Don’t Look Now, but Nets Are Rising From Swamp

From the New Jersey Nets’ arena, you can see the Manhattan skyline. But from the top of the Empire State Building, all you see are some blurry structures amid the marshes, as if in the New Yorker cartoon where all the states across the Hudson River are jumbled together.

When Coach John Calipari arrived, he used to talk about the Nets’ glamour, being so close to the bright lights, until he found out that as far as anyone in New York cared, they could have been in Topeka.

Nevertheless, against all odds and after many mistakes, Calipari has “changed the culture,” just as he promised.

The Nets--the team Rollie Massimino agreed to coach, only to quit after the news conference; the team Larry Brown took to the playoffs, only to quit before they started; the team with the ever-quarreling owners known as “the Secaucus Seven;” the team of Derrick Coleman, Benoit Benjamin and Yinka Dare--are now the hope of Gotham.

Young and headstrong, Calipari knew only one speed (fast) and one way to mess up (in the grand style). He told breathless stories of his UMass miracle to hardened pros--and before the Syracuse game, I told them--who rolled their eyes. He big-timed the local press in the NCAA manner--I’m far too busy to meet with you now--which retaliated by biting him in the butt, publishing his offhand complaint to one writer that another was a “ . . . Mexican idiot.”

Calipari wound up looking like the idiot, but it was standard venting. People under ongoing scrutiny say impolite things about the press privately and, if the truth be told, we say impolite things about them.

At one point last season, Calipari was reportedly checking out a fast return to campus and by the end, Net President Michael Rowe was saying privately it was OK with him.

Now they have a reconfigured, talented team with a rookie, Keith Van Horn, who has “star” written all over him and plenty of young guns to go with him. Calipari has shown he learns fast. Everyone says he’s better.

Of course, when you come in as the league’s presiding wild man, you’ve got a ways to go.

Calipari is a man of great passions. His center, the noted loose cannon, Jayson Williams, notes that nothing is ever just OK with Calipari, it’s the best coffee, or the best hotel.

Similarly, Calipari isn’t given to minor disappointments but to fuming blowups, as in last week’s upset at the hands of the road-weary Clippers, when his team gave up 119 points and he kept bouncing, bug-eyed, off the bench, stomping to halfcourt to call time out, screaming at Van Horn--who, he later said, “scored 26 points and gave up 40”--at Kerry Kittles and twice at Kendall Gill.

“I’ve learned to live with it,” Williams says. “Some things you’ve got to zone out. You know, the other night when we came back on the plane, we were all in the back, mimicking him--’Timeout! Great play! Oh, you . . . ‘ After we won at Charlotte, everybody was feeling good about themselves. Tonight, nobody will mimic him.

“I think some guys--’I don’t have a problem with it.’ ”

And the other guys?

“Well,” Williams says, rolling his eyes in the direction of Gill, “speak to him.

“I think me and [Calipari] have a line we don’t cross with each other. I’m going to go in and work as hard as I can for him and I make some mistakes so I know he’s going to blow his stack on me, so . . . What can I do? I shoot from the hip and this is basketball. There’s a lot more important things.

“Yeah, he’s better than he was last year. That’s the way Cal is, I don’t care what you do to Cal. I see people saying, ‘Wow, he treats them . . . ‘--you’re not going to change Cal. That’s the way Cal’s going to be. One day, he’s going to be--yuahhhh!”

At this point, Williams is pantomiming a man having a heart attack.

“Not with me but the other players--these guys have big egos also, and make a lot of money, also. You gotta be careful or you get six-inch fingers wrapped around your neck.”

The animated Calipari and the expressive Williams had a running feud last season, capped by Williams’ going public in a hilarious diary published in GQ, but they made up and the truce is holding. The test will come next summer when Williams, who is as popular locally as only a free-spirited New York native could be, becomes a free agent.

To this point, no Net has died of embarrassment or done a Latrell Sprewell on Calipari. The mood is upbeat, give or take the occasional debacle.

They aren’t Gotham’s darlings yet, but time is on their side. It’s hard not to like an engaging bunch of youngsters and a coach with his heart on his Armani sleeve, who isn’t afraid to demand greatness. Just pray they don’t kill each other in the process.

FACES AND FIGURES

The Knicks are still treading water--but have played eight of 11 at home since losing Patrick Ewing. The fans are still coming, but they’re not cheering as before. When the Knicks beat Seattle, it was so quiet, Coach Jeff Van Gundy acknowledged it: “We beat the best team in the league and the crowd was sort of, you know, dead. So I think expectations on the outside have changed.”

Buzzard alert: Phil Jackson, an ex-Knick, has always talked about returning, perhaps unaware that Knick officials, whose team he has sneered at through the Chicago-New York rivalry of the ‘90s, don’t like him. Before their last game, Jackson came up with a can’t-miss proposal: What if Michael Jordan came? Jackson was too modest to say it, but Jordan would presumably want his favorite coach too. “Let’s put it this way,” Van Gundy said. “If he can bring Michael Jordan to New York, I’ll be collecting my paycheck at home.”

Better not let the Knicks’ brass know about this one: Late in the Bulls’ one-point victory over the Knicks, Jackson yelled for Steve Kerr to go in. Getting no response, an agitated Jackson yelled for Kerr again. Finally assistant Bill Cartwright whispered that Kerr was already in the game. The players at the end of the bench broke up.

Charles Barkley, in a long-running rift with teammate Clyde Drexler, said the Rockets were “Team Turmoil.” Drexler said he had no problem with Barkley but added, “If Charles would put as much effort into playing basketball as he does into running his mouth, we’d be a lot better off.” Barkley, of course, then recanted and said the media had blown everything out of proportion. . . . Welcome to America: Vlade Divac, on signing his first Laker contract for $500,000 a year: “When Marc [Fleisher, his agent] told me about the money, I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘How am I going to spend that much money?’ ” Looks as if he found a way. Vlade, soon to be a free agent, now says he would like $10 million a year.

Nugget veteran Bryant Stith on the atmosphere in Denver: “The Broncos’ success has really been able to deflect some of the attention away from our poor season, especially with all the hype surrounding them going to the Super Bowl. That gives us a chance to kind of lie in the wings and take our beatings quietly, without any further magnification.”

See if this sounds familiar: Brian Williams, after the Pistons’ victory over the Clippers: “Their owner [Donald T. Sterling] has too much money to be so cheap. Andy Roeser [Clipper vice president] said to my agent the other day, ‘You would never have signed with us for the money you signed with in Detroit.’ And I was like, ‘You’re damn right, I wouldn’t. When you play for the Clippers, you need battle pay. That right there ought to hike it up 20%.’ ”

Said fellow former Clipper Malik Sealy: “The fans were wonderful and I got a chance to show people that I could still play. We built something there. Each year, we steadily got better. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to continue it. You always hear the expression, ‘Well, that’s the Clippers.’ You don’t realize how bad it is sometimes until you leave. It’s no fun playing for the team that’s the butt of everybody’s jokes.”

Congratulations to the one and only Chickie: Here’s to the next 3,000.