FanHouse PhilJackson

ORLANDO -- That lucky Phil Jackson did it again. He just sat there on his makeshift throne, smirked and watched his superior players beat up on another sorry team and gift-wrap him another title.

That's what a lot of Boston fans are saying today. For all we know, that's what Red Auerbach is saying.

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Shaquille O'Neal may be headed to Cleveland or may team with Amar'e Stoudemire to push the Lakers in the Pacific Division next year. Either way, it appears his beef with Kobe Bryant is officially over.

After the Lakers cruised to a 99-86 win for their 15th NBA championship and Bryant's first without O'Neal, the Big Aristotle gave props to Kobe via Twitter:

They have to win four.

I mean, we all know they will. You could point to several moments when this NBA season ended, but Derek Fisher draining a pull-up-jumper-in-transition three was pretty much the final nail in the coffin. You can't blow leads like the Magic did. But they did. But if the Lakers and Kobe Bryant want to cement themselves as everything we've already anointed them as, they have to win four games.

So here we are, and tonight will either be a mercy-killing as the Lakers end it and begin celebrating yet another in a long line of championships, or Orlando will kickstart the ticker and pray for a miracle. Join us for the celebration/funeral, at 8PM EST.

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.

LOS ANGELES -- It's almost a cliche the way he has embraced his every locale, living not only the dream but the time and the place. The world's most interesting man? Rather than that phony-suave goofball in the Dos Equis ads, I'll nominate Phil Jackson, who morphed from a free-love, New York hippie in the '70s to a Midwestern family guy in the '90s before migrating to California and -- what else? -- shacking up with the boss' much-younger daughter in a house by the sea.

Amid his radical lifestyle shifting, he has found time to become the gold standard of modern coaches in pro sports, now approaching his 10th NBA title in a career that looked bleak when he was coaching the minor-league Albany Patroons and driving their van on road trips. You hate to tell a legend when it's time to retire, especially when he's at the top of his game. But the perfect ending for Jackson would be to let the purple-and-gold confetti fall on his silver mane, celebrate his fourth crown in 10 years with the Lakers, appreciate his psychological work in transforming Kobe Bryant from a superbrat to an all-time maestro and depart in style as the league's ultimate coaching champion.

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Cherry Picking recaps yesterday's NBA playoff action.

Complaining about officiating is a tradition among NBA fans and coaches alike. After feeling like the Lakers got the short end of the whistles in Monday's Game 4 loss in Denver, Phil Jackson took to the podium after the game to vent his frustrations.

"Basketball is a game where the aggressor gets the advantage. And tonight we didn't know what a foul was and what wasn't a foul,'' Jackson noted. "Start of the game, we got guys knocked around going to the basket, they said, 'We're going to get those things go.' By the end of the ballgame little fouls were being called all over the place."

Objectively speaking, Jackson probably had a point -- the Nuggets shot 49 free throws in a 19-point blowout on Monday -- but the league didn't care, fining Jackson $25,000 for having the audacity to speak his mind and the Lakers organization another $25,000 for, well, employing a loudmouth, I suppose.

There's no other way to say it, really: the way that Dahntay Jones has chosen to play against Kobe Bryant in the last two games of the Conference Finals has been dirty. The first play in that video clip is the intentional trip from Game 4; the second is a two-handed push in the back from Game 3. The former wasn't even ruled a personal foul at the time, but the latter was upgraded to a flagrant-one a day later.

Bryant took the high road when asked about it post-game, while Kenyon Martin proudly (but not surprisingly) welcomed Jones to the "dirty player" club.

DENVER -- For all the weird smack-talking from those Nike puppets, all the relentless marketing pushes by a sports-drink firm that suggests Kobe Bryant and LeBron James are on "a collision course," guess what? They might be headed for a Porsche-Hummer crash instead, which would be a colossal waste of ad-world brainpower and, when you consider the megastars excluded, our great entertainment loss in June.

No one is pondering a Denver vs. Orlando matchup, least of all ABC, which would watch in horror as a compelling postseason marked by fat cable ratings suddenly fades to black in the NBA Finals. "I'm sure the world does want Cleveland and the Lakers, the best two players in the world and the chance to see them in a seven-game series," said Nuggets star Chauncey Billups. "But I don't want to see it. And I'm trying my best to make sure it doesn't happen."

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The Lakers went into Denver on Saturday night and beat the Nuggets 103-97 to take a 2-1 lead in their Western Conference finals series.

During the regular season, the Lakers won 11 more games than the Nuggets and beat them in the season series 3-1.

Why then does L.A. feel like the underdog in this series? It feels like the Lakers should be down in this series, feels like they are the inferior team and feels like they're the ones happy to hang in games and see if they can pull it out late.

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Cherry Picking recaps the previous day's NBA Playoff action.

After a grueling, physical seven-game series with the Rockets, there was some worry the Lakers might come out flat against the Nuggets (even if history suggested otherwise). And for the first 10 minutes, that's what happened as the Nuggets jumped out to a surprising 27-14 lead. All told, Carmelo Anthony finished with an impressive 16 points in the opening quarter.

Not to be shown up on their home floor, the Lakers spent the second quarter chipping away at Denver's lead, eventually going into halftime with a slim two-point lead of their own. Things continued to go back and forth in the second half until finally Kobe Bryant took over, scoring 18 of his 40 points in the fourth en route to a 105-103 victory.

The only lesson here, though, is that it's better to be a closer late than a front-runner early -- which we already knew. Nothing else should be taken from this game.

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