Peter Vescey of the New York Post is reporting that Kentucky coach Tubby Smith is hinting at wanting to take a job in the NBA next season.

"I think Tubby wants to test himself at the next level," a friend in the professional ranks says. "I'm not so sure he feels the fans fully appreciate what he's accomplished [capturing an NCAA title right out of the box and having a 26-game winning streak after last night's 63-57 victory over Wisconsin] in Kentucky since replacing Pitino in '98."

There is some concern because of unsuccesful attempts of college coaches to excel in the NBA such as Rick Pitino, Jerry Tarkanian, Tim Floyd, and Lon Kruger among others.

"Those coaches were flawed, but it was as much the players' lack of trust and confidence in them that was to blame," an Eastern Conference team president underlines. "The first bump in the road and the players said, ?What does he know? He's from college.' It's too convenient an excuse."

Vescey names franchises like Washington, the new Charlotte franchise, and Philadelphia as teams that might be interested.

The Star Tribune is reporting that Lenny Wilkens feels that Allen Iverson should be a part of the Olympic squad.

"How could he not be on that team?" Wilkens said.

Wilkens also said he felt it was unfair to make such an accomplished player wait for a spot on the team.

Stu Jackson, chairman of the USA Basketball Committee that chooses the players, has said that Iverson is being considered.

So far the only players to accept invitations are Seattle's Ray Allen, Orlando's Tracy McGrady, Scaramento's Mike Bibby, San Antonio's Tim Duncan, and New Jersey's Jason Kidd.

Laker's guard Kobe Bryant and Minnesota forward Kevin Garnett have recieved invitations, but have yet to accept.

The Associated Press reports: Shaquille O'Neal is at it again. The self proclaimed "LCL" (last center left) has decided that while he is busy trying to win a fourth NBA title, he should try on a new hat, USA Olympic basketball selection committee member.

Pondering out loud about Olympic team selections, O'Neal came across a name he didn't particularly see fit for USA basketball.

"How did Mike Bibby get on the team?" Shaq wondered aloud. "Any Cub Scout with Boy Scouts can do Boy Scoutish things. When (Bibby) was in the Cub Scouts, he was a Cub Scout. When he was with Vancouver, nobody heard about(him). Now that he's with Sacramento...he's on the team."

"I ain't going (to the Olympics)."

Shaq then moved on to who he felt should be on the team.

"Allen Iverson isn't on the team? Why not?" wondered O'Neal. "(U.S. coach) Larry Brown should have said,'If he's not on the team, I'm not going.'"

So how did Mike Bibby feel about all this attention he was getting from O'Neal?

"I don't care what he says about me," said Bibby. "I don't care what anybody says. It's not going to affect me."

Add's Bobby Jackson "That's just talk from a guy who likes to talk, nobody cares."

Shaq may say he's not going to the Olympics, but we don't have to wait until then for the games to begin. Tonight the L.A. Lakers will face off against the Sacramento Kings in a game many people feel involves the best rivalry in the NBA.

Ira Winderman of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports: Apparently, Riley is feeling a little empty these days. Riley spoke on how the Miami Heat's season has become of little significance.

Said Riley,"The hardest part is walking in here tonight and knowing we're playing against the Philadelphia 76ers and we are not playing for a divisional title, we're not playing for playoff position."

"We walk through that door knowing that, regardless of what the outcome is, it's not going to have any significance," Riley said."It's a terrible position to be in."

Shaquille O'Neal might not be playing for the USA in the Olympmics, but this did not stop him mouthing off at some of the other selections.

"How the (heck) did Mike Bibby get on the team? ... Any Cub Scout with Boy Scouts can do Boy-Scoutish things," O'Neal said, apparently changing his preferred nickname for the Kings from the "Queens" to the "Boy Scouts." "When he was in Vancouver, nobody knew about (him)."

"Allen Iverson is not on the team; why not?" O'Neal said. "Allen Iverson should be on the team. (Coach) Larry Brown should have said, 'If he's not on the team, I'm not going.' "

According to Phil Jasner of the Philadelphia Daily News a broadcast report yesterday that stated that Sixers guard Allen Iverson would be named to the U.S. National Team next week was not correct.  Iverson, however, did receive a phone call from the non-voting chair of the USA Basketball selection committee Stu Jackson, but no invitation was forthcoming.

"He has not been invited by the committee," Jackson said in an e-mail response. "The committee has not even met recently and probably will not do so until next month. Allen will receive consideration at that time."

Jackson said that Iverson is not out of the running and that the committee sees him as a wing player, meaning the fact that Jason Kidd and Mike Bibby's inclusion in the team does not go against him.

