DOING IT HIS WAY : Detroit Could Start Measuring Time the A.D. Way--That’s ‘After Dantley’

It’s great to be a Piston, one win from a championship, with the world lining up like sheep in bad need of shearing. Let’s start with Disneyland, which will pay $35,000 to the series MVP to run off the floor, smile into the camera and say the magic words.

The Pistons, solidarity ascendant, reportedly have voted to split it: $17,500 for the MVP, $17,500 for the rest of the squad.

They haven’t forgotten one itty-bitty thing, have they?

Like today’s Game 6 and the Lakers? Whoever hires on with the Magic Kingdom has to go through Magic Johnson, first.

Besides, solidarity isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be.

On Saturday, someone asked Adrian Dantley, the series’ leading MVP candidate to date: Wasn’t it unusual that the team was going to split the money?

“That’s Laimbeer’s suggestion,” Dantley said. “That wasn’t anybody else’s suggestion on the team. I want to get that point across.”

Well, will it be done?

“That’s not even the point,” Dantley said. “The point is winning the game.”

But doesn’t it say something about the team that it would do this?

“No one on the team said anything but Laimbeer,” Dantley said once more. “That’s not even important right now. Winning the game is important.”

Maybe he’s keeping the 35 Gs?

Maybe he was just trying to restore everyone’s perspective to the real matter at hand?

One thing is sure: he’s Adrian Dantley, he’ll do it his way.

This is a city that likes its A.D.’s. It’s had Anthony Davis and Al Davis. It had Adrian Dantley, too, although if you went away on a long weekend, you might have missed his Laker career:

--56 games in 1977-78.

--60 games in 1978-79.

--Traded to the Utah Jazz for Spencer Haywood before the next season.

“I was a young player when I came here,” Dantley said. “I was only 22 years old. It was great but I wasn’t here long enough.

“I remember when I got here, Jack Kent Cooke (then the owner) told me, ‘Buy a house. Buy a house. You’re never going to get traded.’

“I lived over here at the Airport Park Hotel (across the street from the Forum). The next season, I moved to the Marina.

“I started both years, but it was a situation, they started two small forwards, me and Jamaal Wilkes. The new coach coming in (Jack McKinney) felt they needed a big player--which they did. They got Spencer Haywood, and he stayed here one year.

“Jack McKinney was the one who wanted to trade me. Jerry West didn’t want to trade me. Sometimes when there’s a new coach, the general manager has to back up the coach.

“It’s tough to get traded at a young age, especially when I was producing. That’s what I had a problem with, I was producing and I got traded.

“It made me learn about the league. It’s just a matter of survival.”

Dantley, then 24, had been in the league three seasons . . . and had been traded four times.

What was the problem?

“He’s a 6-5 forward,” Jack McCloskey, the Pistons general manager said. “The teams say, ‘I don’t think we can get to a championship level with a 6-5 forward.’

“A.D. is an outstanding player. So they say, ‘We’ll use this outstanding player to get to a certain level. Then we’ll move him because he’s still valuable.’

“Obviously, he had some problems in Utah with Frank (Layden), that’s no secret. But almost every player in this league will eventually have some problems with a coach.”

Perhaps not as big as Dantley did with Layden, who once sent him home from a trip, tried to suspend him for the rest of the season, and when management persuaded him not to, settled for fining him 30 dimes--30 pieces of silver, as in Biblical days, a suggestion that Dantley was a Judas.

“You know, I’d rather not say anything,” Layden said from Salt Lake City. “I’ve said enough about him.

“I don’t want to get into a war. I see he made some comments about me. I really could(n’t) care less about him.”

So they never patched it up?

“I have nothing to do with him at all,” Layden said.

There must be something good about Dantley, though?

“Not that I know of. He’s a good player, that’s all I can say. He’s a good offensive player. He had a lot of success here with us. He was a five-time all-star. He led the league twice in scoring, so I don’t see where he could have any complaints.

“Maybe he learned something, who knows? But I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want to waste any time.”

You don’t see many no-comments that long, but then these two were born to battle.

For all his jollity, Layden is confrontational and not beyond taking business negotiations personally. Dantley, moody, strong-willed and single-minded, was a negotiating hardballer.

Or as Dantley said Saturday:

“Well, who doesn’t like money?”

Anyway, they divorced two seasons ago, in the deal that sent Dantley to Detroit for Kelly Tripucka. Thus, when Dantley scored his 20,000th National Basketball Assn. point last season, he became the second player to get that many while playing for five teams. The first was Walt Bellamy.

Well, look who’s in the NBA Finals.

There may have been 6-5 forwards when Dantley was breaking in, but they’re a thing of the past now. He’s a dinosaur, the last of a long-dead species. He’s a phenomenon too, as he always has been, one of a kind, a 6-5 post-up player, the Human Foul Shot.

But weren’t the Pistons even a little concerned about his reputation?

“No. 1, I had recruited him out of high school when I was at Penn,” Piston Coach Chuck Daly said.

“No. 2, we had played 17 playoff games at that point and given up 35 points a game at that (Tripucka’s) position, and we didn’t have a post-up player. It was a no-brain-er.”

Also, McCloskey had been an assistant to West and liked Dantley.

“He’s quiet,” McCloskey said. “I like the mood he’s in.

“I think it’s a mistake sometimes--I think one of the things that Chuck has good insight into, a personality is what it is. It’s embedded. Don’t try to change it, use it.

“People say, ‘You’re selfish.’ Everybody who scores in this league has to want the ball. If the term is selfishness, it applies to all of them.

“All I know is, he’s a pro, he comes to play every game and when the games are toughest, he’s at his best.”

And never before has Dantley come to play as he has in this series, adding new dimensions to his game, like defense and rebounding, and even before Game 5, cheerleading, A.D.-style.

“Like Gunny (the Marine sergeant played by Clint Eastwood) in ‘Heartbreak Ridge,’ he told me to get serious,” John Salley said. “A.D. has very, very little to say. When he says it, it’s like E.F. Hutton--listen.

“During the game, he kept saying I wasn’t showing him anything.

“ ‘I’ve got 10 rebounds, A.D.’

“ ‘You’re still not showing me anything, boy. You haven’t had a good game since the Boston series.’ ”

It’s now fashionable to say that Dantley is a man on a mission.

It’s fashionable to say this to everyone but guess-who, the feature-angle squelcher.

“That’s Chuck,” rumbles Dantley with the faintest of smiles. “Chuck is doing the talking.”

Is Chuck wrong, then?

“That’s just the coach’s opinion. Everybody wants to win. Of course, I want to win but everybody does.”

And the fact that he’s 32 and getting older?

“They always say that, a guy gets older. But I’m going to be around awhile.”

No, Chuck isn’t wrong.

“Yeah, A.D. probably wants it more than all of us,” Salley said. “He wants it real , real bad.

“He wanted the Boston game last year so bad he dived on the floor (and collided with Vinnie Johnson in Game 7).

“This one, he wants more.”

Oh, oh.