THE NBA / MARK HEISLER : Knick-Piston Series Is Bad for the Game

That was the soul of basketball they were fighting over last week.

Last Tuesday there was a TV doubleheader: Detroit-New York (also known as The Death of Basketball) in the first game; Golden State-Seattle in the second.

The Pistons and Knicks was like mud wrestling without the mud.

Before they went one quarter, the referees whistled technical fouls on seven different players.

Of course, no one actually threw a punch. With Rod Thorn sitting in the NBA office, ringing up the fines like a check-out clerk in a grocery store, players know better. You can lose $7,500 for a shove these days, which is a significant piece of change even for a $3-million player.

So they settle for these silly skirmishes. I was waiting for someone to try to pull someone’s jersey up over his arms, the way they do in hockey.

Then they got down to “playing.”

Every time someone missed a shot--which was most of the time--there would be a rebound battle and someone would wind up prone in the lane. Venturing under the basket was like throwing yourself into an octopus’ arms.

The referees were forced to figure out who was creating contact and who was absorbing it. Often, it was both.

On the pivotal play of the game, Detroit’s Joe Dumars drove across the lane, looking for a shot or a foul.

He ran into traffic, created and/or absorbed contact . . . and lost the ball. The Pistons lost.

It was certainly intense.

It was dramatic.

It simply wasn’t basketball.

Then came the Warriors and the SuperSonics.

In three quarters, they scored more points than the Knicks and Pistons did in an overtime game.

They spread the floor, ran up and down and played the game. Players didn’t have to take a blow to get off a shot.

The SuperSonics won, 129-128. If that wasn’t basketball, it should be.

It comes down to tactics . . . and refereeing.

In the Pistons’ heyday, teams discovered how much muscle could cover for lack of skill.

Because muscle is easier to find than skill, teams began looking for bouncers. After the ’90 finals, Dallas Coach Richie Adubato showed his team a “highlight film” of Bill Laimbeer, disrupting the Trail Blazer offense by taking charges.

Vogues change as quickly as champions do.

The Bulls’ success is turning everyone’s head back toward athleticism. Now everyone wants to find someone 6-5 to run the offense. That alone is a good reason to root for the Bulls against the Piston-Knick winner.

The officiating problem lies not with the referees, but the league office.

Blaming the refs is everyone’s cop-out, but the NBA has the game’s finest officials. In college, you have to be 10 points better on the road to win by one. International basketball--forget it.

Also, the game is essentially un-refereeable. Remember, both teams are playing not only each other, but the referees.

Offensive players get their defenders in motion, bounce off them and go to the free throw line. Magic Johnson was so good at this, players said he might as well call his own fouls.

Defenders fall backward, whiplashing their heads back with an artistry rarely seen outside ballet--right, Doc Rivers?

Then there are the sound effects.

Ten minutes after entering the league, a player will know how to yell “whoooof!” as he falls, as if King Kong had just elbowed him in the solar plexus. Golden State’s Don Nelson ordered his players in training camp last season to yell every time they were touched.

Let’s just say the officials do as good a job of calling this game as is possible.

They can call it any way the league office wants it: rough, medium rough, not rough at all.

Remember when you could hand-check a guard?

Jerry Sloan used to beat such a tattoo on opponents, they were wobbly by the time they got to the top of the circle.

The league said take it out, the referees called it, the players adjusted and it’s all gone now.

The answer to all the pushing and shoving underneath?

“Just blow the darn whistle,” Laker General Manager Jerry West says. “This has been going for years, in the name of ‘NBA playoff basketball.’ ”

Some other suggestions:

Forget about this “flagrant foul” stuff.

Go back to the intentional foul--and stop giving the benefit of the doubt to the defense. Whenever someone makes a foul that isn’t a basketball play, call it intentional: two shots and the ball.

Hint: Grabbing someone’s arms as he shoots isn’t a basketball play.

No more grabbing someone to keep him off the fast break. That’s an intentional foul, too.

DEATH OF BASKETBALL (CONT.)

The Knicks pounding on the Pistons might be tedious, but it’s justice, too. What went around has come around.

Additional irony: These are Showtime Pat Riley’s Knicks?

As Laker coach, Riles used to decry spring thuggery. When he took over the Knicks, he planned to turn them into a fast-break team but he found out his players could fight but not run. When he returned to play his first game against the Lakers, he brought with him a new credo: “It’s all about force.”

