At Least Knicks Now Get to Be Happy Losers

Knicks in hell: Now that’s entertainment.

Looks like that morose little guy they rode out of town on a wave of ingratitude could coach, after all. The Knicks were 11-10 under Jeff Van Gundy, 4-12 since. As Joni Mitchell noted, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone?”

They had Pat Riley, but he fled when he saw the sun setting on his empire, after which he became known in New York, or at least in the New York Post, as Pat the Rat.

They had Riley’s disciple, Van Gundy, who prolonged the illusion of contention for five seasons. When he walked, the Madison Square Garden gross was up to $1million per game and only the Yankees’ Joe Torre had been running a Gotham team longer, but he was skewered like shish kebab.

Said a New York Daily News headline: “It Was Time for Van To Go

Said a Post headline: “Finally, the Little Whiner Is Out of Here.”

Marcus Camby, whom Van Gundy often zinged, said it was “like night and day” under interim Coach Don Chaney.

“We still work hard, but at the end of the day, there’s more smiles around here now,” said Camby. “It’s been more laid back.... Hopefully, that can be a good sign and guys can just relax and play their games.”

Wrote the Daily News’ Mike Lupica: “Van Gundy had clearly gotten sick of coaching this team, lecturing them--and us--about how they hardly ever gave him an effort worthy of all his preparation.... [He] has been around pro basketball for little more than a decade. Chaney, once one of the great defensive guards of all time, has been around for more than 30 years and coached three teams before the Knicks and won a coach-of-the-year award in Houston, which is frankly one more coach-of-the-year than Van Gundy won.... Chaney deserved another chance. These Knick players at least deserved a chance to show they are better than their former coach said they were.”

Unfortunately, Chaney and the Knick players got that chance.

The Knicks were gritty overachievers, not great players. However, there’d been a debate on that point since the incredible Knick-versus-Knick spring of 1999, when they made their miracle run to the NBA Finals in the midst of an organizational shootout, with Dave Checketts loyalists insisting this was actually a talented team, which Patrick Ewing and/or Van Gundy slowed down.

Chaney, buying the myth, wanted to run and get easy baskets, which old-line guys used to say was “the name of the game in the NBA.”

It worked with Chaney’s Boston teams in the late ‘60s, which were the best, deepest and most cohesive around.

It doesn’t work for the Knicks, who have modest talent and now aren’t even cohesive.

Checketts, who had ideas, if increasingly desperate ones, is gone. He was replaced by neophyte son-of-the-boss James Dolan, who says he knows nothing about basketball but is aces at delegating.

Last week Dolan went on the road, an ominous sign. Hardly impressed, the Knicks went 0-3 and, worse, seemed to accept their lowly status.

On the charter after their loss in San Antonio, Dolan strummed a guitar. Maybe he does that when he’s thinking, or maybe he was trying to impress the guys. In Van Gundy’s time, noted the Daily News’ Frank Isola, the young scion might have taken his ax home in splinters.

In Houston, where Moochie Norris dropped a game-winning three-pointer on the Knicks, Shandon Anderson joked around afterward. Latrell Sprewell, customarily somber after losses, was described as “giddy.”

In Dallas, they trailed by 31 and lost by 22.

Nor is their future brighter. In 2003, when other rebuilding teams will court free agents Tim Duncan, Antonio McDyess, Jason Kidd, et al, the Knicks still will be locked into an $80-million payroll, far over the cap and deep in luxury tax territory.

Nothing lasts forever, not even the hottest ticket in the biggest town. Not even if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men try to make it so and all the kingdom’s newspapers play along.

Not that Van Gundy isn’t, at last, gaining appreciation. At a home game, where the Nets beat the Knicks by 18, a fan came dressed as a milk carton with a picture of Van Gundy and the words: “Missing: Have you seen this coach?”

A Post headline even noted recently: “All We Want for X-mas Is Our VG Back.”

Heart-warming. Just late, is all.

Faces And Figures

I don’t like to get into that gnashing of teeth because “our team” is getting jobbed on something as “monumental” as All-Star game selections but: Elton Brand’s 18 points and 11 rebounds a game, 51% shooting, exemplary work ethic and participation in the Clippers’ rise should make him a mandatory selection, even in a conference loaded with power forwards.... By the way, who in the NBA’s public relations office left popular, flashy and not unaccomplished Darius Miles off the all-sophomore team, taking such plow horses as Marcus Fizer and Chris Mihm? That one looks like a sop to the Bulls and Cavaliers, who have little enough, since another Clipper, Quentin Richardson, was named to the squad.

At Allen Iverson’s urging, the 76ers donned headbands and went 3-1 before losing at home to Orlando, whereupon Iverson decided solidarity had gone far enough and issued a garden-variety complaint about Larry Brown’s game plan. Replied Brown, playing for sympathy: “This is the first time in my career I’ve had any player say anything like that publicly.” The Philadelphia Daily News ran it under a headline asking, “Whose team is this, anyway?” Soon, it’ll be all Iverson’s.

Heading toward the Feb. 21 deadline, the usual blizzard of trade rumors is circulating as the press--especially the influential ESPN Insider--runs amok with every lame suggestion. In real life, Portland’s Rasheed Wallace is unlikely to go anywhere. He’s scorned by outsiders, whom he won’t deal with, but teammates like him and insiders say there’s nothing wrong with his game. Then, of course, there’s his temper. In the fourth quarter of last week’s game in Atlanta, with the Trail Blazers coming from 10 points behind and on a fastbreak that could have tied it, Wallace drew his eighth technical of the season. They lost, 101-92.

Said Former Trail Blazer, now Turner analyst, Danny Ainge to the Portland Tribune’s Kerry Eggers, “I felt sorry for Mike Dunleavy and I do now for Maurice Cheeks. Maurice has no chance to succeed in that job. He might be a great coach and he might not but I don’t think there’s a chance with that group. Mike has to be cracking up right now at the Blazers. Mike had a very smiley Christmas looking at the Portland Trail Blazers.”

Out-of-control Maverick owner Mark Cuban, fined an astounding $500,000 for ripping referee supervisor Ed Rush, said he’d write another $500,000 check to charity. Next time--and there will be a next time--Commissioner David Stern should suspend Cuban. The time after that, he should boot him out of the league. If NBA owners voted on lifting his franchise, it would be 28-1. Said Seattle owner Howard Schultz, “He should grow up.”

Jerry Sloan, one of three Bulls--with Michael Jordan and Bob Love--whose jerseys have been retired, on his old team: “This franchise probably would’ve won three or four more championships if they had kept that team together. We [the Utah Jazz] aren’t going to break it up until [Karl Malone and John Stockton] are dead, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t see any reason to.”

John Hammond, the former Clipper assistant who’s now Detroit’s personnel director: “We were talking the other day about how, with Kobe [Bryant] and Shaq [O’Neal, the Lakers are] basically invincible. How would you like to be San Antonio? It would be so frustrating to be as good as they are, to know you are going to win 50 games and make a run in the playoffs but in the back of your mind, you know you are going to have to run into the Lakers sooner or later.”

Former Clipper, now SuperSonic, Brent Barry, who still has a home on the beach, on declining an invitation to participate in the three-point contest on All-Star weekend: “Philadelphia or Hermosa Beach?”