David Aldridge | Tough job: NBA boss must fight to right his sinking ship.

NEW YORK - David Stern strode to the podium alone yesterday morning, aware that no one wanted to hear from deputies or underlings. In the front row of the hotel ballroom sat a phalanx of NBA lawyers and officials, but only Stern spoke, for almost 90 minutes.

In the balance was, and is, no less than the fate of his adult life's work - lawyer and then legal counsel to the NBA, and, ultimately, his legacy as commissioner. During two-plus decades as the big boss, he's taken a once-moribund league to unprecedented heights, then fought to keep it relevant, with mixed results.

And today, all of it hangs by a fingernail.

"I can tell you this is the most serious situation, and worst situation, that I've ever experienced - either as a fan of the NBA, a lawyer for the NBA, or the commissioner of the NBA," Stern said in addressing the morass of point spread, betting and mob allegations that face former referee Tim Donaghy.

No lockout, no player brawl with fans, no rape investigation, no television-ratings free fall equals the damage Donaghy has done, and may yet do. And while Stern went to great pains yesterday to say that all of the information made available to him thus far by investigators points to Donaghy's acting alone, he acknowledged he doesn't know what the feds, and Donaghy, ultimately know.

And for a guy who micromanages his league to within an inch of its life, the not knowing has to be the cruelest cut.

Because no matter what you think of Stern - and it says here he's a close second to Pete Rozelle as the best commissioner ever - this is now part of his legacy, as much as huge TV deals or the Dream Team. This is his stain.

Franchise movement, drug abuse and labor strife forever taint the good works of Rozelle in the NFL and Bowie Kuhn in major- league baseball. The steroid era is Bud Selig's anchor. Gary Bettman never will be able to live down the fact that an entire NHL season drowned on his watch.

But this, the ultimate horror, is at Stern's feet - just as the Black Sox scandal in 1919 forced baseball to create the job of commissioner, for Kenesaw Mountain Landis. (Which is one of a hundred reasons I will not countenance lectures from seamheads about the virtues of their sport.)

Stern said again and again yesterday that the information he had received from the FBI indicated that Donaghy acted alone. But he doesn't know for sure. And he can't guarantee the public that this can't, or won't, happen again.

At best, if we accept Stern's version of events, the NBA's extensive network of human safeguards - the security department filled with former FBI and DEA agents, city cops, ex-Army officials and Homeland Security personnel - tasked with finding trouble before trouble finds the league's employees, failed to do its job.

Second, the redundant systems in place to examine every call made by every official, and the calls they should have made but didn't, is ill-equipped to detect patterns in the chaos of calls that would signal something is rotten with an official's work.

Third, the system that hired Donaghy in the first place and assesses officials in such a secretive manner that the officials don't even know their own accuracy rankings, or why certain refs work the Finals while others don't, is as transparent as mud.

In short, everyone and everything that was in place to prevent this very thing from happening broke down. And that has taken the league's integrity down a sinkhole, just as the point-shaving scandals of the 1950s and '60s destroyed some college basketball programs in the Northeast for a generation.

Stern, Gotham-raised and bred, who fought as a young lawyer to keep Connie Hawkins out of the NBA after Hawkins was tied to gamblers such as Jack Molinas, knows that history as well as anyone.

"It is my hope that the NBA will similarly be accorded the benefit of the doubt [as were college basketball and soccer, which was rocked by a referee-fixing scandal last year], based upon what we have done, what we stand for, and what we pledge to continue to do," Stern said.

But hope is not enough.

To keep the FBI investigation on its tracks, Stern often had to bite his tongue yesterday. But to save the league he loves, Stern must swallow his pride and start firing a whole bunch of people. You may argue that the last name on the list should be Stern's, and it's a fair point, though I wouldn't go that far.

But the jobs of a lot of department heads - operations and security, for two - are a good start. In fact, they are the only start.