COMMENTARY : The King Is Dead, Long Live Anarchy

It’s a new day in the postmodern National Basketball Association.

The Detroit Pistons, like them or not, represent a brave new world -- beyond superstars, beyond super teams. In sweeping the Los Angeles Lakers, the Pistons have opened the door for a new generation of champions.

All those teams that have suffered under the yoke of the Lakers and Boston Celtics must be enjoying this moment of freedom. However, for the traditionalists, who have seen the league prosper as never before in the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird era, freedom must seem a lot like anarchy.

For the first time in years, you can look at the NBA and wonder what will happen next.

For the first time this decade, a team without Magic Johnson, Larry Bird or Julius Erving has won the title.

The guard is changing. Once, and fairly recently, that might have seemed a scary proposition. The Lakers and Celtics were a security blanket. The season went by, and for good or ill, there at the end were the Celtics or Lakers or often both in another morality play that increasing numbers of Americans were tuning in to watch.

But it’s a grown-up NBA now. No need to worry. The league that once traded so heavily on the name value of its transcendent performers -- Magic, Dr. J, Bird, Kareem, Jordan -- is now ready simply to sell its product. From now on, just being good enough is good enough.

Cleveland or Utah or Phoenix or New York can win a title, and the ratings should hold.

It’s not a cult sport anymore. It’s a prime-time event, as the sport of the ‘60s and the ‘70s has finally caught on as we head into the ‘90s.

Johnson and Bird deserve the credit, but especially Johnson and his Lakers. They became something like the Yankees, and Magic, at least in combination with Bird, became something like Babe Ruth. The Lakers were showtime, and you either loved them for their style or hated them for their glitz. But you couldn’t ignore them, any more than you could ignore Jack Nicholson in his courtside seat (which, by the way, will sell next year at the Forum for $350 a game).

During this past season, the league sold out more than 90 percent of its seats, the Washington Bullets being a rare blight, from an attendance standpoint, anyway, on the health of the NBA. There were two expansion franchises last season, both financial success stories, and there will be two more next season. The league is growing, its marketing techniques improving. For the first time, the NBA can legitimately lay claim to being major-league.

As for its stars, Michael Jordan is perhaps the biggest name in all sports these days. And although Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is leaving the game, his absence will be felt no more than when Willie Mays left baseball or Johnny Unitas left football.

Of course, the Lakers and Celtics haven’t disappeared altogether, either. One of the early stories next season will be whether the Celtics, with a healthy Bird, can fly again. They’re old, those Celtics, although with some late-season trading they’ve tried to get younger. There might be enough left for one last hurrah. Or maybe even a couple of hurrahs.

The Lakers made it to the finals for the eighth time in 10 years, and I think you’ll see them as favorites to make it nine of 11 as the Magic decade moves on. The Lakers made it this season with Abdul-Jabbar playing center as so much statuary, an immobile monument to his past glory.

We’ve learned that it is no longer necessary to have a dominant center to win in the NBA, but one who can still breathe is preferred. If the Lakers can find an ordinary-to-good center to complement Johnson and James Worthy and Byron Scott and A.C. Green, they should resume the hunt -- and you can still love them or hate them.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Johnson said after Game 4 Tuesday night. “We’ll be back. We’re champions, and champions never go away. We may grow older, but we never go away.”

Actually, the Pistons are champions. Though I love Joe Dumars, your next NBA star, and Dennis Rodman is a coach’s dream, I don’t love the Pistons. The Bad Boy stuff may sell, just as Chuck Norris movies do, but there’s no place for the continuous array of cheap shots, thrown elbows, grabbed jerseys, sliding hips we see from Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn.

Basketball should not be hockey without the ice. It should be ballet on the hardcourt. But the NBA, as prosperous as it may be, is not going to clean up an act that works.

Will the Pistons repeat? It’s very unlikely. They may still be the best team in the league, but it’s a fluid league now, a hard-to-predict league, a wide-open league, a grown-up league. The NBA doesn’t need a Celtics-Lakers rivalry anymore, or a Bad Boys vs. Hollywood rivalry, either. Only five teams -- Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Houston -- made the finals in the 1980s.

The NBA is now rich enough, in tradition and in dollars, to spread the wealth.