He buried his coach – “Arnold,” Bob Cousy called Auerbach – and realized that it had been 20 years since Red had seen something to the standard of Boston Celtics greatness. Red died a year ago and the Celtics still were an embarrassment. The way it had gone for so long, Cousy started to believe he would never see the Celtics chase a championship again.

“I’m 79,” Cousy said by phone this week, “and I didn’t think I would experience this again in my lifetime. This has been…”

He hesitated to think of the word.

“…emotional for me.”

As Byron Scott kept notes under Pat Riley and Larry Brown, the biggest coaching seat in Los Angeles was always in the back of his mind.

He wanted to be a coach.

He wanted to go home again.

As an Inglewood kid raised in the shadows of the Fabulous Forum, the Showtime running mate for Magic Johnson, there would turn out to be one more connection that could’ve delivered Scott to the Staples Center. Eleven years ago, Kobe Bryant had come to the Lakers and Jerry West brought Scott back to mentor him. Bryant insists that Scott taught him his most important lessons on professionalism.

“As long as Kobe is there, you would think about that job because of the relationship I had with him,” Scott said.

As much as a part of the New Orleans Hornets coach will be a Laker for life, the strangest thing has happened in his four years with the most fragile franchise in the sport: Out of the rubble, and losing and moving boxes, Scott has come to an improbable truth: His dream job found him.

The Lakers

As a young star at Wake Forest, Chris Paul would listen to his coach, Skip Prosser, raise his name over and over. Here's how David West played the game. Here's how David West worked. Here's how David West acted.

"David West," Chris Paul sighed on a cell phone Thursday. 'He was all I ever heard about."

Prosser had moved to the ACC out of the Atlantic 10, but his heart was forever with a self-made player who stayed four years at Xavier and made himself the National Player of the Year. A different breed of college coach, the late Prosser was a sincere, self-deprecating high-school history teacher who never played the part of the used-car salesman. When a kid connected with Prosser, it spoke something of his soul.

"When Coach Prosser first got to Wake, he kept telling me about the young guy he got there," West said Thursday. "And I know the kind of guy that Coach recruited."

More than anyone, Houston Rockets owner Les Alexander believed Jeff Van Gundy was holding back his basketball team. Alexander berated his ex-coach for playing too deliberately on offense and costing him customers. Why, the owner lamented, can’t we play like the Phoenix Suns?

As it turns out, Van Gundy wasn’t holding the Rockets back.

He was holding them together.

After Alexander dropped Van Gundy for Rick Adelman, new general manager Daryl Morey had sold people on the Rockets as a serious challenger for the Western Conference championship. He traded for Argentine forward Luis Scola, signed Steve Francis and activated Bonzi Wells. There was a growing belief that he had constructed a roster to benefit Adelman’s accomplished offensive mind.

Yes, the Rockets insisted, the handcuffs were gone. Now, the Rockets could let loose.

And how’s that going?

They discovered the truth about this team’s limitations. From Tracy McGrady’s mental and physical fragility to an absence of athleticism, they

Once the roster had been determined in training camp, Phil Jackson gathered his players for a meeting at the Lakers hotel in Hawaii. All around the room, they were required to stand one by one, give their name and say something about themselves.

And so, the rookies, Javaris Crittenton and Coby Karl, rose, and the old returning champion, Derek Fisher, and finally, the most famous man in the room climbed to his feet.

“Hi, I’m Kobe Bryant and I want to win a championship.”

Smush Parker has returned to Miami where his agent said the Heat front office has invited the banished guard to rejoin the team.

“(Heat general manager) Randy Pfund called me (Wednesday) and told me that they need Smush back down there,” the agent, Billy Ceisler, said Thursday afternoon.

Parker flew from New York to Miami Thursday afternoon.

President and coach Pat Riley made Parker leave the Heat after an altercation with a valet parking attendant on Nov. 27. Upon signing a two-year, $4.6 million free agent contract over the summer, Parker played just nine games before the exile. He had been working out in New York recently, waiting to learn of Riley’s next move.

Parker, who had been the Lakers starting point guard for two seasons, became eligible for a trade on Dec. 15, but league executives have been wary based on Riley removing him from the team. The Heat aren’t required to announce his activation until an hour before game time on Friday night against Orlando at American Airlines

Everyone told Alonzo Mourning to walk away with the Miami Heat’s championship two seasons ago. What else was left? Perhaps the parade down Biscayne Boulevard would’ve been a perfect storybook ending for everyone else, but ’Zo’s journey had been so different, so dramatic, maybe it wasn’t perfect for him.

His life, his story, had never been neat and tidy this way.

So yes, the disturbing tearing of tendons and muscles on Wednesday night was a horrible scene. Mourning crumpled to the floor clutching his knee, his basketball season, his career, over. And then, there was ’Zo. They wanted to carry him off the court, but he bit his lip, climbed to his feet and declared that he’d be damned if they were going to wheel him out of the gymnasium. He threw his arms around his teammates, and Alonzo Mourning, the last tough guy, limped to the locker room.

BOSTON – Karma, Joe Dumars was saying. He's taught the Detroit Pistons to believe in karma, taught them that the good comes back to you. This is the reason he never got angry with Chauncey Billups for playing the part of buddy to Kevin Garnett, for telling him it would be wise to take that trade to the Celtics.

Back in the summer, Billups shrugged and explained himself this way to Dumars: "Hey, it's good karma, man. I did what's right."

Five months later, on a cold December morning at the new Boston Garden, Dumars considered the consequences of Billups' act of friendship for an old Timberwolves teammate.

Chauncey, you told KG to do … what?

"I did have to swallow hard," Dumars said with a smile, "but I accepted the good karma."

As it turns out, these Celtics are the best thing to happen to these Pistons. Deep down, Dumars loves it. Hours before Billups punctuated a magnificent performance with old-school guard play on Wednesday night, beating the Celtics with guile and guts and two free