It’s Show Time for the Spurs

Despite all the Lakers’ barbs, the San Antonio Spurs haven’t fought back.

Now they’ll get their chance.

Tim Duncan had 32 points and 20 rebounds as San Antonio cruised past the Dallas Mavericks, 105-87, Monday night, sending the 1999 champion Spurs to the Western Conference finals against the defending champion Lakers.

“This is the series everybody wanted,” Duncan said. “I don’t know if we wanted it.”

The showdown, which starts Saturday at San Antonio, will be the first conference finals pitting the two previous NBA champions since 1985. It’s only the fifth such matchup in league history.

This one comes with some baggage to it. Laker center Shaquille O’Neal called the Spurs a WNBA team last summer and Coach Phil Jackson has said San Antonio’s title deserves an asterisk because it came in the lockout-shortened season.

“It’s a good series to hype up, isn’t it?” said San Antonio’s David Robinson, the target of some harsh words in O’Neal’s recent book. “They’ve been playing great basketball, their best of the year, and our level of basketball has been extremely high. This is exciting. No question this is a big series.”

Duncan and Robinson threw down dunks for San Antonio’s first two baskets and a three-point basket by Danny Ferry put the Spurs up by double digits within eight minutes.

The Spurs, who trailed by 17 early in losing Game 4, made 15 of their first 20 shots and led by at least 11 for the final three quarters.

“You could tell from the moment everyone walked in this morning that everyone was extremely focused,” said Antonio Daniels, who had 19 points and nine assists.

Except for Dirk Nowitzki, who scored a career-high 42 points and had 18 rebounds, the Mavericks resumed the inept shooting that cost them the first three games of the series. Michael Finley missed 16 of 17 shots and Dallas was 0 for 11 on three-pointers.

The Spurs’ Steve Kerr, who won several titles playing for Jackson in Chicago, doesn’t expect his former coach to fan the rivalry’s flames.

“He might kill us with kindness to change things up a bit,” Kerr said.

Madison Square Garden President Dave Checketts will resign today, WFAN Radio in New York reported.

Checketts, 45, has overseen the NBA’s New York Knicks, NHL’s Rangers, Women’s NBA’s Liberty and the MSG Network and Fox Sports New York cable sports networks, now units of Cablevision Systems Corp., since September 1994.

The Rangers missed the playoffs for the fourth consecutive season despite having an NHL-record $61 million payroll and the Knicks were beaten in the first round of the NBA playoffs, their earliest exit since 1991.

Geoff Petrie, the Sacramento Kings’ vice president of operations, was named NBA executive of the year. Petrie, 53, received nine votes. Billy King of the Philadelphia 76ers finished second with six votes in the selection by a panel of NBA executives. . . . Philadelphia 76er forward George Lynch had surgery after suffering a season-ending broken left foot in Sunday’s victory over the Toronto Raptors. . . . Washington Wizard forward Michael Smith, 29, was suspended for the opening game of the 2001-02 for driving while intoxicated on Feb. 4, the league said.