King Rivalry Starts Early

The Lakers and Sacramento Kings don’t have to like each other, and isn’t that a wonderful thing?

It is early October, Shaquille O’Neal has barely bounced a basketball, no one has played so much as an exhibition game, and already Shaq speaks and Mike Bibby smacks and Chris Webber sneers and Phil Jackson opines.

Responding to O’Neal’s media-day observation that the Kings “won’t ever have what it takes,” Bibby and Webber said the Laker championship ought to carry an asterisk, denoting what they’ve insisted was biased officiating in Game 6 of the Western Conference finals.

“You’re supposed to be the best team,” Bibby told the Sacramento Bee, “and you get the most help.”

Bibby also predicted the Kings would win 70 games.

For their sakes, Jackson said thinly, he hoped so.

“This is the year that if they don’t survive, then they’ll be history. They’ll be folders if they don’t survive that playoff pressure this year,” Jackson said.

And, another thing, Jackson said: Were it not for Kobe Bryant’s food poisoning between Games 1 and 2, the Kings might have been swept.

“My ultimate belief,” Jackson added, “is that if Kobe hadn’t gotten sick, perhaps that would have been a four-game series.”

Told a handful of Kings hadn’t taken warmly to his training-camp assessment of their organization, O’Neal shrugged and held up three fingers, one for each championship ring.

“Tell them to go through training camp, forget about last year,” he said. “It’s a new year. Don’t talk about old [stuff].”

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While the Kings added Keon Clark, who might roll into their camp one of these days, Jackson said the critical element for the Kings has been there all along: Vlade Divac.

“Vlade’s the key to that team,” he said, “as to whether he can stand up to Shaquille and hold the fort.”

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Several Lakers noted Doug Christie’s admission in the Sacramento Bee that he was “scared to death” during Game 7 of the Western Conference finals, a frame of mind that led in part to a late airball.

“I guess being honest about it is the best policy,” Jackson said kindly.

Other Lakers, less kind, said they’d found their fourth-quarter target.

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O’Neal will have his surgically repaired toe examined today by Dr. Robert Mohr, who performed the surgery Sept. 11.... The Lakers open their exhibition season Tuesday against the Clippers in Bakersfield.