Daly Will Give Riley a Run for His Money : Basketball: In terms of style and success, the new coach of the New Jersey Nets is every bit the Knick coach’s rival.

Chuck Daly, the basketball coach, wore what he identified as a simple two-button suit of gunmetal blue, a shirt of dark gray stripes on white, a maroon patterned necktie and a maroon patch of color in his breast pocket. He held his jacket open and revealed the Mani label.

It’s one of perhaps 200 suits in his wardrobe. He needs a New Jersey apartment his closet space can be proud of.

Listen, this is important stuff, as basketball credentials go.

Oh, and on his finger he wore a championship ring, one of two in his wardrobe.

This is important stuff because the team that had either a shoddy image or, at best, no image suddenly has an image of first class. Daly gives that to the New Jersey Nets.

And suddenly there is a real wardrobe rivalry between Pat Riley and Chuck Daly and the potential for a real and healthy rivalry between the Nets and Knickerbockers. Daly referred to the Knicks as “the team across the river” when actually it’s the other way around.

The Knicks are the big-city darlings of the whole territory, and all of New Jersey is across the river. Image is very important in this business. It is a rivalry made for Seventh Avenue.

“I don’t know if they can stock up quick enough,” said assistant coach Brendan Suhr, who comes to the Nets as a shopping companion as well. “Chuck,” he said, “is a five-star shopper.”

A man does not get a reputation the equal of Riley and Daly overnight. When Mike Dunleavy took over the Los Angeles Lakers and appeared on the cover of Gentleman’s Quarterly before he’d coached even a game, Daly scoffed. “Anybody can do it for a month,” Daly said. “When you last eight or nine years like Riley and I have, then maybe you qualify.”

Daly is 61 years old and he’s only the best thing the Nets have done in their star-crossed history. You know the only uniform hanging in retirement in the arena is Julius Erving’s No. 32, and he never played for the Nets in New Jersey. They made the playoffs this season for the first time since 1986, and when they won a home game over Cleveland, attendance dropped from 14,500 to 11,000 for the second game.

You know the Nets had three players who mutinied at Bill Fitch’s instruction to return to a game.

When Daly and Willis Reed, the general manager who failed to support Fitch in crisis, discussed Nets personnel stories, Daly said, “Let me tell you mine.” Daly survived and thrived in Detroit, winning two championships and three Eastern Conference titles with players who threw the dirtiest looks in the league at each other and the coaches.

“This is crisis management, day to day,” Daly said. He managed to make his players pay attention and do what he told them to do.

“If Chuck Daly couldn’t coach, his high profile wouldn’t matter,” Reed said. “If a man can coach, personality and charisma comes along with it.”

That’s only theory. In the pragmatics of million-dollar contracts and multimillion petulance, image is the 2-by-4 the circus trainer uses to get the elephant’s attention. It isn’t sham. “There’s a saying,” Daly said, “that you can’t fool dogs, kids and NBA players.”

Often it seems those are all the same things on the Nets. Daly’s wardrobe would long since have been thrift-shop stuff if he couldn’t coach. But he has style.

Riley came to coach the Knicks with his rings, his Giorgio Armani suits, his Rodeo Drive hairstyle and players who often had been reluctant to pay attention. They could see he knew what he was talking about.

In this business, coaches are always rivals. Like Riley, Daly has a prominent shock of hair. Daly’s manner is easier, softer than Riley’s, which sometimes has a strident edge. Riley quotes Shakespeare from time to time; Thursday Daly referred to John R. Tunis. He’ll tell a story kidding himself.

He, however, concedes no edge in wardrobe to Riley. “He always goes with one maker,” Daly said. “He’s an Armani guy.” Daly goes to Canali and Hugo Boss; his Mani selected for the event is an offshoot of Armani.

“The problem is he’s taller, he’s younger and he’s thinner,” Daly said. “He looks terrific in anything he wears. I’m a little more diverse. GQ refers to it as ‘the 60s gangster type.’ I like different motifs, maybe a little more color.”

Daly did pay tribute to the job Riley did with the Knicks, particularly in eliminating the Pistons. “Across the river they did a remarkable job of moving up in the playoffs,” he said.

The Knicks have the one great player in Patrick Ewing. The Nets have more talented players. What Daly identified as his job is to create a work ethic and find “internal leadership.” The best teams police themselves beyond the dream of the coach. Magic Johnson noted that a lot of people look at Riley and see “those fancy suits” and don’t realize he has “those guys playing harder than they ever did in their lives.”

Daly transformed the Pistons into a demon defensive team, and defense is hard work. He gave them identity, and it sold tickets, too.

He wears his image on his sleeve. “I love blue,” Daly explained Thursday. “Nobody can look bad in blue. Or a tux. Trust me.”

This one time, he went to Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue and dickered with a sidewalk bookseller. He got $70 in books down to $40. When he came out of the store they agreed to $32 and had nothing smaller than a $100 bill.

“He said, ‘I’ll get change,’ ” Daly related. “I said, ‘You’ll never come back.’ ” The slick coach took a chance. “He did come back,” Daly said.

There must be a moral to the story. Daly, still with “a passion for coaching,” took the Nets’ job.

He and Riley and the Nets and Knicks can have a hell of a rivalry. The first night they all ought to wear tuxedos.