A Lot of Fun but No Games for Shaq

MINNEAPOLIS —  Shaquille O’Neal won’t play for the Olympic team, but it seems he has his opinions on who should.

“First of all,” he said Friday evening, “how did Mike Bibby get on the team?”

USA Basketball has announced only Tim Duncan, Jason Kidd, Ray Allen and Tracy McGrady as Olympians. Kobe Bryant has not returned the required paperwork, a delay the organization assumes is tied to Bryant’s ongoing negotiations with Nike, but he has notified officials that he intends to play.

Karl Malone and Bibby revealed in recent weeks that they too had been asked to participate, and it is expected that both will be named formally. O’Neal was vague on his reasons for disliking the choice of Bibby, who has played well in two seasons in Sacramento and nearly beat the Lakers in the last Western Conference finals.

“Any Cub Scout [playing] with Boy Scouts can do Boy Scoutish things,” he said. “When the guy was in Vancouver, nobody heard of [him].

“Allen Iverson should be on that team. Larry Brown should have said, ‘If he ain’t on the team, [I] ain’t going [as coach].’ ”

That was the strategy employed by O’Neal, who lobbied for Phil Jackson to be the Olympic coach. USA Basketball chose Brown, and O’Neal chose to spend his summers in Orlando.

“I gave them a chance to put me on that team,” O’Neal said.

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Robert Horry could earn $5.3 million next season, and the decision to pay him that might be easier to make, considering fellow power forwards Samaki Walker and Mark Madsen are due to be unrestricted free agents and Slava Medvedenko rarely plays.

Horry, who will be 33 in August, could be made a free agent and would have value on the open market, but it has long been assumed Horry has more value with the Lakers than with anyone else.

“It’s all relative to who you play with, what’s your strength, what’s your weakness,” Minnesota General Manager Kevin McHale said. “You could put him on 20 teams in our league and you wouldn’t like him. But if you put him with a real post presence guy or a penetrate-and-kick guy like [Tracy] McGrady ... “

TONIGHT

at Milwaukee, 5:30 PST, Ch. 9

Site -- Bradley Center

Radio -- KLAC (570), KWKW (1330), KIRN (670)

Records -- Lakers 36-28, Bucks 32-33.

Record vs. Bucks -- 1-0.

Update -- The Bucks are 5-7 since they traded Ray Allen, among others, to Seattle for Gary Payton and Desmond Mason. On Nov. 24, Kobe Bryant had a triple-double (15 points, 11 rebounds, 11 assists) in a 111-99 victory over the Allen-led Bucks.