KOBE-SHAQ TEMPEST MINOR BY CURRENT NBA STANDARDS.

Byline: KAREN CROUSE

So Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal could use couples counseling as much as Hillary and Bill or any other role-reversing pair.

So what.

The Lakers are lucky verbal grenades are the only things they've had to defuse.

The tempest between the Lakers' two superstars appears to have blown through Southern California like a winter squall, ripping a few tiles off the roof of the Lakers' tidy house and rattling the storm shutters but causing no irreparable damage.

Elsewhere in the NBA, it's raining catcalls and dogfights, muddying the league's carefully crafted image.

If Phoenix's Penny Hardaway isn't waving a handgun in his girlfriend's face during an argument, the Suns' Jason Kidd is slapping his wife across the face and apparently not for the first time. That's quite a mercurial backcourt the Suns have, huh?

If Utah's Olden Polynice isn't pleading guilty to impersonating a police officer while under the influence of road rage, Wizards guard Rod Strickland is being charged with driving under the influence.

If Seattle's Gary Payton isn't telling his then-coach, Paul Westphal, that he doesn't care about the game anymore and ``you can suspend me for the rest of my career,'' ex-Clipper Tyrone Nesby, now with Washington, is brazenly defying Wizards coach Leonard Hamilton.

If the Denver Nuggets aren't boycotting a practice because their coach, Dan Issel, yelled at one of their own a little too vociferously, Philadelphia's Allen Iverson is opining that in the coach-player relationship, criticism ``is supposed to be both ways.''

It's enough to make you wonder, when did the NBA turn into Narcissists Behaving Abhorrently?

It's as if the players' fuses have grown shorter in inverse proportion to the length of their playing shorts.

``I think egos have taken over,'' said 14th-year veteran forward Horace Grant of the Lakers, who play Miami today at the Staples Center. ``The league is a reflection of society and in this society, money is power. It's sad to say because it shouldn't be that way.''

Grant's right on the, uh, money. Far from operating in the dark from the rest of society, sports is a prism that refracts society's mores. To be dumbfounded by all the smart-mouthed players talking back to coaches is to have turned a deaf ear to how today's smart-mouthed kids talk to their parents and teachers.

In the NBA, as in the rest of the U.S. commonwealth, respect for rules has given way to an autonomy-for-all mindset that looks suspiciously like anarchy from where we respectfully sit.

For a league that wrote the manual on turning perception into reality, it doesn't matter if the majority of players are upstanding individuals. All it takes is a few branches with blight for people to presume that the whole tree is diseased.

``It's unfortunate,'' Lakers forward Rick Fox said, ``because when athletes behave poorly, our actions reflect not only on our families or organizations but also on our peers.''

Yes, and somewhere in the NBA some starter right now is sneering, ``I don't owe nobody nothing.''

We're not saying the NBA is a runaway league, but today's young fan thinks jurisprudence is just another official league statistic. Yo, bro, check it out. My man recorded a triple-double in points, assists and arrests!

Last month, Philadelphia coach Larry Brown left the team for a couple of days because of combat fatigue. Could you blame him? The surprise wasn't that Brown bailed but that he chose to come back. You don't have to be in charge of bridling Iverson to get tired of the sideshows that have turned the NBA into another insipid reality TV series.

Think Big Brother meets Temptation Island and you've got the picture. Not very pretty, is it?

Ron Harper, for one, can hardly stomach it.

``The young athletes don't respect the game,'' said the Lakers' 15th- year guard. ``That's all it is. When I came in the league, the older guys showed me that basketball is a team game, not a who-you-are game. The message was clear: Nothing is bigger than the game. Nowadays, guys believe they are the game.''

It's a crying shame is what it is. The pity is that the perpetrators are the last ones to feel the pain.