Issue #49, March 16, 2007

ARE BASKETBALL’S NEW YORK KNICKS PLAYOFF BOUND?

By Dan Rattiner

Two summers ago, the man who was considered the best coach in professional basketball appeared at the Artist-Writers Softball Game in East Hampton. He was Larry Brown, and having just signed a $30 million contract to coach the struggling New York Knicks for the next five years, he had bought a multi-million dollar house out here and was out for the weekend with his wife. He was the man of the hour.

Larry Brown was going to save the New York Knicks from their many years of doldrums. In August, when the softball game was played, he was just beginning to organize the practices and tryouts that would determine the makeup of the Knicks, as they went into the season, scheduled to begin four months later. Everyone had high hopes for him.

Brown turned out to be a disaster. He took the team from mediocrity to the worst team that had ever played professional basketball in almost a hundred years. The team started off winning about as much as it was losing, but by mid-season, which was last March, it became apparent that Brown’s way of pulling his team together, was not the way to pull the Knicks together and the team went into total collapse. During their final 40 games they were able to win only nine. They sank to the bottom. And as I said they wound up with the worst record of any team ever.

Brown blamed his inability to make a decent team out of the Knicks on the fact that Isiah Thomas, a former player who was now the president of the team, refused to listen to which available players Brown felt Thomas ought to trade to get for the new Knicks. The owner of the Knicks, James Dolan (the Chairman of Cablevision), wasn’t buying it. He fired Brown when the season ended, even though the $30 million was for a five-year contract. Dolan then refused to pay Brown the remaining money he owned him for the upcoming four years, which was $23 million. In the end, after various posturings and lawsuits, the matter got settled and Brown walked away with a reported $17 million.

So who would manage the Knicks for this year? Dolan held a news conference. Now millions of dollars poorer, he said he held his longtime friend, Isiah Thomas, responsible for the mess. He told Thomas that he, Thomas, was now the new coach. And he’d have one year to get the team on its feet or he was gone, too. Larry Brown, by the way, sold his house here and moved away. And he has said that maybe his coaching days are over. So far, he seems to have meant it.

In any case, all this has piqued the interest of any number of people in the media, this reporter among them, to see how the Knicks would do under Thomas, who had only briefly coached a team before, and was trying to fill Larry Brown’s shoes.

I went to a few of the games early on this season. The Knicks had started off floundering about as badly as how they had last year. Only a few die-hard fans were attending the games at the Garden and most of them booed as the Knicks went down again and again.

It seemed a sad thing to see this continue. New York needs the Knicks. And the Knicks have just laid there for about six years. Now it seemed that Thomas, who I could see patiently on the far sidelines, cheering his team and urging them on, would go the way of Larry Brown.

And then an odd thing happened. The Knicks began to perk up. Not terrifically, mind you. But a bit. Pretty soon they were winning as many games as they were losing. And their numbers were coming up, although the fans still weren’t coming, and there was a pretty clear feeling that if this was all Thomas could do, then he would have to go.

But then the Knicks obtained a pretty good forward named Jamal Crawford, and the rest of the team found a rhythm around him. Basketball, like all sports, is led by its stars, but in many ways, it is a team effort in a way that no other sport is, except perhaps hockey. It’s physical, there’s no padding, and there are different ways to play the game. The Knicks had found a way to play with Crawford. And now they began to win.

All this time, the two other stars on this team, Stephon Marbury and Steve Francis, were on the sidelines with injuries. And they remained there, nursing their injuries. But the Knicks were moving up through the standings and now the crowds were coming back to the Garden big-time. There was no way the Knicks could make the play-offs, but it was something to see nevertheless.

Two weeks ago, a physician dropped a report on the desk of Coach Thomas, which resulted in Thomas letting out a scream that was heard throughout the training facility. The report said that Crawford, who had complained of pain in his leg, had a hairline fracture. He, too, would be out for the season.

* * *

The way you can see in the standings whether one team or another is headed for the playoffs is to see the standings of the two conferences, the eastern and western. The top eight teams in each conference make the playoffs. The seven teams below that do not. A bold line is drawn in the standings, and you can look in a newspaper at it and you will see who is above and who is below. The Knicks were three teams below the line. Their traditional rivals, the New Jersey Nets, led by Jason Kidd, were the last team above the line. There were twenty more games to play.

In frequent meetings this year between the Nets and the Knicks, the Nets were always the better team and usually won by ten points or more. In one of Crawford’s last appearances, the Knicks fought the Nets evenly, but finally lost by one point in overtime. The world of these two, which had the Nets playing championship ball and the Knicks in the basement, was still in place.

Now Crawford was gone. And so, it would seem, the season for the Knicks. The first game after he was on the sidelines, the Knicks got badly beaten by a mediocre team. But the players said they thought they had a new kind of teamwork that, with Crawford gone, might work. It felt good. The next game, against one of the best teams in basketball, they won. And the one after that, they won. And now, with no stars at all on their team, they have embarked on an amazing run of wins. The Knicks haven’t played like this in a generation, and I don’t know any team that has ever played, with all its big stars on the bench, like this. It seems to be a kind of miracle.

Meanwhile, and this has nothing to do with the Knicks, the Nets have sagged as the season has come down toward the end. Twice in the last ten years they have played for the Championship, and though they lost both times, it was always for the same reason — they just could never get a big, good center to help out Jason Kidd.

Now Kidd is coming toward the end of his career, and there has been talk of trading him away. But Bruce Ratner, who bought the team a few years ago with the intention of moving it to Brooklyn, said Kidd and Vince Carter are his stars and he will see them through to the end. The team owes them. And they will honor them.

Four days ago, the Knicks pulled dead even with the Nets in the race for the playoffs. And two days ago, they pulled ahead. The Knicks are now the last team above the line. The Nets are the first team below the line.

Given everything, it seems unlikely, with just sixteen games to play, that the Knicks could pull this off, but then a whole lot seemed very unlikely and look at what has happened.

The Knicks? The lowly Knicks? In the playoffs? It will all play out in the next three weeks.

Last week, the Knicks re-signed Thomas to a multi-year contract. I think he might also be a candidate for the Manager of the Year.

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