Phil Jackson Not Greatest of All? Just Compare to Stan Van Gundy

ORLANDO -- They're as different as Yoda and Danny DeVito, the Grateful Dead and Weird Al Yankovic, a complete mismatch in wisdom and savvy and diamonds on their fingers. Just because Phil Jackson evokes the appearance of a half-asleep grandfather waiting for his Metamucil doesn't mean he isn't in complete control of his scene. And just because Stan Van Gundy is running around and howling like a crazed banshee doesn't mean he has a clue.

If the Lakers win another championship Sunday night, Game 5 of the NBA Finals might signify the end of Jackson's spiritual, never-boring adventure through coaching. Yet even as he stares down his 10th crown -- which would push him past one of his biggest critics, the late Red Auerbach, as the most decorated of all pro basketball coaches -- he keeps absorbing potshots from snipers who think he's cruising through a career as an opportunistic fraud.
Remember when they said he won six titles in Chicago only because of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, three titles earlier this decade in Los Angeles only because of Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant? Well, now the word is he's little more than the latest celebrity fan with courtside access to the Kobe Show. Go buy some popcorn while you're at it, "Coach."

"To tell you the truth, Phil doesn't have to do anything but call timeouts," said Alonzo Mourning, not exactly a basement blogger after starring in the league for 15 years and winning two Defensive Player of the Year awards. "Kobe is the facilitator. He is the one driving the mission of this particular team right now. The communication level he has with his teammates out there, you can just see it.

"I think Phil is just showing up, to tell you the truth, and Kobe is doing all the work to make this team successful."

What an ignorant thought from a fellow who seems to be pining for a TV analyst job. Even Charles Barkley will acknowledge that Jackson has been doing his finest work since returning to the Lakers four years ago, having molded the gifted but petulant Bryant into a dynamic, team-first leader who maximizes the talent of a good-but-not great cast around him. Beyond Pau Gasol, who has emerged as an elite inside player with reliably energized and productive performances this postseason, Bryant doesn't have much more to work with than LeBron James has in Cleveland. But the difference, as the growing legions of Mike Brown bashers in Ohio will agree, is that the Lakers also have an elite coach. "I've been spoiled my whole career playing for Phil," said Bryant, who used to resent Jackson but now adores him. "It's hard to imagine playing for anybody else. I grew up with him ... I'm honored to be coached by the best coach of all time. It would be a tremendous honor to be on the team that can get him that 10th championship.

That will happen, probably sooner than later. No way the Lakers become the first team in NBA Finals history to choke away a 3-1 and lose. No way Jackson blows a 43-0 record when his teams win Game 1 of a playoff series. And no way the Orlando Magic, deep and skilled but doomed by bouts with dysfunction that often lead right back to Van Gundy, overcome Jackson's 50-21 record in potential series-clinching games -- even though Dwight Howard declared Saturday that the Magic intend to "make history" and said the series will "be going back to L.A."

Jackson is satisfied enough in his own skin, at 63, to dismiss negative critiques by Mourning and others with a smile. He knows his body of work indeed has included the most dominant player ever (Jordan), one of the most dominant big men ever (O'Neal) and one of the best two-way players ever (Bryant). But he also knows -- as should Mourning -- that leading the greatest players to championships is a maddening process that involves coaxing the sacrifice of egos and melding them toward a team initiative. He has coached complex minds -- Jordan, Pippen, O'Neal, Bryant and Dennis Rodman among them -- and remarkably succeeded the first nine times he went to the Finals. He encountered rocky times at the end as Shaq and Kobe feuded, leading to O'Neal's departure to Miami and Jackson's firing -- yes, he was fired by owner Jerry Buss, father of his significant other, Jeanie -- five years ago. But after a one-year hiatus, during which he wrote a book destroying Bryant as a cancer and admitting he tried to have him traded, Jackson is one win from pulling off his most challenging of championships. Never mind if the dummies don't understand how far the Lakers have come from even a year ago, when they were blown out in the Finals by the Boston Celtics and dismissed as soft and wimpy.

