Shouldn't the Memphis Grizzlies have seen this Allen Iverson train wreck coming?

The NBA season is barely two weeks old, and the Memphis Grizzlies already are paying the price for paying The Answer. It didn't take long for Allen Iverson to pick up from where he left off last season, when things ended so badly during the meltdown that was Detroit's season.

Iverson, signed by the Grizzlies as a free agent in the offseason to a one-year, $3 million deal, already is hurt and disgruntled. It has taken exactly one game for this dilemma to blow up in the face of the only franchise that was truly willing to gamble on whether Iverson had a few more answers in that high-mileage, 34-year-old body.

After missing all of the preseason and the first three games of the regular season with a hamstring injury, Iverson made his debut with Memphis last week against Sacramento. And after he played just 18 minutes off the bench, Iverson lodged his debut assault against the Grizzlies coaching staff for casting him as a reserve.

Iverson's body and overall skill set might be deteriorating with age. But his pride is in midseason form.

``I had no problems [with the hamstring]. I had a problem with my butt sitting on that bench for so long,'' Iverson was quoted as saying after the game. ``I'm not a bench player. I'm not a sixth man. And that's that.''

If Iverson failed to get his point across to coach Lionel Hollins at that moment, he did with his next verbal volley after he scored 18 points in 28 minutes off the bench two nights later in a loss to Golden State.

``I don't want to be the guy who is a distraction to this squad,'' Iverson said, ``but everybody knows I'd be fake if I said, `Yeah, I'm so happy with everything that's going on.' It would just be too fake so I wouldn't even play that game.''

On Saturday, Iverson reportedly left the team for personal reasons.

This was the reason Iverson, a former league MVP and perennial All-Star even at this stage, was largely unwanted during free agency. The Heat bypassed him as much for this very reason as much as for salary-cap and luxury-tax implications.

Iverson clearly still has some game left. But he also still is capable of tearing apart a team as quickly as he used to be able to finish on a fast break.

Hollins already has grown beyond frustrated with the Iverson issue and has said he's done talking about the player's specific problem ahead of the team's overall concerns. But that's what the Grizzlies get for going after Iverson. Owner Michael Heisley essentially got his wish when he was willing to bring in Iverson against the private wishes of his coaching staff. Heisley wanted to create a buzz around a franchise that has been annually irrelevant.

Now, the Grizz are getting buzz for the wrong reasons. After Iverson's flare-up, the owner was left no other choice than to side with his coach in this drama.

``Lionel will handle it,'' Heisley told the Memphis Commercial Appeal. ``What Allen said was inappropriate, but I'm not going to make a big deal about it.''

Too late. Iverson already has.

And the ordeal is threatening to derail a season that's not even a month old for the Grizzlies, a team that curiously added disgruntled vets such as Iverson and Zach Randolph to what otherwise is the NBA's youngest roster.

Twenty-nine other teams saw this train wreck coming and backed away from the tracks. Memphis didn't. For that, the Grizzlies season already might have been be railroaded.

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