Who's the best coach in the NBA these days?

"You mean other than Phil?," the Knicks' Allan Houston said.

That sums up how players look at today's coaches. There's the Lakers' Phil Jackson, and then everybody else.

	Winning the Larry O'Brien trophy is a big reason why players want to play for Phil Jackson, left.

Houston was speaking for a lot of players when he put Jackson at the top of his list. Jackson also finished No.1 in an ESPN.com poll of basketball experts.

"Although he's always had great players playing for him, he's still the best," Houston said. "A lot of coaching is getting guys to do something they don't want to do -- getting your players to be unselfish and do what's best for the team while still being able to allow them to play their game. And that's the hardest part for NBA coaches: getting guys to play hard and accept their roles. Phil is very good at that, obviously."

Good enough to have won nine championships, equaling Red Auerbach's all-time NBA record. Houston has never played for Jackson, yet thinks he knows the secret to Jackson's success. Sure, having Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen and Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant is a big part of the story, but there's also something else.

"Great coaches like Phil are able to communicate with different kinds of people and get them to play to their max," Houston said. "They're prepared. They know what they're talking about. And they make a lot of demands on their players, especially their stars."

After Jackson, the coaches mentioned most frequently by players as the ones they would like to play for include Pat Riley, who finished fourth in the ESPN.com poll. Like Jackson, Riley gets major points for having won four championships with the Lakers in only a seven-season span in the 80s. Although Larry Brown has never won a title and has gotten his team to only one championship series, his years of success in Indiana and Philadelphia put him high on the players' list.

"I've always liked Rick Adelman," said Dallas' Nick Van Exel, referring to the veteran Sacramento coach who finished 11th in the poll. "He's always gotten his players to play loose. They're always right there, competing for a championship, even when he was in Portland. George Karl is a great coach, when he keep his mouth shut. But he talks too much."

It's automatically assumed that the coaches who yell the most are the ones who are least likely to get their messages across. Yet Johnny Newman, who has played for 12 different coaches in 15 NBA seasons -- from tranquil leaders Lenny Wilkens and Don Nelson to screamer Rick Pitino -- doesn't agree.

"I loved playing for Rick," said Newman, who was with Pitino in New York in the late '80s. "Yeah, he was out there screaming at us on every play. But behind closed doors, when you were in the locker room, he was always backing you up 100 percent."

But some players prefer someone less in their faces.

"Maurice Cheeks has a great future as a coach in this league because he's a player's coach, so he's not the type to scream and shout," said Portland's Dale Davis. "He's easygoing, but he expects you to go out there and play hard and give your 110 percent. He spends a lot of time trying to get a personal relationship with everybody. That makes it easy for players to go and talk to him if they've got a problem."

In a lot of cases, players prefer to play for the so-called player's coach. "But if you start losing," Van Exel said, "that's when people say the coach isn't tough enough, and fingers start getting pointed. So it's a tough call in terms of who makes a better coach."

Kenny Anderson, heading off to Seattle to play for Nate McMillan, ranks P.J. Carlesimo, a notorious screamer, as one of his favorite coaches. "Because he trusted me and let me run the team," said the veteran playmaker, who was in Boston last season. "But the best coach I ever had was Chuck Daly."

And not just because Daly brought a Hall of Fame résumé and two championship rings from Detroit to the Nets, where he coached Anderson.

	“	When you need a basket in the last minute, you want to go into that huddle and be confident that the coach is going to draw up a good play and give you confidence to get it done. You don't want a guy frowning at you because you just made a mistake. ”
		— Nick Van Exel

"Chuck said very little, but what he said registered with me," Anderson said. "He wasn't one of these coaches who drilled stuff into you during three-hour practices. Chuck said, 'This is your profession. You've got to do this and that.' That was it. He moved on. He didn't lecture like some guys. It's too long of a season for that. But he also had a great feel for situations, what to do at certain points of the game. The fact that he also won was very important to me. You could tell he knew what he was doing."

Players want to see more than rings, though. It helps that coaches once played in the NBA. More than one player gave high marks to four young coaches, all ex-players who have had some degree of success on the sidelines in a relatively short amount of time -- Cheeks, Orlando's Doc Rivers, Seattle's Nate McMillan and Detroit's Rick Carlisle, last season's Coach of the Year. In the poll, Carlisle finished sixth, highest among the group.

"Byron Scott knows the game," said the Nets' Kenyon Martin, mentioning another former NBA player who has already enjoyed success while guiding New Jersey to last season's Finals in just his second season.

"He played it and he knows what it takes to win. He's not just someone who's been around it and heard about it. He's won championships, so you know when he talks about something and what needs to be done, it's genuine. He also knows his Xs and Os, but at the end of the day it's not about Xs and Os. You can write all the Xs and Os you want. If you don't have the pieces and the guys willing to go out and do it, forget it."

True, but a coach still needs to know what he's doing, especially in pressure spots when he's drawing up late-game plays during timeouts.

"I look for a guy who is always calm under pressure," Van Exel said. "When you need a basket in the last minute, you want to go into that huddle and be confident that the coach is going to draw up a good play and give you confidence to get it done. You don't want a guy frowning at you because you just made a mistake. Coaches have to be able to talk to players, but not get them upset and wind up on their bad sides. You need to be able to walk that line, which is very hard to do."

But never very hard, it seems, for Phil Jackson.

Mitch Lawrence, who covers the NBA for the New York Daily News, writes a regular NBA column for ESPN.com.