Lakers head to training camp: That's entertainment!

So much for the Lakers' post-soap opera phase.

Last season was pretty exciting with the team winning a title, but, as their fans can tell you, it still came up short on drama.

The franchise, which once featured a war of titans between Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant, was reduced to Sasha Vujacic and Jordan Farmar, who were more like first-graders who wouldn't share.

Happily, or not, entertainment value is once more not an issue as the team opens camp this week with everyone wondering how the newest member of the Lakers Family will fit in.

No, not Ron Artest. Khloe Kardashian, who's expected to become Khloe Kardashian Odom this weekend.

(The Clippers also open camp with prize rookie Blake Griffin and the best roster, by far, in their history. Not that many people want to hear about them after last season's March of the Zombies, so anything they do will be a surprise . . . which they're actually good enough to pull off.)

Of course, with the Lakers' What-Me-Worry coach, not even Lamar Odom's marriage to a star of an ongoing TV reality series poses a major problem. This is good for them, because en route to last season's title, they demonstrated that they already had enough to work on with focus, consistency or whatever polite word you prefer for a team that didn't always play hard.

Who can forget the day when they beat the Yao Ming-less Houston Rockets in Game 7 here, and Kobe Bryant, asked what he'd learned about his team, answered:

"We're bipolar."

That was the day Trevor Ariza said, "We were stubborn. We thought we could win on sheer talent" . . . and Farmar and Vujacic got into a spat on the bench during the fourth quarter.

For Phil Jackson, this was nothing. Jackson coached Shaq and Kobe in the days he had to hold them apart, or trust that someone would. In Chicago, he had Dennis Rodman and Bison Dele, in the halcyon days when a Saudi crown prince was denied entrance to the dressing room to meet Michael Jordan in Washington, and a Bulls official said, "There's a crown prince in every city."

No NBA coach has repeated as many times as Jackson, whose Bulls teams won four titles in his five defenses -- the only miss came with Jordan off playing baseball in 1994 -- and whose Lakers went two for three, for a grand total of six of eight.

So, yes, Jackson thinks this Lakers team can repeat too, and, no, it doesn't get easier.