For months now, maybe the man most responsible for Los Angeles’ championship run has been ripped over the Pau Gasol trade. The mere mention of suspicions over Memphis’ motives gets the Grizzlies owner’s voice rising on the telephone, gets him going on the gossip that suggests something unseemly happened on the way to a Lakers renaissance.

Michael Heisley starts to ask, well, who is ripping Minnesota for the Kevin Garnett trade?

How about Seattle and Ray Allen?

“Is anybody jumping on Popovich in San Antonio because he traded that center to Houston for virtually nothing?” Heisley wondered.

Heisley was talking about Luis Scola, the forward, whom had been a long-ago draft pick of the Spurs. Only problem was, Scola never played a minute for the four-time champions. Gasol was the Grizzlies’ franchise player, and it was Spurs coach Gregg Popovich saying on the record what most of his peers had only the guts to say without attribution: What in the world was Memphis management thinking on the

Just as Phil Jackson reached the cusp of catching him with his ninth NBA championship, Red Auerbach was on the telephone, grumbling over the legitimacy of that legacy. The emperor of the Boston Celtics resisted letting Jackson climb onto the coaching Olympus with him, insisting a fatal flaw of the Los Angeles Lakers coach still separated them.

“He’s never tried building a team and teaching the fundamentals,” Auerbach said. “When he’s gone in there, they’ve been ready-made for him. It’s just a matter of putting his system in there. They don’t worry about developing players if they’re not good enough. They just go get someone else.”

This would’ve made the possibility of Jackson’s 10th title so crushing to Auerbach. What could Red say now? Six years later, Jackson dares to do it Auerbach’s way. All those old Celtics kept wishing Auerbach had lived to see this return to Garden glory, but Auerbach would’ve loathed that this season be punctuated by Jackson using Boston to pass him for the

BOSTON – Down the corridor moved Ray Allen late Wednesday, talking about the calm, the peace, the balance, that comes with his regular routine of shooting the ball on game night. It never changes. Hot streaks. Slumps. Whatever. When there are three hours until tip, he can be found alone with his thoughts and a rebounder.

When the rest of his teammates are still driving downtown, Allen is cutting across the floor, the sweetest of strokes lifting shots, delivering the parquet the night’s first droplets of sweat.

“What I want,” Allen said, “is to feel the shots that I’m going to make, see the angles, and the spots, and the contact that is going to come for me.” Now, Allen wears a suit and tie and slides his hip into you, as though you’re one of those imagery defenders that come for him.

“Some guys, they just go out there, take some shots, just standing there, and that’s preparing them for the game.…”

Whatever has happened in these playoffs, whatever shots stopped dropping, whatever doubts

LOS ANGELES – Once, Lamar Odom was the lost basketball soul on whom the public passed such harsh judgments. He was the high school star bouncing from high school to high school, the teen prodigy ensnared in the grips of a system that made him a pawn of handlers and opportunists.

Nevertheless, Odom is thoughtful and aware, and it shouldn't be surprising that in the middle of the best basketball of his life, a Los Angeles Lakers championship chase, he found a moment to cast a weary eye toward the saga of a kindred spirit.

"As a player that's been in O.J. Mayo's position before, I can kind of sense what's going on," Odom said recently. "Everybody wants a piece of you, and it's too bad because you're just a kid."

A decade ago, Odom was Mayo. The best high school player in the nation with a dubious recruitment to college basketball, agent strife and a fatherless childhood that made him susceptible to grown men with unsavory motives. Even Friday night, shirtless in the Lakers locker room,

LOS ANGELES – Here was the contrarian Kobe Bryant, playing the pacifist, the passer, the smirking wise guy tapping his foot at the starting line, letting the world champions sprint out at the sound of the starter's gun. Almost a game within the game for him, this was just to see how long Bryant could hold back the greatest player on the planet.

Phil Jackson declared his superstar on "vacation" for well into the third period, sniffing that his scoreless MVP "had gotten us out of rhythm," as the Los Angeles Lakers flailed down 20 points to the world champions. This wasn't the design on the coach's chalkboard, but Bryant delivering an unauthorized message of defiance to the San Antonio Spurs.

Here's your head start, a silent Staples Center, and a chance to steal home court in the Western Conference finals.

Here's Game 1 on my turf, my terms.

"I can get off anytime," Kobe Bryant marveled of Kobe Bryant. "And … I did …."

Long before the deed was done with the Lakers' 89-85 victory, Bryant

This was late December, late in the morning, and Joe Dumars let the silence wash over his championship bones 20 rows high in an empty Boston Garden. Once more, he could feel it, this thing they had, the Boston Celtics and Detroit Pistons. Alive again.

“It’s great for the league that Boston is one of the best teams again,” Dumars would say that morning.

In its own way, this Celtics renaissance was greater for the Detroit Pistons. The Pistons needed the nudge. They’re growing older, grumpier and they had lost their edge getting chased in the Eastern Conference. They needed Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen delivered to Boston, the horns and trumpets, the magazine covers and SportsCenter commercials, the coronation that came with 66 victories. They needed basketball – even Boston – to buy into the mirage that the Celtics could march into these Eastern Conference finals un-bloodied and untested.

All along, the Pistons promised: We’ll be waiting. So, here they are for Game 1 at the Boston Garden.

SAN ANTONIO – The bus bringing the New Orleans Hornets out of Game 6, out of angst and anger, grumbled near the back of the AT&T Center. Before climbing the steps, Byron Scott tugged out his iPod’s ear piece and considered the possibility that Robert Horry had turned into Cheap Shot Bob again.

The old man of these San Antonio Spurs had delivered a dubious blow to the bad back of the Hornets’ David West, and the coolest, calmest coach in the NBA was seething through that stoic disposition.

“I’m not real OK with it,” Scott told Yahoo! Sports. “But if I didn’t know Robert on a personal level, I’d say that was a dirty shot. Yeah, if I didn’t know him the way I know him, I’d say it was a cheap shot.”

Yes, he always liked Horry, but no one could convince Scott that West wasn’t a victim of a desperate shot by a desperate champion. The Hornets had been destroyed 99-80 in Game 6 on Thursday night, and still Scott and his players seethed over the blindsided screen Horry had leveled on West and

NEW ORLEANS – It was one of the sweetest scenes of All-Star Weekend. Hotel ballroom, NBA superstars of yesterday and today milling together between news conferences and across the room, you could see David West’s eye catch his childhood hero. He had a New Orleans Hornets official walk him over to make the introduction because it simply wasn’t West’s way to presume that David Robinson had ever heard of him.

His eyes were wide, his back straight, an All-Star reduced to that little kid in Teaneck, N.J., who never rooted for Patrick Ewing’s Knicks, nor Michael Jordan’s Bulls. He was a San Antonio Spurs fan. When the NBA was exploding, personalities and personas becoming bigger than life, it surprises no one that West gravitated toward an officer and gentleman out of the Naval Academy.

“The only Spurs fan, the only David Robinson fan, that I knew of, in Northern Jersey,” West said with a laugh late Tuesday night. He was unwrapping his knees of that ice, his back still so stiff he had to