Whether it was the bench-clearing brawls, controversial finishes, magnetic personalities or the trench warfare thinly disguised as basketball, nothing could top the New York-Miami rivalry. And we aren't even talking about their four classic head-to-head showdowns in the playoffs.

	Sprewell has been through the Knicks-Heat wars and had his moments.

Talk about bitter rivals. Compared to the Knicks and Heat, the Hatfields and McCoys were bosom buddies.Thursday in the Garden, they'll lace 'em up again. But forget about a rock-em, sock-em heavyweight bout. These are now two aging prizefighters, well past their prime, with the Knicks 3-5, and the Heat a mere 2-6. They often fought for supremacy in the Atlantic Division. The way it looks now, they'll be fighting each other for eighth place in the East. It's as if the best rivalry the NBA had in years is kaput.

"Those days are over," Pat Riley said. "Those wars and battles were different players, different times and almost in a different era."

They never played for so much as an Eastern Conference title, but it was a championship era.

"You'd have tickets for Knicks-Heat and it would be, wow," said New York's Allan Houston. "That's a rivalry that'll go down as one of the most intense rivalries in all of sports. But everybody's been moving on."

Tim Hardaway, the heart and soul of the Miami teams, and the Heat's best big-game player, is playing for Dallas. Larry Johnson, now retired, is back home in Dallas. Dave Checketts, the Garden CEO, was fired last spring when the Knicks, like the Heat, failed to get out of the first round.

From 1997-2000, everyone knew that no matter happened in the regular season, New York would be playing Miami in May. As Riley liked to often say, "it's been preordained."

The basketball might not have been top-notch, but the storylines and mayhem were incomparable. Do you realize that there were controversial endings and fights BEFORE the Houston game-winner in '99 and the first melee? Both came in regular-season games in Miami. All four playoff series went the distance, with enough wild endings to last a lifetime.

"I don't think you'll ever be able to top it," said the Knicks' Latrell Sprewell. "It was probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing, where you have a three-year stretch where it's just so intense for all those years. You had Zo against Patrick. You had Larry and Zo doing their thing. And Tim, he was hated by the New York fans because he was always talking stuff and making big shots."

	“	We're both struggling. It's going to be very difficult in the East this year. I don't think everyone is just focusing on New York and Miami. ”
		— Miami's Anthony Carter

A few of the old stand-bys remain. Riley, who fueled the rivalry when he bolted the Knicks for South Beach after the 1995 season. Jeff Van Gundy, who was flung around the Garden floor like a ragdoll in 1998, holding onto Mourning's leg when Johnson and his former Charlotte teammate went toe to toe. Mourning battled Patrick Ewing tooth and nail but normally came out on the short end.. Houston, whose last-second shot in 1999 in Game 5 propelled the Knicks all the way to the NBA Finals. And Charlie Ward, whose confrontation with P.J. Brown in 1997 sparked the most celebrated melee in Knicks' history.

Only Mourning, Houston and Ward are still around from the inaugural 1997 playoff series, one of the most bitter moments in Knicks history. As much as the Heat's losses in 1998, 1999 and 2000 still haunt Riley -- all in deciding games of playoff series, all coming on the Heat's home court -- the 1997 fight in Game 5 will long be remembered in New York for what it might have prevented.

To this day, Checketts believes the fight and ensuing mass suspensions for players leaving the bench cost the Knicks their best chance of defeating the Bulls in the conference finals and winning the title.

"That was our best team," he said.

Van Gundy agrees.

"We were a great team, a great, great team," he said. "We were young. We were big. And we were nasty. We were in our prime, with Ewing and (Charles) Oakley and Larry (Johnson). We had Allan and (John) Starks. Our point guards (Ward and Chris Childs) were young. We had Buck Williams and Chris Dudley as our fourth and fifth big men off the bench. If we were able to move on -- you never say you're going to beat Chicago, we never did -- but I thought we had a championship caliber team that year. The next year, I thought we did, too. But (Ewing's) broken wrist altered the course of our franchise forever."

	Ewing

	Hardaway

The Heat's course, meanwhile, was forever altered by the Knicks. They come into tonight's game with only Mourning and Anthony Carter from their 2000 squad.

"We're both struggling," Carter said. "It's going to be very difficult in the East this year. I don't think everyone is just focusing on New York and Miami."

Not like the good old days, ones that almost always ended badly for Miami. Riley refers to the playoff setbacks as "deep wounds," which must come as a sheer delight to true blue-and-orange Knicks fans. It was in Riley's first game back in New York that created one of the watershed moments in the rivalry. Lustily booed by the sellout crowd when he was introduced, Riley sarcastically blew kisses to the fans and waved his arms, as if to say, "let me have it."

The basketball was never pretty, with both teams engaging in hand-to-hand combat at the defensive end and barely showing much dexterity when it came to shooting the basketball. But you couldn't find two more evenly matched teams. For the record, the final won-loss tally from their playoff history is 13-11, New York.

"It was like looking in a mirror," Houston said.

Right down to their final playoff battle, you saw some incredible endings. In the 2000 playoffs, you had an illegal basket shot from behind the backboard by Carter that counted. Followed, in Game 7, by Ewing going in for his final basket as a Knick, an uncontested dunk, when Mourning, the reigning Defensive Player of the Year, foolishly went for the steal. And on Miami's final possession, Jamal Mashburn passed up the potential game-winner and threw the ball to Clarence Weatherspoon, who today, plays for the ... the Knicks? You guessed it.

"I don't care what everyone said about how the game was played," Van Gundy said. "Everyone turned it on. Everyone wanted to watch. Because you knew it was going to come down to the last possession. You knew there was going to be great drama and intrigue."

That was then. Thursday, the only drama and intrigue of Knicks-Heat will center on which team can crawl closer to the .500 mark.

Mitch Lawrence, who covers the NBA for the New York Daily News, writes a regular NBA column for ESPN.com.