THE best part about Gus Alfieri’s recently released book about Joe Lapchick isn’t Lapchick’s story, although it’s an important retelling of one of the greatest New York basketball lives ever. It isn’t in reminding younger generations of what a giant Lapchick was, both physically and metaphysically, although that’s important, too, in order to remind those kids that the profession of basketball coach really wasn’t invented by Phil Jackson or Pat Riley.

No, the best part is how clearly Alfieri – once a wildly successful coach in his own right, at St. Anthony’s High on Long Island – reveres his subject matter. And that makes sense, because Alfieri played for Lapchick at St. John’s, absorbed so much of his old coach’s lessons on basketball and life, and that comes across on every page. It may not make for the most cynical take on a man’s life, but there’s no law that says every biography has to lead with the warts.

Mostly, it’s comforting to remember that there was a time when the profession of coaching wasn’t populated, as it is now, by an overwhelming number of mercenaries, miscreants and me-first peddlers of plastic platitudes.

It’s unfortunate to paint the whole profession with this broad brush stroke, of course. There are thousands of men and women who still embody the old-school coaching notions that Alfieri writes about, who still yearn for nothing more from the job than for their old students and players to return for visits over the years and refer to them by the singularly honorary title of “Coach.”

“When you are a coach,” Jeff Van Gundy told me earlier in the week, “there’s no higher way to show or receive respect than when another coach calls you that. That means you’re accepted. If that matters to you, then it means the world to you.”

The problem is, in our current sporting culture, coaches are not only enabled to behave poorly, they are encouraged to do so. So vast are the rewards for the cut-throatiest of the cut-throats – and so vast are the consequences of failure – that what we’ve bred is a generation of insufferable louts who not only believe themselves to be smarter than you and me, but completely detached from the laws of decency and decorum to which you and I subscribe as a matter of course.

Nick Saban may be the most glaring example, but the sad part is, what he really is, is only this week’s example. Sure, he lied through his teeth. Sure, he obnoxiously sneered at prying questions about his intentions, even though it turns out all of those questions were absolutely spot-on relevant. And, sure, he wound up taking $32 million, guaranteed, from a state university where the average salary for an assistant professor is $47,000. He is detestable and deplorable at once, a handy guide for distasteful, dyspeptic manners.

But, again, he’s news only because he’s a coach who did all of this now, in the most recent news cycle. We see this all the time, of course. In New York, we’re intimately familiar with the nine-page resume of Larry Brown, the godfather of all coaching itinerants. We’ve seen the development of modern-day Machiavellis Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick.

And, of course, a year ago, we saw the Saban script played out with almost note-for-note precision by Herm Edwards, a man who for the moment is the toast of the town in Kansas City, a man who sure seemed to embody some of those warm, fuzzy, old-timey coaching values Alfieri writes about, but who – let us never forget – lied about his intentions and, ultimately, about his destination.

And let’s face it: If this kind of boorish behavior can infect even a fellow as genuinely nice and well-intentioned as Herm Edwards, then maybe you have to ask the same question most of the nation’s 300 million people really want to ask of the men and women who ultimately seek the Presidency: Who in their right minds would want that job?

If you want to survive, you have to be slippery. Van Gundy himself started out with the purest intentions, the son of a coach who was still driving the bus to junior-college games in his 60s. But the only way he could survive in the shark-infested waters was to look out for his own back. Which he did. And then, to prove he’d mastered the craft, he fired himself before the Knicks could do it. And the whole while, the process seemed to torture him.

Because it will torture men who have the misfortune of owning a conscience. The harsh truth is this: as Gordon Gekko once said in “Wall Street”: If you want a friend, buy a dog. If you want to be a coach in 2007 – or at least a successful one – better to be a dog.

(Mike Vaccaro’s e-mail address is michael.vaccaro@nypost.com. His Yankees-Red Sox book, “Emperors and Idiots,” is available in bookstores everywhere.)