"Yep, Kobe is doing a lot of the work," Jackson said with his trademark sarcasm and smirk. "I'm just here kind of sitting on my chair."

Nor will he fire back at those who accuse him of surrounding himself with stars. Sure, maybe he hand-picked the Lakers job in 1999. But in Chicago, he was an assistant with a Bulls team that couldn't get over the title hump when he was chosen to replace Doug Collins. "I'll accept the [criticism]. You have to have the special players to make the Finals," he said. "That's why they're special players, because they get to this position at the end of the season."

But passing Auerbach is a honor of considerable magnitude for Jackson, who realizes it officially places him in the pantheon of all-time coaches in sports. Before his death in 2006, Auerbach took frequent whacks at Jackson's legacy, including this doozy: "He's never tried building a team and teaching the fundamentals. When he's gone in there, they've been ready-made for him. It's just a matter of putting his system in there. [Jackson's teams] don't worry about developing players if they're not good enough. They just go get someone else." Of course, when Auerbach was coaching the Celtics to nine championships, he didn't have to deal with free agency, a salary cap and a 30-team league. What he did have were Bill Russell and numerous Hall of Famers, a team he could keep together for the long term. As Bryant said Saturday, before confirming that he doesn't intend to exercise contractual options allowing him to leave the Lakers the next two offseasons: "I can't name one coach that won a championship with a bunch of scrubs. So that argument makes no sense. Coach Auerbach also had a lot of lucky, very fortunate situations. You have to have that. They've got to go hand in hand. But in my opinion, [Jackson] is the best."

While careful not to disrespect the Magic -- and showing no bitterness toward Auerbach -- Jackson does grasp his place in history. "We try to work under the assumption that you're only successful the moment you perform a successful act, and in that regard, this has not been accomplished yet. So talking about futuristic things kind of throws me for a loop," he said. "Talking about Red Auerbach's record and what he accomplished, I can [remember] as a young player in the NBA looking at those records of the Celtics and thinking how unattainable they are, how remarkable 11 championships at that time were, and the fact that Red coached nine world championships. So I do know that it's a momentous thing."

He praises Auerbach while knowing the league's structure was completely different then. "Of course, free agency wasn't part of the game," he said. "It was eight and then expanded to ten teams at that time. So it was a different league entirely. Going to the playoffs was like meeting your family or your best rival, Celtics and the Lakers in the '60s."

Chatting comfortably, Jackson hinted only slightly that he is considering retirement if the Lakers win. I have urged him to do so and will continue here. Who wouldn't want to go out on top, with a nice round number that no one will forget? "It's certainly an event that would be a culmination of an effort," he said. "I guess I really haven't thought about it in that depth. I've kind of left that off to assessment at the end of the year." Maybe he'll think he can win an 11th championship with Bryant and Gasol playing at optimum levels. Or, maybe he'll remember the difficulty of surviving the Western Conference playoffs and not want to fail next year. He does know, whenever he retires, that he'll miss the game. Jackson has taken breaks twice, after leading the Bulls to their final title and when he was pushed out in L.A. in 2004, and couldn't wait to come back both times.

"It's really about the momentum of a season. You get caught up in this day-to-day life that we have where your schedule is pretty much determined from October until summer. I think it's going to be hard to get away from it, personally," he said. "I've done it twice -- the asterisk season [in 1999] when they didn't start playing until February, and the other year I went to the South Pacific and got away from the game simply by dissolving the presence of NBA ball. Yeah, it's something that's been in my life for 40 years."

