it won’t be duplicated.

So Jerry Buss should think twice about hurrying to usher the Triangle Era out the door so that he can get back to Showtime. These eras themselves are special things. They come our way once in a lifetime. We get players like Kobe and Magic and Bird and Jordan and coaches like Jackson and his longtime assistant Tex Winter once in a lifetime.

So with all due respect, Dr. Buss — and I sincerely mean with all respect for you have been a great owner — please leave the fucking poker games for Vegas.

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

The Lakers knew that last summer when they signed Artest and passed on bringing back promising young forward Trevor Ariza. Artest brings plenty of defense to help make up for his deficits on offense. But the Lakers won the league championship last year in part because they were finally able to execute the complicated offense at a high level.

This year that simply hasn’t been the case. The offense requires that players be able to make sophisticated “reads” of the action to trigger facets of the offense. Artest simply isn’t ready to make many of those reads.

Lakers Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom report that the team hasn’t been able to use the more complex levels of the offense because Artest isn’t ready to go there.

Artest’s adjustment might have gone better if backup forward Luke Walton hadn’t been troubled by back problems. Although he’s faced consistency issues over the years, Walton has always been a smart passer and a key sub who makes the offense work. Walton’s absence for much of the season has made Artest’s protracted adjustment all the more painful, although there is some hope that Walton could return to action by the playoffs in April.

Usually in March, coach Phil Jackson’s teams are starting to round into major form, but the Lakers show some uncharacteristic signs of struggle this year down the stretch. A recent three-game losing streak has Lakers fans fussing that Jackson too long clings to veterans like 36-year-old guard Derek Fisher. Jackson likes Fisher, even at an advanced age, because of his competitiveness, his ability even still to pressure the ball on defense, and most of all, his knack for getting the team into the offense and guiding its execution.

Fans who complain about a Fisher or a Walton often miss the point. Jackson’s teams are always greater than the sum of their parts. That is the main power of the offense, it’s ability to create opportunity for lesser players. Jackson’s teams have always shown an ability to bind these lesser players with stars like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant.

Like other critics, Jordan himself once snidely derided the triangle as an “equal-opportunity offense” because it required that he share the ball with less talented teammates. But Jordan later said repeatedly that the offense gave his teams an operating format, one that allowed them to relate to each other and become champions.

The numbers back that up. In the 19 seasons that Jackson and triangle guru Tex Winter have employed the offense in the NBA, it has won 1,089 regular season games and lost just 453, an astounding winning percentage of .706.

The offense has been even more effective in the playoffs, where Jackson has used it to win 10 titles in those 19 seasons, with two more appearances in the league championship series. It has allowed Jackson to win 209 of the 300 playoff games he has coached. The Lakers recent troubles are unfortunate, because there’s more than a bit of pressure on the team this season, with Jackson’s future unclear because the team’s front office hasn’t offered him a contract.

Even if Jackson does coach the Lakers or some other team next season, it seems the remarkable run of the triangle offense is just about up, its era coming to a close. Tex Winter predicted as much a few years back.

Why? Other coaches have tried the offense in the NBA and failed famously because of the time commitment and learning curve for professional players. Only coaches with the stature of Jackson and Winter, supported by stars with the abilities of Jordan and Bryant, have made it a success. As tirelessly as he has promoted his offense over the decades, Winter himself would admit it’s an awkward fit with modern pro players.

MINDS MADE UP?

Back in 2004 when he was seething, Lakers owner Jerry Buss would have a few pops and tell anyone within earshot — even a Lakers beat reporter or two — how much he despised the triangle. Buss made it clear even to random strangers. He loved fast-break basketball ala the Lakers’ vintage Showtime teams, and he was tired of the unbalanced floor look that Jackson’s triangle teams employed.

Former Lakers VP Jerry West worked with Buss for years and knows him well. West says that when Buss makes up his mind on something, he rarely changes it.

Even though Jackson’s team had won three straight championships, 2000-2002, with the triangle, as soon as the Lakers stumbled in the 2004 championship series, the owner gave his approval for his son Jim Buss to fire Jackson as coach.

