The New York Intangibles

At New York's Madison Square Gar den last week, a stylish terrier named Ch. Glamoor Good News padded off with the best-in-show award at the annual Westminster Kennel Club show.

In recent years the event usually meant bad news for the New York Knick erbockers. Invariably, some sportswriter would point out that once again the pooches drew more spectators to the Garden than did the Knicks, the dogs of the National Basketball Association.

But not this season. While last week's dog show played to a sedate audience of 8,000, the Knicks turned away at least that many ticket seekers three nights earlier, when they defeated the Baltimore Bullets, leaders in the N.B.A.'s Eastern Division, 106-100 before a sell out crowd of 19,500. The difference is that the Knicks are now playing as though they were the top dogs in the league. As of last week, the streaking New Yorkers had won 19 straight games at home and 27 out of their last 31 starts.

Simple Shuffle. After the Baltimore game, reporters swarmed around Knick Forward Bill Bradley, apparently in the belief that only a former Rhodes scholar could articulate the secret of the team's success. "I've never seen a team pull together the way this one is now," said Bradley. "Pulling together isn't just an effort of will. The important thing is that we're getting to know one another -- -personally and in terms of the way we play." Injuries hurt the team but, preaches Bradley, "adversity tends to make a team pull together. Everyone thought we'd be down, crippled. That's where pride comes in. I admit I'm sort of a believer in intangibles."

Knick Coach Red Holzman believes in tangibles, like the trade he made two months ago that sent Center Walt Bellamy and Guard Howard Komives to the Detroit Pistons for Forward Dave DeBusschere. At the time, the Knicks were fifth in the Eastern Division with an 18-17 record. Many of the team's troubles revolved around Bellamy, who slouched in the keyhole like a huge, 6-ft. 11 -in. question mark, playing won derfully one night and indifferently the next. DeBusschere's arrival allowed gan gly Willis Reed to move from the cor ner to his old position at center, where he has performed inspiringly every night since, scoring at a rate of 25 points a game. With that simple shuffle, every thing went click for the Knicks.

For Bradley, whose skimpy 8-point average was a major disappointment for the Knicks last season, everything is suddenly clicking on the Scoreboard.

The three-time Princeton All-America once said that the emphasis on shooting in the pros was "overdone." Brad ley is now gunning from all angles, has scored 20-plus points in four of the last seven games. Even so, the fact that not a single Knick is among the top-ten scorers in the league attests to Bradley's philosophy of the intangible.

The team's remarkable winning streak is a tough act to follow--even for a dog show. Nonetheless, as the new New York Intangibles closed to within three games of the front-running Bullets last week, they seemed bent on only one goal: winning the very tangible $10,000 that would go to each player on the team that leads both divisions and wins the N.B.A. championship.

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