The best coaches, like the best race car drivers, know when to shift gears. Such a coach is the Los Angeles Zen master, the Dalai Jackson.

Phil Jackson has won literally a handful of NBA championship rings, at one finger short of two handfuls. Another this season will be 10 titles, which would pass the legendary Red Auerbach, who won nine championships coaching the Boston Celtics when the Boston Celtics still played NBA basketball. One more and the Dalai Jackson will have gone where no other NBA coach has ever gone — into position to open his own Zen Master's Jewelry Outlet.

But this year' struggle to win the 10th ring has more with his own team than with the opposition, a very zen-like conundrum.

The Dalai Jackson had to deal with the usual overload of egos, the unusual flights to Colorado by one of his stars to answer sexual assault allegations. Biggest of all is the pressure what is likely the final year of his Los Angeles' tenure, stemming from the many public spats involving the Lakers, including Shaq and Kobe, Kobe and Jackson, Gary Payton and Jackson.

Throw in the presence of a 40-year-old Karl Malone — playing key minutes at a time in life when most 40-year-old guys are watching their kids playing key minutes for high school junior varsity teams — and it's a combustible situation.

Yet somehow Jackson led this team of malcontents back from a lackluster regular season (by Lakers standards) and an 0-2 deficit against San Antonio to win four straight games against the defending NBA champs. The players deserve a great deal of credit, but Jackson deserves his fair share because just when it seemed all was lost he did what only the most confident and innovative coaches do. He went with the flow.

Jackson changed what he'd done to win so many of those other rings and significantly altered his triangle offense. Why?

For the best reason there is — it wasn't working.

Publicly, the Dalai Jackson denies significantly changing the triangle offense, but for those who know what they are looking at, the triangle has been broken.

Steve Kerr, a guard on three of the Bulls' championship teams, certainly knows both the offense and what he is looking at and he said recently, "They say they run the triangle, but they don't run it anymore.''

The Lakers protest, but Kerr knows a triangle when he sees one. And lately, that's when the Lakers have the ball. It is to Jackson's credit that he allowed a team ill-suited to run the offense effectively against the NBA's best teams to go away from it in an effort to get Payton, Malone and Bryant more involved.

The triangle was the foundation of Jackson's success, an unselfish offense that uses passing to feel the ball, see the ball, get the ball to Michael — wait a minute, that was with the Bulls. Jackson asks the Lakers to feel the ball, see the ball and become one with the ball, but when the playoffs were on the line last week he simply said, "The hell with it! Play ball.''

The Lakers did just that and now are favored to win the whole thing, even though they have had their problems with the Timberwolves.

Jackson's loyal assistant, Tex Winters, has insisted in recent days that the Lakers are still a team that works the triangle offense, pointing out that, "The offense is not just one option, per se, it's a sequence of options that they have to go through. That's all part of the triangle philosophy. Most people don't know the difference, but we get into the triangle a lot of different ways.''

Maybe, but the way they got into the Western Conference Finals was to get out of the triangle. For that, the Dalai Jackson deserves as much credit as he has for anything he's done in the past.

If it takes a triangle to win one more time, the Dalai Jackson will do it. But if he believes the way to a centered life — and a 10th NBA title — is to transcend the triangle, he's shown he'll do that, too. That's what real coaching is all about — using what he's got and taking his ego out of it.

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