Before his 17th NBA season, Horace Grant arrived again, gathering a chair beneath him amid the calm and Indian feathers of Phil Jackson's office, this time in El Segundo.

It was late Wednesday morning, still three weeks before training camp. Jackson had recently come in from Montana, Grant from Orlando, old friends having more in common by the day. Grant keeps wandering off ? he left Jackson's Chicago Bulls in 1994, then Jackson's Lakers two years ago ? only to return again, this time at 38, as front-court depth, his contract not fully guaranteed, his left knee, he says, fully healed.

They keep finding each other, Jackson usually down a power forward or two in the broad-shouldered Western Conference, Grant this time in search of a new job and a fresh lifestyle. For more than an hour, they talked about their lives and these Lakers, of the defensive assignment ahead of Grant and the massive task ahead of Jackson and the season that promises, at the very least, to show them things they've never seen before.

Later, over lunch in the Bel-Air hotel that will serve as his temporary home while he awaits shipments of cars and furniture and three German shepherds from Florida, Grant said it was both strange and comforting, how they kept rediscovering one another, particularly considering their occasional clashes early in their careers in Chicago.

"Phil's got this magnetic personality that you can't get away from," he said, laughing. "I could be in Timbuktu and Phil's energy would draw me back to this place."

Grant calls him P.J. P.J. calls Grant when he needs him, this time after the acquisitions of Karl Malone and Gary Payton to go alongside Shaquille O'Neal and, presumably, Kobe Bryant.

"When we found out we were going to have so many 20-point-plus scorers on the team this season, we knew we needed to get a defense-minded player," Jackson said Thursday. "We needed someone who could guard guys like [Tim] Duncan and [Chris] Webber, and my first thought was Horace Grant.

"Horace has the experience and has played with us before He has a tremendous work ethic and has the ability to get to the boards, and we're going to need someone like that this year."