Getting Used to Noise Under Big Top

The bubble burst Thursday, loud and shuddering, like the clap of an angry giant.

BOOM! After hitting a TV camera, an inflated medicine ball exploded right outside the Laker locker room right before their shoot-around at the Arrowhead Pond.

Even Dennis Rodman, situated in a separate room during their interview time before he joined his teammates for a video session and a light on-court walk-through, probably heard the blast of deflating air.

You just don’t get symbolism any clearer than that.

BOOM! The Lakers lose three in a row. BOOM! They sign Rodman. BOOM! They fire Del Harris after only 12 games. BOOM! The NBA’s showpiece franchise goes another day without announcing a new head coach.

BOOM! The Lakers went out and ripped apart the Clippers in the game, unleashing several days’ worth of frustrations in one 48-minute therapy session, 115-100.

“When I came in here,” Eddie Jones said before the game, “I said, ‘Boy, I feel sorry for the Clippers today.’ ”

Things are bursting everywhere these days.

“It was kind of a touchy situation,” Kobe Bryant said of the circumstances leading to Harris’ dismissal.

“Everything just kind of collapsed all at once. And the burdens fell on Del.”

Here’s something that might brighten Harris’ post-Laker mood: The Lakers didn’t play particularly well Thursday, not that it mattered against the winless Clippers.

And Rodman, who won’t make his Laker debut until tonight at the Great Western Forum, was given the option of skipping the game at the Pond, which he did, choosing discretion over distraction.

“That might be a good thing,” Jones said of Rodman’s absence from the Laker bench. “I think if Dennis was here tonight, who knows, people might be jumping out of the stands and run onto the court.

“They love him. He’s a big, big star.”

See, the carnival never stops, not at least until the Lakers know who their players are, and hire a coach, and maybe win a few more games.

“It’s been good and sad,” Shaquille O’Neal said of the past few days. “It’s been Frick and Frack. Tom and Jerry.”

Bryant said he had “no reaction,” to learning of Harris’ firing Wednesday, adding that he was too stunned from the procession of events to completely soak it all in.

But he did not disagree with the Lakers’ decision to dismiss Harris, or with the presumption that some of the players had begun to tune Harris out during long lectures.

“I think from Day 1, some players were tuning Del out,” Bryant said.

“That just happens. That happens with Larry Bird, happens to Larry Brown, whoever it may be.

“I tuned him out a couple times. I mean, it just happens. I like to think we paid attention more often than tuned him out. . . .

“Del’s the old school. A lot of us young players nowadays have a different style we respond to. Modern coaches are more personality, more people-oriented.”

Forward Rick Fox suggested that all the tumult of the first weeks of the season--the trade rumors, the injured and sick players missing games, the wooing and eventual signing of Rodman--gave Harris or any coach too much to handle.

And once the players started wondering if things were out of control. . . .

“There is something to self-fulfilling prophecies, I guess,” Fox said. “When you talk so much about something, eventually it comes about. . . .

“The bottom line is you can’t talk your way to a championship.”

O’Neal stressed that all the rumors of discord among the Laker players--specifically the two highest-profile Lakers--had nothing to do with Harris’ firing, mostly because he said there is no internal discord.

But doesn’t the firing of a coach give credence to those rumors?

“I don’t really think there’s dissension in the team,” O’Neal said.

“I think you all want to see dissension between the team, but we all like each other, we all hang out.

“You all want to see it. You all want to see me and Kobe fight.”

Whatever the perceived wishes of the media, with a coach firing, a Rodman signing and insistent news making, there is no shortage of issues to debate and Laker agendas to contemplate.

“It’s kind of exciting and it’s kind of different,” Robert Horry said. “You don’t know who’s going to be the coach, you don’t know how Dennis is going to react.

“We’re just going to be like a traveling circus now.”