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What: “Basketball for Dummies”

Price: $19.99 (IDG Books Worldwide).

No, the Clippers haven’t decided to put their playbook on the market.

This is an entirely different enterprise--a spinoff of the best-selling “For Dummies” series of home-computer instructional manuals--although we may see the day, very soon perhaps, when Bill Fitch buys a dozen copies and begins holding team readings:

“All right, Stojko, please turn to the bottom of Page 19 and read with me. ‘The basketball is spherical and orange and has eight panels. . . .’ ”

Written by former Notre Dame coach Digger Phelps and Sports Illustrated’s John Walters, “Basketball for Dummies” is, at its most basic, a bare-bones primer that assumes the reader is either a Unix hacker grown curious by overhearing the phrase “triangle and two” in the adjacent cubicle, or an alien whose flying saucer just crash-landed outside the Delta Center.

Sample entry: “The objective in basketball is simple: to score more points than your opponent. This is accomplished by making baskets on offense [when your team has the ball] and preventing your opponent from scoring baskets while you’re playing defense [when your opponent has the ball.]”

Sounds a mite too rudimentary for the average reader, but has anyone reminded the Denver Nuggets lately?

Deeper in, the text switches from plain-worded instruction to Phelpsian commentary on everything from women’s pro basketball (“I don’t see how two leagues will survive”) to the Dream Team (“Dream Team I was akin to Woodstock--the equivalent of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who and so on all on one stage. But the novelty should have remained just that.”)

More than you want to know about basketball is covered, even tips on filling out an NCAA tournament office pool. Real dummies out there are advised simply to pick the team in blue: “Ten of the last 14 NCAA champions, including the last three, had some shade of blue in their uniform.”