EL SEGUNDO - A few odds and ends from draft night at Lakers headquarters:

-- GM Mitch Kupchak said the team liked what it saw when it worked out first-round pick Javaris Crittenton, but apparently, that was based more on the off-court testing and impression he made. His actual workout was pretty brief. As Crittenton noted in a conference call, he had hurt an ankle the day before.
“I tried to push through,� he said. “I worked out for about 15 to 20 minutes. I could only participate in certain drills, because I turned my ankle at the L.A. Clippers workout with Acie Law (the guard coveted by the Clippers who was picked by Atlanta). I came down on his foot. But I think I showed them what I could do in the drills I could participate in.�
Crittenton, incidentally, said he's familiar with the triangle offense, having run it for four years in high school (at Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy).
A reporter joked that he was going to call coach Phil Jackson and tell him he was running a high-school offense.
“No, don't do that,� said Crittenton. “It's too early to be getting in bad with the coach.�

-- If you're wondering why the Lakers used their two second-round picks on foreign players - after all, the Slava Medvedenko and Sasha Vujacic picks have worked out so well - part of the attraction is that both Sun Yue and Marc Gasol could, in a sense, remain stashed overseas. Contract issues could keep them from reporting to training camp, which would be just fine because, as Kupchak noted, the Lakers are considering going with 14 players, rather than the full 15-man limit this year. (This would give them the freedom to add a player in midseason, if someone of note is released elsewhere.)
“We have 11 players, I believe, under contract,� he said. “… We didn't want to draft a player and then have to cut the player because there was no room on the roster. We looked at these as a pick or two where we could work with the player and keep him playing internationally, or if the timing was right bring him in this year or next year.�

-- Jackson, making his first appearance before the media since his second hip-replacement surgery, said the surgery is the primary reason he's putting off any decision on extending his contract with the Lakers, which ends after the 2007-08 season.
“A majority of what concerns me is about the ability to coach at the level that I think is required of myself … and that has to do a lot with the mobility, getting up and down the court and being active,� he said.
Of course, that's not the only consideration. He's as interested as Kobe Bryant in seeing what the Lakers do to improve their roster.
“You want to have success when you coach in this business, there's no doubt about it,� he said. “You don't want to beat your head against the wall.
“But we're really confident we're going to get this done, make strides to do the right thing.�

-- Jackson, who said he believes in his “heart of hearts� that Kobe Bryant will remain a Laker, noted one reason the idea of trading Bryant is so unlikely: It's virtually impossible to get full value for a player of his caliber.
“There seems to be no value at all for what we expect for Kobe Bryant, and I think that's understandable from anybody that's ever been a part of this game,� he said. “So we're not anticipating that this is something you're just going to drop in a hat and shove one team for their talent to replace him with Kobe Bryant, and anticpate that we can fill the needs that have to be filled with one player. You don't get that with this game.
“It's been said sometimes one good player has the value of three starters on another team, but I'm not even sure that that's the quality that you're looking for. You're looking for a talent of desire and work and an ethic that goes along with it.�

Back on line after some time off, and some downtime with illness. In case some insomniac actually stumbles onto America's Least-Read Blog (TM), I'll try to start making more regular entries.

For starters, a few notes from Thursday's conference call with Ducks general manager Brian Burke and goalie Jean-Sebastien Giguere, announcing Giguere's new four-year contract:

-- Understanding the importance of re-signing Giguere, Burke strayed from his normal practice and went to visit Giguere's agent, Bob Sauve, in Montreal. Normally, he doesn't go to agents, and assistant general manager Dave McNab handles the contract negotiations.
“We wanted to make this clear how important this was for us, or to us,� he said. “
In the end, it was a pretty easy deal to make, it seems. The Ducks wanted to keep Giguere and Giguere wanted to stay.
“We had some goals in mind, and our priority was to make a deal here,� Giguere said. “My family and I just wanted to be part of this great organization, and we wanted to stay in California. We like it here a lot.�
From the beginning, it was pretty clear the Ducks were serious about keeping him, he said.
“There's a market out there for goalies,' he said. “… Burkie knew where the numbers should have been at, and they just didn't make any fuss about it. They wanted to keep me, and I think they knew what they had to spend to do that. And I wanted to stay here, and knew what I would be satisfied with.
“To be honest, it was very easy to get this deal done. … Everybody, I think, gets out of it happy with what we got.�

