Spurs Want a Better Advantage at Home

The Spurs have brought the NBA finals to San Antonio, only to have the basketball championship series played in a football stadium.

Home for the Spurs is the Alamodome. At least for the moment.

It’s a cavernous place where seats are plentiful and tickets are cheap by NBA standards. The Spurs would like to move into another more profitable facility as soon as possible.

Winning the NBA finals over the New York Knicks could ultimately help the franchise--the only major league sports team in town--gain public support for a new taxpayer-funded arena.

That could prevent the Spurs from leaving town, something team owners insist they don’t plan to do but a reality in the big-money world of sports that can’t be ignored.

“We want to stay in San Antonio,” club chairman Peter Holt said. “We’re going to do everything we can to make that happen.”

Hardly a glamour team cheered on by celebrities, the San Antonio Spurs are an unconventional squad struggling to survive in a blue-collar city. They’re a team searching for national identity and local respect. Nothing underscores that more than the Spurs’ arena predicament.

After playing in the old HemisFair Arena, built in the late 1960s, the Spurs of the former American Basketball Assn. moved into the new Alamodome in 1993 with the idea it would be a temporary arrangement.

In the Alamodome, a huge indoor stadium that can seat up to 65,000 for football, the basketball court is located at one end of the facility with a massive blue curtain blocking off the rest of the building. Up to 40,000 can be seated for a basketball game if all the dome’s upper decks are open. Sometimes seats near the rafters are sold for $5 or $8.

Team executives have floated ideas for using tax money to help build a smaller arena built for basketball and equipped with lucrative luxury suites, something the Spurs contend they need to profit in the NBA and to pay the big contract second-year star Tim Duncan will probably soon require.

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The book on “How To Beat The Spurs” is not a voluminous one, which is what Knick Coach Jeff Van Gundy learned when he started researching his next assignment.

“I asked our video coordinator, ‘Pull up all their losses. I want to see the teams that beat them in the last three months.’ And he gives me this little stack of tapes,” Van Gundy said. “Baaaad sign.”

Another daunting task awaited them as the New York Knicks had their first practice in preparation for for series, which starts Wednesday night at the Alamodome.

How does a New York team missing two frontline starters, Patrick Ewing and Larry Johnson, stand a chance of beating a San Antonio team with two 7-footers, David Robinson and Tim Duncan, who have confounded even the healthiest of teams?

“Other guys are going to have to--that old cliche--step up. Do a little more in a lot of different areas. We still have enough guys to play,” Van Gundy said.

But exactly how many guys they’ll have, at least in Game 1, remained uncertain. Johnson, who sprained his knee in the clinching Game 6 against Indiana, said he plans to play sometime in the series even if he can’t go in Game 1.

If Johnson can’t play in Game 1, the Knicks would be expected to use a starting lineup of Chris Dudley at center, Kurt Thomas and Latrell Sprewell at forward and Allan Houston and Charlie Ward at guard. That would leave Marcus Camby and 41-year-old Herb Williams as the only big men coming off the bench.

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NBA Finals

New York Knicks vs. San Antonio Spurs

Game 1: Wednesday at San Antonio, 6

Game 2: Friday at San Antonio, 6

Game 3: June 21 at New York, 6

Game 4: June 23 at New York, 6

*Game 5: June 25 at New York, 6

*Game 6: June 27 at San Antonio, 4:30

*Game 7: June 29 at San Antonio, 6

Games on Channel 4, all times Pacific

*If necessary