Snacking on a Bitter Team

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into Staples....

The star guard was mad at the coach again for things he said he was never going to forget, although he also said he could still play for the coach.

Happily for the Lakers, for once this wasn’t their star guard or their coach but the 76ers’ Allen Iverson and his new interim coach, Chris Ford. Philadelphia showed up looking like a snack and was devoured, as expected, 116-88.

For the Lakers, it was their first three-game winning streak in five weeks.

For the 76ers, it was just the way things were going.

It seems like a long time since they met the Lakers in the 2001 NBA Finals. They were abandoned by Coach Larry Brown last summer; the team then fired his successor, Randy Ayers, after 52 games.

The nucleus remains, but as point guard Eric Snow noted before the game, laughing, “It’s only a three-man nucleus.”

They’re lucky to have three -- Iverson, Snow and Aaron McKie -- left. Before Thursday’s trade deadline, the 76ers entertained offers for Snow and McKie and, for the first time, Iverson suggested they could trade him, for the good of the franchise, he said.

Just asking: If they trade Iverson, does Hip-Hop, the 76ers’ rabbit mascot, go with him?

This was after Philadelphia’s latest crisis, when Iverson reported back late from the All-Star game, missing Monday’s practice in Denver. Ford benched him for the start of the next night’s loss to the Nuggets, and ESPN ran that 2002 tape of Iverson sputtering “Practice!” every hour on the hour.

Ford said they would get past it. Iverson replied he’d never get past it, vowing, “I’ll always remember it. I don’t have to be his friend. I don’t have to speak to him. I don’t have to say how you doing or anything to him.

“I can play for him, though.”

Sound familiar?

Iverson was obviously fooling with the wrong coach. Shaquille O’Neal missed practice the same day because of that wrecked milk truck, or fish truck, or chicken truck. Coach Phil Jackson gave him a nominal fine and let him start.

Of course, Ford’s chances of getting the 76ers’ coaching job on a full-time basis are down to nothing, but at least he’s going out with his head high.

In 1990, when Ford was a first-year head coach with the Celtics, he faced down the great Larry Bird himself in an argument about whether they would play slow, as Bird wanted, or up-tempo, as Ford wanted. The Celtics went 55-27 Ford’s way and won a division title.

Unfortunately, it didn’t get easier. Ford’s last stint as a head coach was with the Clippers. He was the one Donald T. Sterling didn’t hire until after the 1998 lockout was over, because he didn’t want to pay the extra salary while no one was playing.

“It doesn’t bother me,” said Ford before the game of the Iverson controversy.

“I’ve been around it too long. Things have changed, of course, over the years, but I’ve been around it.... I think coaches have less control, simple as that....

“I wasn’t doing it against Allen Iverson. I was just doing my job.... But I told these guys, I don’t mind, you can curse me out, but we get by it, it’s over with. That thing [with Iverson] is over with. It’s past. And we just move on.

“Keep winning, right?”

In his dreams.

Ford’s No. 2 scorer, Glenn Robinson, recently responded to criticism of his defense and enthusiasm, announcing, “They knew what they were getting when they acquired Glenn Robinson. I’m a scorer. My strength is to score the basketball. When I first came here, the first press conference, I said I know I’m not the best defensive player on the court.... I do what I do.”

Oh, and the 76ers were also on the second night of a back-to-back, after winning Thursday night in Seattle. In a bad omen for them Friday, Iverson missed his first nine shots. By the time he finally got a layup to drop on a run-out with 5:51 left in the first half, the Lakers had already been up by 18.

The Lakers have actually turned it up since the All-Star break, and this was another in Bryant’s recent series of accommodating games (seven assists, giving him 25 in three games) and O’Neal’s lively ones (29 points, 13 rebounds).

How often do they get to be the happiest team out there?

Enjoy it, it doesn’t happen every night.