COACH MUST FIX OLD PROBLEMS - BAD CHEMISTRY, ATTITUDES.

Byline: Karen Crouse

``Today's Lakers can't run a patterned offense because the players don't seem to have any idea what's going on.''

Yes, Phil Jackson was pretty harsh in his assessment of the Lakers in his 1975 autobiography, ``Maverick.''

Had he known then that 24 years later he'd be in charge of a Lakers team with even less of a clue, Jackson probably would have put his pen down and meditated instead of finishing his thought: ``I feel it's a ballplayer's responsibility to learn the plays but it's also the coach's job to see to it that the plays are in fact learned.''

So there you have it, straight from the Maverick's mouth: If the Lakers don't look a whole lot more organized in March than they did in October, if they never make it to June despite having two of the game's marquee players, blame the head coach.

We suppose Jackson could make like Charles Barkley and claim to have been misquoted in his own memoirs. But then we'd have to play back for him his words from the June 16 press conference in which he was formally introduced as the Messiah, uh, Kurt Rambis' replacement:

``To be honest with you, I think the talent is here. The players on this team right now have the ability to move into that next step.''

That was before Jackson lobbied unsuccessfully for Scottie Pippen and Shaquille O'Neal showed up at training camp heavier than ever and Kobe Bryant broke a finger on his right hand and the Lakers stumbled onto a new variation of Tex Winter's trademark offense.

It's called the Bermuda Triangle and it can make victories disappear so fast, Jackson has spent the past week bailing out rising expectations with one hand and sending up S.O.S. flares with the other to Michael Jordan and Bison Dele and Dennis Rodman, three men who otherwise wouldn't belong in the same sentence.

Instead of flailing around and wasting so much energy, why not just summon Magic Johnson out of retirement for a third curtain call? Even at 40, the bulked-up guard would make a better power forward than most of the names being bandied about. It's hard to picture Dele right now collecting 14 points and 11 rebounds against a Swedish basketball league team as Johnson did last week.

Or the Lakers could resurrect the playing career of Rambis, whose new job, after all, appears to be plugging holes as they spring up. Last week found him sitting next to broadcaster Chick Hearn, filling in for analyst Stu Lantz, who was recovering from minor throat surgery.

It'd be worth the steepest price of admission at Staples Center to see if Rambis would have O'Neal's back after the way O'Neal twisted the knife in Rambis' back last season.

But we digress. Poor Jerry West, this is supposed to be his luxury liner to steer, but he has bosuns Jackson and O'Neal barking directions over his tense shoulders. If Jackson isn't pining over Pippen or ruminating about Rodman, O'Neal is lamenting the loss of released center Benoit Benjamin.

We'd rather have seen ``Eight-of-Ten'' than ``Big Ben'' on O'Neal's sneakers last week. It'd be much better for the Lakers if O'Neal was concentrating more on the free throws he was missing than teammates who are gone. For the record, O'Neal used a finishing flourish to improve his free-throw percentage during the exhibition season to 37.8 percent.

When Jackson told O'Neal over the summer to shrink his waist, maybe O'Neal thought he said shrink his free-throw percentage.

Why would O'Neal bother spending so much time dwelling on personnel decisions that, unlike his free throws or weight, he can't (or shouldn't be able to) control?

O'Neal is hard to figure. His actions often contradict his words.

He spent the first few days of training camp telling people how unfair it was to guard Glen Rice to be subjected to so many offseason trade rumors. He spent the last few days of training camp thinking aloud about how nice it would be to wrest Antonio Davis from Toronto, which couldn't have been comforting to Rice and Robert Horry, whose positions on the team these days are not guard or forward but ``trade bait.''

The bottom line: With peacemakers like O'Neal, who needs rioters?

Forget Davis, we can do O'Neal one better. How about trading him to Charlotte for Elden Campbell and Eddie Jones?

OK, so that's not going to happen. The truth is, as much as the Lakers' roster may need tweaking, the Lakers' attitudes need tweaking more.

Every team has holes. The best teams don't dwell on what they're missing, they do their best with what they have. The Lakers have the talent to challenge Portland and San Antonio and Utah for supremacy in the West.

But do they have the toughness, the tenacity and the togetherness? We'll find out, starting tonight in Utah.