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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That was Tex Winter’s description of the coaching staff’s relationship with Bynum. Not mine. And that was almost two years ago, well before Winter suffered a debilitating stroke.

At the time, the Lakers were nursing their humiliation at the hands of the Boston Celtics in the 2008 championship series. Bynum’s approach was clearly a function of the disconnect between coach Phil Jackson and basketball operations chief Jim Buss.

As Winter explained at the time, Bynum was Jim Buss’s prize draft pick. Buss was apparently concerned about how Jackson was handling Bynum. In fact, Buss would advise Bynum to hire his own big man’s coach because Jackson wasn’t a good coach for big men.

Sister Jeanie Buss, well known as Phil’s girlfriend, questioned her brother’s take on the situation by pointing out Jackson’s large success with Shaquille O’Neal and lesser talented post players in Chicago.

Jeanie Buss had long confided to friends that her brother was the main impetus for the team’s firing Jackson in 2004. With trust between Jackson and Jim Buss already at a minimum, it’s not hard to figure that Jim Buss’s coaching advice for Bynum damaged the relationship further.

Then there was Bynum’s decision to involve his own doctors in his knee injury that season, rather than relying on what the team had to offer in terms of medical support. Frankly, it’s not all that unusual for pro athletes to seek medical advice outside the team. But the sum of the situation left Bynum oddly distanced from the coaching staff, Winter confided at the time.

Two years have passed, and Bynum’s situation with the team has perhaps improved. But the internal trust level in general is not great with the Lakers, so you have to wonder.

Recent games have shown that Bynum’s return to the lineup from his recent injury will be key for the Lakers prospects in this spring’s playoffs.

Even with the Lakers posting the top record in the Western Conference, the Twin Towers look of Bynum and c/f Pau Gasol has brought mixed reviews, but this much is clear: With the two big men, the Lakers have been able to overpower a lot of opponents. Though at times it has seemed that the best pairing is either one of the big men with sixth man Lamar Odom.

The truth is, questions such as these often never find definitive answers in the NBA. Some nights, Bynum and Gasol will play very well together. Other nights, the Twin Towers will have their issues.

As it stands now, those questions are small beside the questions about basic trust within the organization. There have been all sorts of strange signals and communications coming out of the organization this season.

And while Jeanie Buss has tried desperately to put a good public face on it, the situation seems fragile at best. Jerry Buss recently tried to pose that it was normal for Jackson to finish out the season without a contract for next year. But it’s not.

Consider the Denver Nuggets. They found themselves in a similar situation with coach George Karl and reached an agreement with him right before the All Star Weekend just so they could avoid just such late-season craziness as the Lakers are facing right now.

As Shaquille O’Neal told me a few years back, he felt no trust in dealing with Jerry Buss, had no relationship with the man. Now Buss is known for being quite loyal to those with whom he shares trust and warm feelings. But that’s not the case with these Lakers, no matter how many coats of paint you put on it.

Jackson himself has sought to emphasize in his recent public comments that the Lakers only have five or six players under contract for next season. The last time Jackson was fired, the team tried to make a transition to a running team. Are they preparing to do the same now? Has the decision already been made? That’s a fair and legitimate question.

Are the Busses quitting on these playoffs even before they happen? Another fair question.

And is Bynum’s return from injury a wild card in the hand that’s being dealt by the Busses? Another fair question.

And in all of this where stands Kobe Bryant, who can opt out of his Lakers contract after the season? A truly intriguing question.

If this Lakers season disintegrates into the foul gas of mistrust, the blame will lie squarely with Jerry and Jim Buss. Now, as an owner, Jerry Buss has been hugely successful, and he’s earned plenty of favor with Lakers fans. So it may just be that he and son Jim would be forgiven for ditching Jackson’s last team that runs the Triangle offense.

As a friend of Jeanie Buss’s said earlier in the season, Jim and Jerry Buss are gambling that fans won’t complain too loudly if they end the Phil Jackson era with the Lakers. Maybe not.

Of course, all this conjecture winds up lining the bottom of the bird cage, if Bynum returns from injury and the team gathers strength down the stretch.

In the meantime, all Lakers fans can do is wonder. And try not to get a whiff of the mistrust that blows in the winds of El Segundo.

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

After all, it’s going to take time and patience for Walton to work his way back in. He’s only played two dozen games this season and has been out since just before the All Star Game.

But when he resumes playing next week and if he’s able to round into form, Walton should improve a lot of things for Phil Jackson’s team.

The Lakers’ bench was decidedly exposed against the New Orleans Hornets in last night’s loss, and Walton should add considerable strength there. He’s had his highlight moments defensively, but it’s the execution of the triangle offense that should improve substantially with Walton on the floor.

Improving that execution should help the bench keep better control of tempo, which means they have a better chance of holding their ground, of not losing leads.

Walton’s presence should also help in forward Ron Artest’s adjustment to the triangle’s nuances and challenges. Walton will give Jackson more options in terms of lineups, particularly in the second half.

With Artest in the lineup, Bryant has gotten far less time on the wing himself, and as Bryant explained to me earlier in the season that has changed his relationship with the offense itself.

Bryant added that he doesn’t mind this. In fact, he said the addition of Artest has made things more interesting for him, given him fresh and different challenges this season.

Mainly, it has meant that Bryant gets the ball in different places than he did last year. That can be good and bad. Getting the ball as a guard means he’s operating higher and further way from the basket. It can mean there are fewer opportunities for him to work “behind the defense” because he is not on the wing.

With Walton on the floor with Bryant, perhaps that means the star will be able to return to some of his comfortable spots in the offensive execution.

Bryant has long shown an ability to turn all kinds of things that could be negatives into positives, and that appears to be his mental approach this season as well.

Bryant pointed out for reporters that because of the addition of Artest this year, the Lakers have changed substantially as a team, simply because it takes time for any player to learn and adjust to the triangle. The classic example of this is Ron Harper, who struggled for most of two seasons with the Chicago Bulls trying to learn the triangle. When he finally did, Harper became a key component of the Bulls, as he later was for Jackson’s first two championship teams with the Lakers.

So it’s only fair to allow Artest his time to learn and adjust, thus the help that Walton can bring in his return is key.

If the Lakers win the title again this year, they’ll win it differently than they did last year, Bryant recently observed.

That’s because last year they won the championship with some elevated execution of their offense.

This year Artest means the Lakers have a chance to develop as a good defensive team in the playoffs, although that obviously still remains a work in progress.

With Walton back, the execution of the triangle also should improve. Make no mistake, if the Lakers are going to win the title in June, they’ll have to improve dramatically, as they did over the course of last year’s playoffs. Walton’s personal improvement was a big part of the team’s progress.

There’s also the enthusiasm Walton brings to the task. He’s an upbeat person. His teammates like him. He’ll bring those tremendous mental positives to the team’s relationship with the offense, just as he always has.

In fact, even during his time on the injured list Walton found a way to emulate triangle offense guru Tex Winter, who has been sidelined himself for almost a year while recovering from a stroke.

Walton has donned a suit and sat amongst the coaching staff, furiously scribbling notes during the course of the game, then communicating what he sees to teammates during pauses in the action.

That, of course, has long been a role filled by the tenacious Winter. Obviously, Walton has been more diplomatic in delivering his observations to teammates than Winter, who was known for his brutally frank corrections of players.

As a player, Walton will confine his contributions to all the subtle things — the reads and passes and cuts — that make Jackson’s triangle teams so special, and secondary players such as Walton so crucial to the big picture.

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

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.