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.