Good to see the Lakers come through with a 6-0 mark on their just-completed 11-day roadie. Especially since Andrew Bynum went down with a freak knee injury early into the trip, and they finished by beating the Celtics in the second game of a back-to-back, and beating the previously home-perfect Cavs in a nationally televised game on Sunday.

It was particularly gratifying that the players who really stepped up were the ones who disappeared so pathetically in last year’s Final: Pau Gasol and, especially, Lamar Odom. I don’t know what got into Odom, in particular, but whatever it is, they should bottle it and feed it to the rest of the squad.

True, the Lakers needed some luck and some favorable calls, but every team needs those. With all those moving picks the Celtics set, just f’rinstance, they have some nerve blaming their one-point loss on a no-call to Derek Fisher. As for the Cavs’ game, it’s almost impossible to determine whether the misfires in the second half were due to tightened Lakers’ defense or to just plain going cold. Probably a bit of both, but I’m not in a hurry to herald the Lakers’ acquisition of defensive mojo until I see them clamp down on opposing offenses regularly.

Still, an outstanding road trip and 2 stellar wins. Even had Kobe Bean Bryant been in good health for the Cavs’ game, props should still have gone to the 2 big guys. Nonetheless, the fact that he was so weakened and dehydrated by “flu-like symptoms” that he was retching in the toilet before the game, and required IVs at half-time and after the game, make his otherwise ordinary numbers (19 points on 8-17 from the field, 3-3 FTs, 0-2 from beyond the arc, 3 boards, 2 assists and 1 steal) pretty impressive from where I sit.

Heck, I can barely drag my sorry behind in to the office when I’ve got the flu, let alone play 35 minutes in a sport that’s not merely physically demanding, but aerobically demanding, while taking the primary responsibility for guarding Mr. Crab-Dribble. True, the whole team chipped in to contribute to LeBron James’s 5-20 shooting night, but The Kobester was the initial defender in most instances. And to top it off, his ridiculous rainbow shot over James in the waning minutes, to stave off a Cavs’ comeback, would have been impressive at any time. That it came when he’d already logged 30-some minutes in his weakened condition puts it up there with some of his other miracles.

Which is why I take great issue with noted Kobe-hater Charley Rosen, who, after acknowledging that Kobe’s energy was severely impacted by his illness, weakness and dehydration, still claims, “However, once a player steps onto the court, he forfeits any otherwise relevant medical excuses.”

Oh, please. This isn’t about excuses. Heck, the Lakers won, for Pete’s sake. But context, in sports as in life, is everything. It makes a huge difference in evaluating someone’s performance to know whether he was healthy or not. It just does.

Michael Jordan played well in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals, but he’d had better games. He shot below 50 percent and, frankly, didn’t have the kind of defensive presence for which he was known. Not that his stats were bad — I mean, the guy did score 38 and made a huge clutch three-pointer with 25 seconds to play in a 90-88 Bulls win. But anyone looking at his stat line from that game could be excused for being underwhelmed, since it wasn’t a “vintage” Jordan line, although most players would gladly settle for 7 boards, 5 assists, a steal and a block to go with 38 points.

What made his performance memorable was that he, like Number 24, played while weakened by a miserable flu that had him hurling his innards before game time and left him weak and dehydrated throughout the game. That’s certainly what I and many others remember. Don’t try to tell me that we should just ignore the physical handicap under which Jordan accomplished his performance.

Kobe’s 19 points on 8 of 17 from the field, plus 3 boards, 2 assists and 1 steal in a non-Finals game doesn’t quite have the same cachet, but in its own way, it was impressive. Especially because he played solid defense against the thus-far consensus league MVP, and made a crucial circus shot to stanch the bleeding.

I don’t have much feeling about the players the Lakers acquired in exchange for Vlad “The Impaler” Radmanovic. Adam Morrison may have some upside, despite his spotty showing pre-knee injury, and his timid play after rehab. I don’t know anything about Mr. Brown. But this is an “addition by subtraction” in the vein of the trade that sent Brian Cook (and Mo Evans) to Orlando and brought the Lakers back Trevor Ariza.