However, rumors continue to circle as to why Iverson has not been named.  They involve questions about his attitude toward practice; his willingness to make the commitment necessary for two straight summers; his relationship with Sixers coach Larry Brown, who will coach the U.S. team; and how he would adapt to a limited role coming off the bench.

Sources close to the selection committee said that the focus right now is on frontcourt players, which explains why Minnesota's Kevin Garnett and Utah's Karl Malone have been prominently mentioned as possibilities.

"Like I said a million times, if I didn't make that team, I wouldn't be bitter," Iverson said. "And I wouldn't be bitter about it even if it was because of non-basketball issues. I wouldn't be mad at all."

"The only thing [Jackson] could've told me that showed me I'd be on that team is 'You'll be on the team'...I honestly don't think it should be a big deal like everybody's making it out to be. I wish they could make a decision right now, so people wouldn't have [it] to write about. As long as you let it go, there'll be an article about it tomorrow, the next day and the next day and the next day... The big deal to me is the Philadelphia 76ers; that's all I care about. Like I said before, if I don't make the team, I'll be right at home with my popcorn and my son, enjoying the games and rooting for the USA."

For what it's worth Kobe Bryant is throwing his weight behind Iverson's cause, saying that Iverson being on the team should be an automatic decision.

"Iverson definitely deserves to be on the team," Bryant said last week. "It's a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned."

Sixers duo Allen Iverson and Larry Brown were each fined $7,500 by Stu Jackson and the NBA yesterday for comments made about the officials after Sunday's game in Los Angeles, Phil Jasner is reporting.

Both were unhappy with a third-quarter sequence in which Iverson, Brown and forward Tyrone Hill each were assessed a technical foul. The calls against Iverson and Hill were made by referee Derrick Stafford; the call against Brown came from Joe Forte.

"One of the officials has it personal for some of our players, and if that wasn't the greatest forum to see that, nothing is. He's been personal with us for a long, long time," said Brown.

"It was frustrating," Iverson added. "That ref, Derrick whatever-his-name-is, I think he has a personal vendetta against us. It was evident tonight, because we weren't able to talk to him at all. When we asked about things, he gave us a smart comment and pretty much joked us."

Last year I made the mistake of thinking that the Eastern Conference wasn't as bad as other people believed. I wasn't about to put that opinion out there at the start of this season, but I also pledged not to write off the good ol' East too early. I thought: Let's give those New Jersey Nets, those Detroit Pistons and those Indiana Pacers some time to jell. It was a season, after all, in which the three-time defending champion Los Angeles Lakers appeared ready to implode, paving the way, perhaps, for a beast from the East to rise.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it appears time to write off the East. I still believe the Nets are the best team in the conference, and while there was a time when I believed they might be the third best team in the NBA behind the Lakers and Sacramento, I don't think that's the case anymore. I put New Jersey at No. 7 or 8 in the league, just ahead of the Pacers and a couple of spots in front of the Pistons. In fact, while everyone has to appreciate what Detroit gets out of its talent, I now wonder if the Pistons shouldn't be ranked behind the Philadelphia 76ers, the only Eastern club that's made a real run recently and one that at least knows how to bow out valiantly in June, having won a game in the Finals against the Lakers in '01.

The wise-ass answer to the question of what makes the West so dominant is obvious: They have better teams and better players. Ha ha. The question is: Why? When the dominance of the West is brought up to NBA execs, understandably, they say something about this conference-dominance thing being cyclical. That's true to a certain extent. The Houston Rockets' improbable back-to-back conference title wins in '94 and '95 were the only championships won by a Western team from '89 through '98. But that wasn't an East-is-dominant thing as much as it was a Michael Jordan-is-dominant thing, as the six Chicago Bulls' championships followed back-to-back title wins by the Bad Boy Pistons. The competition in the West during those years (in no particular order -- the Lakers, the San Antonio Spurs, the Utah Jazz, the Phoenix Suns, the Portland Trail Blazers, the Seattle SuperSonics and, of course, the Rockets all had strong teams) was just as good as it w! as! in the East. It harkened back to the '60s when the East was ascendant basically because the Boston Celtics were next to unbeatable.

What we're seeing these days is unusual because of the depth of good teams in the West vis-a-vis the East. Something is bound to happen with the expansion team in Charlotte coming aboard in 2004 (probably the Minnesota Timberwolves joining the East). But it's interesting to note that, to a large extent, the East has only itself to blame for the current state of affairs.

Take a look at the top teams in the West and consider:

The Milwaukee Bucks drafted Dirk Nowitzki with the ninth overall pick in the '98 draft, but traded away his rights for Robert (Tractor) Traylor, who is still, basically, a tractor trailer, now rumbling along the interstate in New Orleans, while Nowitzki has become, as the ad copy might say, a marvel of German engineering.

