Former Sixers executive King wants to return to NBA

AMID THE WHIRRING of blenders and chatter of customers, Billy King sipped a sweetened iced tea at the Starbucks in Narberth. The evening before, the ex-Sixers executive had watched his former team lose its sixth consecutive game, an occurrence that would have caused him considerable consternation back when he was running the club. But circumstances are such now that he can click off the television, log an untroubled 8 hours of sleep, and get up early to take his 2 1/2-year-old daughter to the Please Touch Museum.

"I happened to run into Danny Ainge at the Duke-Villanova game," King says of the Boston Celtics general manager (who coincidentally would later be hospitalized with a heart attack). "And Danny looked at me and said, 'Why are you smiling?' And I told him, 'Because I'm not in your position. I'm enjoying life. You're winning and you look miserable!' "

Sixteen months have passed since Billy King walked out of his December 2007 meeting with owner Ed Snider, unemployed. As he looks back on it, he says the "timing" of the dismissal surprised him, given that the season was just 6 weeks old and that he and ownership seemed to be on the same page. But as president and general manager of the Sixers, King understood that letting people go was part of the deal in sports. He looked upon it as a chance to evaluate what he wanted to do. Some believed he was polished enough to try politics or that he would be an ideal candidate for a job in the league office. But while King had been perceived as an ascending star in the executive suite, he himself was not exactly sure if he wanted to work again in the NBA when the Sixers replaced him with Ed Stefanski.

Now he is.

He wants another NBA team to run.

"I am at a point where I am anxious to come back," says King, now 43, who at one point was the youngest executive in the NBA. "You do miss it. I miss the competitiveness involved in putting a team together, going to practice, [and] the ups and downs of a long season. I am anxious to come back."