Tonight's Jayvee game between the Eastern Conference teams will start at 6 p.m. The Varsity game with the West begins at 8. Make sure you stop by the snack booth between games and try some of Pa Stern's Circumvention Pie. With Wolf Filling.

	Scottie Pippen and the Blazers figure they will topple the Lakers this season.

You want to know about NBA 2000?

If you live east of the Mississippi?

Get a satellite dish.

Otherwise, you're gonna miss all of it.

'Cause everything that matters this season, my friends, is happening late at night.

The West Has Died. The West Has Risen. The West Has Come Again.

Now, the truth comes out about the Eastern Conference: MJ and the Bulls were the best team in the league for a decade, no doubt. But their triumph covered up the atrophy elsewhere. And a couple of high-profile free agent signings in the Land of the Mouse doesn't change that. It's not that all the teams in the East stink; far from it.

But all the dominant teams, the teams that really have a chance to win rings in June, are out West. The East is a bunch of good guys who work hard and play by the rules, and always finish just out of the money. The West is glitz and glamour; flash and fun.

OTHER STUFF TO PONDER

10 very important players for their teams that you may not be thinking about (no particular order): 1. Andrew DeClercq, Orlando. Not to cast shadows on the Era of Good Feeling, but somebody has to board and play D inside. DeClercq's the biggest body the Magic have at power forward. 2. Damon Stoudamire, Portland. Who'd have thought the 5-10 Mighty Mouse could wreck the Best Team Paul Allen's Money Can Buy? But he could, if he complains at the right time about lack of playing time. 3. Horace Grant, Lakers. The Ho will have a steady diet of all-star fours to cover: Rasheed, C-Webb, Duncan, McDyess, Robinson, etc. Can he still do it at 35? 4. Don MacLean, Miami. With Alonzo Mourning out, Heat need points as well as boards. Don could handle the first part off the bench. 5. Jamal Mashburn, Charlotte. Bobby Phills' shoes are still awfully big to fill. 6. Ruben Wolkowyski, Seattle. Sonics' backup center will have to provide quality minutes behind 38-year-old Patrick Ewing. 7. Kurt Thomas, Knicks. He'll be the starting center come playoff time. 8. Danny Ferry, Spurs. Veteran can play all three frontcourt positions and gives nice guy Spurs a little nasty streak. 9. Tony Delk, Phoenix. Suns need a steady hand running the show if something happens to Jason Kidd (Olympic Grind) or Penny Hardaway (doesn't it always?). 10. Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Cleveland. If the 7-3 center is finally healthy, the Cavs are a playoff contender. If he's on the injured list again, they're, well, the Cavs. Seven reasons the West is better than the East: 1. Shaquille, Kobe, Duncan, Sheed, Stevie Franchise, Finley, Dirk Diggler, Hughes, Stockton to Malone, Uncle Cliffy, Shareef, the Clippers' Kiddie Corps, C-Webb, GP, J-Will, J-Kidd. 2. See above. 3. See No. 2. 4. Ditto. 5. Double ditto. 6. And again. 7. Don't you get it by now? Five guys who'll be head coaches this time next season: 1. Bob Huggins, head coach, University of Cincinnati. Has talked his way into the first tier; odds-on to replace Dan Issel in Denver. 2. Mike Jarvis, head coach, St. John's University. Tried to buffalo Wizards into giving him more cash to right their sinking ship. Someone will give in next summer. 3. Del Harris, assistant coach, Dallas. Mark Cuban's paying him sick money for an assistant, but Del's a head man. 4. Eddie Jordan, assistant coach, Nets. Ready for another shot. 5. Garry St. Jean, general manager, Warriors. He's from just outside of Boston, and Boston, uh, might have an opening. A few predictions: Division Champions: Orlando, Milwaukee, San Antonio, Portland. Playoff teams: East-Charlotte, Indiana, Miami, Milwaukee, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Toronto. West-Lakers, Minnesota, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, Seattle, San Antonio, Utah. League MVP: Tim Duncan, San Antonio. Rookie of the Year (Winner of Award): Stromile Swift, Vancouver. Rookie of the Year (Actual Best First-Year Player): Desmond Mason, Seattle. Coach of the Year: George Karl, Milwaukee. The Bucks are gonna be good. (Didn't I say this last year?) Scoring champion: Allen Iverson, Philadelphia. Coach on the hot seat: Rick Pitino, Boston. He's already laid the groundwork for a hasty retreat. Did somebody mention the Hoosiers? Sleeper team: Dallas. Damn that Nellie, picking up talent. Damn that Cuban, paying for it. Best offseason acquisition: Mark Jackson, Toronto. Vinsanity won't know what to do with a real point guard getting him the ball. Worst offseason acquisition: Glen Rice, Knicks. Um, Glen doesn't do defense. Portland over the Lakers in the West. New York over Orlando in the East. Portland over New York in the Finals. Dr. Benton over Dr. Carter in "ER."