Even had Ariza not proven to be the revelation he’s been, that trade would have been a positive just because it got rid of Cook. Ditto for this trade, except substitute “Borat” for Cook.

I’m not suggesting that Morrison is or ever will be as important a piece as Ariza’s become. For one thing, Morrison has yet to prove that he can play defense against anybody with more mobility than a fire hydrant. But the Lakers do get some medium-term cap luxury tax relief from the trade, which was probably the main motivation. Almost as importantly in the short run, they don’t have to put up with Radmanovic’s aggravating laissez-faire defense, brain-dead decision-making and movement without the ball, and generally unprofessional attitude.

Not that he’s evil. Many of his fellow Lakers teammates apparently liked him. Of course, Cook was tight with a few of the Lakers, too. But pro basketball isn’t a Miss America competition. There are no extra points for congeniality. Cook’s problem wasn’t his likeability; it was that he was a waste of money as a basketball player.

As a basketball player, Vlad Rad just isn’t someone a winning team really wants, in my opinion — certainly not as a starter, and maybe not even as a role-player — despite his ability to shoot the three-ball and to help with “floor spacing.” The Lakers especially don’t need him because, unlike Ariza, who actually told the coaches that he’d prefer coming off the bench with the second team, Vlad Rad could never be happy in that kind of role, or adjust to inconsistent minutes.

I think all we need to know about him as a basketball player is that he’s happy to be on the Bobcats rather than the Lakers — well, happy until noted grouch Larry Brown tears him a new one — because he has a chance for more minutes and better stats with less accountability. A player who’d rather have more personally satisfying stats with a losing team than be a valued role player on a winner is someone who should ALWAYS be on losing teams, since that’s where they belong.

I understand that players in general don’t get rewarded at contract time for their intangible contributions to winning. Because the public and even GMs are so stat-conscious, it makes good economic sense for a player to be more concerned with how his stats look in a box score than with how he’s actually played. That’s fine for the player, as long as he doesn’t really mind losing all the time. Such players talk about wanting to “play for a winner,” but they’re not willing to do it if it means adjusting their game. There’s always a market for such “stat men,” but that market, in general, shouldn’t include teams that expect to challenge for championships.

God, there’s enough mealymouthed hypocrisy surrounding the revelation that even A-Rod took steroids to fill all the Great Lakes, with millions of gallons to spare for the Aral Sea. The hypocrisy starts, but most assuredly doesn’t end, with A-Rod, who’s on tape from an interview with Katie Couric a few years ago, not only denying that he ever used performance-enhancing substances, but boasting that he never needed them, and that anyone who uses them is a disgrace to the great game of baseball. Now, he’s suddenly contrite? Everybody’s sorry when they get caught — not because of what they did, but because they got caught. He gets no points whatsoever from me for “coming clean” soon after he was outed.

Not that he did, in fact, “come clean.” His formulaic “apology,” bolstered by his Wally Cleaver interview attire of blue crew-neck pullover and button-down Brooks Brothers shirt, presumably obtained from the Desilu Studios prop room, was a palpable crock from the start, a fill-in-the-blanks template from the Big Book of Non-Apology Apologies apparently issued to every athlete along with his uniform.

I mean, really. “I was young and stupid.” A “young and stupid” person maybe takes a bong hit or two at a party. Maybe he drives once or twice with a blood alcohol content over the legal limit. Maybe he gets into a bar fight. Maybe he has unprotected sex with a groupie. He doesn’t stick hypodermics loaded with prescription meds into his butt regularly over a period of 3 years. (That’s if we believe his story. For all we know he’d done it since high school.)

But every athlete spouts such claptrap when he gets caught. What makes A-Rod particularly deserving of derision and scorn is that, like his former teammate Rafi Palmeiro, he publicly and arrogantly proclaimed his virtue, knowing it was a lie. Sanctimonious cheaters are, simply, worse than those who simply cheat without all the sanctimony.

