The Last Enforcer, page 7
“We should have been the ones sweeping them,” Barkley said. “Three shots changed the outcome of all three games.”
It was a close series—we outscored the Sixers by a total of 8 points—and a bunch of us celebrated by pushing a broom across the court. In the first quarter, Barkley had thrown the ball at Mark and I started pushing Barkley. He was doing a lot of talking, and now it was time for us to have some fun. Me, Mark, Sidney Green, Johnny Newman, and Eddie Lee Wilkins all grabbed the broom and swept Barkley away.
Not everyone liked it. Ira Berkow, the basketball writer from the New York Times, wrote: “They did it gaily, gloriously and with utter disdain for good taste and the gods of chance.”
Honestly, it’s not that deep. We just won the game, the broom was there, and I don’t really care if it annoyed Barkley and the Sixers. Let them worry about that. We were the team advancing.
* * *
While we were doing our thing in Philadelphia, Michael Jordan was producing one of the iconic moments of his career: his famous last-second shot over Cleveland’s Craig Ehlo in their pivotal Game 5. The win meant that it would be the Knicks against the Bulls in the Eastern Conference Semifinals.
I know reporters like to ask, “Does it mean more to you playing your former team?” The answer, really, is no. I couldn’t get caught up in that. My job was to defend, rebound, and make shots. I was not going to try to score more against the Bulls because they’d traded me. That’s not how it works, at least not for me. It’s not how I operate. Our best chance of winning was for all of us, myself included, to play our game, not get caught up in the storylines… and hope that Jordan had a rough series.
The series opened on May 9, 1989, at the Garden, and it took us fifty-three minutes to lose a 12-point fourth-quarter lead and home court advantage. The Bulls rallied to force overtime and then just rolled, 120–109. Michael recorded his first playoff triple-double—34 points, 12 assists, and 10 rebounds—and he scored 9 of Chicago’s 17 points in OT.
It was a bad sign for that series, and ultimately a harbinger of things to come for the Knicks. Michael was a great player who always found a way to win. He got the benefit of the doubt from the officials, which was bullshit. He shouldn’t have gotten every call, but he had talent and he knew how to win. And Michael was very good at not allowing one bad performance to carry over into the next game.
For example, we held Michael to 15 points in Game 2 to draw even in the series. Then, because the league and its television partner, CBS, wanted to air Michael’s games on Saturday and Sunday, we played back-to-back in Chicago on May 13 and 14. Jordan was at his best in those games, coming off of the loss. He scored 40 points with 15 rebounds, 9 assists and 6 steals in Game 3, and the Bulls crushed us, 111–88. The claim was that he injured his groin in the process though, and he was being listed as questionable for Game 4, which was less than twenty-four hours away.
No one—Rick Pitino, myself, or anyone else on our team—thought that Michael would sit out Game 4. We weren’t buying that. The next night, Mother’s Day, he was limping, and he still scored 47 points, including 18 in the fourth quarter. CBS named Mike’s mom, Deloris Jordan, the MVP of the game. Well, Mrs. Jordan and Michael got some help from the referees as well. Michael attempted twenty-eight free throws and made twenty-three. As a team, we took just twenty-two free throws.
“I never saw the officials call a game tighter than they did today,” Gerald Wilkins said after the game. “Every time we went near him, they sent him to the free-throw line. He doesn’t need that kind of help.”
Michael and the refs were a problem, but so was Patrick’s overall play. He was awful in Game 4: our All-Star did not shine bright. He made just five of fifteen shots and finished with 15 points, while Cartwright, the Bulls’ center, scored 15 of his 21 points in the first quarter. It was the worst possible time for Patrick to have one of his worst games. We were down 3–1 in the series after that loss, and Michael, like a Great White Shark, was smelling blood in the water.
“According to Coach Pitino, I’ve been faking the injury all the time,” Michael said. This is the kind of stuff Michael doesn’t forget. Rick didn’t back down. He reminded the media that a year earlier, on April 19, 1988, Michael had reported to work for a game against the Knicks with an upset stomach “and scored 47 against us.” I never thought that Michael was faking an injury or an illness, but Rick wasn’t buying the groin injury.
