The hardwood; the Slam team.(The Talk of the Town)

The magazine Slam, which has been around since 1994 and has a circulation of nearly a quarter of a million and an editorial staff of five, is all about basketball. It is aimed at young, obsessive fans and is full of hip-hop idiom (sample headline: "HE READY"; sample text: "Holla at a player, yo"). There are admiring profiles, pullout posters, a sneaker-fashion page, and features on such obscurist's passions as the six players in National Basketball Association history whose careers lasted only one minute of game time.

Slam's reporters are easy to spot in the press rows at Knicks and Nets games. Russ Bengtson, who, besides producing a good deal of copy, serves as the editor-in-chief, is thirty years old and has red hair in a crewcut with flared sideburns, and usually wears skull-shaped earrings, baggy jeans, high-tops, and some kind of sports jersey. A favorite is one with the name "Satan" on the back -- for Miroslav Satan, a Slovakian hockey player. "It's pronounced 'Shuh-tan,' " he said. "Other than that, I have no interest in hockey." Lang Whitaker, another Slam writer-editor, looks a little like Russ -- grown-out crewcut, growing-in goatee, baseball jersey, baggy jeans, Air Jordan Retros.

The other night, Russ and Lang took a Town Car to the Meadowlands, where the Los Angeles Clippers were visiting the New Jersey Nets. "The Nets are a lot more fun to cover than the Knicks, and it's not just because they're finally winning and the Knicks are finally losing," Russ said. (Notwithstanding a recent surge, the Knicks last month had an eight-game losing streak, including their most lopsided home defeat ever, while the Nets, awful for so many years, have the best record in the Eastern Conference.) "It's true," Russ went on. "The Garden is old and historic and the Meadowlands is generic, like the inside of a refrigerator. But, once a game starts, that all goes away. The Knicks and that boring, defense-first basketball -- they never did much on a nightly basis to make me want to put them in the magazine."

"Obviously, the Nets are more of a Slam team," Lang said. "They're up-tempo. The Knicks shouldn't be on TV so much." Lang, who grew up in suburban Atlanta, volunteered that he had played high-school ball against Shandon Anderson, who is now on the Knicks: "He blocked one of my shots up into the stands."

"We did a Nets cover in '98 that said, 'Nets: Champs by 2001,' " Russ said. "We might be off by ...