Listen to the usually mild-mannered Steve Smith: "We're not looking only to try and win one," he told me during camp. "We're looking to get a streak of one, two or three ... whoever comes out of the West is going to win a championship."

So Indiana and Miami shouldn't even bother showing up?

"Once we get out of the West," Smith said again, "we're going to win a championship."

Is that a guarantee?

"Once we get out of the West, we're going to win a championship."

Okayyy ... Mr. O'Neal, over there?

"One has never been enough for me," the Diesel says. "One car is not enough, one house is not enough, so one ring will not be enough. I am the type that I celebrate during the moment, but after the moment it is time to start focusing on something else. So I celebrated it. I went home and hugged my father and he had tears in his eye, we both had tears in our eyes. He slapped me on the back and said 'all right, let's work on getting No. 2.' "

Mr. Wallace? Rasheed? You have something to say?

"I put one thing up on the blackboard in the locker, each side," he said. "My ring size. Six and a half."

There is depth conference-wide. The Spurs are salivating at having a seemingly healthy Sean Elliott for the first time in two seasons. And in Alamo Country, they point out they've always beaten the Lakers in the playoffs when the Twin Towers, Tim Duncan and David Robinson, were both healthy and available. The Twin Towers are healthy and available. Don't sleep on Phoenix, which won 53 games last season with most of its starters out with one malady after another. The key for the Suns is trying to keep Jason Kidd in one piece; coming off of a broken leg, he logged an extra 35 days playing for the Olympic team.

"He wants to play," coach Scott Skiles says. "He's playing with a toenail that's about to come off. He's just incredible. I was a guy that loved to play, so when a guy says 'I want to go and I'm happy with the minutes as they are,' we'll keep it like that."

"You never know how good a player is until you see him every day," newcomer Mario Elie says of Kidd. "This guy's an amazing talent. I'm just trying to keep up with his ass. That guy is moving."

But the Phoenix Bane is rebounding, which is why the Suns are hoping Chris Dudley can give them a little work on the boards. They're excited about newcomer Daniel Santiago as a backup pivotman; he's fluid enough and can hit the jumper, but he doesn't exactly remind you of Wes Unseld on the glass. Still, the Suns have one significant advantage over other West contenders: they didn't make as many significant changes to their nucleus. They were playing in the preseason like it was March.

"It definitely gives us a better opportunity to understand that we're a good team earlier than we did last year," Clifford Robinson said. "That's key with us. Just realizing that, yeah, we're a good team and we can play with some of the top-notch teams."

Utah still considers itself in that category. John Starks, replacing Jeff Hornacek, and Donyell Marshall will help the Jazz more than you might think. Utah has a bright-eyed teenager in high schooler DeShawn Stevenson to back up Starks at shooting guard, but the bigger question is backup point guard, now that Howard Eisley's left for Dallas. Meanwhile, Karl Malone prepared for his 15th NBA season by spending so much time on the treadmill at his Arkansas farm that he now has 3.7 percent body fat.

"At the end of the season, I challenged myself to come back in better shape than I ever did, just to see if I could," Malone said. "I didn't do one wind sprint the whole summer. I did hours and hours of cardio machines, elliptical machines, stairmaster, bikes ... I put my stuff out on my patio. It's 95 degrees out. And I'd ride for an hour at a time, at least ... it wasn't healthy. Because after I did my test and all, I had to take a week off before training camp. Because when you get down that low, a guy my size, your body starts to cannibalize itself, and you don't have any fat to burn. So you start burning muscle."

Oh, yeah, happens to me all the time.

Even the middling West teams, the Sacramentos and the Minnesotas and the Seattles, would be high seeds in the East. The Sonics are hoping Vin Baker's mind has healed as his body fat has diminished, though it's hard to believe he and coach Paul Westphal have really made up after the Sonics almost traded Baker to the Knicks for Patrick Ewing. Baker says everything's great. Westphal says everything's great. Importantly, Gary Payton says everything's not so great.

"If Vin has anything to say (to Westphal), I'm going to try to be the mediator to get that working," Payton says. "Going to Paul and saying, 'well Vin thinks this,' and go to Paul and tell him what (Baker) thinks. And then if we get to a situation where I don't think it's going at the right stage, then we get to meet -- all of us get in there and sit down and let's just blow it out right there."

"We told him the truth," Westphal says. " 'Well, look, if you were the GM and you had a chance to trade a real good power forward for Patrick Ewing and another real good power forward, would you do it?' And most people would say yeah."

(And now, finally, a word about the Timberwolves. A lot of mewling out there about how unfair The Commish was to the poor Wolves, taking away five first-rounders, fining them $3.5 mil and voiding Joe Smith's contract. I'm using the same standard I always do with the Commish: Was the punishment too excessive?

