Preaseason basketball is about as sexy as Don Zimmer in Spandex. But as the Knicks and Nets are finding out this week, that doesn’t make it any less important.

While writers have filled several volumes with musings about spring training, and NFL training camps generate excitement mainly due to the sheer boredom that precedes them, basketball’s preseason has to compete with the baseball playoffs, college and pro football and, this year, a presidential election.

Yet preseason play is more important to each NBA team than it is in any other sport. While the others spend close to two months preparing, the NBA has just a few short weeks from the time the teams reunite at “training camp” (which for most is a glorified three-day weekend at a Holiday Inn) until the opening tip-off on November 2.

Teams have to assess their situation quickly, make judgments on roster hopefuls in the span of a few days, and work everyone into playing shape for opening night.

The one thing basketball has in common with the other sports’ preseasons is this: Winning doesn’t matter. That’s why the results of the local teams’ Tuesday exhibition games are so misleading. The Nets won while the Knicks got spanked, yet halfway through the exhibition season, it is the Knicks who are feeling much better about the coming season.

Let’s start with the men from Gotham, who were routed 113-89 by Utah for their first defeat of the preseason. First, there’s the unexpected impressive play of second-round pick Trevor Ariza. Drafted out of UCLA as a project, he’s looked ready to contribute right away and could see minutes off the bench if Allan Houston isn’t ready for the opener.

Ariza’s 15 points against the Jazz came on the heels of a 12-point effort against New Jersey. His ability to finish on the break, get to the line, and rebound for a small forward could make him a productive role player despite his youth (he’s just 19) and inability to shoot.

The other impressive Knick is more of a known quantity: Mike Sweetney. I’ve been campaigning for him to start at power forward since late last season, and it appears he may be forcing the Knicks’ hand. Sweetney scored 18 against the Jazz on 7-of-10 shooting and is second on the Knicks in preseason scoring after Jamal Crawford. He also leads the team in rebounds at nearly eight per contest despite playing just 24 minutes a night.

With those two and the arrival of Crawford, who was great in a win over San Antonio but awful on Tuesday, the Knicks are no longer just a gang of overpaid guys in their 30s. They have some exciting young players for the first time in eons, and one hopes Isiah Thomas will resist the urge to trade them for a 32-year-old former All-Star with a leaden contract, which has been the Knicks’ M.O. for the past decade.

So how does a team that looks so good in theory lose 113-89? By playing all the scrubs. The Knicks used 17 players on Tuesday, which is amazing considering you can only suit up 12 in the regular season. Among them were short-timers like Andre Barrett, Bruno Sundov, and Jamison Brewer. In the final four games, look for Lenny Wilkens to give more minutes to his core players for the coming season – with the exception of Houston, who may not be ready any time soon.

While the Knicks and Nets each have four preseason games left in which to work out the kinks, it’s the Nets who require a much greater dekinking. How does an opening night backcourt of Zoran Planinic and Rodney Buford sound to you? Offensively, the Nets look like a train wreck without the injured Jason Kidd to organize things and with Planinic, Jacque Vaughn, and Travis Best battling to see who can play worse.

The loss of Kidd, who won’t be back until a month into the season – and that’s if everything goes well – only magnifies the Nets’ summer talent drain. Gone are Kerry Kittles, Kenyon Martin, and Lucious Harris, with precious little to replace them. Even with those three players last season, the Nets weren’t a great offensive team. They were well below average in fact, but won the division with suffocating defense.

Without those players and Kidd on the shelf, it could be a long, dull year. In their first exhibition game, the Nets nearly put up a bagel in the fourth quarter before finally finding the net in the last two minutes.

But the Nets knew their backcourt would be a question mark before the preseason started. The bigger disappointment has been in their frontcourt. Alonzo Mourning, who is trying to return from a kidney transplant and provide the one hope that maybe the Nets won’t be terrible this year, hasn’t been cleared to play yet.

Meanwhile, rookie center Nenad Krstic has played, but isn’t doing much to inspire confidence that he can fill the breach, making just one field goal in 40 minutes of action.

Then, of course, there’s the ugly karma behind the scenes. Once the Nets started dismantling the juggernaut of the past three years, Kidd reached back into his “demand it privately, deny it publicly” bag of tricks (see Scott, Byron) to try to get himself traded somewhere, anywhere, before training camp started. Then he got into a public fight with the team over whether he should be present at two-a-days when practice began.

In the big picture, the Nets have come up with more questions than Alex Trebek, and none of them are being answered in a positive way. Kidd and Mourning aren’t ready to play, Krstic isn’t contributing, and the veteran castoffs imported to spackle the hole at shooting guard have been wholly underwhelming.

Answering questions is the name of the game in the preseason, and that’s why the Knicks have to be so pleased. Even before training camp began, a number of scribes were tabbing them to win a watered-down Atlantic Division. With the young players looking strong and no major injuries beyond Houston, the exhibition season has only served to confirm that possibility.

New Jersey’s three-year vise-grip on the Atlantic is almost certainly ending, but based on the strong play of the Knicks’ young guns, the trophy may not be traveling far.