In the East, Creampuffs Rising

It’s playoff time again and according to the rules, outdated as they may be, the East gets to hold a tournament and crown its champion too.

For the past five seasons, the Smurfs’ winner has then been served to the West, like an hors d’oeuvre. Since Michael Jordan left the Bulls in 1998, the West is 5-0 by a combined margin of 20 games to six.

This has engendered skepticism everywhere but the league office, where Commissioner David Stern regards it with amusement, at least in public, as suggested by this exchange on a late-season conference call with reporters.

Question: “It is quite possible that you will have four or five sub-.500 teams making the playoffs in the East. Is the preponderance of these kinds of teams in the playoff hunt a concern? Is the competitive imbalance between the conferences a concern?”

Stern: “I have no problem. Russ, do you have any problem?”

Deputy Commissioner Russ Granik: “I don’t have any problems.”

Happily for Frick and Frack, the Hobbits would have to produce only one good team to revive the Finals, and they have two that might do, Indiana and Detroit, which are bigger and better than any of the little creatures that have emerged lately.

A third team, New Jersey, gives away size but might still be respectable at the elite level. The Nets got to 2-2 last spring against the Spurs, the first time the Finals had been anything but 3-1 or 4-0 since 1998.

But TV ratings cratered, dampening the celebration of the new parity.

The league would like to think the lack of interest was “market-specific,” but it may also suggest that as a marquee event, the Finals need their lightbulbs changed.

Unfortunately for the NBA, one important component, the East, is still missing a few things, like size, depth and management.

The Pacers, Pistons and/or Nets may have promising futures. The young Cleveland Cavaliers have talent, big players and cap space in 2005, which is good because their 4-11 finish suggests they still need a player or two.

The rest of the East teams are small, a joke or both.

The Miami Heat was seeded No. 4 at 42-40 and has no one bigger than Lamar Odom and no cap room coming.

The New York Knicks and Boston Celtics got in with losing records. The Celtics clinched while on a five-game losing streak.

And forward thinking is not all it could be. When the new Atlanta Hawk owners, who took nine months to consummate the sale while the franchise moldered, get around to firing Terry Stotts, it will mean all 15 East teams will have changed coaches in 18 months.

Nine general managers went with them. Of the seven NBA teams with sub-$40-million payrolls who can wheel and deal in free agency this summer, five are in the West: the Clippers, San Antonio, Phoenix, Denver and Utah. Only two, Atlanta and Detroit, are in the East.

As expected, the early rounds were on the why-bother side. The Pacers, Pistons and Nets are a combined 8-1.

Meanwhile, the Knicks and Celtics made themselves look pathetic, begging for suspensions of opponents for wandering a few feet off the bench during fights that were more like disagreements.

Indiana’s Ron Artest was set down for one game, which the Pacers won by 13, raising the question: How many Pacers would have to be suspended before the Celtics had a chance?

The Knicks, who wanted to play the Nets rather than the Pacers or Pistons, lost the opener, 107-83, and began mewing that Richard Jefferson had to be disciplined for taking two steps off the bench during a Jason Kidd-Frank Williams faceoff.

There was the usual hue and cry about playing Dikembe Mutombo, now a Knick, which seems to be a rite of spring, no matter what team he’s on. Before Game 2, Mutombo, responding to a garden-variety hard foul by New Jersey’s Jason Collins that sidelined Tim Thomas, noted tastelessly this was “a war,” adding, “They just shot one of us.”

It not only wasn’t a war, it wasn’t much of a basketball game. The Nets won, 99-81.

The Knicks did an impressive job -- of talking. Thomas, a career disappointment, ripped Kenyon Martin, noted his teammates’ failure to retaliate and announced, “My goal is just to get back out there on the court before this series is over so I can go hit somebody.”

At that point, Thomas got a call from league official Stu Jackson, telling him to zip it, suggesting that even Stern was finding this embarrassing.

Fightin’ Tim didn’t make it back for Game 3. Martin taped the New York Daily News’ back page to his jersey at the shoot-around, then scored 19 points with 15 rebounds and the Nets won the first playoff game in Madison Square Garden in four years, which suggested that today’s game there would be the last.

It looks as if we have the answer to the question that was posed on that ESPN the Magazine cover, “Can Isiah Thomas and the Knicks save the East?”

