The Finals Offer a Little Something for Everybody

Cliches R Us, or the NBA finals, it’s an overwrought, semi-civilized kind of world . . .

So we leave the home of basketball (it says) for the home of glitz, where beautiful people applaud between sips of their cafe latte with Evian chasers as the Indiana Pacers, who aren’t supposed to be here and have even bigger surprises planned, finish with the Lakers, who just found out that Game 5 is over and they slept through it.

A grumpy national press corps, which was sort of hoping to spend Father’s Day at home, gets set to record the event, deify the winners, shoot the losers and, of course, name another successor to Michael Jordan.

As everyone knows by now, the standards for the new MJ are tough. You have to be about 6 feet 6 and do something good in a nationally televised game.

Kobe Bryant? Vince Carter? Devean George?

It doesn’t matter because he won’t soon win six titles and six NBA finals MVPs, etc., so as fast as the new guy goes up, he’s coming down, in 120-point type:

“(Fill in name) No Air Apparent.”

It has been an OK finals, which is a surprise since the Eastern Conference was thought to have gone out of business when Jordan left. But the Pacers are tough guys who can shoot, even if running and jumping is no longer possible for all of them, and the Lakers still have a measurable pratfall quotient.

Of course, Laker fans know Game 6 is ceremonial. The problem is, the Pacers don’t. They made 27 of 57 three-point shots in the three games at Indianapolis--that’s 47%--and if they keep that up, the parade’s off until at least Thursday.

The finals have had one Game 7 since 1988, so if the longshot comes through, it would be a rare break for David Stern, who now is paying for his genius reputation, as in, if you’re so smart, how come you can’t make the ratings go back up?

Not that Stern can’t handle the scrutiny. He convened his annual finals press conference--or as he put it, “Russ [Granik, deputy commissioner] and I will present ourselves for batting practice”-- the morning after Game 3, perhaps on the theory the writers would be so groggy, it would only take a little spin and they’d drop like tenpins.

“Prime-time ratings are down, you know, I think 50% or some amount over the last several years,” Stern said, “so we think we’re down less than prime time.”

Of course, NBA ratings have only been going down for the last two years, not seven. Through the ‘90s, the league enjoyed a special cachet, gaining ratings while everyone else’s numbers deteriorated, such as the NFL’s, or nose-dived, such as the NCAA basketball tournament’s.

But then You-Know-Who left. Let’s face it, not even he could play forever.

Now there’s a process the league must endure, as it builds stature into new players. Tim Duncan and David Robinson were imbued with some last season (not that it wound up meaning much when they went back to playing 82 games, as someone around here suggested recently).

If the Lakers win, Shaquille O’Neal and Bryant will go to a new level and the audience will have someone to identify with or, mostly, not, since rooting against Los Angeles teams is the nation’s No. 2 pastime, after rooting against New York teams.

Stern is now busy on many fronts: the WNBA, NBA.com, NBA.com TV, the forthcoming developmental league known as the NBDL. One is reminded of a domestically embattled American president climbing on Air Force One and flying abroad, where he’s still treated like a potentate.

Everything in the NBA now is thorny. The union opposes anything Stern proposes, on the theory that he must be up to something.

Last spring, Stern announced a promising plan to discourage young players from going pro. The union leadership signaled it was OK. Then the union membership met on an island in the Caribbean and went thumbs down, ignoring its own interest in keeping a dozen ill-prepared 19-year-olds from putting a dozen dues-paying thirtysomethings out of work each year.

Then there’s the actual NBA game, which is still static, over-legislated and gimmick-laden. The problem is, no one is sure what to do about it.

Miami Heat Coach Pat Riley had the bravest idea: eliminating three-point baskets, which actually encourage coaches to play in the half court. Riley said that when he brought it up last spring, everyone got looks of horror on their faces.

It would be nice to experiment with throwing out the zone-defense rules too. However, like American politics, the NBA is kind of a checked-and-balanced system, in which it’s hard to do anything very different.

The WNBA, of course, is just waiting for innovation, like the league’s centralized control over contracts.

“This is the way David would do it if he could start all over again,” said a league source. “I think that’s the reason he spends so much time on the WNBA. In the NBA, it’s almost like, ‘What can I do about it?’ ”

Nevertheless, the NBA’s long-range prospects are good. Basketball is still strong on the school level. The NBA hasn’t had to take out ads, encouraging kids to play its game, like baseball’s RBI program or the NFL’s “Play Football” campaign. The NBA has taken its labor hit and now it’s someone else’s turn.

In the near term, well, who said it would be easy?

This league has lost a lot: Jordan, Magic Johnson and now Charles Barkley and Larry Bird, the last links to the golden era of the ‘80s.

In the ‘80s, the league was on the rise but everyone wasn’t making $100 million a year yet and Stern had good reason to brag about how gracious and beloved his stars were.

Now, we’re down to Bird, the Human Throwback, in his last days before resuming his golf/fishing career, but what fun days they are.

Question: “Larry, Phil Jackson just said you guys are whining about the referees. Are you whiners?”

Bird: “Aw, sometimes.”

Last week, the Chicago Tribune’s Sam Smith, president of the Professional Basketball Writers Assn., perhaps under the impression he was elected to do something, hosted a seminar with several league officials including Granik. It was titled “Why the players hate us and we hate the players,” although Smith, under sharp questioning from one of his constituents, admitted this was an exaggeration, “like our coverage.”

Of course, there are many more reporters now--a “media beast,” a league official called it--with the NBA so much bigger. Tensions between reporters and the people they cover are as old as time, and pumping a few billion dollars into the system hasn’t simplified anything.

Until Johnson retired in 1991, he was the greatest thing that ever happened to a sportswriter, arriving hours before games, chatting amiably and animatedly with anyone.

Five years later when he came back, everything was different. Beat reporters now did pregame notebooks and there were cable TV guys and talk radio guys. There were no more chats, only group interviews. Johnson started holing up in the training room and coming out the last five minutes before the reporters had to leave.

On the other hand, the worst guy in the NBA will only sneer at you and things are still more peaceful than in baseball, where someone still might try to part a reporter’s hair.

In other words, it looks like a go for the next century, challenges and all.

Now to see which town gets to hold the parade. Not that we can turn out as many people as Indy, but this is L.A., we’ll catch the highlights on TV.

This thing has to end some time. Doesn’t it?