Jordan Retirement Blessing for Knicks : NBA: Their road through the Eastern Conference figures to be a lot easier without league’s top player.

The New York Knicks have added free agent forward Anthony Bonner, they have a healthier Rolando Blackman and they’re better prepared for Coach Pat Riley’s boot camp. But those are not the key ingredients that have made them the odds-on favorite to win the NBA title. It ain’t Lewis Geter, either.

Although nary a Knick will admit it, there must have been at least a few sighs in New York when Michael Jordan hung up his shoes in Chicago Wednesday.

Less than 24 hours after Jordan’s retirement announcement, the Knicks assembled at SUNY-Purchase, the site of their practice facility, which is a couple of basketball passes from the Greenwich line. The Knicks were on hand for pictures and to meet informally with the local media.

Afterward, they went to Charleston, S.C., where Riley and his staff will brief them on the first week of training camp.

The Knicks said they were prepared for Riley’s notorious regimen. Such wasn’t the case last year, when guard Doc Rivers found himself going from practice directly to bed and forward Charles Smith found that his idea of conditioning was vastly underrated.

“I don’t know that a Riley camp can ever be considered easy,” Rivers said, “but at least this year we don’t have to learn all the plays.”

Rivers and Smith were two of seven players the Knicks used to beef up their roster a year ago. The Knicks won 60 games in the regular season -- best in the Eastern Conference. Their goal of winning a championship ended when they fell to the Jordan-led Chicago Bulls in the six-game conference finals.

Now that the greatest player on Earth has removed himself from the floor, are not the Knicks the best team in the land -- or, at least, the conference?

“We just look at it as another title chase,” Smith said. “Whoever comes in our way, we want to beat. That’s the bottom line. No matter what happens during the course of the season, no matter what happens to other teams, no matter what happens to the Bulls, the Hornets, the Pacers or whoever, it doesn’t matter to us. That’s not part of our job.”

If the Knicks were this close to beating the three-time defending champions last spring, doesn’t it follow that the Knicks have made up this ground by virtue of Jordan’s departure?

“That’s a fan’s thought,” Smith said. “Here’s what it is to us: I remember playing Chicago last year, in that last game, when we wanted it so bad that we got separated a little bit. And here they were, moving the ball around boom-boom-boom, open shot, boom-boom-boom, open shot.

“See, those players have been together so long in that system, they’re still going to be good.”

To that end, the Knicks feel that they have naturally improved.

“In college, you have that close-knit feeling; everyone knows each other,” Blackman said. “This year, we have that same kind of feeling. You come into the locker room, you know everyone there, you’re comfortable with one another. I’m a firm believer that when things go well off the court, things will go a lot smoother on the court.”

Even Patrick Ewing, a fellow Dream Teamer and friend of Jordan, was terse when it came to bantering about Air Jordan.

“If he feels like it’s time for him to retire,” Ewing said, “then I wish him luck. They still have Scottie Pippen and they made some additions and they’re still world champions.

“Us, we still have pretty much the same team. We’ve just got to improve on what we did last year. The younger players are going to have to develop and become more consistent. We’re just going to have to get the job done.”

It was left to Rivers to comment on the Knicks’ new potential.

“I think this team is going to be one of the most improved teams in the NBA,” he said. “We didn’t make a (major) move, but we are better chemistry-wise. We’ve had an entire year to grow together, and I think that’s going to make us much better.”