CAN DEL HARRIS BEAT THE ODDS?

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

Del Harris has waved goodbye to Nick Van Exel, breaking up the NBA's funnest couple this side of Dennis and Carmen.

Harris' old headache, Cedric Ceballos, is two teams down the road by now, water skiing on another coach's time.

Even Harris' radio tormentor, Joe McDonnell, is without a full-time gig and temporarily out of the coach's hair, relegated to fill-in work on a fading news-talk station.

What's left to make a Lakers coach's life miserable?

Only a team he calls ``the best we've had,'' his hardest-training and most coachable roster since Sidney Moncrief was a Milwaukee Buck, and the prospective nightmare of an excuse-free season that happens to be the last on his Lakers contract.

It's a weird, lockout-shortened NBA schedule of 50 games in 90 days, but the Lakers are young and can take it, so nobody will cut Harris any slack if they bomb out of the playoffs again.

``I'm no stranger to it,'' said Harris, 61, noting he has coached without a contractual safety net twice before. With Houston in 1979-80, his rookie year as an NBA head coach, he took the Rockets to the second round of the playoffs for the first time since '77.

``I got rewarded with another one-year contract,'' he said.

And a raise?

``Ten thousand dollars!'' he said with mock grandeur. ``I went from 70 to 80,000 dollars and was happy to get it. Then the next year we went to the Finals and lost to Boston, and I got a three-year contract.''

Harris resigned before that one ran out as the Rockets fell to earth in '82 without Moses Malone.

The standards are higher in Los Angeles. In four seasons under coach Del, the Lakers have improved their regular-season record each time, a rare feat, building to last year's 61-21. And Harris' battle is still uphill.

If the Lakers don't get to the NBA Finals this year, barring extenuating circumstances, he can forget about even a $10,000 raise on his approximately $1.5 million-a-year contract, and break out his old ``consultant'' shingle.

If they get there and don't win, his return is a 50-50 proposition, worse if it ends badly. If they get there and do win, well, how are they going to fire him?

Of course, getting past the Western Conference finals isn't any easier just because the Chicago Bulls are no longer contenders in the East. So while it might be going too far to call Harris a lame duck, he is waddling with a limp as the season opens Friday night.

Harris declines to ``negotiate in the papers,'' which is smart, because the fans wouldn't be with him, unconvinced as they are that he has earned the right to demand anything. He has, however, touted his own Lakers loyalty by revealing he said no to two NBA teams that approached him last summer about their coaching vacancies.

Meanwhile, Lakers management has declined to negotiate in the papers or out of them either, preferring to put off Harris' potential contract hassle until the end of the season. The official reason is that management thinks negotiations would prove a distraction, just what a coach on a four- to five-games-a-week schedule doesn't need.

The real reason is that Jerry West and Jerry Buss aren't sold on him either.

It's not his X's and O's that raise occasional doubts but his way with people, which suggests the occasional locker-room grumbling isn't just an example of players being players.

Harris' tin-eared criticism of players' effort during an early, unsupervised workout in the days following the labor settlement was an example of something that didn't go over well in the front office.

And his sensitivity to criticism, even after 13 NBA seasons and 550 victories, is a continuing source of amazement. A photograph in the Lakers' preseason media guide shows Harris on the team plane with stat sheets, a calculator and a copy of the Daily News on the table in front of him. With some imagination you could guess he just read something negative in the paper and is devising a statistic to refute it.

Then there's the observation - hard to refute - by David Claerbaut of ``The NBA Analyst'' that ``a coach has to have an impact on the psyche of his team (and) Harris evidently had none.'' In other words, Harris hasn't taken the Lakers' assortment of large and immature personalities and put them together as something greater.

He has one more chance.

This is the season he yearned for all through the lockout. He wanted one to dedicate to his parents, who died within weeks of each other during the summer.

He wants the championship he's never had, also.

``I think we can win the championship,'' Harris said of his reason for turning down those other teams.

He's right and then some. The Lakers should win the championship with their talent. The roster is mostly the same, the big positive change being the replacement of point guard Van Exel with good soldier Derek Fisher and steady 37-year-old Derek Harper.

Their depth - nine members of the new roster averaged at least 20 minutes a game last season - should help them survive the schedule.

One Las Vegas odds line makes them 3-1 co-favorites with Utah to win the title for the first time since 11 years ago in the Pat Riley era. Guess who'll get the blame if they fail.

The odds against Harris being their coach next year are better than 3-1. But not by much.

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Photo

PHOTO Lakers coach Del Harris, shown during the 1998 conference finals, is no stranger to the uncertainty of an NBA coaching job.

Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press