Rock of Ages?

Greatest team in history? The Bulls? That’s a laugh.

Catch this action: Michael Jordan drives into the middle, the defense collapses and he throws the ball back to Scottie Pippen.

Pippen has been in a long slump--you could call it “1996”--and has run away from his shots all spring. He steals a glance at the basket, as if afraid he’ll spot a gargoyle sitting on the rim, and whips the ball to Ron Harper.

Through Harper’s whole career, the book on him has been to let him shoot it from out there. Wisely, for this is the new, serious Harp, he looks for a teammate.

Dennis Rodman? No help there. He may be a demon rebounder and attention-grabber, but he’s useless with the basketball, so Harper keeps looking.

Now he’s down to Luc Longley, a lumbering Aussie who might actually shoot it, although it will take him a while. Or Harper can throw it back to Pippen and start all over again.

Get that? The Bulls have three guys on the floor who aren’t looking to shoot and this is their starting five. Call me a skeptic but I don’t think it’s very becoming for the greatest team in history to be tossing the ball around the perimeter like a hot potato.

The Bulls are still what Jordan used to call them to get them mad, “my supporting cast.” He may not have been the perfect one to say it but it was true then and it’s true now.

They have dominated a watered-down league, which is not their fault, but it doesn’t make them better than the ’67 Wilt Chamberlain 76ers or the ’72 Wilt-Jerry West Lakers or the Bill Russell Celtics of (pick a year from 1959 to 1966), either

“In all honesty,” says Laker Coach Del Harris, covering the finals as a radio broadcaster, “I don’t think they’re as good as those teams.

“I’m not one who says today’s teams are no good, the league is no good, it’s watered down. But at the same time, we can’t be total shills for the league. Let’s have some credibility.”

It happens every spring. If the season is ending, they must be canonizing someone. This process shouldn’t be taken seriously. A year ago, people were calling the Houston Rockets a great team and Robert Horry the new Pippen.

Since it’s the celebrity-saturated Bulls who are about to claim their fourth title in six years, the lemmings are heading toward the inevitable with even greater frenzy.

The Dallas Mavericks just hired Jim Cleamons, an untested assistant off the Bulls’ bench.

Cleamons will run the “triple post” offense, invented by another Bulls’ assistant, Tex Winter. Winter drew it up 30 years ago but it’s so hot now, you’d think someone just found it in a burning bush.

Dick Versace, a former coach of little accomplishment but good connections in TV, announced breathlessly that he had screened tape of it for the entire four hours it took to fly here. Winter confided that he really loves it when Jordan and Pippen are out of the game because the slugs on the second unit run the offense so wonderfully.

Winter would be coming out of this with a new job, himself, if he hadn’t broken in when they had to climb up the ladder to get the ball out of the peach basket. As it is, this is likely to get him into the Hall of Fame.

Of course, peers with intact memories remember him running his offense at Houston with Elvin Hayes, Rudy Tomjanovich and Calvin Murphy in the early ‘70s, going 51-78 and getting canned in a season and a half.

Then there’s the Cindy Crawford-Rodman liaison. And Bill Walton noting that Jordan has developed a “mental dominance” so awesome, the other team knows it’s beaten before it starts. You can see what we’re up against here.

In such a “fan-tastic” age, with popularity and press coverage increasing geometrically, it’s hard to remember that there was an NBA before 1980. But there was.

In 1967, when the Philadelphia 76ers finished their 68-13 season, there were 10 teams. They played the Boston Celtics, who had won eight consecutive titles and had five future Hall of Famers, nine times. The Celtics actually won the season series, 5-4.

In the ensuing 29 seasons, the league added 19 teams, almost tripling its size.

One need take nothing away from what the Bulls have accomplished in the ‘90s to note their timing was excellent. They emerged at a moment when the ‘80s powers, the Lakers, Celtics and Detroit Pistons, were all expiring of old age.

All the other great teams had foils--the Celtics and 76ers in the ‘60s, the Celtics and Lakers in the ‘80s--but the Bulls have had no one. If they close this one out, they will have beaten four different Western teams in the league finals and four different teams in the Eastern Conference finals.

Jordan, himself, doesn’t think this is even the best of the Bulls’ teams, voting instead for the 1992-93 club with Horace Grant, John Paxson, B.J. Armstrong and Bill Cartwright.

“It’s hard to say this is the best,” he says. “I think it’s the most amazing. I think the third [championship team] was the best because of the rhythm and the continuity and the time we spent together.

“I think the most amazing was this year because I’d never played with Dennis Rodman. I’d played against him. I never played with Luc Longley and some of the other guys for a full year. For us to blend and be successful, as we’ve been this year, is truly amazing.”

Amazing, surely. Great, absolutely. Finest of their time, who can argue with that?

But greatest? Nah. Let’s give history a break and leave the busts in the pantheon where they were.