THE NBA PLAYOFFS : Daly May Just Never Get Past This Setback : Bird’s Steal and the Celtics’ Victory Were Painful and, Perhaps, Even Final

Chuck Daly boarded the charter flight just after midnight. Boston’s Logan Airport was gloomy and quiet, as was Daly’s team. The Detroit Pistons trudged silently and single-file up the stairs, through the jet way, and ducked their heads--all of them except Isiah Thomas, who need not--at the door.

Their coach sat up front. He said very little. He had not said much since leaving Boston Garden, the scene of the crime, where Larry Bird’s steal and Dennis Johnson’s last-second basket gave the Celtics a nerve-rending 108-107 win over Daly’s Pistons in Game 5 of the National Basketball Assn.’s Eastern Conference playoffs. Detroit now trailed in the series, 3-2, with Game 6 to be played tonight.

What Daly wanted to do was get past mad. That happens to be a favorite phrase of his: “Get past mad.”

It is a reminder to himself, sort of a string around his finger, not to let disappointment linger, not to permit hardships to drag him down.

“Old friends used to tell me: When an Irishman gets mad, with or without your teacups to get you through it, you should stay mad for a minute or two, then forget whatever it was you were mad about and get on with it,” he says. Get past mad.

So, Daly gave it a shot. He turned to another man on the airplane who was in charge of the team’s equipment. He told him to haul out the portable video cassette recorder that the Pistons cart with them, wherever they go.

“OK,” Daly said. “Let’s look at the travesty.”

For the rest of the flight, he watched a replay of the game.

He watched the highlights: Detroit’s comeback from a dozen points down. Isiah Thomas’ shot with 17 seconds remaining to put the Pistons on top by a point. Dennis Rodman’s block of Bird’s shot with seven seconds left. Rick Mahorn’s effort to knock the ball out of bounds off a Celtic’s leg.

He watched the lowlights: Robert Parish’s left-right combination that decked Detroit center Bill Laimbeer late in the first half. Bird’s swoop. Bird’s feed. Johnson’s layup. Daly relived the whole lousy experience, including his own inability to get his players’ attention with five seconds to play, to get somebody to call a timeout.

It was a horror movie, worse than any late, late, late show he ever watched, worse than anything ever shown by Elvira. It was a sad, shocking film, with surprise and suspense worthy of Hitchcock. Worthy of, dare we say it, “The Birds.”

Daly shut it off.

But he couldn’t shut it out.

He drove to his home in the Detroit suburbs and thought about it all night. He never slept.

By Tuesday morning, he and the Pistons were sadder and angrier. General Manager Jack McCloskey called a press conference to vilify the Game 5 officials for calling nothing, not even a technical foul, on Parish for fat-lipping Laimbeer.

A $7,500 fine and one-game suspension for Parish appeased the Pistons only a little, since it did nothing to turn back the page to the one-point loss that already appeared in the score book, the loss that might keep the team from making the NBA finals for the first time since the franchise left Fort Wayne, Ind., and moved to Detroit.

And Chuck Daly, well, he was still steamed.

“For five years now, he has been almost a fatherly figure to me, and I’ve seen him in every kind of mood,” Matt Dobek, Piston publicity director, said Tuesday. “But I’ve never seen him exactly like this. As of right now, he’s still not past mad.”

An hour before leaving for the game Tuesday night, Chuck Daly slumped back on a sofa in his Boston hotel suite, wearing a warmup outfit and sneakers. Such clothes look odd on him, partially because Daly, 56, the second-oldest coach in the NBA to Indiana’s Jack Ramsay, is a fashion plate who owns hundreds of elegant suits, and partially because with his husky build, rugged face and mane of wavy hair, Daly has something of a Victor Mature look that would make him seem properly attired in a toga and sandals.

Before his coaching career took off, Daly did a lot of real-man jobs back in his native Pennsylvania. Out of high school, he did heavy lifting at a furniture and appliance store, and construction work, and even unloaded hides for a tannery, tossing them into lime pits until the blood and salt could be scrubbed from them, and the hair plucked off. That job left him so stiff every morning that he had trouble just walking up a small hill.

Sometimes, in his hometown of Kane, Pa., population 5,000 or so, 90 miles northwest of Pittsburgh and not far from the New York border--”Smalltown, USA,” Daly calls it--Chuck and his younger brother Bud agreed to clean the swimming pool at the Kane YMCA, for $1 a day and the freedom to shoot baskets for as long as they liked.

They had a brand new Last-Bilt leather ball--a white basketball--that was the most prized possession on their block, a gift from their Uncle Kenny.

The Daly brothers were very competitive. “If we weren’t playing basketball, we were playing pool or Ping-Pong or something, at least until we got into a fight,” Chuck said.

