Let’s play a name recognition game. I’ll give you a list of people, and you try to figure out what their claim to fame is. Ready? Here we go: Sandro Gamba, Dino Meneghin, Alva Duer, Antonio Diaz-Miguel, Cesare Rubini, Hortencia Marcari.

I’m envisioning your puzzled looks. “Who are they, the headliners at a Milan fashion show? Did Hollinger get switched off the basketball beat?”

I’ll tell you why I’m writing about them.These are the names of real, actual people who have been inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in the past 20 years.You might find this ironic,since they aren’t actually famous. Truly hardcore fans might – might – recognize one or two of those names. And those aren’t the only puzzling inductees.In the last decade alone, the Hall has also seen fit to make room for household names like Drazen Dalipagic, Leon Barmore, Billie Moore, Aleksandar Nikolic, Denise Curry, Joan Crawford (not that Joan Crawford), Kresimir Cosic, and Uljana Semjonova.

This year’s Hall of Fame class, announced on Monday, isn’t much of an improvement. Yes, they redressed last year’s shameful shafting of Dominique Wilkins, but they also gave a spot to the legendary Mr. Gamba while continuing to ignore many NBA greats. If you’re looking for Pat Riley, Phil Jackson, David Stern, Dennis Johnson, or Artis Gilmore, don’t look here.

They, and plenty of others, have been routinely ignored by an institution that seems to go out of its way to favor collegiate coaches and international “stars.” Of the last six coaches to win an NBA title – Jackson, Riley, Chuck Daly, Rudy Tomjanovich, Larry Brown, and Gregg Popovich – only Daly and Brown are enshrined. And Brown got in as much for his NCAA title at Kansas as anything he did in the pros.

Meanwhile, of the last six college coaches to win a title – Jim Calhoun, Jim Boeheim, Roy Williams, Gary Williams, Mike Krzyzewski, and Tom Izzo – three have already been inducted. But at least those guys won something. What’s staggering about the Hall is the number of college coaches who snuck in without winning anything. In the past two decades, John Chaney, Lou Carnesecca, C.M. Newton, Marv Harshman, Harold Anderson, Pete Carril, Ralph Miller, and somebody named Stanley Watts all got in without a single NCAA title on their resumes. Carnesecca was the only one of the bunch to even make a Final Four, and he had a losing record as coach in the pros.

That those men have been inducted is insane enough, but now consider who hasn’t made the cut. Multiple title winners like Riley, Popovich, and Jackson still await induction – along with Dick Motta, Don Nelson, and countless other great NBA coaches. It’s as though they put Billy Packer and Dick Vitale in charge of making the selections.

That takes to one of the Hall of Fame’s main problems – for all we know it is Packer and Vitale, because they won’t tell us who’s on the committees that make the picks.It has to be the only Hall of Fame in sports where we don’t know the names of the people doing the selecting.Most major sports have a pool of writers and/or former players and coaches prominently involved, to the point that they’ll write about exactly how they voted and why. This doesn’t make the process perfect,but it does make it more open and fair. The secret approach by the folks in Springfield, Mass., has the opposite effect.

Additionally, basketball’s selection process involves multiple committees, which is exactly the type of thing that never ends well. Committees on pro, college, women’s, and international basketball produce a list of nominees each year, and then another committee (comprised of subsets of the first) votes on those nominees for final selection.

As you might expect, this process results in the under-representation of the NBA group and over-representation from the other three, including a ridiculous number of women’s and international players.

For instance, a college women’s coach has made it in four of the past five years – and the other year a college women’s player was selected instead.The only pro coach selected in that same time frame was Brown, and it’s questionable whether that was because of what he did in the pros.

As a result of these biases, and of the unidentified voters making some peculiar selections, there are some laughout-loud anomalies in the Hall of Fame right now. For instance:

* Did you know that the guy who coached the Showtime Lakers (Riley) isn’t in the Hall, but the guy who announced them (Chick Hearn) is?

* That the former commissioner of the Big East, Dave Gavitt, will be inducted later this year, but the commissioner of the NBA during the two decades of its greatest success hasn’t been invited yet?

* That Derrick Coleman and Reggie Theus haven’t gotten a whisper of support for the Hall (and rightly so), but Drazen Petrovic, their clearly inferior but “international” teammate in New Jersey, is in?

Every Hall of Fame is going to have its bad votes. I’m sure Tim Marchman could fill this paper for the next month with all the errors baseball has made. But basketball is unique in that the bad votes almost outnumber the good ones, and that so many obviously deserving candidates from the game’s highest level have been excluded.

There is a solution to this, of course, and sooner or later I think it’s bound to happen: A Pro Basketball Hall of Fame. The NBA has the resources and the gravitas to pull this off, it’s just a question of whether the league decides it’s a priority. Besides, the current Hall of Fame is horribly managed anyway – what kind of Hall is only open for six hours a day? One with the NBA’s authorization, perhaps located near Madison Square Garden, would be certain to operate much more smoothly and profitably.

The other alternative is to keep getting the shaft from Springfield. If the NBA can live with a system where a guy with nine championship rings is on the outside looking in, and where it’s greatest players routinely take a backseat to the Dino Meneghins and Hortencia Marcaris of the world, then so be it. But the time for a change is long overdue.

Mr. Hollinger is the author of the 2005-06 Pro Basketball Forecast. He can be reached at jhollinger@nysun.com.