I had an early dinner the other night with friends, the night that the Lakers played the Rockets, and I said casually as we were leaving the restaurant that I thought Shaq would have his way with Yao Ming.

So much for me as a prophet. I got back to my apartment in time to see the second half, which means I missed Yao's opening blocks on Shaq, to find that I was wrong. I had, like many others, understood early in the year that Yao Ming was very good, better than anyone expected at this stage of his development, with very sound fundamentals, a good sense of the game, and therefore of what he can do and what he can't do, and with greater strength and better conditioning than most people expected.

Nonetheless, given Shaq's superior strength and agility, and given, as well, the need of the Lakers in what is so far a dismal season for them to make a statement, I had expected Shaq to be physically dominating. And he was not. I waited for him to take over the game in the second half and he never did.

Oh, I know there were a couple of thunderdunks, and I thought the flagrant foul call at the end of the game was a cheap one. But in no way did he dominate. I thought he was surprisingly slow to the ball, both in rebounding, and on defense. Yao did a far better job playing his game than Shaq did playing his; and the Rockets as a team played their game and looked much quicker than the Lakers as a team. In fact, I thought all the Lakers, for most of the season, have looked slow and somewhat lethargic on defense, which is unusual for a Phil Jackson team.

I've always believed that the most important thing about Jackson's teams, both in Chicago and in Los Angeles, despite the obvious firepower of both Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, was that, first and foremost, they played exceptional defense, and they were in uncommon physical condition. In big games (and in regular-season games as well, but it was more noticeable in big games), the first thing they would do was take away from the other team what it wanted to do on offense. Then late in the game, very slowly, like an executioner who preferred to offer a slow death to a condemned man rather than inflict a swift execution, they would take over the game on offense.

But that hasn't happened this year. On a couple of occasions, I've watched them play, and I'm talking about games after Shaq returned, seen them start slowly, and expected them to turn it up in the second half, only to watch them play a rather soft game in the second half, as well. They are still under .500, and we are halfway through the season.

So that brings up the question of what is wrong. Clearly a number of things. First, I think they're tired as a team, and they're able to go to full velocity only occasionally -- they've played 54 playoff games in the three championship years, and that's almost the equivalent of an additional season, a stretch in which every other team is always coming at you.

These days, the regular season is already too long, and the road to the title even longer. They're tired because they have to play too many games at too high a pitch in too short a time, and because there's too little time to rest in the offseason. Indeed, in contemporary sports, unlike sports 25 years ago when you could rest during the offseason, you have to work hard to stay in shape; thus, it's very easy to come back to the beginning of a long pre-season tired, and worse, just a little bored. In the NBA, the fatigue is not purely physical -- it's more likely to be mental getting yourself up for a game night after night. What gets lost is the concentration that's needed to execute each night.

The great players usually have it -- although it's not a bottomless well that even the best of them can go to. Being a professional, Julius Erving once said in the best definition of professionalism in any discipline that I know, is doing the things you love to do on the days when you don't feel like doing them. Amen, both in his profession and mine.

What that means in high-level sports is that the most difficult thing is not to win a championship, but to keep going on a championship run without losing some of the most essential hunger. It's very hard to sustain the passion and effort for a championship run night after night. In the playoffs, yes; in the regular season, no. You become everyone else's big game.

Last year, the Lakers were not necessarily the best team in the league. Sacramento looked like a better team, deeper, with more possibilities on offense, but not quite ready mentally and emotionally to win, even though they had changed overnight from a careless team to a smart one by the addition of just one player, Mike Bibby.

So part of the problem for the Lakers is that other teams are getting better while they've pretty much stayed the same, and no new player has stepped forward to a level just below that of an All-Star to help carry the burden. That means that the two critical role players, Robert Horry and Rick Fox, are just a little bit older each year.

Meanwhile, a number of teams in the West have gotten better, most noticeably Sacramento, Dallas and Houston. The problem with the Lakers is not that there aren't good role players available, and at relatively low price tags, it's that they're capped out because of their two stars. They desperately need a real power forward to continue this run, and have tried to get through it by patching here and there.

Two years ago, after the first title, someone I know told Phil that the player he should go after was Kurt Thomas of the Knicks, who was underrated, and perfect to play alongside Shaq, being a good rebounder, with a surprisingly good 12-foot shot. With a defense keyed to Shaq, Thomas might genuinely bloom in Los Angeles. Nor was he that expensive. But nothing happened, because I think the Lakers cannot compete for players at even the middle price level.

