ANALYSIS : Have Knick Bosses Got It Right This Time?

Maybe this Dave Checketts is the right guy to run the Knickerbockers. Then again, maybe he isn’t and this is deja vu all over again.

It’s easy to be skeptical about what the corporation has wrought. It’s difficult not to be skeptical about anything corporate Madison Square Garden does.

I mean, Dave Checketts may be just the right guy to lead the Knickerbockers out of their own morass. But then we thought Al Bianchi might have been just the right guy. And you know, from too many championships the corporation didn’t make this change.

Too bad about Al. I liked a lot of things about him, he had some native New Yorker style about him. But his record wasn’t pretty and Richard Evans, the man at the top of Madison Square Garden Sports Group was sitting there most nights at the end of celebrity row when the Knicks were getting their assets kicked and the fans were chanting, “Al must go.”

They were an embarrassment to the extent that attendance is down 2,000 a game and with the newspapers and television informing people this is a bad team, there may well be resistance to increases of ticket prices. Stockholders do make the ball go round.

Why should anybody not be skeptical? For all their history as a founding franchise in the league, the Knicks have been kind of like the Chicago Cubs. The Knicks have won two championships in 44 seasons. For Checketts, the job has been divided into two parts: He’ll be the head of the Knicks while Jack Diller, who used to head the Knicks and the Rangers, runs only the Rangers.

The big corporation remains unchanged. The change is greatest with the Knicks. Two years ago the Rangers were in trouble; now it’s the other way around. Checketts will select the man who will do the player selection and ultimately the coach selection. “I don’t claim to be a terrific basketball personnel guy,” Checketts said. “I hire people and judge them on results.”

Bear in mind that the only truly effective front office operation in Knicks’ history was when Eddie Donovan and Red Holzman worked in tandem.

This division into Rangers and Knickerbockers responsibility was long overdue. The demands of two games and two sets of rules -- the salary cap alone made Bianchi’s teeth hurt -- are a bit much. But corporate headmen don’t like to look back on misjudgments.

Firing Bianchi was overdue. It made no sense to extend his contract for this season when the problems were long-range and of his making. “We’re here to talk about the future of the franchise, not the past,” was the way Evans dismissed that thought. Those who ignore the mistakes of the past are doomed to ... well, never mind.

Maybe Checketts is the right man for the job at age 35. Neil Smith has done well with the Rangers at a tender age.

Checketts has been working on international business in the league office. He says he understands the pressures of New York and it does not make him squirm. The Garden has no advertising budget for sports because coverage is free, telling the public that a team is good or a team is bad.

He has lived in the territory since September. Maybe the Rocky mountainification of the Knickerbockers is right.

Evans is a former swimmer at the University of Denver. Checketts, from Bountiful, Utah, played a nominal season of basketball at Brigham Young before transferring to Utah. He got his master’s degree in business from BYU.

Both are fair-haired and coiffed from the same salon publications. Both reside in Connecticut. Checketts sipped a glass of club soda at his inauguration Friday. He neither smokes nor drinks, which is not something to be held against a man. That’s not to say that a fair-haired boy from the land of milk and honey can’t come to the city of soot and grime and thrive.

Checketts has been kind of a boy wonder. He was using his MBA education with a management consulting firm in Boston when a group contacted him about buying the Celtics. He did such a thorough job of research among the other franchises that when his clients didn’t get the Celtics, Checketts became executive vice president of the Utah Jazz at 27. A year later he became club president.

In his term the Jazz drafted Karl Malone and John Stockton. Checketts said those players were first on Utah’s list and he “couldn’t believe” they were available as 13th and 16th selections. The Knicks haven’t drafted that well in successive drafts since the late 1960s.

Checketts does have this one indiscretion in his background. In 1987, he was sitting in his courtside seat as president of the Jazz and said some buzzwords about Seattle players, who happened to be black. He said, “Olden Polynice leads the NBA in stolen stereos,” which referred to a college incident.

Friday Checketts said he had repeated “a bad joke” to his wife and it became public. He said he had apologized. Evans called it “not a situation of a serious nature.”

A bad attempt at humor, an awkward wisecrack should not damn a man as racist. But they were said. They are of a serious nature and, assuredly, are kept in mind -- and should be -- in a league that is predominantly black.

The fact remains that corporations do what they think is best for the corporation. MSG Sports Group is supposed to make money for Paramount Communications; decision-makers ultimately are accountable to stockholders who go on forever.

Eventually, they may get it right. Maybe.