Here’s hoping that when he remolds his roster, he remembers who he was.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE NBA OFFICE

What Commissioner David Stern does care about is new buildings.

Maybe he needs to justify all that money he’s making, but one of his favorite boasts is the number of teams who have new arenas.

In Seattle last week, he decried the local building.

“I’m not Fay Vincent coming to Seattle with any preconceived notions,” Stern said, “but I think I would be really fair in saying the Seattle Coliseum is one of the four worst buildings in the NBA, and the only bad building with no hope of a new one coming up in the near future.”

To which he added:

“A move is inevitable the way things are going.”

The NBA is the best-run league in American sport, the one that should serve as the model to all the rest, which are squabbling children in comparison.

But on this one, give me Fay Vincent.

Exactly where in the U.S. Constitution does it say that every NBA team is entitled to a new, state-of-the-art arena every 30 years--at public expense?

SuperSonic owner Barry Ackerley, the deflated advertising tycoon, once intended to build his own arena, but the recession took care of that.

Seattle Coliseum is, assuredly, a modest facility with only 14,295 seats.

On the other hand, they don’t have any problem holding games there. It went up in 1962. The roof keeps out the rain (if it didn’t, they would have found out long ago). The neighborhood is fine. Whenever the SuperSonics are good, they draw. If they need additional capacity, they can use the Kingdome--as they did four times this season.

This may be a difficult time for over-extended millionaires, but it’s worse for municipalities such as Seattle.

If Ackerley can’t put up a building, let him make do. Or, let him sell to someone who can, take his $50-million profit and retire.

The first loyalty should be team-to-city, not vice versa.

Or just call them the “Ackerley SuperSonics” and see how many people come out.

FACES AND FIGURES

Larry Bird update: He’s still day-to-day. . . . It happens every time (cont.): The Celtics sailed into the Cleveland series, winners of 18 of 19, optimistic they could handle the Cavaliers even without Bird. Then the Cavaliers swatted them, 101-76, in the opener. . . . No brainer: No Bird, no Eastern finals. By now, he has been out so long, it’s unlikely they could re-integrate him on the fly against a good Cavalier team. . . . Indiana’s Chuck Person, after failing to duplicate last spring’s big performance against the Celtics: “Boston hasn’t seen the last of me yet. If I’m going to go down, I’m going to go down standing up.”

76er owner Harold Katz, on trading Charles Barkley: “I have vacillated, I’ll be honest. Maybe the answer is think about it and take the best (offer) there is and start from scratch. I’m not going to have him dictate to us. If it’s best for the team, he’s going to be here. I’m a ‘90s owner. I do what I want.” . . . Tightwire act of the year: New York’s Xavier McDaniel paid $500,000 to buy out the last two seasons of his contract--on which he would have been owed $3.6 million--on the theory he would be worth more on the open market. McDaniel then posted his worst season, averaging 3.2 fewer points (13.9) than he did as a rookie (17.1), before bouncing back to average 18 in the first four games against the Pistons.

Wrapping up the Nets’ four-game loss to Cleveland: Drazen Petrovic got into an argument with Chris Morris late in Game 4 and refused Coach Bill Fitch’s order to go back into the game. Fitch said he stopped fining players who wouldn’t go in, like Petrovic, Morris and Derrick Coleman, because the front office wouldn’t back him. . . . General Manager Willis Reed said Fitch never talked to him about it. . . . The New York Times reports the league office is upset about all the squabbling and is pressuring Net management to get their stuff together. Chicago backup center Will Perdue has a 900 number on which he says things like: “It’s now Tuesday and Rony Seikaly keeps saying the Heat is getting better. At what? Sunstroke?” and “I like how Portland kept that 36-point lead over L.A.--Not! Tells you something, doesn’t it?” It tells you that the little publicity Perdue has gotten is too much. . . . Magic Johnson, after playing pickup games with Shaquille O’Neal, calls him the best big man to enter the NBA in Johnson’s time. “He’s going to be something,” Johnson said. “Everybody’s just going to be shaking their heads, like I was shaking mine.” . . . Knick center Tim McCormick on the team’s new black sneakers: “It’s a great idea, because now Kiki (Vandeweghe) had good footwear for formal occasions.”