The Orlando Magic had the draft rights to Sacramento's Chris Webber but traded them to Golden State for Penny Hardaway, a deal that, to be fair, didn't look bad at the time. When Webber came back to the East, as a Washington Bullet, he was famously unloaded to the Kings for two nice, but over-the-hill, players, Mitch Richmond and Otis Thorpe.

Both the New York Knicks and the Toronto Raptors traded Webber's underrated teammate, Doug Christie, and any number of Eastern teams probably could've made a deal to pry Mike Bibby from Vancouver, as canny Sacramento general manager Geoff Petrie did. Speaking of Petrie, while many GMs still couldn't find Yugoslavia and Turkey on a world map, he was drafting Peja Stojakovic and Hedo Turkoglu.

Those two picks speak to the fact that, in general, the West has shown more perspicacity than the East in selecting foreign players. The only international player of recent vintage making a true impact in the East is Zydrunas Ilgauskas, drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers at No. 20 in the '96 draft. Meanwhile, the West's list doesn't stop with Nowitzki and the mini-United Nations established in Dallas. San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich (he gave up his GM handle this season but no Spur gets drafted without Pop's approval) plucked point guard Tony Parker with the 28th pick of the '01 draft and, two years earlier, beat the East (and everyone else) to Emanuel Ginobili, snagged with the 57th pick. (Andrei Kirilenko adds to that case: the Utah Jazz got him at No. 24 in the '99 draft.)

The Trail Blazers aren't, in my opinion, a title contender -- they probably blew their best shot in '00 when they had the Lakers all but beat in the Western finals -- but Portland would certainly be the cream of the East. The theme continues. The team's best player, Rasheed Wallace, played in Washington for one season, before being traded to the Northwest in '96, while Portland's second best player, Bonzi Wells, was drafted by Detroit and then had his rights traded to the Blazers for a draft pick. (It's probably not fair to mention Scottie Pippen, who made a stop in Houston before going to Portland, but, for the record, there's another Eastern expatriate.)

The Rockets and Suns are probably a couple of years away from a title run, but shrewd rookie picks -- Yao Ming for the former, Amare Stoudemire for the latter -- have helped fuel the resurgence of both clubs.

Anyone else? Oh, yes. There is the matter of that former Eastern Conference resident Shaquille O'Neal (who came to L.A. from Orlando via free agency) and his playmate, Kobe Bryant, whose potential was apparently insufficient to satisfy the Charlotte Hornets -- they traded him to the Lakers for Vlade Divac, who is now back in the West helping the Sacramento Kings.

Look, some of this is 20-20 hindsight. Playing alongside Tim Duncan, as Parker, Ginobli and ex-Miami Heat swingman Bruce Bowen are doing, would make anyone look better. Then, too, the East has had some bad breaks, most recently the possibly career-ending injuries suffered by two centers. But with apologies to Philadelphia's Todd MacCulloch (a progressive nerve disorder) and Detroit's Zelijko Rebraca (irregular heartbeat), they are not the kind of players who make franchises. Now, Grant Hill was that type of player and, partly due to his bad ankle, the Orlando Magic have never risen the way many observers thought they would.

Speaking of the Magic Kingdom, for a long time it was the rumored destination of Duncan, who will be a free agent at the end of this season. Now? The betting is that Duncan will stay put and the Nets' Jason Kidd, the second-most coveted free agent, will flee to San Antonio. Add to this the factor of Jordan's retirement, and the East's future isn't exactly getting brighter, is it?

The Philadelphia Sixers and Tyronne Hill officially reunited with eachother last night, just moments after 6pm when he cleared waivers.  According to a report by Phil Jasner in the Philadelphia Daily News Hill accepted (prorated) the remaining $2.1 million in the Sixers average salary exception.

"This is where his heart is," Bartelstein said. "It sounds like a clich?, but he's found his heart."

Hill arrived in Arco Arena after the game had begun, hurrying from the airport in a limousine. He was on the bench in uniform with 26 seconds left in the first quarter.

"He came in and helped us defensively and with his rebounding in minimal time on the court with no practice," Snow said. "That's hard to do. We needed him, and I think it'll be easier for him with us than it would have been with Dallas or anywhere else he hadn't been before."

Marc Spears of the Post writes about Denvers loss to Philly last night.

However it was Rocky's 13th birthday last night and a ton of kids enjoyed those festivities.  Several mascots made the trip to celebrate, including Chip (U of Colorado), Grizz (Memphis Grizzlies), Sasquatch (Seattle Sonics), Dinger (Colorado Rockies), Thunder (Golden State Warriors), and Skyhawk (Atlanta Hawks).

The dunk of the night was made by Thunder, who pulled of a sick flip and jam.