By way of example, take all those bible-thumping, holier-than-thou hypocrite Republican politicians who pummeled Slick Willie so mercilessly for his extramarital indiscretions, and piously espoused “family values” and “old-fashioned notions of morality,” and then turned out to have had affairs of their own, or to have visited high-priced hookers who put them in diapers and allowed them to suck toes, or whatever. They’re absolutely more reprehensible than people who merely cheated on their loved ones without the false, public attestations of piety. It’s not right to cheat, to be sure; but it’s worse when the cheater has not only pretended to be above such behavior, but actively condemned the same behavior in others.

But A-Rod needn’t bear the shame alone. How about MLB, which cannot but have known of rampant steroid use for years, and did nothing? How about Bud Selig, who gets paid $18 Million per year to do — well, I don’t really know what he’s paid to do except pretend there’s no problem other than player greed, and to keep Pete Rose banned for life from baseball? How about the Players’ Union, which is supposed to represent and protect the players, and couldn’t even be bothered to make sure that all confidential test results were destroyed, so that some bent government or court person would never have had the results to leak? How about the sports media types, who damned well knew for years what was going on, but for various reasons insisted on framing the debate about increased home run production around a mythical “juiced ball” instead of actual juiced players? And how about the government and the Federal Court which absolutely had no authorization to make the test results public in this way?

And how, most of all, about Rangers’ owner Tom Hicks, who claims to feel “betrayed” by A-Rod’s steroid use, and demanded a personal apology to himself and all Rangers’ fans. Oh, really? Hicks, after all, benefited handsomely from signing steroid users who hit lots of home runs. Forget about A-Rod for a second, although A-Rod’s presence — and his prodigious stats — probably brought Hicks more money, directly and indirectly, than Hicks ever paid him. The Rangers clubhouse was a hotbed of ‘roid use. Juan Gonzalez, Rafi Palmeiro and Pudge Rodriguez come immediately to mind. Hicks never had a clue about any of them? And we’re supposed to believe that? Is Hicks now going to give back all the money the fans and the electronic media poured into his coffers because it was “tainted”? Hardly.

I’m not defending any steroid use. I’m on record as hating such cheating. And not just because cheating is bad in some absolute, moral sense. This kind of cheating, in particular, makes it impossible to compare records across generations and unfairly inflates the records of more recent players at the expense of even the greatest players of prior eras. It also puts modern players who refused to cheat at a distinct and entirely unfair competitive disadvantage.

But of course that assumes that there are any modern players who DIDN’T cheat. I assume there were, but at this point, it’s impossible to tell. Just because someone wasn’t named in the Mitchell Report, or isn’t on the “confidential” list of 104 players who tested positive in 2003, doesn’t mean he didn’t, or doesn’t, cheat.

I’ve given up trying to guess which players during the “steroid era” were or weren’t clean — although I suspect that’s a good drinking game, for those alcoholically inclined. In fact, if there’s one semi-good thing that’s come out of the A-Rod revelations, it’s that we can no longer assume that players who have “the look” — you know, sudden gains of 35 pounds of rippling muscle, back acne, anger management problems — are the only ones juicing. A-Rod is to baseball what ingénue, girl-next-door looking actresses are to the porn industry, or baby-faced, frat-boy looking actors cast as serial killers are to the mainstream movie biz — a stereotype-buster, cast against type. If a guy that looks like him juiced, anybody could have.

Since it’s now obviously impossible to tell just from looking at a player’s physique whether or not he’s been juicing, it’s time to stop assuming that any player is innocent. And it’s high time, too, to stop pretending that now that we have testing, the so-called “Steroid Era” in baseball is over. Until I have proof of the negative, just for example, I’ll never believe that Albert Pujols is, or ever was, clean. The fact that he’s never tested positive for banned substances (as far as we’ve been informed, at any rate) merely means, to me, that baseball players, like NFL football players, have become a lot more sophisticated at beating the tests. Unless anyone really still believes that the NFL’s stern drug policy has actually stopped players from using performance-enhancers.

