FOR Jeff Van Gundy, the audition is over.
The Post’s Kevin Kernan is reporting the Knick coach will be back on the sidelines next season. But even before it had become that definitive, I knew Van Gundy would be retained.
I knew because Phil Jackson told me.
No, he didn’t tell me personally, or even through some shadowy “source” who on occasion turns out to be wrong.
Phil Jackson told me Jeff Van Gundy will be the Knicks’ coach next year because he, Phil Jackson, will not be.
Congratulations, Jeff. Now understand that this has nothing to do with the Knicks’ Eastern Conference finals victory over the Pacers, clinched by last night’s 90-82 victory at the Garden, although it certainly should.
It has everything to do with Jackson’s apparent decision to forgo New York City for Los Angeles, where the livin’ is easy and even failure is fabulous.
It won’t be official, we are told, until Jackson returns from a trip to Alaska, where he is teaching the Triangle Offense to the Inuits.
But you can’t really blame Jackson, since L.A. is a town where actors who have a string of flops longer than Patrick Ewing’s inseam still command $20 million a picture, and people are considered geniuses if they can guess the answers to “Wheel of Fortune” without buying a vowel.
Things are a little tougher here. The fans boo and the newspapers criticize and for heaven’s sake, players are expected to perform for their money.
So therefore, Jackson decided to allow Van Gundy to keep his job.
All along, I have told you that the decision of who would coach the Knicks next year was not being made by Dave Checketts, nor by anything the players said on behalf of Van Gundy or did on the basketball court once they squeaked into the post-season torunament.
The ball was strictly in the hands of Jackson. Shoot or pass?
If he decided he wanted the Knicks’ job, it was his.
If not, it was Van Gundy’s. Checketts, actually, had very little to say about it.
And now, if the rumors are true that Jackson is on the verge of signing a deal to coach the Lakers, just watch how quickly Teflon Dave comes riding to Van Gundy’s rescue, announcing to the world that Jeff Is Our Guy.
Of course, this is an announcement that should have been made weeks ago, right around the time that Van Gundy once again bested his erstwhile mentor, Pat Riley, for the second time in three playoff matchups.
Sweeping Atlanta was no real accomplishment, because the Hawks, for whatever reason, played as scared as any other out-of-towners lost in the Big City.
And the Knicks’ elimination of the Pacers is clearly the result of a team that suddenly realizes how good it is beating up on a team discovering it is not as good as it thought it was.
Besides, the Knicks have long since passed the threshold of being a team just happy to be here to being a team that should be unhappy with anything less than an NBA championship.
Beating Miami, the No. 1 seed in the East, was Van Gundy’s real accomplishment this season, coming as it did right on the heels of a regular-season ending win streak that took the Knicks from a .500 team on April 19 to the eighth and final playoff spot.
That is what started this Knicks’ snowball rolling down a hill it does not appear will ever flatten out.
That is when the Knicks began to believe in themselves and Van Gundy began to believe in the Knicks, especially Marcus Camby, who is making everyone forget not only Charles Oakley, but Patrick Ewing, too.
Now, the Heat have been out of action for a month while the Knicks stand at the verge of going to the NBA Finals.
And yet, while no one has even raised the possibility that Riley, former genius turned first-round failure, could be out of a job, it has been a foregone conclusion that if the Knicks could land Jackson, Van Gundy most definitely would be.
How Checketts would justify that, only he knows.
Perhaps he would draw on that great talent for dissembling that he displayed when it first became known that he and Jackson had met for two hours back in May, presumably discussing vegetarianism, Zen Buddhism, and the Knicks’ head-coaching job.
Checketts’ story at the time was that, with the Knicks mired at 21-21 and apparently headed out of the playoffs, he owed it to his employers to explore all possibilities. I understand Checketts also looked into the possibility of instituting “tie-dyed T-shirt Fridays” in Jackson’s honor, a plan that no doubt will be scrapped once Jackson signs with L.A.
And Checketts will be “stuck” with Van Gundy. Rumpled, balding little Van Gundy, the coach he would love to get rid of but now almost certainly cannot.
In some ways, Checketts is like Max Bialystock, the slimy Broadway producer played by Zero Mostel in the film “The Producers.”
Bialystock desperately needed a flop to get what he wanted, which was a way out of paying back his investors, to whom he had sold 25,000 percent of the show.