OFF BROADWAY

It was Everyman’s dream. The agony and exhilaration, the struggle with his bosses, the Garden crowd chanting his name, the breathless run to the finals, and when it was over, he thought he would be different somehow.

But the next day, Jeff Van Gundy got up and went to the office as he always did, come triumph or disaster or looming tabloid scandal. He says it was exactly . . . the . . . same.

It’s true, especially for Knick coaches, that nothing really changes.

Five months later, the magic is gone and the struggle has been renewed. The Knicks are finishing a shoot-around in America West Arena. Van Gundy chats with a reporter as Patrick Ewing, who is out with a sore Achilles’ tendon, gets off his cell phone and prepares to take the floor with his physical therapist.

“Jeff,” says Ewing, grinning sheepishly, “you have to do your interview outside.”

“Why?” says Van Gundy. “Are we bothering you?”

“I’m going to work out now,” says Ewing.

Van Gundy takes it outside. In the traveling garrison state that is the Knicks, Ewing’s rehab is secret. Outsiders can’t even watch him jog, nor will they receive updates. When he is back, he’ll be back. Until then, it may look as if he’s with them but he’s really in his preferred state of splendid isolation, safe in Patrick-land.

It’s another perfect day in Knick hell. The team is struggling. They’re headed for Golden State for Latrell Sprewell’s reunion with his beloved P.J. Carlesimo. Sprewell is being asked about it every hour on the hour and keeping everyone happy with quotes about dismantling the Warrior franchise for what they did to him, etc.

Then there’s the new sex scandal, as word spreads that a grand jury is alleging a troupe of strippers entertained Knick players at a 1997 training camp in Charleston, S.C.

In any other NBA city, this would be known as chaos, with phones ringing off the hook and the front office gulping tranquilizers.

Among the Knicks, it’s just known as Friday.

An official from Cablevision, the corporate parent, recently confided to one of the tabloid reporters that the suits actually love this stuff, the soap opera, the crisis atmosphere, the huge headlines on the back pages.

It sells $1,500 courtside seats, and, more important, the software, the Madison Square Garden network and Cablevision. Without having won a title in the ‘90s, or the ‘80s, with the highest prices in Christendom, the Knicks are still the hottest ticket in New York, having sold the Garden out for every game since 1993.

Of course, from Van Gundy’s perspective, the drama isn’t as amusing.

“The good part for me is, I was an assistant for 6 1/2 years in New York for four different coaches, three of whom had won 700 games,” he says.

“And all of them at the end. It was bad. It got ugly. So, if it could get ugly for guys who are all going to be in the Hall of Fame, Pat Riley, Don Nelson, John MacLeod, if it can end ugly for them, if it can be really hard on them. . . .

“That 6 1/2 years was really like an eye-opening experience, all the extra stuff that made that job unique. And the job is unique, no matter what other people in other cities believe about how tough it is in their cities. Everybody’s got their own pressures but that job is unique.”

Try “Herculean.” An optimist would say they’re rebuilding an aging team on the fly. A cynic would say they’re peddling an ever-deteriorating product at ever-inflated prices.

In either case, it isn’t easy, and failure isn’t forgiven. The opera ain’t over till someone is dragged off the stage with a pitchfork in him.

Six months after the dream faded away, the song remains the same.

Who You Calling Paranoid?

There’s no doubt, coaches are the most paranoid people in the world. They are. Some would say that’s negative. I would say, that’s rightfully so.

--Jeff Van Gundy

It’s true, it isn’t paranoia if they’re really out to get you.

It’s self-defense.

The Knicks started the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season coming off a virtual tie for No. 7 in the East. Of course, they beat Miami again in the first round of the playoffs after Larry Johnson had enticed Alonzo Mourning into swinging at him and missing Game 5, but that didn’t fool anyone. They were old.

MSG President Dave Checketts and General Manager Ernie Grunfeld, who were nothing if not risk-takers, traded venerable warhorse Charles Oakley to Toronto for promising-disappointing Marcus Camby, and John Starks et al for the notorious Sprewell--whom Checketts had said the Knicks would never touch. Now, they were way past face and safe moves.

Of course, Van Gundy, assembling this polyglot at camp, didn’t have to be told for whom the setup had been set up. He could see the likeliest victim in the mirror when he shaved.

Van Gundy was starting his fourth season, which is late in the life expectancy of a Knick coach. In the beginning, he’d been a surprisingly popular choice with his anything-but-charismatic presence, the un-Riley, a relief after the tense reign of Riley and Nelson’s half-season of internecine strife.

Riley looked like a movie star and acted like a czar. Van Gundy made self-deprecating jokes--”That’s why I relate to John Starks. I went to four colleges in five years too. I started out at Yale. My mom still says I’m the only guy to transfer from an Ivy League school over playing time. . . . Then I went to Brockport State, where I played for my dad one year, got him fired.”--and had been in New York long enough to know better than to try steamrollering the press in the No. 1 press city in the world.

Van Gundy was friendly with the beat writers so, inevitably, his doubts filtered down to them. If everyone thought Camby was soft (“Cotton Camby”) and wondered if he could work to the Knick standard, so did Van Gundy--and it got out.