Since I now believe that everyone’s a guilty cheater until proven innocent, I don’t really care about all the cheating. It’s a level playing field of infamy, sort of like a country run by criminal cartels. If everyone’s a criminal, then the definition of crime has to change. Let players put whatever crap they want into their bodies. If it negatively affects their health, tough noogies. If they die young, at least their juicing let them earn large salaries, and they may leave behind a nice estate. They may even die young enough so that their cougar widows can use the inheritance money to find a nice boy-toy, so it’s win-win for everyone. If a few of the athletes go berserk and commit murder-suicide, well, that’s the price a free society pays, eh? I’ve made my peace with the culture of cheating in sports. Intellectually, if not viscerally.

The worst thing, for me, is that Jose Canseco, whose morals are lower than an earthworm’s belly, is the one who winds up vindicated, like a lotus growing above the muck. The guy’s a pathological scumsucker, in all things EXCEPT his revelations of drug use. Damn. I guess it’s like the premise of that old TV series, “It Takes a Thief.” If you really want to catch criminals, or beat them at their own game, employ a criminal against them.

So let me get this straight Brett Favre. You created your own Wisconsin reality show by announcing your retirement after an NFC-Final loss to the Giants, then waiting until the Packers had irrevocably committed to Aaron Rodgers before imperiously announcing your “unretirement.” You self-absorbedly tried to shame the Packers into allowing you to QB the Vikings, who were in their division, and turned down a cash offer of $20 million to stay retired. Then, you joined the Jets, basked in the accolades when they started 8-3, and tried to deflect as much as possible of the blame when they finished 1-4, and missed the playoffs while you, personally, threw a ton more interceptions than TD passes.

Here’s what I take from the psychodrama. Favre is a solipsistic drama queen of the first order, under his thin veneer of gritty competitor who just wants to win. (If he REALLY wanted to win so much, maybe he could have tried to throw fewer interceptions. But of course, what he actually wanted to do was win while being the star in the klieg lights.) The Vikings made the playoffs without him; the Jets missed the postseason with him. No matter how much the Jets paid him, it wasn’t nearly as much as he’d have made by taking Green Bay’s offer to stay retired. Had Favre stayed retired, he’d be remembered for having led the Pack to a wonderful record in his final season. Now, he’ll be remembered as just another superstar who stayed on just that little bit too long. Gee, fan adulation plus $20 million versus near-universal contempt and derision from his own teammates plus a tad more than $12 million. Who wouldn’t have gone to the Jets, had he to do it over again?

Interesting to learn that Elgin Baylor is now suing the Clippers, Donald Sterling, General Counsel Andy Roeser, and, for good measure, the NBA, for race and age discrimination. I don’t see it, myself.

Mind you, I hold no brief for The Donald, whose bizarre and parsimonious ownership decisions are legendary. But give me a break. If anything, Sterling kept Baylor around, at a decent salary, for at least a decade longer than most owners have kept even successful GMs. That’s 22 years or so of mostly atrocious personnel decisions.

Any casual fan in L.A. can recite a litany of misguided, high draft picks apparently orchestrated by Baylor: Benoit Benjamin; Danny Ferry (who became a decent role-player down the pike); Joe Wolf; Michael Olowokandi; Bo Kimble — God, the list is endless. Anyone else would have been fired years earlier.

Baylor’s longevity despite the pathetic drafting, and the team’s equally pathetic record of just making the playoffs — let alone having a winning record — in only two of those 20-plus years, suggests that, if anything, Sterling bent over backwards NOT to appear racist.

Let’s be clear, though, that Sterling has been successfully accused of racially discriminatory behavior before. In 2006, he was sued — and lost — in Federal court in Los Angeles, on charges that his real estate company had a policy of not renting to African-American applicants in Beverly Hills, and refusing to rent to anyone but Koreans in Koreatown, which, despite its name, has a substantial population of people of other ethnicities. In 2003, the L.A.-based Housing Rights Center sued him for trying to chase out non-Korean tenants,– and especially African-American and Latino tenants — at apartment buildings in the Koreatown area. Not only did it win, but it was awarded almost $5 Million in attorney fees and costs. So it’s not as if Donald “T for Terrific” Sterling, as Doug Krikorian used to call him, has ever been an angel in these matters.

