COMMENTARY : These Finals are No Classic

At halftime Wednesday, these dogawful NBA Finals got some much needed class when Mark Messier walked out to center court carrying the Stanley Cup. We are grateful he knew better than to pass the Cup to any of the Knickleheads or misfiring Rockets. Some risks just aren’t worth taking.

Some NBA Finals, you wish could go on forever. Not this one. This one is the hoop equivalent of the Russian winter. This one, not even NBC and Bob and Marv can save. This one belongs on cable access, with Wayne and Garth, the sultans of schwing, presiding.

You can put Hakeem Olajuwon on Letterman, and you can put Cindy Crawford, Jerry Seinfeld and Madonna courtside, but if the participants can’t put the ball in the basket, or on the floor with anything resembling a reasonable dribble, what you’ve got is basketball the way the Rangers and Canucks would play it. Come to think of it, that might be more entertaining.

Kenny Smith, John Starks, Sam Cassell, Greg Anthony, Vernon Maxwell, Derek Harper, Hubert Davis. All nice people and no doubt kind to little children and the elderly. But has there ever been a worse group of guards in an NBA Finals? Impossible. More than any other position, it’s the guard play that gives a basketball game its elegance. We rest our case.

Maybe it’s just a case of the oh-so-hip NBA ensuring that life imitates art. Could it be that David Stern’s masters of marketing, always looking for that clever commercial tie-in, decided to fashion the 1994 Finals after the summer’s blockbuster movie, “The Flintstones”? With boulders instead of basketballs?

Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden, the Rangers won the Cup, Brian Leetch lofted the MVP trophy and the place was one giant Shangri-la. Then the stagehands rearranged the furniture and the Knicks and Rockets returned, and suddenly we were back in Bedrock, and the Stone Age. Yabba-dabba-doo?

If you think of the 1994 Finals as a chess match, the queens are Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing, and once they neutralize each other, as has happened, all you’ve got left are pawns. Charles Oakley is the best forward in this Finals, but would you rather have, him or the young James Worthy or Kevin McHale? Be serious.

Trailing two games to one in this best-of-seven series, the Knicks knew they had to win Game 4, seeing as how a loss would place not just the Rockets, but history squarely against them. No team has ever won the NBA Finals after being down three games to one.

The Knicks started out as if they were going to crush the Rockets and cruise to an easy victory. With the Knicks playing what seemed to be a triangle zone underneath and the Rockets unable to get near the paint save for some off-balance Maxwell heaves, the Knicks led, 17-2, with just over four minutes left in the first quarter. The Rockets, like so many Knicks opponents, appeared to be totally discombobulated.

That changed. It changed because of Olajuwon. It was Olajuwon who was heard Tuesday to proclaim that if the Rockets got a 3-1 series lead, the Knicks would choke. The gracious Nigerian later said that his remark was misinterpreted, but that didn’t keep the local media from riding it like a moon rocket.

Olajuwon, the league MVP, was his brilliant self after a slow start, finishing with 32 points, including 14 points (5 of 6 from the field) in the fourth quarter. Ewing fouled out with 1 minute, 13 seconds left. He finished with 16 points and 15 rebounds, but had another bizarre shooting night, only 8 of 28 from the field. And while it seems impossible that any team could hope to win the NBA championship with its best offensive player shooting so miserably, here at the Flintstones Finals, the modern dictates of the game need not apply.

In the end, the Knicks did what they do best: survive. With Oakley laying the wood on every Rocket and Anthony “Brick” Mason walling off the rest, the Knicks outlasted Olajuwon’s one-man show to escape with an 91-82 victory to square the series at two games, with Game 5 Friday night here in Bedrock.

That is good news for New Yorkers, who are dreaming of becoming the first to win both the Stanley Cup and the NBA championship in the same spring.

But it’s bad news for those of us who would like to see the plug pulled on this series, and the sooner, the better. Reruns are the dreary staple of summer TV, but the NBA would be better served by serving up those than this ahem, highly original presentation. The powers-that-be can hype this series as they would any third-rate mini-series, but that doesn’t change the reality. And the reality is that the NBA Finals have never looked worse. In 1994, Bedrock is no place to be.