The triangle offense got a reprieve the next year when Buss abruptly rehired Jackson. Why did the Lakers owner relent and return to the triangle? 1) Because he faced a well-organized revolt by season ticket holders who demanded Jackson’s return; and 2) because Jim Buss’s hiring of Rudy Tomjanovich proved such a disaster, financially and competitively.

But six years later those basic feelings of the Lakers owner haven’t changed. Buss and his son have held off on making Jackson a contract offer for next year, and they’ve implied they want him to take a pay cut from his $12 million salary.

The circumstances mean that the 2010 playoffs are a referendum on the offense pioneered by longtime Jackson assistant Tex Winter. If Jackson somehow drives the Lakers to a repeat of their 2009 NBA championship, then the Busses may begrudgingly invite Jackson back for a shot at a three-peat.

One key inside observer says Jerry and Jim Buss are calculating that fans won’t mind if Jackson doesn’t return next year, that there won’t be a revolt by season ticket holders this time around.

It seems showtime vs. triangle are the competing visions for the team, with former Lakers greats and some factions in the front office feeding the desire of Jim and Jerry Buss to move away from the formula that has won four championships over the past decade.

At the center of the controversy is the development of young center Andrew Bynum. The Busses have great belief in his future, and they have articulated a beef that Jackson doesn’t have a reputation for developing young players.

It’s certainly true that Jackson prefers to rely on veterans to run his teams, just as it’s true that Winter himself upbraided Jackson about his handling of a young Kobe Bryant. But the Busses might be overlooking Jackson’s track record for developing players such as Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant in Chicago, where Jackson guided the Bulls to six championships.

Another irony in the Buss opposition is that the triangle, or “triple-post” offense as it is also called, is great for getting the ball to post scorers, such as Shaquille O’Neal or Bynum.

Critics such as Orlando Magic assistant coach Brendan Malone, who has battled Jackson’s triangle teams many times over the years, point out that the Lakers defeated the Magic in last year’s championship because they used the screen and roll to devastating effect, rather than the triangle.

But Winter has long countered that the triangle gives teams a basic philosophy from which to operate. That means a triangle team can use its format to employ screen and roll, fast breaks, or any other number of offensive looks at any time, Winter has explained.

“The triangle is a philosophy for playing the game that allows you to just about use whatever you need in any given circumstance,” Winter once explained. The 88-year-old Winter continues to recover in Oregon from the effects of a stroke suffered last April and may soon move back to Kansas, where he enjoyed years as a highly successful college coach.

For all of Jackson’s 18 NBA coaching seasons, Winter has been a strong presence with his teams, alternately teaching and sternly correcting players who violate the principles of his offense. In all of those seasons, Winter has been an infectious promoter of the offense he developed. He has not been able to fill that role this season, leaving Jackson to press on without him.

HALL OF FAME?

Like his offense itself, Winter also faces a referendum this spring as he attempts yet again to gain election to the Basketball Hall of Fame. His name has been put into nomination many times, but he has been turned down because the bulk of his NBA experience has been as an assistant coach hired as a mentor for a younger coach, Jackson. Winter has a brilliant record as a coach for several colleges, most notably Kansas State where his teams were among the nation’s best for a number of years.

USA Basketball’s Jerry Colangelo says the Hall of Fame is trying to expand its scope to take in a rare and special genius like Winter. But this year’s field of Hall nominees is crowded with excellent players, coaches and teams and Winter once again faces uphill odds for selection. Hall of Famers Bill Walton and Magic Johnson both said Winter deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, as have many others.

Walton pointed out that generations of players have absolutely loved playing for the passionate Winter. Walton also said that of the special generation of coaches who competed against and successfully challenged John Wooden, Winter is the only major figure yet to be named to the Hall. At a time that the highly successful offense he created is being challenged, Winter is without voice to speak up for it or himself.

Jackson, though, has been diligently coaching in his absence, and although Winter’s strong presence has been missed, if the Lakers find success this post-season it could well mean yet another season for the offense.

Otherwise, this could be one of the last pro seasons for the triangle system, which is still used in pieces at some colleges, mostly by women’s teams at Tennessee and Connecticut. Winter has long predicted that his system wouldn’t be used much beyond his and Jackson’s tenure as coaches. A basketball visionary in so many ways, Winter also seems to have a clear view of the future for a system he created.

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