John Walters

A dozen years ago, back when he'd coached teams to just one-third of the championship rings he owns today, Phil Jackson was asked a remarkably blunt question: What's the best part of basketball?

"(It) is the bus going to the airport after you've won a game on an opponent's floor," Jackson told NBA Entertainment. "And, preferably, in the playoffs. And that feeling that you have, together as a group, having gone to an opponent's floor and won a very good victory, is as about as high as you can get."

Although Josh Howard may disagree, Phil Jackson knows from high. And no coach has ever gotten "as high as you can get" in basketball as prolifically as the Zen Master. Jackson's Chicago Bulls (1990-99) and Los Angeles Lakers (2000-04, 2006-present) teams have a 65-57 (.533) playoff road record in his 16 previous seasons as an NBA head coach. The legendary Celtic coach Red Auerbach, to whom Jackson will be compared more and more with each passing game of the playoffs, had only a 29-37 (.439) road playoff record in his 16 postseasons with Boston.

Auerbach won nine NBA championships in those 16 seasons. Then again, so has Jackson. But you already knew that.

In an NBA postseason as pregnant with promise as any in recent memory, the Jackson-Auerbach "rivalry" is a fascinating sub-plot. Jackson's Lakers are the top seed in the Western Conference while the Celtics, eternally possessed by Auerbach's ghost (might that explain the haze we viewers notice in the first half of games at Boston Garden?), have the best record in the NBA.

So many fans -- along with ABC -- find themselves parquet-pining for a Celtics-Lakers Finals, for a revival of those classic Sixties (Russell-Chamberlain) and Eighties (Bird-Magic) heavyweight bouts. But this one would be about more than just the marquee players who, it must be said, never lacked for future Hall-of-Fame teammates. Still, if Los Angeles and Boston each win their respective conferences, this Finals will be as much about Jackson versus Auerbach as it will Kobe versus KG.

Auerbach, who died in 2006, is the NBA's Lombardi, or Wooden. And Bostonians are fiercely protective of his legacy. As pudgy, bald, Boston-based renegades go (it was Red, after all, who broke the color-line in the NBA coaching ranks by having his best player, Bill Russell, succeed him), only John Adams compares to Auerbach. In a city riddled with monuments and historic sites, a statue of Red graces the plaza of Faneuil Hall.

And so, imagine the hostility that will be unleashed should Boston, making its first NBA Finals appearance in 21 years, be subject to not only defending homecourt, but also Auerbach's legacy. It would sting, of course, to lose an NBA Finals to the Lakers who, after losing their first eight to Boston, have won the last two (1985 and '87) in which they've met. It would be that much more painful to surrender Auerbach's record that he shares with Jackson, the nine NBA rings as a coach, directly. Especially to cede that title to a coach who for ten seasons wore a Knicks uniform, on top of it all.

And what if the Lakers do win the NBA Finals, thus putting Jackson alone among NBA coaches as the first to win a ring for every finger (he also won one as a player with the 1972-72 Knicks)? Compound that record with the fact that Jackson, just 24 victories shy of 1,000 in his career, is the only NBA coach of any reasonable tenure to have a career .700 regular-season win percentage. And that, despite being the sole member of this .700 club, that Jackson's teams actually have a better postseason record (.704 heading into Saturday's game at Denver).

In short, how many "Is he the greatest coach in NBA history?" on-air debates will we be able to stomach?

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