Absolutely not. Not for blatant cap circumvention. Do you think Glen Taylor and Eric Fleisher did this kind of work over a beer at GlamSlam? It took dozens of lawyers dozens of hours to work all that stuff out. This was teamwide circumvention, a collective thumbing of Wolf Noses at the league office. Nobody's blind to the fact that other teams cheat. But nobody's brazen enough -- or dumb enough -- to put it on paper. And you can't let Smith re-sign with Minnesota, because then, what exactly have you deterred? What's to keep a team with multiple first-rounders over the next few years -- Chicago, say -- from offering Chris Webber $100 million? If it costs them five firsts? So what? You can't let the team that cheated still wind up with the player for which it fractured the rules. If you don't give a team the death penalty when you have the illegal contract in your hands, when do you blow a team out of the water?

At any rate, I think the Wolves will be fine. Flip Saunders has been one of the top five coaches in this league since he got here. Kevin Garnett has a heart bigger than the Metrodome, and it's not like he's alone; there's still Terrell Brandon, Wally Szczerbiak, Radoslav Nesterovic, Chauncey Billups. The Wolves will make the playoffs again because they're a really well-coached team with a superstar who never takes a night off.)

Anyway, by comparison, here's all you need to know about the East. After Dikembe Mutombo, who's the second-best center in the conference? I'll wait.

Hard to think of one, isn't it?

The Heat can still win without Alonzo Mourning. But they can't dominate. They can't intimidate. And you wonder if Pat Riley can coach this team the same way when he doesn't have his best player and hardest worker squarely in his corner, taking every bit of abuse Riles can dish out and asking for more. I'd say Orlando is in the catbird's seat in the East, but nobody's sure when Grant Hill will be 100 percent recovered from that broken leg -- including Magic coach Glenn Rivers. "Doc's just a nickname," he said.

It was Rivers who got the most out of his overachievers last season. When Milwaukee's George Karl opined that Orlando would have to get rid of half of its team to sign big-time free agents, the Magic brass scoffed. Um, half of Orlando's team from last year is gone. Not that the remaining players are bugged by that. Not much.

"Well, two of them got nice little deals," guard Darrell Armstrong noted.

"The really terrible thing about George Karl's statement was that it assumes that all of us playing on that team were morons, or desperate," said center John Amaechi, quickly becoming one of my favorite players. "For the most part, we may not be the smartest group, but we're certainly not fools."

No fool is young Tracy McGrady, who bolted Toronto as soon as possible for the greener, tax-freer pastures of Orlando. He says he wants to average a triple-double and be the best defensive player in the league this season. Hey, there could be worse goals. McGrady is 21, he's going to have $93 million in the bank over seven years, and he's living in Payne Stewart's house, which he bought from Stewart's widow, Tracey, this past summer.

"Well, I definitely wanted to be out away from everybody," McGrady said. "I wanted a nice spot out on the lake where it's nice, peaceful. And the house is beautiful. His wife was trying to get rid of the house and I felt it was definitely a perfect situation for myself and what I wanted to do with the house. It has a tennis court. So I'm gonna enclose that to a basketball gym. So it's everything that I wanted."

The Bucks look like they're ready to make a move. Karl and I made a bet at the Boston Summer League that Milwaukee wouldn't be able to keep Tim Thomas unless they maxed him out. I was wrong, George, and the first round at Major Goolsby's is on me. That move could get the Bucks into the Eastern finals in June, because Thomas is about to bust out big-time. So Sam Cassell is unhappy about his contract. Sam's always unhappy about his contract. And he still plays big most of the time.

	OPENING DAY RANKINGS
	THE TOP 10 1. L.A. Lakers (defending champs' prerogative) 2. Portland 3. San Antonio 4. Orlando 5. Miami 6. Phoenix 7. Milwaukee 8. Seattle 9. Utah 10. Indiana THE BOTTOM FIVE 25. Vancouver 26. L.A. Clippers 27. Golden State 28. Detroit 29. Chicago

In Philly, what's left to say, really? Allen Iverson hates Larry Brown. Larry Brown hates Allen Iverson. The Sixers tried really hard to trade AI during the offseason, and if Matt Geiger hadn't insisted on being paid his 15 percent trade kicker to accept going to Detroit, Iverson would be filling the Palace in Auburn Hills. The Sixers will still win 45 games and be a pain in the butt to whoever they play in the postseason, because they have a locker room full of standup guys: Eric Snow, George Lynch, Aaron McKie. The Knicks don't have a center, and Marcus Camby's in and out of Jeff Van Gundy's doghouse. But the Knicks will still defend and the Knicks will still be tough and the Knicks may still beat Miami in the playoffs. Not that any of it (or recapping any of the other East teams' chances) matters. Think of the East as the coming attractions before the feature presentation.