They also played together on the Kane High School basketball team, Chuck a 6-2 center-forward, Bud a 5-9 guard, and drove their mother crazy at home by hammering a nail above the kitchen door and using an orange for a basketball. It was two points if they threw the fruit at the nail and it stuck.

Their high school teams were very successful for such a small town, and the year after Chuck left for St. Bonaventure, Bud not only was a state champion miler, but led the Kane basketball team to the state title. In Jason Miller’s play “That Championship Season,” coincidentally, two brothers named Daley led a basketball team from Scranton to the Pennsylvania high school championship.

The son of a traveling salesman, Chuck got all of his father’s height, 6 feet 2 inches, that his brother did not. From his mother, Daly got encouragement. All those John R. Tunis schoolboy sports books he had read, such as “Yea, Springfield!” convinced him that being a coach was a pretty fine thing to be.

“One day I went up to her and said, ‘Mom, all I want to do when I grow up is be a basketball coach and someday make $10,000 a year.”

And her reaction was . . . ?

“She approved,” Daly said.

What the Daly brothers both did after college was become schoolteachers. Chuck’s first job was at a high school in Punxsutawney, Pa.--which is “Groundhog, USA,” home of Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog whose job is to poke his head out of a hole once a year and declare that spring is here, or still six weeks away.

Daly taught English and corrective speech, coached the basketball and golf teams and ran a summer basketball program. For the year, he made $3,600.

Bud, too, taught school, but has since retired and now builds houses near Washington. The only times he has seen Chuck coach the Pistons in person was whenever they played the Washington Bullets at Landover, Md., but Bud called his brother in Boston the other day and said he wanted to be there in Michigan for Game 6.

“He said he wished he could play for us,” Chuck said.

Although they never played together in college, Chuck and three other citizens of Kane did get together later. After he transferred from St. Bonaventure to Bloomsburg State in Pennsylvania, Daly and three of his Kane teammates formed four-fifths of that college’s starting lineup.

As a coach, he has been all over the map. Assistant at Duke, where he went to the Final Four twice. Head coach at Boston College, replacing Bob Cousy. (“He left me no black players and a 6-5 center.”) Head coach at Penn, where he hired as an assistant a perpetual-motion recruiter he knew from his Boston days, Rollie Massimino.

The two men became fast friends. They recruited tirelessly throughout Pennsylvania and the East, riding around in a station wagon and stopping at Mama Massimino’s several times a week for “a pound of pasta,” as Daly put it. “A pound of spags.”

Daly helped Massimino get his first college coaching job, at Stony Brook on Long Island, N.Y., and was delighted when Rollie got the Villanova job later on. The night Villanova beat Georgetown for the NCAA championship, Daly was moved no end.

“I sat there in front of my TV with tears in my eyes,” he said. “The one thing I’ve always said about people in this business is, everybody in it deserves at least one slice of cake. Well, Rollie got his slice.”

Dessert, after all those spags.

Daly, now, is in position for some cake. But the Boston Celtics are trying to deny it to him. He claims it doesn’t matter, that the effort is what matters, that if he and the Pistons can look back and honestly say that they did the best they could, that that would be reward enough.

“I don’t need a championship to make my life complete,” he said.

Nevertheless, the time is right for Daly to get one, because he might not be coaching that much longer. He readily admits that he hopes to land a general manager’s job, and that when his current two-year contract expires after next season, he could be through with coaching.

This also serves as a subtle reminder that Daly has not forgotten how Piston management made him suffer a little before this season’s success.

For one thing, they took their sweet time before finally picking up the option year on his contract in February, 1985.

Then, in June of that year, after giving permission to the Philadelphia 76ers to meet with Daly about the job that Billy Cunningham had vacated, the Pistons tossed a wrench into the works by demanding a first-round draft choice. Daly, a former 76er assistant and broadcaster, felt as though he had been used.

A few months later, when the Pistons lost 14 of 19 games, rumors flew that the coach was through. He could have been out of a job altogether. It was on the verge of becoming his worst experience in coaching since a short term as boss of the Cleveland Cavaliers, something Daly describes as “the only mistake I’ve ever made in taking a job someplace.”

When Detroit won 23 of its next 27 with the same players, though, Daly’s job was safe. The team had a good season. And after an off-season trade of Kelly Tripucka for Adrian Dantley, plus two good draft choices in John Salley and Rodman, Daly had enough pieces to go after the whole puzzle.

The Philadelphia thing was forgotten. He got past mad.

Watching the film of Tuesday’s game made Daly more sad than mad.

“The hardest part was not having any control over what was happening,” he said. “Trying to call a timeout and nobody being able to see me or hear me with 15,000 people screaming and a lot of things happening on the court. I felt helpless, and I don’t like feeling helpless.”

But life goes on. You can’t let the bad stuff get to you. You get down, you get your Irish up, then you forget and get on with it.

“We’ve still got some basketball to play,” Daly said. “We can still win this thing, believe me.”

Piece of cake.