-- Burke said he had not yet talked with the Ducks' other goalie, Ilya Brzygalov, who 10-8-6 with a 2.47 ERA and won the first two games of the playoffs.
“I will not speculate on what his reaction will be,� said Burke, who immediately did just that. “My guess is - I think Ilya Brzygalov has clearly established that he is capable of starting in the NHL, and I expect him to ask me to find him a new home.�
That Giguere is entrenched and Brzygalov could be leaving is an indication how far things have come in a year. At the end of the 2005-06 season, Brzygalov appeared as if he might become the No. 1 goalie, and Giguere said publicly he felt he would be traded.
“It's pretty amazing,� said Giguere. “… I came into this season and just wanted to take it one day at a time, and it ended up being a pretty good season - altogether, in my private life and in my hockey, an amazing year. I get another opportunity to play here, and hopefully we'll get another opportunity to do what we did this year. …
“I decided I wasn't going to worry about it. I told my wife, don't worry about it. Don't read anything into anything. We'll know. If something's going to happen, we'll know, because I'll be playing or I won't be playing. There's always telltale signs. And by the time the trading deadline came, I was playing a lot of the games and I was pretty comfortable I was going to stay.�

-- Before the playoffs, Burke had urged Giguere to “make it difficult� for him, meaning that if the goalie played well, the GM would be under more pressure to sign him. Of course, the goalie complied, and when the team had its rally after winning the Stanley Cup, it was cleared how much pressure there was.
“The crowd started chanting, 'We want Jiggy,' or 'You've got to sign Jiggy,' or something,� recalled Burke. “And he was waving to the crowd like, more, more, more.' …
“I told Jiggy, make this as hard on me as you can. And he did. These are lovely problems and lovely headaches for a GM to have, when one of your players forces you to pay him more money because he's excelled.�

-- With next year's league-wide salary cap not yet finalized, the Ducks' own budget is not set, either, although Burke has a pretty good idea what it will be - and it will be lower than the league's figure.
“I would guess it would be in the $42-44 million range, regardless of where the cap goes,� he said. “Our revenues will not support us going to the cap if it goes to $49 or $50, which is what I believe it will be, and we think we can compete at that.
“Our team still loses millions of dollars. We're in a situation where we really had to work hard to fill the building. We're absolutely thrilled with our progress; we're grateful for the fan response, but we're still in a money-losing situation. So that's the number I expect.�

In itself, that's an indication how far things have come in the last year for Giguere, who opened last season believing there was a very good chance he'd be traded before the 2006-07 season was over.

-- Burke also discussed the draft, which begins this evening, and said he expects an active trade market. There are a couple of reasons for that: the nature of this year's draft class - which doesn't have a raft of can't-miss prospects at the top end - and the fact the draft-day trade market is a separate entity from the trade-deadline dealing, which saw rent-a-player prices reach a shockingly high level this year.
“The pressure at the deadline is intense,� he said. “… The pressure to do anything, and pay ridiculous prices is so intense. …
“We make more mistakes as a group, the (general) managers do - and I'm including myself in this - we make more mistakes at the trade deadline than we do the rest of the year combined, and it's because of that pressure to win. … It becomes an arms race that loses any semblance of rationality. There's nowhere near the panic level this time of year.�
An active trade market at the draft, he said, would be “a function of the type of draft it is.
“It's an atypical draft. Normally you have a consensus No. 1 pick, and then a pack of players, whether it's three, or seven or eight. And then there's a drop-off. …
“There's none of that this year. We have a bunch of what I describe as rough stones in the draft, guys that have a chance to play, and maybe you take a chance on a guy who's big and you think will develop.
“When it's not so clearly defined, you tend to see more trading up and down. There's less risk. If I'm at 16 - that's our pick - and I don't see a guy I love, I might trade down. There's less risk in that if there's not that guy that's there.