Days of Wine and Closure

Greetings from Venice.

“What can I tell you?” Jerry Buss said Monday from Italy. “The pasta’s great, and the wine’s flowing freely.”

In the hours before Kobe Bryant would be free to choose his next organization, the Laker owner signed off with a handful of reporters in a conference call with the news that his vacation is going great. “I love it here,” he said.

Back home in the rat race, Coach Phil Jackson is gone, center Shaquille O’Neal is about to be traded to the Miami Heat and, at 9:01 tonight, Bryant, the player Buss has said he views as a son, can sign a new contract with anyone.

Buss typically does one interview a year, during training camp. This season, he turned down many requests, expressed his preference for Bryant over others in a midseason television interview in Phoenix, and this weekend had his public-relations staff set up Monday’s conference call.

It was mid-evening in Venice, and Buss was countering the perception that he was rebuilding the team to Bryant’s specifications. He said he’d decided Jackson would not return and O’Neal would be traded without regard to Bryant or his free agency. He said he believed Jackson’s term had “run its course,” that it was better to trade O’Neal a year or two early than a year or two late, and that he expected Bryant to re-sign for the seven years and $130 million he’d offered.

His message to Bryant: “Stay with the people who love you.”

Sounding upbeat about new coach Rudy Tomjanovich and what could be a very different team, from the players to the system they run, Buss said he might even come out of his luxury suite at Staples Center and watch next season’s games from a seat on the floor.

“This is going to be a big year for me,” Buss said.

He should know soon enough. The O’Neal trade -- for Lamar Odom, Brian Grant, Caron Butler and a draft pick -- could be made official tonight, pending physical examinations. Bryant, who has been courted by the Lakers, Clippers, Denver Nuggets and New York Knicks, could make a decision any day. He is expected to pick between the Lakers and Clippers, with reports of his leanings changing by the hour.

If replacing Jackson and trading O’Neal has made the Lakers more attractive to Bryant, Buss said, then that is an unintended result of decisions he made to maintain the momentum gathered over the last five seasons.

Buss said he had not spoken to Bryant since the hours after Game 5 of the NBA Finals in Detroit, but he seemed unsure. He did plan to talk to Bryant shortly, so that his voice would be among the last Bryant heard before choosing a contract. General Manager Mitch Kupchak and Tomjanovich were to meet with Bryant on Monday night. The organization can only assume, Buss said, that Bryant will be found not guilty of the felony sexual assault charge he faces in Eagle, Colo. His trial is scheduled to begin Aug. 27.

“The decision with Phil and the decision with Shaq was made totally independent of Kobe,” he said.

Buss said he called Bryant late in the season to say so, telling him, “I just want you to know what I’m about to do has zero to do with you or your free agency.”

He added, “You know, Kobe has never at any time ever told me that Phil or Shaq had any influence on his decision as to where he would like to play.... I follow the soap opera as much as all you guys. Basically, Kobe has never said anything like that to me.”

But with O’Neal all but gone and none of his replacements All-Star caliber, Buss admitted the success of their off-season hinged on Bryant, a six-time All-Star and not yet 26.

“I don’t think there’s any question about it, with Kobe we’re one of the premier teams,” he said. “Without Kobe, we’re going to have to get busy with trades and in the free-agent period to sign some premier players.”

The Lakers have agreed to trade away what many believe to be the league’s premier player. Contract talks with O’Neal’s representatives broke down months ago because, Buss said, O’Neal wasn’t satisfied being the league’s best-paid player. He wanted more money over two years, then became eligible for a three-year extension, and wanted more again.

Buss said he spent the latter part of the season considering whether to trade O’Neal. After the season ended, O’Neal asked out, and Buss’ decision was made. By then, the owner had started thinking about fending off the collapse that often comes with the ends of dynasties, and whether O’Neal had a place in the restructuring. He’d offered about $45 million over two years at the end of what O’Neal already had coming -- $27.7 million next season, $30.6 million the season after -- and O’Neal, he said, refused.

A dynasty, Buss said, “begins to age. If you don’t make some effort to rejuvenate a team, then you sometimes go to the bottom. That’s a very scary, miserable, depressing thought for me.”

So, too, does O’Neal age.

“At some time, we know his value is going to decline,” Buss said. “That’s completely obvious.

“Shaq is the most dominant player in the game, there’s no question about that. The question is, if I wait until he isn’t the most dominant player, will I get adequate return on him? Maybe I’m trading him too soon. Maybe I’m trading him too late. I don’t know....

“We offered to make him the highest-paid player in the NBA for perhaps the rest of his career. He turned that down.... We certainly negotiated in good faith. We did not call off those negotiations. He’s the one who called off those negotiations.”

O’Neal has said that it was the Lakers who ended talks about an extension, but he could not be reached and his agent, Perry Rogers, declined to comment.

Jackson left town Sunday, three weeks and two days after Buss told him he wouldn’t be back at any price. Jackson said he would have gone anyway, that he could not stand alongside a reorganization he did not believe in, and lacked the conviction to stand in front of it.

“I just really felt that when Phil came he did an absolutely incredible job,” Buss said. “However, there were some health issues at one point. I don’t know, I got a feeling the thing had run its course. Five years seemed the appropriate time.

“Phil and I are very close, very good friends. I didn’t want him to do something he didn’t want to do if, out of loyalty to me, he would decide to do it instead of taking time off.

“It occurred to me he was not likely to return anyway.”

So, Buss said, he’d try it over again. If his way happened to align with Bryant’s, all the better. He has a new team, a new coach, and three weeks left on vacation.

There’s still a lot of summer out there.