So they embarked on the season, with the team struggling, and Camby out of the rotation, and Sprewell out of the starting lineup, and Ewing getting hurt, and reports circulating Van Gundy was about to be fired, and Ewing backing Van Gundy, and Checketts firing Grunfeld, instead, and the team righting itself and beginning its playoff run, and reports circulating that Checketts had contacted Phil Jackson, and Checketts denying them, and Checketts admitting he had lied.

By then, the press had fractured and the rifts were crystalline. There were Jeff Guys, Dave Guys, former Ernie Guys and the others, who weren’t getting the inside story from anyone and were doubly skeptical of everyone.

No one’s reputation survived that cross-fire. Van Gundy was now held by critics to be a “Riley clone,” a devious schemer (“Treacherous Jeff,” the New York’s Post’s Pete Vecsey called him). Van Gundy was, to be sure, a Riley guy. He played games and went far afield, looking for motivational techniques like labeling Michael Jordan “a con man.” He seemed to have a healthy self-interest in his own survival, besides, like everyone else in his snakepit-organization.

Not that any of it held the team back.

Amazingly, in the midst of a clinic in dysfunctionalism, the Knicks surged. They won Game 5 in Miami on Allan Houston’s last-second shot that bounced in off the front rim, swept the Atlanta Hawks, then lost Ewing with a torn Achilles’--still got past the Indiana Pacers.

“We just got to where we were playing so hard and so together, it almost didn’t matter who was playing at that point for us,” Van Gundy says. “ . . . I don’t think it happens too much in pro sports, where everybody has the common goal in mind, instead of their own agendas.

“Then we were aided by some great shots, Allan’s shot, Larry Johnson’s shot [the four-point play that beat Indiana in the pivotal Game 3.] But there was a great belief and when you have that, sometimes you get a chance to make those shots. . . .

“It’s what keeps you in coaching. Because there’s so many bad times now in coaching. You’ve got things off the court, you’ve got many times when guys don’t play hard or don’t play together and there are agendas that are splitting the team up.

“But you live for those moments as a coach when you see a group really . . . ‘overachieve’ is such an overused term. . . . Our guys, they came from so many different backgrounds and playing experiences, guys who had never won playoff games, and then they’re in the mix, in the Eastern Conference finals and doing great things. It was great to see, it really was.”

They finally succumbed in the finals. Their run should have been remembered as something rare and remarkable but the Dave Guys said that was how it would have been all along if Van Gundy had played Sprewell and Camby, etc.

So it ended that way, a matter of debate, depending on your perspective, almost happily.

A Team for Spree

This is how it is these days.

When Ewing is out and the Knicks are winning, everyone writes that it is no longer his team.

When Ewing is out and the team is struggling, everyone writes about how long it will be until he is back.

With or without Ewing, however, the Knicks seem to have crossed the line--and are now Sprewell’s team. When they started 3-0, there were suggestions the young guys weren’t holding their breaths till Ewing’s return.

Sprewell may still have a horrible reputation and may still be capable of extreme gracelessness, as in his return to Golden State where he rejected P.J. Carlesimo’s peace overture and vented his rage, but he has also become the most gracious of the Knicks and the most candid. In the dressing room and on the floor, it’s Sprewell who sets the tone and the pace.

Of course, going into tonight’s game against the Clippers, he’s shooting 38%. The Knicks are 6-6 and 48-47 in the games Ewing has missed the last three seasons.

Ewing, looking distressed at the pace of his rehabilitation, recently blurted his doubts about the Knick medical staff--”I’m not going to cry over spilled milk but they told me it wouldn’t tear. Well, guess what, I tore it.” Checketts took him to dinner, to assure him he was still a valued member of the team.

“You know what, I’m just tired of defending him,” Van Gundy says. “I’ve grown to where I let the facts speak for themselves.

“He’s really been hurt for three straight years. From the wrist injury to the Achilles’ and now the carry-over of the Achilles’. He’s starting the third year basically where he hasn’t been with us. Or he’s been with us intermittently. We’ve been, in that time period, one game over .500. Some people would say that’s bad but if you take a Hall of Fame, top-50 player out of your lineup--like David Robinson in San Antonio, they won 21 games. So our guys have done a good job. But this whole notion that somehow you remove this great player and you’re better is ludicrous. . . .

“The thing is, Patrick has sacrificed. His shots have gone steadily down. . . . I feel badly for him because it’s gotten to the point where I think he’s really been worn down mentally by the constant discussion, constant labeling of being selfish, when he’s been everything but. He’s totally changed how he’s played over the last three or four years, as far as shot attempts and things of that nature. . . .

“Because he’s not an easy interview or more accessible, he’s taken unwarranted shots by the media. Not because of that but they transfer that over to, is he any good?”

The thing is, someone once taught Ewing never to concede anything. When he does submit to interviews, he always insists his role hasn’t changed one iota, nor will it ever.

On the floor, it’s different. In interviews, it isn’t.

“I just wish he would say to everybody, ‘I have sacrificed. Please look and watch the game,’ Van Gundy says. “ . . . He is stubborn but to me, it’s not in a negative way. I mean with me, he’s coachable. But what he doesn’t want to be is, coached by outsiders. He doesn’t want to be told by outsiders what he should be doing.”

Boy, is he in the wrong place, then. But then, he has always been, hasn’t he?

Given time and a recuperated Ewing, the Knicks could well make this work. But who knows if they will have both, or either? It’s New York, where the opera ain’t ever over, no matter who sings.