By Patrick Mooney

Spike Lee's latest joint, 25th hour, chronicles a New York drug dealer's final day of freedom before his incarceration. Granted an impossibly narrow time frame, the convicted felon travels through the streets of Manhattan in an attempt to reconnect with family and friends. With a protagonist shackled to past mistakes and sentenced to a bleak future, the New York Knicks' most demonstrative fan has, fittingly, created a film that serves as a metaphor for his favorite basketball team.

Having just fallen out of the Eastern Conference playoff race, the Knicks currently reside in the NBA's conception of purgatory -- mediocre enough to flirt with the eighth seed in a weak conference but incapable of actually earning a playoff berth and winning a seven game series. Overpaid and undersized, the Knicks are essentially a collection of swingmen without a legitimate point guard or center. Handcuffed by onerous multiyear contracts and the NBA's restrictive salary cap, the Knicks, much like Spike Lee's lead character, are locked in an intractable position.

Nominally "The World's Most Famous Arena," Madison Square Garden now only generates electricity when a transcendent talent like Kobe Bryant or a visual curiosity like Yao Ming makes his annual appearance. The sellout crowds, and the accompanying atmosphere, have evaporated from Knick home games. The arena is still electric, because it's a great building with flashy colors and a magnificent sound system, and it's still impossible not to spot some stars sitting courtside, but the action taking place on the court doesn't do the building justice.

Patrick Ewing never decorated the Garden with a championship banner, but his Knicks always delivered meaningful, exciting basketball well into May and June. For more than a decade, Madison Square Garden was the place to watch professional basketball. The Garden would swell to capacity with Park Avenue lawyers entertaining Wall Street brokers, and NBC television personalities posing for courtside cameras. After a thunderous John Starks dunk or Ewing fadeaway jumper, 19,763 fans would surge to their feet and make the opposing team feel as if they were performing in an MRI machine rather than a basketball gym. But just as the boom market has crashed for their corporate clients, the Knicks are no longer Must-See TV.

Yet one is more likely to hear an informed defense of President Bush's foreign policy from a Hollywood celebrity than a rebuilding plan from Knick management. Neither general manager Scott Layden nor owner James Dolan has revealed a blueprint for the team's reconstruction. The current administration seems to advocate a strategy of paralysis, dominating discussions of the franchise's long-term health with medical opinions on Antonio McDyess's ACL rather than assessments of the NBA's economic landscape and expanding talent pool.

The Knick hierarchy has displayed a stunning lack of vision through a series of personnel decisions-primarily the Ewing trade and Allan Houston's maximum contract- that eliminated the possibility of salary cap flexibility.

In addition, Knick executives have not fully recognized the global sprawl that is transforming the game of basketball. The NBA Draft has evolved into a speculative, futures market where you are just as likely to find a player in the Republic of Georgia as you are at the University of Georgia. The Knicks have not navigated this sea change -- anticipating the arrival of 1999 French draft pick Frederic Weis is like waiting for Godot.

The Knicks' rapidly increasing insignificance, as evidenced by their absence from All-Star Weekend and disappearance from the national television schedule, has been Cablevision's greatest failure. New York's various sports media outlets, and their voracious consumers, have already diverted their attention to Derek Jeter's health. This shift from prominence to insignificance is difficult to quantify but can be extremely damaging to the organization in terms of ticket and merchandise sales, television revenue, and, ultimately, Cablevision's willingness to invest in the on-court product.

Knick management has maintained that New York fans will not accept a rebuilding project, a patronizing assumption that excuses management from making the difficult decisions that will shape the direction of the franchise's future. But the indictments handed down by the fan base-the mass exodus after Ewing's jersey retirement ceremony, the vocal cheering against the Knicks during Michael Jordan's final Garden performance-indicate New York's sophisticated basketball audience will not tolerate mediocrity.


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