Is It Too Late to Take Away East’s Berth in Finals?

Meanwhile, back in the junior circuit....

It has been a terrific postseason, with some of the most exciting series in years. Both conference finals have been epics with TV ratings up more than 10%.

What could go wrong now?

Oh yeah, the usual.

Unfortunately for the “renewal” David Stern keeps pushing, his league doesn’t have parity but parities. Two of them. One in the powerful West, another in the deflated East.

Anyone watching the Nets and Celtics, outside of New Jersey and Boston, had to be thinking: One of these teams is actually going to the NBA Finals?

Since Michael Jordan left the Chicago Bulls, the East has fallen, 4-1, 4-2 and 4-1. Last spring, Philadelphia at least looked respectable, having led the league most of the season with explosive Allen Iverson, 7-foot Dikembe Mutombo and a hard-nosed defense, but the Lakers took them out in five.

The Nets don’t look that imposing. If they had played in the West, they would have had a hard time just getting into the playoffs as the seventh- or eighth-seeded team.

Against common opponents in the East, the Nets had a .648 winning percentage, compared to .643 for Seattle and Utah, well below Portland’s .750.

And who took all their big guys?

The West has the greatest concentration of big men the league has seen since the 1960s, when the East had most of them and Bill Russell ran over the Lakers’ Ray Felix, Jim Krebs, Leroy Ellis and Darrall Imhoff annually in the finals.

At center the Celtics had willowy Tony Battie, of whom Celtic great Bob Cousy noted, “He’s a power forward and power may not be the word. His game is basically finesse.” The Nets start Todd MacCulloch, the Krebs of his day.

And is there anything else good on TV?

To get a good rating, the NBA needs a series that goes at least six games, and not the way it did in 2000, when Indiana won Game 5 after the Lakers had taken a 3-1 lead.

Of course, the East welcomes the challenge, it says.

“Shaq [O’Neal] distorts the difference,” Indiana President Donnie Walsh says. “If you take Shaq out of it, then I don’t think Sacramento is just going to knock over anybody in the East.”

My solution is to reseed the final four.

This season, that might have matched the Kings and Lakers in the finals, rather than the annual Western-finals-everyone-calls-the- real-finals.

Today’s game may get a better TV number than anything in the real NBA Finals.

Stern keeps explaining patiently this is cyclical. Of course, he has been saying this for three years and the end of the cycle is nowhere in sight.

The most promising East teams, in terms of talent, size, youth and cap space, are actually No. 8 Indiana and No. 15 Chicago, which is about to draft Duke’s Jay Williams and rejoin the living.

Meanwhile, the Nets could lose Jason Kidd, a 2003 free agent, who recently repeated he wouldn’t sign an extension now.

“This year completely--finals, winning the championship--has nothing to do with me re-signing here or not,” he said. “I have the luxury to wait and play it out. You never know what happens next year.”

The 76ers are old and creaky, and then there are Iverson and Larry Brown.

Pat Riley is back to square one with the Miami Heat.

The Orlando Magic has to get Grant Hill back and find a big man.

The Detroit Pistons must prove they’re for real and lure a premium free agent to the Motor City.

Baron Davis, another ’03 free agent, may leave the Hornet hive, wherever it’s situated.

The Toronto Raptors are built around Vince Carter, still wowing them in Nike commercials, if not the NBA.

Worse, some East teams are doing short-term rebuilding on such dubious assumptions as “This is the East, where you don’t need to be so big,” and “Let’s just try to get to the finals, where anything can happen.”

Meanwhile in the West, everyone gears up annually, trying to get bigger to deal with O’Neal and importing athletes to guard Kobe Bryant.

Take the Celtics ... please.

Young and promising, they have a problem: This is their team. They have no size, no cap space and no No. 1 pick in this draft, having traded it to Phoenix with still-promising Joe Johnson for journeymen Rodney Rogers and Tony Delk.

The Celtics’ rationale? After years of desperation, they wanted to take their shot, while it was here.

Rogers is huge, around the middle anyway, but he’s still only 6 feet 6 inches high and about half as productive as he was as sixth man of the year for the Suns in 2000. He averaged 8.9 points against the Nets.

Oh, and he and Delk will be free agents so they’ll have to give them $50 million or so.

Not that the East finals weren’t interesting, in a minor league way.

Paul Pierce made three of 20 from the field in Game 3, after the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan wrote that when he talked, “I could have sworn I was listening to No. 33.”

Ryan presumably meant Steve Kuberski, not Larry Bird, since he coauthored Bird’s first book and understands there are many good players but only a few who are transcendent.

The Celtics hit on a new strategy: Let’s let the Nets get 20 points up and see if we can make them choke. This worked in Game 3, but fell short in Games 4 and 5.