But by all outward appearances, Baylor, with a few sparse and short-lived exceptions that gave Clippers fans glimmers of false hope, was an unremitting disaster as GM for a period longer than some of the Clips’ players have been alive.

It’s not just that all of the aforementioned draft picks, and many more, were busts. Lots of other teams have crapped out drafted crap with high draft picks, although few, if any, had so many high lottery picks, over so many years, to screw up. MJ drafted Kwame Brown No. 1, after all, and just traded his latest mistake — Adam Morrison, drafted as No. 3 a few years ago — to the Lakers. The Warriors have their own sad history, including Chris Washburn. The Sixers drafted Shawn Bradley. The well-respected Joe Dumars took Darko Milicic. The Celts had lots and lots of bad choices until their recent return to glory — via trades. The Lakers have had their fair share of clunkers, although, because they were successful, few of those clunkers were chosen early in the First Round.

The big difference is that most GMs who drafted badly for a period of years, AND who failed to deliver winners, lost their jobs. Baylor just kept having his contract extended.

Mind you, white or black, it can’t have been any picnic working for Sterling and being his whipping-boy all those years. And, in fairness, who knows whether the Clippers’ personnel mistakes were all Baylor’s? It might well be that Sterling is the one who made most of the bad decisions and kept Baylor around because, like Presidential press officers, he was willing to take the fall. When Ron Harper referred to being a Clipper as like being in jail, I suspect he was talking about Sterling, not Elgin. But if Baylor was just being a good soldier, he still knew what he was doing.

Baylor may have a point in claiming he was underpaid all those years relative to others in comparable positions with other clubs. But gee, whiz, didn’t he know that 5 years ago? 10 years ago? 20 years ago? We have something called the Internet, on which it’s pretty easy to find information about compensation other GMs around the league are getting. It’s just not credible to me that he suddenly discovered this disparity after he was fired.

And, anyway, billionaire though he is, Sterling has been known for years as a pennypinching cheapskate. It’s not a stunning new revelation.

Of course, that cuts both ways. What, exactly, has Mike Dunleavy done to be worth 20 to 30 times as much per annum as Baylor was being paid? It can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that the two men have radically different skin pigmentation.

Baylor’s best argument may be a variation of “Battered Wife Syndrome,” where people in abusive relationships are so used to the abuse that they assume they deserve it, and only realize their mistake when they’re free of the situation. Maybe it took the firing last summer to finally make Baylor wake up.

Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that Roberto Alomar actually had HIV infection and has AIDS, as alleged in a lawsuit recently filed by his ex-girlfriend, one Ilya Dall (if that’s her real name, and not her stripper stage name). There have been rumors for years that Alomar is, if not gay, then at least bisexual. If he has AIDS, there’ll be more than a few whispers that he got HIV/AIDS via unprotected homosexual sex.

Personally, I don’t care whether a person is heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual, and I certainly don’t care how a person has contracted HIV/AIDS. The virus and the disease are a scourge — albeit now treatable — and nobody deserves them, regardless of sexual orientation. Those who call the disease God’s punishment for immoral behavior are simply ignorant or sick. And, let’s face it, it’s possible to get it in a variety of ways: from unprotected homosexual sex; from unprotected heterosexual sex; from unsterilized syringes containing the virus; from contaminated blood used for IVs.

Nonetheless, I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that if Alomar has it, a lot of people will whisper — or maybe shout — that he got it from sodomy. When Earvin “Magic” Johnson got HIV, nobody that I can recall even suggested that he got it from such activities. Or maybe my memory is just playing tricks. If it’s accurate, why not? Because people like Magic better than they like Robby? Because it’s still not all right for our greatest sports heroes to be seen as other than lusty heterosexuals? Just asking.

Please send comments and criticism — especially criticism — to thonglaw@sprynet.com, where it will be dealt with appropriately.