Isiah bet the house on quick fixes that got them into the playoffs but not the Eastern elite, and was unlucky too, losing Allan Houston to a sore knee.

By now, Isiah must have noticed, as the Suns did, he was on the wrong side of the Kidd-Stephon Marbury equation. Kidd led. Marbury got angry at teammates when things went bad, disappeared for large stretches and the Knicks’ latest rebuild-on-the-fly program was sending up bubbles.

Meanwhile in Miami, the New Orleans Hornets, who move West next season and were presumably saying farewell to the postseason, were embarrassing themselves too.

They went down 0-2, and Jamal Mashburn got involved for the first time in months, sort of, ripping the team for trying to make him play hurt. Mashburn is not on the playoff roster, or popular with teammates, and the team sent him home.

Mashburn lives in Miami, so it was a short trip. Anyone who wants him can have him, which may go for Coach Tim Floyd and GM Bob Bass too.

Owner George Shinn refused to say Floyd, who hadn’t been there a full season, would be back. The only nice thing Shinn could think to say about Floyd was, “He’s a wonderful person.”

The change the Hornets need is at owner. Maybe Stern could give the team to Bob Johnson, move it back to Charlotte and keep it in the East, where it belongs.

Nor should anyone expect much from old powers in Chicago and Orlando, now contemplating franchise suicide.

The Bulls, who terminated their dynasty six years ago, are so upset at their young players that they’re expected to trade Tyson Chandler and Jamal Crawford.

Said GM John Paxson last week: “I do hope and believe over time we can make some changes to get us back to a real competitive level.”

Get it? The organization that once overflowed with arrogance no longer thinks about titles, not even “over time,” just a “real competitive level.”

The line for the 7-1 Chandler is out the door, injury concerns notwithstanding. The front-runner might be Portland, which would give the Bulls Shareef Abdur-Rahim. Other interested teams could include the Spurs (how do Hedo Turkoglu and Malik Rose sound?), Memphis (Mike Miller and Shane Battier?) and Seattle (take anyone, even Ray Allen.)

Isn’t that great, David? One of the East’s few young big men may come West.

Orlando is now run by a former New York Ranger (that’s in the NHL) named John Weisbrod, who came to run the Orlando Solar Bears of the International Hockey League.

Not that it was necessarily Weisbrod’s fault, but the Solar Bears folded and he’s catching on to basketball slowly. He quoted Herb Brooks, a hockey coach, when he took over the Magic, and committed himself to ineffectual Coach Johnny Davis while giving free agent-to-be Tracy McGrady a deadline.

“I have no intention of starting the season with an ‘I don’t know,’ ” Weisbrod said of McGrady. “That’s a fair statement.”

Or maybe it wasn’t a fair statement.

McGrady, who left in March to “rest my knee” for the Olympics, said he’d let them know by the trade deadline, next February.

Skating backward, Weisbrod said he didn’t mean to sound “ultimatum-ish” and stomped out of a meeting with reporters, upset by their questions.

The line for McGrady is out the door and around the block, starting with the Clippers, if they don’t get Kobe Bryant, and the Suns. Yes, yet another East star could come this way.

Milwaukee is a nice little team, although its 8-20 record against the West suggests what it would be out here. The 76ers just hired Jim O’Brien to coach Allen Iverson’s last stand, after Portland wouldn’t let them talk to Mo Cheeks. O’Brien said he was “fairly easy to play for,” which makes him a good match for Iverson, who’s fairly hard to coach.

After that, it’s Dregs City. Toronto finished 33-49 amid managerial chaos and has yet to select the next pigeons, er, coach and GM. Washington, Atlanta and the expansion Charlotte Bobcats are at about the same level of development, and the Bobcats don’t have any players yet.

It is Stern’s job, as he notes, to preserve tradition, so he really should err on the conservative side.

Of course, if the Pacers, Pistons or Nets don’t measure up, he might have to consider gimmicks, such as seeding the final four. (This would also be a good idea for the Final Four, since it would have made the Duke-Connecticut game the final, rather than that UConn-Georgia Tech ratings bomb.)

The East isn’t dead, but it is largely incapacitated. TNT bills itself as “the exclusive network of the Western Conference finals.” ESPN, the exclusive network of the Eastern Conference finals, doesn’t acknowledge it and management may want the people who negotiated the deal to explain just how this happened.

As Stern would tell you, it’s still early, in the TV deal and the postseason.

Granik would agree.