In Game 3 in the FleetCenter, two lowlifes painted “wife” and “beater” on their bodies and taunted Jason Kidd’s wife Joumana, watching with their son, T.J. The Kidds were moved to a quieter row for Game 4 and stayed home for Game 6.

Celtic Coach Jim O’Brien, impressed at the way the Nets handled his great team, said he thinks they’ll win in the finals. “They have as good a point guard as I’ve ever seen,” he said. “They have tremendous starters and a deep bench. They are very tough to prepare for. I think the West is in for a surprise.”

Good, we could use a surprise.

The Celtic rallies were fun but the series reminds me of when I was in Thomas Jefferson Junior High in Springfield, Ill., and the local paper ran a picture of our point guard, Dick Hinkle, fighting for the ball during a city tournament game, under the caption: “Big Doings for Small Fry.”

Now, it’s time to meet the Big Fry.

It’s true, anything can happen in the finals, although it hasn’t lately.

Thanks David, We Needed That

I don’t like writing about referees or conspiracies, since I respect the former and regard the latter as fit conversation for asylums and talk radio. But when the marquee team, playing at home, shoots 27 free throws in the fourth quarter of Game 6, extending the series to a Game 7 on a day when NBC has no other NBA programming, it doesn’t look good.

The referees’ task, once thankless, is even harder now, with both sides flopping and coaches trying to steal an edge for the next game.

The league should crack down further on such discussion because these days, that’s all there is.

Not that the veteran crew of Dick Bavetta, Bob Delaney and Ted Bernhardt called a great game. There could have been more no-calls.

The NBA way, as opposed to the NCAA, is to let the players decide games, not the officials, so let ‘em play, which is what today’s crew will probably do.

Inconsistency is inevitable when all the calls are subjective, as they are in basketball. If the games themselves aren’t consistent, why would anyone else expect the officials to be?

In Game 5, the Laker defense let a lot of drivers get O’Neal in foul trouble. In Game 6, they didn’t allow the penetration and Shaq kept himself out of trouble at the other end, turning and shooting rather than backing his man in.

A conspiracy, however, would be something else. Not that the refs couldn’t affect the outcome or some NBA exec under pressure couldn’t get demented enough to tell them to.

The problem would be keeping it secret afterward.

This isn’t the Mafia, but a highly visible and media-penetrated sub-culture. If a league exec ever made an improper hint to a referee, it would leak. One day, in a bar, or a labor dispute, or a lawsuit, someone would talk and there would be a scandal they’d remember the rest of the century.

Here’s how you know it isn’t happening. The Lakers are two-point underdogs today.

In other words, the books offshore and in Las Vegas are still taking action. If this thing didn’t look kosher, it would he whisked off the board. If you think you’re suspicious, you’re an innocent, compared to a gambler.

“If anything fishy was going on, like the college basketball scandals, the lines in Las Vegas would move dramatically,” Gary Oldshan of the Gold Sheet says. “There’s been nothing like that.”

Many coaches and players go beyond suspicion into paranoia, but they’re the ones who can acknowledge only two outcomes: “We won,” or “We were cheated.”

Then there are the stand-up guys like Charlotte Coach Paul Silas.

During his second-round loss to the Nets, Deputy Commissioner Russ Granik acknowledged the league wouldn’t be comfortable with the Hornets in the finals, and everyone in Carolina ran around reviewing every call against them.

Silas, nobly refusing to play along, said complaining about the referees “is for losers.”

However, if you losers, er skeptics, are convinced this isn’t on the level, you should just watch something else. It’s still a free country.

Unless, of course, you think everything’s fixed.

Faces and Figures

Just asking: Why wouldn’t the Clippers offer Houston Lamar Odom, either or both of their lottery picks, and anyone else it takes except Michael Olowokandi and Elton Brand, for the No. 1 pick and Williams? Williams would become their point guard, giving them a cheap starter for five seasons. The deal would slice $5 million off their cap, make it easier to sign Olowokandi and Brand and clean up their logjam at small forward, giving Darius Miles a chance to play....

On the bright side, he gets to leave: The Cleveland Cavaliers rejected Andre Miller’s request for a maximum extension, suggesting they think they can help themselves more by trading him for help at several positions. “I would like to get it out of the way and go ahead and play the season,” he told the Akron Beacon Journal, “but that might not happen.” ... The Touchables: A Denver Nugget official said they have “no untouchable players,” meaning Antonio McDyess is officially for sale.... How much is that Big Dog in the Window? Milwaukee’s Glenn Robinson is back on the market, too, or as Buck GM Ernie Grunfeld put it: “Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] got traded and Oscar Robertson got traded, so for the right deal, the right situation, if it will make you a better team, I don’t think there’s an untouchable player in this league. But it would have to be the right deal.” ... He’s a walking anachronism, partly fact and partly fiction: Celtic assistant Dick Harter on Red Auerbach’s visits to practice: “He lights up that cigar [and] it drives the guys crazy.”