By creating publicity, is Jackson hurting image?

LOS ANGELES — He might coach the Nets.

He might get involved with the Lakers again.

He might take a front-office job in Toronto.

If an NBA team lands in Seattle, he’ll run the whole thing as an omniscient dictator.

He loves Michael Jordan.

He loves Kobe Bryant.

MJ was a better leader than Kobe.

He’s not trying to make a fuss with that comparison.

But seriously, Kobe, he loves you.

Oh, yes, and have you heard, he doesn’t want to coach the Clippers.

He probably doesn’t want to coach anywhere at all. He probably wants to work in a front office. But maybe he doesn’t want to do anything in the NBA. And maybe he does. Just wait and see, guys, and in the meantime, continue to ponder all the million and a half things he could do. Therein, of course, lies his power.

This is the Phil Jackson news cycle, born of the former coach’s book, 'Eleven Rings', and his subsequent publicity tour. It’s been running rampant for weeks now, and the multitude of NBA head coaching vacancies has fueled the thing like gas on a flame, to the point, now, that it’s teetering on the brink of excess.

I get it. Really, I do. The man is the greatest coach of a generation and was the puppetmaster behind two NBA dynasties, the Bulls of the 1990s plus the Lakers of the late 1990s and 2000s. Of course every team covets Jackson as its coach even two years after his (latest) retirement. Of course they’d love to have him. Of course they’ve seen that to him, retirement is loosely defined as a hiatus away from which he can strategically be coaxed.

But still. He’s saying no — no to everyone. The Phil Jackson obligatory phone call, in fact, is the coach’s greatest sign of power, and it’s driving the seemingly unending conversation surrounding him this spring. You will call me. I will say no. And you will keep on calling as I keep on talking — about everything under the sun — and as the entire working press documents my words as hard news.

Call me crazy, but I’m ready for it to be over. I’m ready to stop searching for meaning in the twitch in Jackson’s nose as he utters the word “Lakers,” to stop wondering when someone’s going to find a tail number on a plane associated with him and put a tracker of it in the upper right-hand corner of the SportsCenter screen.

It’s not fun anymore, and this isn’t the Phil Jackson I want to remember.

In fact, this was fun for exactly 21 hours on March 27 and 28, when Jackson debuted on Twitter with the missive: “11 champ;ipnsikp[ ringhs” and the world joked that he was technologically challenged — or drunk — and thereby just a little bit adorable. I was on board with that public Phil Jackson until the next day, when in an AOL (yes, AOL, because he couldn’t be that current) video he revealed that the whole thing had been a promotion for his upcoming book, which was released last week.

It’s hard not to wonder how much of this is tied to the book and how much is legitimate interest in returning to the NBA. His words are certainly not 100-percent fueled by the book or 100-percent NBA interest, but where exactly is the line? Perhaps it’s just that his waffling has been made public by the publicity tour, which has offered a nearly constant outlet for the Zen Master’s musings, and frankly, those musings aren’t hurting book sales, either. You have to know Jackson and his team know that, and so it’s a self-perpetuating cycle of book to current job openings to future in the league, back to book, and so on.

The problem with all this isn’t really the rumormongering it engenders. Instead, it’s the perception of Jackson it’s created, that of a powerful, rambling publicity hound. He’s not that, of course, but that’s how it can seem these days, and that’s not how Jackson should be remembered. His last act of basketball shouldn’t be to toy with the Raptors and poo-poo the Nets, to ream the Lakers for how they handled last November’s almost-hire.

That’s not how it should be, not for a man with those eleven rings.

So yes, it makes sense to want Jackson to take one of these jobs — well, maybe not one of these, but a job, and soon. It makes sense, then, that teams should keep calling, although it’s not hard to imagine that if they stopped, he’d still be more than happy to pick the organization on which he’d bestow his talents and call them.

Really, that’s the crux of it. Jackson doesn’t need a publicity tour to stir up interest in his abilities. He doesn’t need to opine publicly on which jobs he’d take and which he wouldn’t, and why, and how, and when he made that decision. He chose to share musings on his strategy and his past in his book, and so it’s natural that nuggets like the Kobe-MJ comparison will emerge as hot-button topics, but he shouldn’t have to spend his life defending them ad nauseum.

So maybe it’s time for the conversation to stop, or pause, for the notion of Jackson returning to the league to regain some integrity and gravity. The minute it does, news will probably break about Seattle’s new franchise, coached by . . . well, you know.