No Subject

"Any place he's gone, he's had the team given to him," the 82-year-old
Auerbach said before last night's game. "I had to go make my team and
put it together. I had to draft the players myself.

"Jerry West gives him a team, and Jerry Krause gives him a team. And he
goes ahead, and he wins with those teams. He's a good coach, but let's
not get carried away."

Either out of spite or wounded pride, Auerbach went on:

"He got blown out three times in the playoffs. He was supposed to run
the table with these guys. He was lucky in that Portland game. They just
fell apart at the end; that's why they won."

This was Auerbach refusing to give another successful coach his due.
Arrogant in his day, despised by many in his profession, he would light
up victory cigars with games in hand, celebrating as much he was rubbing
it in.

Phil may not want to admit it, but he has a lot of Red in him. The
condescension aimed at the other team and its crowd, the inability to
give effusive praise to another team's staff, the idea, deep down, that
he's Phil Jackson and you're not.

No matter how much trouble his team appears in, Jackson has never given
the impression that he or his players have panicked and nearly thrown a
series away. Tested severely against Sacramento and Portland and then
Indiana, Jackson still had this serene demeanor about him, as if he knew
how it would end with Shaquille O'Neal just as he knew how it would end
with Michael Jordan.

During the Sacramento series, to make sure his players were paying
attention to the game film, Jackson had look-alikes for Kings Coach Rick
Adelman and Jason Williams spliced into the videotape. For Adelman, he
used Adolf Hitler. For Williams, he had edited in a clip of Edward
Norton's skinhead character in "American History X."

"Some of the times, the harder you try, the harder it is not to,"
Jackson said when asked if he has alienated some of his N.B.A. peers. "I
don't know. I just let it slide. You just have to let that kind of stuff
slide in this profession."

Asked about the comparisons to Auerbach, he said humbly, "When you
retire, 10, 15 years down the road -- God willing you're still alive --
you think about those things at a later date."

For the record, Auerbach was also not singing Larry Bird's praises.
Bird, who planned to retire after the season, after taking the Pacers to
two Eastern Conference finals and one N.B.A. finals in three years, was
drafted by Auerbach in 1979.

"Larry, he also took a ready-made ball club," Auerbach said. "He doesn't
want to go through the process of rebuilding, which is a smart move. He
doesn't really want to coach. He's so wealthy, why is he going to kill
himself? But, basically, he did a good job."

As old school as you can possibly get, Auerbach was asked about
Jackson's coaching philosophy, which includes a lot of new-age
teachings.

"I can't follow that routine," he said. "When you win, you can all of a
sudden worship the moon. When you lose and you say it's Zen or zip, or
whatever they call it, they laugh at you.

"People said they got no ballplayers outside their two stars. What is
Rice? Chopped liver? What about Robert Horry. Rick Fox, I know a lot of
ball clubs who would want him on their team.

He's not doing it with mirrors, so why doesn't he come out and say, 'I
got a good ball club'?

"I don't know what it is these days. Coaches have a tendency in all
sports to downgrade their ball club. So when they win, they're heroes.

"The person who gets coach of the year now is a guy that finishes second
that was supposed to be fourth. I like Doc Rivers, but why did he win?
What can you do more than win? Isn't that the job?"

Auerbach was not all gloom and doom, saying O'Neal belongs in a category
with Russell and Chamberlain. But he saved his choicest comments for
Jackson, the Renaissance man who many feel has eclipsed Pat Riley as the
best coach in the game.

"As long as you can do it the way he's doing it, it's easy," Auerbach
said. "You walk right into a ball club. He didn't make any moves. He
didn't do anything. They'll say the other coaches that were there didn't
win. Maybe they weren't given enough time to mature with that team.

"Whether he had to do anything with their immaturity, I don't know. But
when you're older, things start to fall in place. You tell yourself:
'Last year we lost. Why did we lose? Let's play together.' That's what's
happened to those guys."

Auerbach has never been incredibly complimentary regarding his peers,
just as Jackson has not exactly endeared himself to his generation of
coaches. They won't ever admit it, but they're more like each other than
they both realize.