Category Archives: knicks

The Knicks as contenders? (Ask your parents.)

This is how long it’s been since the New York Knicks played for a championship: One early-season Knicks’ loss leading up to that most-recent NBA Final-round appearance was the result of a last-second three-point basket by a Milwaukee Bucks sharpshooter named Dell Curry.

Stephen Curry’s father.

Way back then, in 1999—20 years ago; a generation ago—I had volunteered to cover that season after Newsday’s designated Knicks beat reporter traded herself to the New York Times. I can report that the experience was akin to having a courtside seat at a Stephen King novel. Abundant horror. Relentless suspense. Imperfect, real-life ending.

Knicks fans, not as thoroughly despondent as during this—the worst season in the team’s 73-year existence—nevertheless were as restive as ever then, regularly in full grumbling mode during a disorienting season which had been downsized from the usual 82-game slog to a 50-game frenzy over 13 weeks.

Because of a protracted labor dispute, training camps weren’t opened until mid-January, almost four months later than originally planned, and immediately the sky seemed to be falling. Spectator favorites Charles Oakley and John Starks had been traded away and in their place were an (unfairly) perceived slacker, Marcus Camby, and the NBA’s Enemy No. 1, Latrell Sprewell, whose 68-game suspension for choking his Golden State coach a year earlier had just been lifted.

The first game wasn’t played until February 5 and on April 19, already down to the last eight games, the Knicks—their roster stocked with fabulously compensated but aging, injury-hobbled veterans—were adrift at 21-21. They likely were going to miss the playoffs for the first time in 12 years.

The condensed schedule, which cut significantly into practice time, exacerbated the Knicks’ health issues and the need to marshal a reconstituted roster. There was an ongoing sense of fitting square pegs into round holes, constant talk of seeking a “chemistry”—though backup point guard Chris Childs argued that “chemistry is between lovers. Not basketball players.”

Really, those Knicks were schizophrenic. And so were those Knicks. Beautiful music one night. Completely off-key the next.

Five days into the season, Sprewell suffered a stress fracture in his heel and missed 13 games. The theoretically indispensable Patrick Ewing, from the start, was nursing a bad knee, a deteriorating Achilles tendon—and, later, injured ribs. He was absent for 12 games and below par for many others. Larry Johnson, another past-his-prime former All-Star, was restricted by chronic knee tendinitis.

Holding on to late leads was a persistent problem, a recurrence noted one night in Phoenix by radio play-by-play man Gus Johnson as the clock—and the Knicks’ advantage—again were leaking away.

“Coach Jeff Van Gundy is pacing the sidelines,” Johnson reported to his listeners.

Van Gundy, three feet away, turned to Johnson. “Damn right,” he said.

As the Knicks’ new hired gun, Sprewell engaged in serious one-on-one practice duels with the team’s shooter-in-residence, Allan Houston, in attempts to establish a pecking order. Until, eventually—and just in time—the two came to the conclusion that there was room for both of them.

Sprewell bridled at being used as a sixth man most of the season and declared that he wouldn’t change his full-throttle style to fit Van Gundy’s half-court sets. Like Van Gundy, though, his intense persistence ultimately served the team well.

Somehow, despite their deficiencies, the Knicks never lost their fire, a trait embodied by Childs, all of 6-foot-3, who late in the season offered to rumble with Atlanta’s 7-2 Dikembe Mutombo after accusing Mutombo of an intentional elbow that knocked out Childs’ tooth.

“It’ll be a 12-round fight,” Childs promised. “I’m going to call Don King and get it set up. I may not be able to reach his mouth, but I’ll get him.”

As the Knicks continued to flail around the .500 mark, rumors persisted that general manager Ernie Grunfeld was about to fire Van Gundy, who hardly was surprised. (“What’s he supposed to be saying to me?” Van Gundy said, “‘Good job’? You know, like, ‘Keep it up’?”)

When the Knicks hit that 21-21 low point, three places out of a playoff spot, team president Dave Checketts instead fired Grunfeld. And word leaked that Checketts was talking to Phil Jackson, coach of the six-time NBA champion Chicago Bulls, about also replacing Van Gundy.

Then came the series of far-fetched happenings. Down 15 points with seven minutes to go in Miami against the first-place Heat, the Knicks wound up winning by two. The next night, they won in Charlotte in the process of taking six of their last eight and sneaking into the playoffs. Barely.

Whereupon Houston’s awkward, desperation last-second 14-foot jump shot, waffling on the rim and backboard before deciding to fall through, bushwhacked Miami in the last seconds of the decisive fifth game of the first round. That was the first—and still, only—time a No. 8 seed eliminated a No. 1.