When his playing career was over, he never dreamed he'd be coaching well into the 21st century. He was in private business when the opportunity arose to coach in the minor-league Continental Basketball Association with the Albany Patroons. "It wasn't something I had planned on doing when I was finished with basketball at age 34," he said. "I had a private business at the time -- I was a partner in a business -- and that was a very difficult time. Interest rates were anywhere from 18 to 15 percent to start a new business, and so after running the business for almost a year, the opportunity came for me to coach. It was a part-time, four-and-a-half-month operation, and it was something that could help with our business problems, and my partner was perfectly capable of running it by himself. This was an opportunity for me. I went there kind of on a gamut to see what it was like."

Naturally, he led the Patroons to a championship. But the NBA didn't come calling immediately, in part because they viewed him as a counterculture character who once admitted to drug use. "You know, I think it just went from one success to the next, and after being there for four years, I realized that I wasn't making a move and those salaries were at $25,000, and our kids were on the edge of high school, which meant college was soon, and I needed to get going in a career and I was turning 40," he said. "So I really literally quit the [CBA] job and moved out into another field and looked at graduate school and law school." That's when a sports announcer friend supplied advice, saying, "If you're having success and it's your bliss, make sure you do it, and successes will follow you." Said Jackson: "Certainly that's what's happened, and I've been fortunate to have the right opportunities follow behind it."

He was hired as an assistant by Bulls general manager Jerry Krause, who eventually became Jackson's nemesis. Krause liked telling people that he saved Jackson's career, which may be true to a degree but isn't something Jackson likes having thrown in his face, given his successes with the Bulls and since leaving Chicago. Krause didn't like how Jackson became aligned politically with Jordan and Pippen and how the power trio attacked the GM, forcing owner Jerry Reinsdorf to side with Krause as the dynasty crumbled before its time. Back then, I had small wagers with people on which of the Bulls would win the most titles in the end. I thought it would be Pippen, who still was young enough to win several more -- but won none in Houston and Portland. Turns out Jackson was the smarter bet.

"The key about coaching is that you watch these young men develop from individuals trying to make their own game happen to a team which is willing to sacrifice personal goals for the goals of the group," he said, in what sounded like a commentary on Bryant. "I think that's a valuable experience for them -- and a wonderful feeling for me. I think my experience as a player helped me in this regard, this profession. Not everybody has that chance [to win titles] and understand the drill, the grind, the sweat, the tears, the pain that goes into it and the number of surgeries that you have because of it. The aspect of taking over a team [the Bulls] that was on the verge of being a very good team was a real gift for me, enhanced by the fact that they'd been to the Eastern Conference finals a couple times, and they were really a young team ready to play and very readily coached. So I got off to a really good start. But that team changed hands in three years, and we came back with the Pippen-Jordan crew in the late '90s that was even probably better in regards to knowing their roles. Maybe not as talented, but a very good role team.

"And this venue has been kind of like a second career for me in L.A. Obviously, the Buss family is a very engaging family, very interesting family, and they've given me an opportunity to coach this team, which is one of the storied franchises in the NBA."

Is he a better coach now? "That's a hard thing to measure," he said. "A lot of things end up being that way because of the players you have and the talent you have, and obviously that team in Chicago was a very talented team. I think temperament-wise, yeah, I'm probably a better coach in that degree, not as excitable, not as intense, much more patient."



As opposed to Van Gundy, the excitable, intense, impatient whirl who, like Jackson, started on the lower rungs of coaching and has worked hard to reach this level. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a Jordan to bail him out from his screwups in these Finals. It's hard to blame him entirely for a 3-1 deficit when his team missed 15 free throws in Game 4 and his superstar, Howard, missed two foul shots with 11.1 seconds left that probably would have sealed a win. But Van Gundy has committed tactical blunders throughout the postseason. To his credit, he admits when he's wrong, which has turned him into a blame-accepting soundtrack that no one in central Florida wants to hear anymore.

