LAMPE LIGHTS UP ROOM

June 27, 2003 -- ELVIS wore a cream colored suit, a shiny blue cap, and a stony expression that everyone inside The Theater at Madison Square Garden could relate to. That roar? That was for every JV hacker who never was quite good enough to make the varsity. It was for the 11th kid in every schoolyard who couldn't get picked for a full-court 5-on-5.

"We want Lampe!" they cried. "We want Lampe!" they yelped. "We want Lampe!" they bellowed.

"Hopefully," Maciej Lampe said, "I'll be able to pay them back someday."

Let's be brutally honest for a second, OK? A few days ago you never heard of Maciej Lampe. You still have no idea if he's ever going to be any good and, really, neither do the Knicks. He is, in the grand old basketball tradition, a "Project," capital "P," a 7-foot question mark.

But for a few minutes inside the Theater last night, a few hundred yards from the Garden show floor where all of this will be judged some day, Maciej Lampe was transformed into an instant basketball folk hero, an urban myth for the urban game, filling the small room with a jolt of electricity that's been missing from the bigger gym next door.

"Good for us," Knicks GM Scott Layden said. "Good for New York."

Well, we'll see about that. At the end of the day, at the end of a top-heavy draft that yielded three sure things and 55 who-can-tells, the Knicks are not appreciably better this morning than they were yesterday afternoon, are no closer to legitimacy now than they were then.

Mike Sweetney? Nice player. Power forward. The Knicks have about 19 power forwards under contract. Slavko Vranes, their other second-round pick? He's tall. He's raw. You use all the other capital letters in "PROJECT" when you talk about him.

And then there is Maciej Lampe, who starred for Real Madrid's version of the Columbus Clippers this year. It is said that he can shoot a little from the outside. It is believed that, in five years, with a little luck and a lot of work, he could possess a game that resembles Dirk Nowitzki. That's all we really knew about him until last night.

Until one name after another filled the big board above David Stern's head, until the whole first round was completed without his name called, costing him a few million dollars, nearly summoning tears to that stony face. Ultimately raining cheers and chants on his head from a city of strangers. New York has always been a sucker for underdogs and upstarts. And now it had one, born in Lodz, Poland, schooled in basketball at Spain's Universidad Complutense.

"Everybody thought I was going to high," he said, and it was true. Layden had predicted he'd be a top-10 pick. Every lottery team except for Golden State worked him out. He was one of 15 players invited to the holding area just off the stage, proof the league believed the hype, too. "I'm just happy for the opportunity the Knicks have given me and I want to try to prove people wrong."

He paused.

"When everyone tells you one thing going in, that you're in the lottery, that you'll be a top-10 pick, of course you feel like, what's wrong, right? The guys that were picked in first round aren't a lot better than me. Some teams made a mistake."

As a basketball move, this could still work out to be Frederic Weis, of course. Layden's track record remains unchanged, for now. Maybe Lampe will change that. Maybe Sweetney will. Maybe this really will turn out to be a double-lottery exacta for Layden, the kind of seminal draft night Rod Thorn had two years ago. Or maybe it's just a couple more nudges toward the door.

For one night, anyway, it didn't matter. For one night, New York felt Maciej Lampe's pain and opened its arms, actually ceasing to slander Layden long enough to cheer for this unknown Pole. Good for them. Good for him. Good for New York.

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