A second-round sweep of Atlanta suddenly had Garden fans, those insatiable beasts, temporarily sated and chanting Van Gundy’s name—“I thought the next word would be ‘sucks,’” was Van Gundy’s sly reaction—and had Checketts admitting he had lied about denying contacts with Jackson.

Next, tied a game apiece against Indiana in the third round, the Knicks learned that Ewing’s Achilles tendon was torn. But while he watched from the bench in the third game, with 11.9 seconds to play and the Knicks down by three, another impossibility was conjured by Larry Johnson. He caught a deflected inbounds pass and drilled a three-point shot as he was fouled, and his subsequent free throw won the game. And the Knicks won the series in six.

That the Knicks, without Ewing and with Johnson’s bad knee acting up, then lost the Finals to a younger, healthier San Antonio team in five games was perfectly reasonable.

So, close but no cigar.

There is a tired old cliché in sports that “nobody remembers who came in second,” a contention that anything less than a championship is failure. Horsefeathers. Those Knicks were memorable. And they get better as the years pass.

“Oak” and the nutty Knicks

The first time the New York Knicks exiled Charles Oakley from Madison Square Garden, it was done with a large measure of regret. That was after the 1997-98 NBA season, when the wildly popular and ruggedly efficient Oakley was traded to Toronto for a younger, more athletic Marcus Camby. The situation was nothing like this week’s banishment, ordered by autocratic owner James Dolan after Oakley’s altercation with some Garden security personnel and Dolan’s unsubstantiated allegation that Oakley “may have a problem with alcohol; we don’t know.”

Then again, in both cases, Oakley lingers as something of a specter, a haunting image of haywire happenings weighing on Gotham’s basketball franchise. To see Oakley, at 53, escorted from his courtside seat in handcuffs provided the metaphor of shackled competence, while the Knicks bumble toward their fourth consecutive non-playoff season. During Oakley’s 10-year stay in New York, the Knicks never failed to reach the post season.

And that’s why, a couple of decades ago, the Oakley apparition was hanging over the Knicks’ preparation for their first season without him. It already was a bizarre time, with the league emerging from a three-and-a-half-month labor dispute. The 1998-99 season didn’t commence until February of ’99, shrunk from 82 to 50 regular-season games.

It so happened that 1999 was my one turn as an NBA beat writer (because Newsday was desperate after failing to replace Judy Battista, who had gone on to bigger things at the New York Times). So I stepped into the roiling Knicks narrative, in which general manager Ernie Grunfeld already was catching grief for trading fan favorites John Starks and Oakley.

That Starks was exchanged for Golden State’s Latrell Sprewell, who had been suspended most of the previous season for having put his coach, P.J. Carlesimo, in a chokehold, was unsettling enough on the behavioral level. But it was the loss of Oakley for the unproven Camby that created the greater angst in pure basketball terms.

Throughout the abbreviated two-week pre-season training camp, and right into the season, Knicks players spoke of “the ghost of Charles Oakley.” Sprewell was among those who acknowledged that head coach Jeff Van Gundy “mentions Oak’s name at times. We all know what Oak brought to the table.”

Van Gundy wasn’t about to deny that. “When the ball’s driven into the paint,” he said, “when there’s a loose ball on the court, we have to make up for what was lost. So that’s the reason we bring up [Oakley’s] name. Charles would take charges. Charles would take loose balls, get the offensive rebound.

“As a coach, you start right away [to get over such a loss]. But, as a person, a little bit of me left when Charles left, just as a little bit of me left with John Starks.  Personally, it is very difficult for me to say goodbye to those two guys because of what they did for me and my career for all the time there were here.”

Camby, whom Van Gundy said “needed to be pushed and prodded” to approximate Oakley’s work rate, defended himself by praising Oakley while arguing that “I bring something else, moving up and down the court.” Van Gundy was moved to predict that center Patrick Ewing would have to compensate for Oakley’s bullying, hulking spirit by having “a career rebounding year.”

As it turned out, and this somehow magnifies the greater dysfunction surrounding the Knicks’ recent expulsion of Oakley, the ’99 Knicks persevered to the championship finals in that microwaved season. They were 21-21 with eight games to play, whereupon Grunfeld was fired, but somehow found last-minute magic in spite of crucial injuries. Sprewell became a model teammate, Camby developed into something of a star and Van Gundy combined a touch for exploiting matchups with an ability to convince all the players to buy into his system.

During the rousing playoff run—the Knicks’ last trip to the finals—there was what could now be interpreted as a spooky glimpse of things to come. Then-Garden president David Checketts denied rumors, then admitted, that he was angling to replace Van Gundy with a marquee name. Phil Jackson.

Eighteen years later: Jackson is in his third year as James Dolan’s personal choice to be team president. The Knicks are in the midst of another lost season. And Charles Oakley’s ghost has come back to torment the Knicks’ house.