Stephen Jackson returned to the Warriors on Tuesday. There were no balloons or coffee cake. But coach Don Nelson did commemorate the occasion by using a jet engine to blow smoke up the pant legs of the assembled media.

“He served his (two-game) suspension,” Nelson said, “and we’re ready to roll.”
So he’s on board, his mind’s right, he’s committed to the cause?
“Jack’s good to go.”
And there will be no more scenes like the one Friday night in which Jackson engaged in an angry exchange with Nelson during an exhibition game in Los Angeles?
“I hope not,” Nelson chuckled.
Almost as an aside, Nelson mentioned that Jackson had asked out of his role as team captain. Successfully, it turns out. And with that, Nelson, who has come to regard media briefings as time in his life he’ll never get back, was outta there.
He slipped into a jacket with “D-A-L-L-A-S” spelled out in big letters on the back and departed, with players still on the court participating in individual drills. Make of that what you will.
Then Jackson sat down and let ’er rip.
“Of course,” he said when asked if his relationship with Nelson had changed. “Anytime someone takes $150,000 from you, of course it’s going to change, regardless of who it is. If my mom took some money from me I’d still love her to death, but I’d still be upset about it. And he’s not my mom. So you can imagine how I feel.”
Bottom line: It’s precisely as you had it pegged even before Jackson, Nelson and general manager Larry Riley met Tuesday morning, even before Jackson returned to practice and even before Nelson and Jackson presented their versions of reality to the cameras and digital recorders. The situation is acutely not OK. And the only way to make it OK is for the Warriors to accommodate Jackson’s request for a trade.
Nelson: “It’s not that easy to do.”
Jackson: “I don’t think it’s as hard as people say it is.”
There are two ways of looking at this. You can vent at Jackson for accepting a $28 million contract extension 11 months ago, then deciding he still wants to make the money, only not here. You can begrudge him his candor and dislike his attitude.
He’s high maintenance, no doubt. But the NBA is chockablock with high-maintenance personalities. So griping about Jackson’s me-centric agenda is like complaining about the rain. It’s simply a force of nature for which you must account.
Here’s the second way of looking at it: The Warriors aren’t smart enough to anticipate rain even as the clouds are gathering.
They have a gift of maneuvering themselves into untenable situations because they lack the vision to see them coming. Their myopia in this case is stupefying. See, Jackson didn’t need a contract extension. His old deal doesn’t expire until after this season. Giving Jackson an extension last November was redundant to the point of idiocy.
Only worse, because high-maintenance types such as Jackson are more manageable when they’re trying to gain leverage. Having attained it, they wield it like a cattle prod.
This basic fact of NBA life never occurred to team president Robert Rowell. As part of his plan to marginalize former GM Chris Mullin, Rowell offered Jackson the extension that Mullin would not. Now Mullin, who put together the team that snapped the franchise’s 12-year playoff drought, is gone. Jackson is raging against the machine. Monta Ellis, still smarting over the way the team handled his moped mishap a year ago (another Rowell gift that keeps on giving), is beginning to flex his me-centric agenda.
Nelson, having duped Rowell into his own contract extension through the 2010-11 season, is chuckling like a guy without a care in the world. And why not? In his own way, he’s as high maintenance as Jackson. And he’s wielding the same kind of leverage, having assisted in Mullin’s ouster and replaced him with the compliant Riley.
In a more rational parallel universe, Jackson would be playing out his current contract and trying to earn his next one. He’d either be the good soldier or make (with his expiring contract) the perfect trade bait. Nelson, having been identified as a guy who has lost interest, would be back in Maui with his poker buddies and his Dallas gear.
But that’s not how things work in Warriors World, where sunrise always comes as a surprise, and next year can never come soon enough.