After this off-season, he needs a pull-it-off season

Has a sports executive ever entered a season more outnumbered, outmanned and potentially out of his mind?

On the court, the Lakers will be playing two-on-one.

Phil Jackson and Kobe Bryant are the two.

Mitch Kupchak is the one.

Off the court, the Lakers are sounding like two million-on-one.

Laker fans are the two million.

Mitch Kupchak is the one.

The Lakers general manager has been publicly ripped by one of the league’s best active players, publicly questioned by a Hall of Fame coach, angrily swarmed by Southern California’s most passionate fan base.

Oh, yeah, and one more thing.

He’s not Jerry West.

As the Lakers take the court next week for the beginning of training camp, everyone will be cheering for Bryant’s presence, and Jackson’s wisdom, and Andrew Bynum’s maturity, and Lamar Odom’s health, and even Kwame Brown’s hands.

Me, I’ll be cheering for Mitch.

I’m still challenging him like I did last spring, but, having witnessed this summer’s beating and understanding this winter’s challenge, I’m now also cheering for him.

No sports figure in town has had his reputation so continually pierced. Yet few sports figures have absorbed these arrows with as much quiet and graceful dignity.

Even when Bryant said he thought West could do a better job, did Kupchak fire back? How about when Jackson intimated that the front office lied to him, did Kupchak offer a clarification?

I’m cheering for Mitch, if for no other reason than he deserves better than the loud and messy fate that could soon await them all.

If the Lakers don’t improve enough to win a playoff series, Kobe Bryant will have to be traded, and does Kupchak want to be known as the guy to trade Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal?

If the Lakers don’t win a playoff series, Phil Jackson will leave, and does Kupchak want to be the guy in charge of losing basketball’s best coach twice?

Kupchak has more than a year left on his contract, but you wonder how any man can survive both blows.

I’m cheering for Mitch, if only because the front office needs someone who can look up from a stack of daily printed insults and say:

“Of course you get upset, but you’ve got to keep your composure in this job.”

And say this:

“There has to be a voice of reason.”

And this:

“Dr. Buss has always believed the fans will respect someone with a calm demeanor, and that’s the lead I follow.”

Some folks think he has calmly led the Lakers into the abyss, and I’ve agreed with some of that.

Trading Caron Butler and Chucky Atkins for Kwame Brown was a blunder.

Drafting Brian Cook ahead of Leandro Barbosa and Josh Howard, and then giving Cook a $10-million contract extension was silly.

Many of his problems could have been avoided if he had not been forced to trade O’Neal, and do it before Bryant signed with the Clippers.

That trade was not his idea, it was ordered by Buss. And if Kupchak had been allowed to wait longer, perhaps he could have acquired Dwyane Wade instead of Odom, Butler, Brian Grant and a first-round draft pick.

Kupchak began his career in the shadow of West, and then fell into a hole created by Buss, and now has about nine months to dig himself out?

Yeah, I’m challenging him, but I’m also cheering for him, because, besides perhaps the referees, nobody in this year’s NBA has a tougher job.

“You’re going to wake up at 3 a.m. and stare at the ceiling and think about a deal,” Kupchak said of his life these days. “We all do.”

Within the first few seconds of Wednesday’s interview, he casually mentioned the Angels’ Bill Stoneman, and it makes sense.

Stoneman calmly sat through several trading deadline storms before being vindicated with a team that is headed for the playoffs. Kupchak wants to be known as that guy.

“I understand that everybody wants it now. . . . I want to win now too,” he said. “But I’m the one who has to be accountable, and I won’t do something just to do it.”

Bryant and Jackson clearly feel Bynum cannot help them win a championship now. But Kupchak doesn’t want to mortgage the future to give him away.

Odom and Brown are clearly expendable. But it’s tough to find the matching parts in a league where nobody wants to help the Lakers, as was recently evidenced by Minnesota’s Kevin McHale.

Still, Kupchak is being paid to figure this stuff out, and he must, and quick, and he knows it.

“We’re very aware of the window we have on the greatest active player in today’s NBA,” he said of Bryant. “If you’re not aware that the window is closing a little bit more every year, you’re making a big mistake. Dr. Buss wants to win at least one more championship, we all do.”

So he wants to make a deal, needs to make a deal, works to make a deal. . . then sits quietly while he is trashed for not trying to make a deal.

This is Kupchak’s life, working an exercise machine in his garage in the morning, reading insults in the newspapers during the day, awakening at 3 a.m. every night.

And yet, he said he took time to look out from his office window down to the Lakers’ practice court Thursday. And he said that, despite being days from perhaps more Bryant rips and Bynum complaints and Jackson tweaks, he thought only one thing.

“This is the best time of the year,” he said, his soft voice heard loudly over the worst of times, outnumbered but not outclassed.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.