Phil Jackson is trim and apparently fit again, good things to be for the man who will run a basketball team of All-Stars and sure-thing Hall of Famers while one among them faces criminal charges.

Kobe Bryant told Jackson last month that he would attend training camp when it begins in two weeks, that he was recovering from off-season shoulder and knee surgeries, and that his focus would be on basketball as much as it could be.

It is all anyone can know for now, as Jackson and the Lakers initiate one of the great basketball experiments, during which all of the basketball, it seems, will be played around all of the details of Bryant's legal case.

Bryant, who turned 25 three weeks ago, had shoulder surgery in New York on June 12, knee surgery in Colorado on July 1, and was charged with felony sexual assault in Colorado on July 18. Since, Bryant, so famously protective of his privacy, has seen his life picked through, photographed leaving church and stuffed into supermarket tabloids, and he has appeared once in court.

Meanwhile, Jackson recuperated from his late-season angioplasty procedure, Shaquille O'Neal reclaimed the body that allowed his claims to historical superiority, and veterans Karl Malone and Gary Payton signed on in gestures of career satisfaction over financial security, all of which could serve to energize a team Jackson said grew "fat and happy" a season ago.

And so late on Friday morning, Jackson, in the organization's first extensive comments of the summer on the matter, took a stab at balancing the whimsy of the game with the gravity of Bryant's circumstance.

"It's real hard to digest that," he said. "First of all, we were real excited about the addition of the players Almost on the heels of that sudden coup for us, the Kobe situation arose. Obviously, we were all in disbelief. The idea that it was going to affect our season didn't sink in right at that moment. It will affect our season, there's no doubt about it, and we're going to live with it and we're going to deal with it. We're fortunate to have made some moves, regardless of what happens with the Kobe situation."