He should be skewered for yanking Rafer Alston in the fourth quarter, after the point guard had played so well in a Game 3 victory, and using Jameer Nelson throughout the entire fourth quarter and overtime period. While Nelson is an All-Star point guard, he's still getting back into basketball shape while recovering from a shoulder injury that sidelined him four months. He looked particularly bad when he gave Derek Fisher too much room to operate on his game-tying three-pointer with 4.6 seconds left. That's all Fisher has left at 34, a long-distance shot, and the fact Nelson wasn't up in his face is yet another indication that the Magic aren't coached nearly as well as the Lakers. When you watch Van Gundy and his players continually flub up, it makes you further appreciate Jackson's excellence.

Why play Nelson exclusively in crunch time and not use Alston, who said he was "shocked" not to be in the game? "I had no problem with Rafer," Van Gundy said. "The thing I decided is that we had a unit on the floor that was playing well together. The next time really that I really thought about it was the start of overtime, and by then, Rafer had sat for 13 minutes, and that would have been a very, very difficult time to inject somebody new into it."

If he'd used Alston earlier, of course, he wouldn't have had to worry about him getting cold. "I was ready. I was antsy," said Alston, who received calls from friends angry at Van Gundy, especially after similar playing-time issues involving Nelson and Alston in the Game 1 loss. "I was anticipating him yelling my name and that I was going to sprint to the scorer's table and give it a shot and help us pull that game out. [Friends] were ready to fly in and wring his neck, but that's the way the game goes. Friends don't understand that. They want their buddy in the game. It's tough. You think you're going to go back in there."

And yo, Stan. Why not foul Fisher instead of letting him shoot the three? With a three-point lead, any 7-year-old kid shooting in the driver can perform the math equation that two free throws still leaves the Lakers trailing by one point in the final seconds. "I've rethought it and rethought it and rethought it, and it's easy to say now, 'Do I wish we had fouled as opposed to giving that up?' Yeah. But I still don't think at 11 seconds to go in a game that we're going to foul in that situation," Van Gundy said. "I'll put it this way: You always have regrets. But faced with the same situation again at 11 seconds, we still wouldn't be telling them to foul."

Huh? On one hand, he suggests he regrets the decision and says it "will haunt me forever," which is true. On the other hand, he'd still do the same thing when "faced with the same situation." You lost me there, Stan. And was Nelson not told to be in Fisher's shorts on the game-tying three? "I do reflect back on whether there was something else we could have said in terms of instruction that would have gotten us to [defend] that play a little bit tougher, because [Fisher] really got a lot of air space on that to shoot the ball," Van Gundy said. "You know, basically, Jameer had one responsibility on the play, and that was to not give Derek Fisher a look at a three. It's one of those things I'm sure Jameer wishes he had back and had played differently. I question whether we made that clear enough or could have told him to play the play a different way. But I thought we were pretty clear on that."

Somehow, the Lakers always are clear on what they're doing and where they're supposed to be, in part because Bryant is an extension of Jackson on the floor. Phil's only issue, it seems, is with the officials. He was fined $25,000 for saying in an in-game TV interview Thursday that Gasol, Lamar Odom and Andrew Bynum were hit with "bogus" first-quarter calls. This was the same Jackson who said recently of the officiating process, "We might need some candidates for Supreme Court justices to be sitting in the situation because there's so many judgments going on."

One victory from another parade, he didn't want to comment on the refs Saturday. This while Van Gundy was delivering a pep talk involving Greg LeMond's comeback win in the 1989 Tour de France. Yep, I'm sure Howard and Hedo Turkoglu relate to Greg LeMond and a 20-year-old story. "He had come from behind and then taken the lead and then lost it on one of the late stages, and people started to write him off," Van Gundy said. "At the end of the stage, he looked beaten, and he and his wife were talking when they left, and they asked his wife what he had said."

LeMond's words: "It'll just make the story all that much better when I come back and win it all."

Some coaches merely dream the dream. Others actually live it, 10 times. We are watching the greatest NBA coach ever, America.

Appreciate him. For tonight might be the last time you see Phil Jackson on a sideline, even if he doesn't have to do anything but call timeouts.