Besides, Pat Croce could also become a free agent, or the latest former president. He's got happy feet and searching for new challenges, but said he won't leave unless the farewell comes with a parade. The trade indicates as much, seeing as Theo Ratliff will be around longer than Mutombo but won't be better this season.

That means the expectation level has been raised for Brown, who is already the leading candidate for Coach of the Year. For all the masterful work he has done through the years, the work this season has been exemplary in meshing role players with the one star, Allen Iverson, and keeping a beat-up team pointed in the right direction. Now all he has to do is continue it until mid-June.

No. Not yet.

He still doesn't think it's time to have the Shaquille O'Neal-Kobe Bryant summit, and history says that Jackson deserves the benefit of the doubt on these sort of things, or at least the chance to be monumentally wrong. "I don't want to put my index finger, the gun, to the head of either one of those young men," is how he put it. "I still want them both to be determined and tremendously confident in what their ability is. Yet, I want them to understand that the team is bigger than the individual efforts. That's what I'm getting across to them. Whenever an individual puts himself ahead of the team, he runs aground of what I'm trying to do. That's my territory. That's where they run afoul of my basketball club. I don't even know if they've fouled the water. I don't know if they fouled it up. But the feeling I'm getting from this team is they're playing in a depression. They're playing depressed basketball. That's a symptom you get when too much energy is released around a situation like this."

Of course, the longer he waits to go Greenpeace on the Lakers, two of them in particular, and clean the water, the greater the gamble becomes. Make a move too soon and could become a bad patch job. But wait too long and chemistry won't recover in time for the playoffs.

Your call, Phil.

P.S.: The schedule the final six weeks is loaded with games against the Western Conference. They've had their shots at the Least.

And the new boss hasn't come out and made a final decision on you holding both jobs as coach and personnel boss, has he? Better watch your front, too.

He's got the interim tag and needs every win to earn the permanent gig. If he needs to get Boston in the playoffs to get the job, the race to lose in the first round will rarely have been so meaningful, seeing as this isn't just any coaching opportunity.

The early returns have been encouraging. The Celtics got better as soon as Rick Pitino got out -- some coincidence -- and February alone included wins over the Trail Blazers (on the road) and Bucks and two against the SuperSonics.

With the fact that surpassing last season's total of 22 wins is not a lock? It should happen, but you can imagine how fast this whole thing can go downhill once a new home is announced and the distractions really start.

With the notion, sad but true, that the New Orleans Grizzlies or Anaheim Grizzlies might feel like they need big names out front for marketing purposes upon introducing themselves to a new city?

Or with the suspicion of many that Versace, the president of basketball operations, is only waiting for the right time to take over on the sidelines himself, or at the very least is stepping heavy around the topic? Lowe himself picked up on that one when Versace, in commenting about the job his (current) coach was doing, noted "If I had Lenny Wilkens in here or Chuck Daly in here, maybe their experience would win a couple more games, but I don't know if it's going to dramatically affect anything."

It struck a nerve with Lowe. Others, too. He said players were concerned about the comment, a backhand compliment at best, and that coaches and executives from other teams called to express support. The wagons were being circled.

"For the most part, I'm still happy about the effort," Lowe recently said of the Grizzlies. "What I'm more discouraged about are those internal things, situations within."

Gulp.