Michael Ventre

He coaches a team known for its athleticism, quickness and grace, yet he moves as if another car just rear-ended his on the freeway. He is 63, dates the boss’ daughter, has nine gaudy rings as a head coach, makes $12 million a year and oversees a team that boasts arguably the best player in the world — which, incidentally, is the second time he can make that claim.

To call him the Zen Master is a little misleading, because most Zen masters aren’t as content as Phil Jackson.

Yet there is a slight imperfection in this portrait. No wait, more like a missing space on a paint-by-numbers canvas. In this case, the number is “10.”

He needs one more championship to achieve 10 as an NBA head coach. He has nine, the same number as the late Red Auerbach. Jackson has had dos cracks at Numero Diez — in 2004, against the Detroit Pistons, and last year, against Auerbach’s progeny, the Boston Celtics — and both times his Lakers were chased out of the gym.

On Thursday, the Lakers play host to the Orlando Magic in Game 1 of the 2009 NBA Finals. Jackson seems serene and the Lakers appear self-assured, even though the Magic have dispatched the defending champion Celtics and the team with the best record in the league, the Cleveland Cavaliers, in this postseason to get here, and it has a center who can call himself Superman without eliciting too many dissenting opinions.

Jackson is too cool to admit that Red and No. 10 are on his mind. He insists he is staying in the moment, relishing this opportunity, and working toward making up for last year’s Finals disappointment. And most of the guys around the team who know him best insist he’s fixated on the work ahead, not his body of work.

“I’m sure it will (mean something to him),” said Derek Fisher, who has served under Jackson in five previous Finals, winning three rings, “but not personally in terms of Red Auerbach. It would mean a great deal to him because I think this team has really grown up in the last couple years.”

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Jackson coached the Lakers through the 2003-04 season, which ended in heartbreak. Although the Lakers had a much-ballyhooed roster that included future Hall of Famers Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Karl Malone and Gary Payton, they lost to the Pistons in five games. Jackson took a year off to fish in Montana, then returned when it became obvious the Lakers were rudderless without him.

Fisher left the Lakers when Jackson did, going first to the Golden State Warriors and then to the Utah Jazz. He returned to Los Angeles last season because his young daughter needed medical care that could not be found in Salt Lake City. “For him to come back and take the job the way he did after leaving for a year or so, and coming back to a really young team that didn’t have championship contending capabilities, per se,” Fisher explained, “and for us to grow to where we did last year and now to grow up again this year and have a really great season, I think to finish it with a championship, he’s probably going to be as emotional as he has been in a long time.”

When Jackson came to the Lakers for the first time, for the 1999-2000 season, expectations were high, but not championship level. That those Lakers broke through to win that year was perhaps Jackson’s greatest career achievement, although that squad did have a formidable nucleus of O’Neal, Bryant, Fisher, Rick Fox and Robert Horry.

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This team’s ascent toward the elite was not so much Jackson’s miracle, but Mitch Kupchak’s. It was he who pulled off the Pau Gasol trade in February of 2008, which transformed the Lakers into a power with one stroke of the pen.