So we have a team dependent on its two stars, which had won by a fingernail for its third title. And then Shaq had his operation late in the offseason, and the Lakers were without him at the start of the season and other teams were hungrier, and the Lakers looked careless, and vulnerable, and soon the blood was in the water.

When Shaq came back, he was not entirely ready, and somehow by then a good deal of the Laker mystique was gone. The other Laker players, most notably Fox and Horry at this stage of their careers, are very dependent on Shaq. If he's playing well, they become perfect pieces for a championship team. If he's not quite ready and a little slow, then they look much older overnight. So with the Lakers showing vulnerabilities, other teams are encouraged and more confident now, and the Lakers don't get the calls they once got -- the flagrant call against Shaq in the Houston game, for example -- proving that basketball, like life itself, is never entirely fair.

Still, I'd be very surprised if they don't make the playoffs, and that's another story. In the meantime, on an equally pressing issue, I think Phil Jackson should shave that goofy little beard just under his lip. I don't think it looks good, not at all, and it certainly isn't going to help him get any calls from the refs.

* * * * *
And now some assorted goodies. I had thought the Miller Lite commercial with the two women doing mud-wrestling was the stupidest commercial of the year, a sure bet to make it into the finals in the category for Madison Avenue people who are not hip, never were, and could not connect with girls when they were young, but now make commercials pretending they are hip.

But now we have a new entry, an almost sure winner, from that famed billionaire-radical, Phil Knight of Nike. That's the one built around a naked (except for the shoes) jackass running on the field during a soccer game. It's exactly what everyone in sports needs at a time when fan behavior gets worse all the time. I wonder how amused Phil Knight would be if some people ran through his offices tearing everything apart, or tried to destroy his annual meetings -- would he make a commercial about it, thereby encouraging others to try even harder next year?

* * * * *
And I have a tip for Myles Brand, the head of the NCAA, who apparently is pondering how to improve graduation rates at some of our great centers of higher learning. He could take a suggestion offered by Robert Montgomery Knight, whom he once knew back in Bloomington, and who now coaches at Texas Tech, and who, whatever his other failings, always had an enviable graduation rate. Bobby Knight used to suggest that a coach could give out only as many scholarships as young men who had graduated from his university that year. That, he thought, would immediately upgrade the interest of many a coach in how well their students were doing in class when they weren't actually playing football or basketball.

I actually have my own suggestion -- something less draconian, and something, I think, that would be far easier to pass at a larger NCAA meeting. Just offer up a rule that says that any broadcast, radio or television, of any event that involves an NCAA team, must include at the start of the broadcast mention by the announcers of what the graduation rate was among the team's players in the previous season. It's something that the announcers should do on their own, including some who work for the network that bears the same name as this page, but of course do not -- or they do only if it's Notre Dame or a comparable school where the rate of graduation is relatively high.

* * * * *
And now a laurel to Phil Simms and Greg Gumbel, who are, in my opinion, by far the best broadcast team doing professional football. There is a lovely tone to the way they work -- one has a sense, unlike so many other teams where the camaraderie seems quite forced and artificial, they actually like each other's company -- there seems to be a real palship there, and they seem like the kind of men who might go out on the town together and have dinner, even if they were not being paid to work with each other.

I've always liked Simms. There are a few athletes here in New York in the 60 or more years that I've been paying attention who stand out in my mind as men who have very quietly made their teams a great deal better, and never quite gotten quite the acclaim they deserved -- Tommy Henrich back with the Yankees in the '40s, Dave DeBusschere, with the Knicks, among others ... and Simms.

I don't think being Bill Parcells' quarterback when the strength of the team was defense was an easy role, but Simms always seemed smart, tough and shrewd and likable, in no small part because he was so straight as a man. And as a broadcaster, he seems the same way. He's deft, straight and independent in his calls, and has a very good, rather sly sense of humor, which he doesn't push -- he's never in the way of the game, and he lets the game come to him.

There was a lovely, somewhat typical Simms call during the Oakland-Tennessee playoff game, when Bill Romanowski had a chance to nail Steve McNair as he was going out of bounds, and Simms noted that this must really be a big game, because Romanowski held back from a cheap shot. It was a perfect low-key call, one that told much more about the game and the players than it seemed to.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam, who has written 12 best sellers, including "Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made," "The Best and the Brightest," "The Powers That Be," "The Reckoning" and "Summer of '49," writes occasionally for Page 2.