With the final week of the season around the corner, it’s award time in the NBA. And while several races look like they’ll be going down to the wire – most notably the MVP race – perhaps none is more interesting than the contest for Coach of the Year.

I say this because every year there appears to be an abundance of candidates for coaching honors, and this one is no exception. In Detroit, Flip Saunders took over for Larry Brown and has guided the Pistons to the league’s best record. In Dallas, Avery Johnson has remade the Mavericks into a more defense-oriented club without losing their traditional offensive firepower, and they’re challenging for the West’s top seed as a result. And in Phoenix, Mike D’Antoni shrugged off the loss of Amare Stoudemire and integrated several new pieces to put Phoenix back on top of the Pacific Division.

Impressive accomplishments all, but I can’t sign off on any of them for Coach of the Year honors. In every case, their team’s performance says more about our own lowered expectations than about what those gentlemen did – even though all three did admirable work.

Saunders, for instance, benefited from the healthiest team in league history, and faced lowered expectations due to Brown’s highly exalted status a year ago (what a difference a year makes, huh?). Johnson’s team wasn’t regarded as a top-tier club in the West entering the season, but looking at his roster it’s hard to figure why – few teams can match Dallas’s combo of a superstar big man in Dirk Nowitzki and waves of depth backing him up. And in D’Antoni’s case, the Suns’ remarkable start has been dampened by a disappointing finish. While his system has done wonders with players such as Boris Diaw and Eddie House, he was unable to keep Phoenix’s defensive results up to snuff once Kurt Thomas went out with a foot injury.

Instead, I have my focus on two other candidates. The first is Byron Scott.Yes, the same Byron Scott who Jason Kidd ran out of town three years ago. He took over in New Orleans last season and couldn’t have had a rougher start. The club went 18-64 in his first campaign, traded nearly all its best players before the start of this season, and had to relocate to Oklahoma City on short notice after Hurricane Katrina.

Considering all that, nobody would have blamed the Hornets for posting a 24-58 record and spending another year at the bottom of the Western Conference.Instead,Scott has his team fighting for a .500 record in the tough West, just two games out of a playoff spot heading into yesterday’s games.

The arrival of rookie Chris Paul and the emergence of third-year forward David West certainly helped, but Scott also made all the right moves – quickly demoting guard J.R. Smith and big man Chris Andersen (who was later suspended for two years under the league’s drug policy) after sluggish starts, riding a small backcourt of Paul and Speedy Claxton to close out games most nights, and demanding maximum defensive effort from a club that should have been too young and undersized to compete.

So it turns out there was a lot more to Lord Byron than just folding his arms on the sidelines and letting Eddie Jordan draw up plays. But in spite of that, Scott only ranks second on my ballot.

Who beats him out? The same coach who is beating Scott out for the last playoff spot in the West – Phil Jackson of the Lakers. Jackson hardly needs another honor next to his name, having already won a league-record nine championships.But winning titles with Michael Jordan and Shaq looks like child’s play compared to keeping his flawed Lakers over .500 this year.

The Zen Master took over a team consisting of Kobe Bryant, Lamar Odom, and little else, and has molded it into an overachieving winner. This despite the fact that Bryant and Odom don’t particularly seem to like each other, and the fact that nobody else much seems to enjoy playing with Kobe either. Miraculously, Jackson has kept the other 11 players focused on defending and rebounding rather than griping about all the shots Kobe is taking.

Dr. Phil’s most impressive work has come at the defensive end, where he has made a team with almost no defensive talent into an average defensive team. That’s no mean feat when you’re starting Chris Mihm and Kwame Brown in the frontcourt, CBA refugee Smush Parker is running the point, and the rest of the cast consists of assorted mediocrities like Devean George, Luke Walton, Brian Cook, and Sasha Vujacic.

A good way to see how little Jackson had to work with is what I call the “onethird”test: Look through a team’s lineup and see how many of its players could start for at least one-third of the league’s teams. For some teams, even bad ones, it’s surprisingly high – the Knicks, for instance, could plausibly say six players qualified (Stephon Marbury, Steve Francis, Jamal Crawford, Eddy Curry, David Lee,and Channing Frye).The Lakers are lucky to get half of that – only Kobe, Odom, and Mihm have any case at all.

But because Jackson got the rest of the team to buy in to the idea that riding Kobe was their best shot,and because he got Kobe to buy into playing some defense and resisting the urge to take the most difficult shot possible, it’s worked like a charm.The Lakers are on target to nab the seventh seed in the Western Conference, and could even upset the vulnerable Suns once they get there.

Looking at all the evidence, as crazy as it seems to say this about a man with nine rings, this has been Phil Jackson’s best coaching job of them all.

Mr. Hollinger is the author of the 2005-06 Pro Basketball Forecast. He can be reached at jhollinger@nysun.com.