Based on hindsight and the admittedly slim evidence of an 87-79 opening-night victory over Houston, the Detroit Pistons sure looked like the team that USA Basketball should have sent to Athens to bring back Olympic gold.

They spread the floor and shared the ball, getting double-figure scoring from all five starters. They smothered Tracy McGrady with great individual defense by Tayshaun Prince and neutralized Yao Ming’s height advantage by surrounding him with a swarm of bodies. In short, they dusted off the blueprint Detroit coach Larry Brown drew up last June to topple the heavily favored Lakers and their talented duo of Shaq and Kobe.

“When you have one or two guys, we’ve got five coming at you,” Richard Hamilton said. “That’s tough.”

If that style of basketball catches on with the rest of the league, it won’t pay dividends in the international arena for at least four years. But it could benefit the NBA immediately, making the season a lot more viewer-friendly as it unfolds over the coming months.

To be fair, it’s not as though the league is without its share of compelling story lines. The way the Lakers broke up, like an engine seizing up and throwing parts all over the road, practically guarantees the lingering bitterness between Shaq and Kobe will spill over into the headlines every so often.

And just in case things get too quiet, there’s that wonderful scheduling coincidence that matches O’Neal and his new employers, the Miami Heat, against Bryant and his former employers, the Los Angeles Lakers, on Christmas Day. That day also holds the possibility that former mentor and coach Phil Jackson will be telling both of them what to do one more time, though this time as a television analyst.

There’s also the prospect of watching Kevin Garnett try to carry the Minnesota Timberwolves to a title, even as Latrell Sprewell expands his horizons in a different way – seeing if he can strangle an entire team. In case you missed it, Sprewell, in the final year of a contract that will pay him $14.6 million, has already declared himself “insulted” by a contract offer of $10 million per for the next three years. Better yet, he threatened reprisals if the deal wasn’t wrapped up by tipoff Wednesday night.

“I think this thing is headed toward me leaving,” Sprewell told reporters after practice Sunday. “I’m at risk. I’ve got my family to feed.”

That kind of nonsense is the outgrowth of a policy that evolved over the years as the NBA promoted individual stars at the expense of its teams and rivalries. It served the league well when those superstars were Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan, who were not only transcendent talents, but also hardworking stars who made everyone around them play better.

But the trend backfired as the stars who replaced them entered the league younger and younger, with shoddy fundamentals and a “me-first” attitude that produced a handful of highlight-reel moves every night, but way too much standing around.

All those empty seats in the arenas and the decline in TV ratings prompted commissioner David Stern to begin looking at ways to improve the product. Most of those efforts have centered on rule changes designed to return some of the flow to the game. What the Olympic debacle did was remind an already skeptical audience how much ground still needs to be made up.

In one sense, the timing couldn’t have been worse. The collective bargaining agreement between the NBA and its players expires next summer, and rumbles of a possible lockout are already making the rounds.

Among the items at the top of the league’s agenda are a minimum-age rule – likely 20, a number Stern has floated in the past – and a limit on the length of contracts. Both sides have made it clear they want to avoid the work stoppage that has the NHL sliding toward irrelevance at the moment, but barely a half-dozen years have passed since the NBA last locked out the players.

In the meantime, both parties would do well to concentrate on putting a product on the floor that fans want. There are a few teams besides the Pistons – most of them in the Western Conference – playing an attractive, team-oriented style and the league should be doing as much to put them front-and-center as it has already done to keep the Shaq-Kobe feud simmering. And if not, well, then maybe the Pistons can do it for them.

“A lot of people are still doubting us,” Pistons center Ben Wallace said, “so I guess we just have to go win it all again.”

Guess so.