WE don’t expect much out of NBC Sports these days thus we’re rarely disappointed. In fact, this week’s announced return of Marv Albert to NBC left a familiar stench, the kind that NBC Sports, under its imperious president, Dick Ebersol, regularly produces.

Let the record show, no matter what you may hear or read – including Albert’s words of gratitude – that Ebersol and NBC exhibited neither altruism nor courage in returning Albert to national, over-the-air television. Quite the contrary.

NBC, instead, allowed first MSG Network, then TNT cable network, to assume all the risks in hiring Albert following a national scandal that left him pleading guilty to a charge of misdemeanor sexual assault. Whatever fallout from advertisers and viewers in response to the re-appearance of Albert wouldn’t be NBC’s to suffer. Hell, no.

Furthermore, and perhaps more important, Ebersol’s “noble” act, this week, was fueled not by a desire to do right by Albert, but by a desire not to lose a rook in a network chess game.

“What really made it happen,” Ebersol said during a Tuesday press conference, “was reading in various columns that the talks with Fox [for Albert to land an NFL play-by-play position] were heating up and I felt I had to act immediately.

“I felt this was the time to move or the opportunity would be three or four years away from us.”

In other words, this was Hollywood Squares. “I’ll take Marv Albert for the block.”

Whether Albert has been sufficiently healed, whether bringing Albert back at this time was quite simply the right thing to do was irrelevant when compared to a competing broadcast network beating NBC to the punch.

Marv Albert this week may as well have been a bag of rock salt, sitting on a shelf in a hardware store with a blizzard moving in. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Get your Marv Albert while he’s still available. Don’t get shut out.

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TO have been a great athlete in the pre-TV days too often means that your abilities are either exaggerated or forgotten. To that end, the death of Marion Motley Sunday was badly underplayed by the national media.

Motley, Cleveland running back in the late ’40s and early ’50s – and among the first black superstars of pro football – was the original Jim Brown and the original Gale Sayers. At 6-1, 240, he could run through you or around you. And he returned kicks.

I’ll forever be grateful to NFL Films for introducing me to Motley through grainy but awesome black and white footage. While it’s a bit silly to engage in the debate as to who’s the greatest running back of all time – everyone’s context is just too different – I do suspect that Marion Motley is the most underrated superstar in the history of pro football.

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MIKE Piazza still lingers near the batter’s box after putting the ball in play in close games, and the Mets’ broadcasters still ignore this as if we don’t notice.

Wednesday, tie game, top of the eighth, none on. Piazza hits a high fly to left. A replay shows him slowly jogging toward first, watching the ball. He’s only halfway to first before the catch is made.

Top of the 10th, game still tied, one out, man on second. Piazza lines one to deep right, where Florida’s Mark Kotsay makes a catch against the wall. A replay shows Piazza watching the ball while getting a very slow start from the batter’s box.

In both cases, there was no reason given for Piazza not to have run at a moderate pace. In both cases, had the ball not been caught, Piazza likely would’ve cost the Mets a base or an out in a close ballgame, something he’d already done this season.

And in both cases, FSNY’s Fran Healy and Howie Rose didn’t even drop a hint that they saw what we saw. Early this season, incidentally, Healy went off on Kotsay for not running hard to catch up with a bloop that fell for a hit.

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TIM McCarver works a double shift, tomorrow, calling Fox’s Braves-Mets game, then heading over to Yankee Stadium for Orioles-Yanks on Ch. 5 … Happy 30th anniversary, Joan and Bill Raftery. And to think that everyone bet the under.

And now CBS holds a proprietary interest in pro wrestling in the form of the ECW, known to the initiated as every bit as vile as the WWF. The more networks that buy into pro wrestling, the less these networks’ news divisions will be inclined to investigate and report exactly what goes on within these ratings-emboldened netherworlds.

Speaking of desensitized, quick-buck TV programming, the home run is becoming to baseball what the slam dunk became to basketball – a marketing tool to attract the impressionable, but no big thing to real fans of the game.

HBO, after 25 years today departs Wimbledon, an alarm to the greed-driven men’s pro tennis game that likely will go unheeded. And now we hear that NBC, with its five-year, $18-million-per deal to carry Wimbledon, may be next to wave farewell.

It was like a journey on Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine. Last night, before the start of the Yankee game on Ch. 5, viewers were able to see and hear the playing of the national anthem.

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APPARENTLY, Tampa Bay Buc Derrick Brooks lost his copy of the Politically Correct Handbook. Seen tomorrow at 11:30 a.m. on CNN/SI’s “Page One with Nick Charles,” Brooks speaks:

“You don’t want kids to think that all professional athletes get DUIs, have drug charges or are violent towards women. Good things have to outweigh the bad so people won’t have negative stereotypes about professional athletes, and that’s African-American athletes in particular.”

Bold, gutsy words. But even if the good began to outweigh the bad, the bad acts, regardless of race, would still be selected as the preferred commodities for commercial America, the ones chosen for kids to admire.