Ewing answered the bell in Game 5 with 32 points. I added 18 points and 13 rebounds, and we forced the series for Game 6 back to Chicago, where we hadn’t won all season. We caught a break in the third quarter when Scottie Pippen and Kenny Walker were ejected for fighting. And our luck continued when Trent Tucker tied the game with six seconds left by converting a three as he was fouled by Craig Hodges. We had a chance. They had Michael. He drew a questionable foul with four seconds left, sank both free throws, and that was it. Jordan finished Game 6 with 40 points. His series average was 35 points, 9 rebounds, and 8 assists.
Pitino called Jordan the “best player to ever put on a uniform,” which was saying something real at that point, considering Michael and the Bulls were headed to their first Eastern Conference Finals. He hadn’t won anything yet. And the Bulls went on to lose to the Pistons in the next round. But Michael’s time would come, of course. I, on the other hand, was heading home for the second straight year with a loss in the conference semifinals, and more change on the way.
There had been reports that Pitino and Knicks general manager Al Bianchi were feuding. I never picked up on that. Nor did I care. I thought Rick was doing a great job, and the system he’d implemented was working. We just ran into Jordan in the second round, and he was great.
But Rick, who was from New York, was being romanced by the University of Kentucky. It was one of the best college jobs in the country, even though the Wildcats were on three-year probation for violating recruiting rules. Pitino took the job anyway.
“I wasn’t looking to get into professional basketball,” Pitino said on the day he was introduced as Kentucky’s coach. “I wanted to be a part of the turnaround here with the New York Knickerbockers. I wish it could have lasted longer, but you have to know who you are and I’m a college basketball coach and I think that’s where my heart is.”
With Rick, I thought we had a chance to be a really good team. He was young and we were young. It was a good fit. But management was getting in his way. I couldn’t blame him for doing what was best for him. I just didn’t think it was the best thing for the Knicks.
6 THE PRICE OF BEING LATE
The Knicks didn’t look very far to find Rick Pitino’s replacement. They simply promoted Stu Jackson, who had been Pitino’s assistant in New York after working for him at Providence College. At thirty-three, Jackson was the second youngest head coach in league history, and one of his first moves was to make the coaching staff even younger by hiring twenty-seven-year-old Jeff Van Gundy, whom Stu had lured away from McQuaid Jesuit High School in Rochester, New York, to work on Pitino’s staff at Providence. Jeff had spent the previous season at Rutgers University before being reunited with Stu. Like I said, this is how things work in the NBA. It’s all a big family tree.
Stu inherited a good roster from Pitino; eight players were returning from a team that had won fifty-two games the year before. But Stu was also inheriting some of Pitino’s problems. Rod Strickland was unhappy being Mark Jackson’s backup and asked to be traded midway through the season.
“Looking back, I screwed that up,” Stu said. “Rod deserved to play more. I should have made that work. Rod could be hard to coach. He was late for practice. He’d forget his sneakers. But for years it bothered me the way things went down. Our relationship was strained. I told Rod years later that I should have handled things better.”
With age comes experience. Stu wasn’t much older than his players when he became head coach. He was learning on the job and he had a player who wanted out. It’s not an easy situation. The front office tried to make a deal with the Denver Nuggets for Lafayette (Fat) Lever, but the Nuggets rejected two offers. The longer it went on, the worse it got for management.
One day, after Rod arrived late for practice, he got called into a meeting with GM Al Bianchi and Stu. He showed up fifteen minutes late to that. I’m not even sure if Rod was doing it intentionally. He was always late. After Mark Jackson retired, his friends organized a roast and a charity auction. Rod bought an expensive watch, and when it was time for Pitino to address the crowd, he cracked a joke about Rod being late his entire career and deciding now to buy a watch. The audience enjoyed that.
But in 1990, Bianchi and Stu didn’t find it funny that Rod arrived fifteen minutes late for an important meeting. It was only a matter of time before a trade would happen, and on February 21, 1990, Strickland was dealt to the San Antonio Spurs for Maurice Cheeks. It was a swap of point guards; the twenty-three-year-old Strickland for the thirty-three-year old Cheeks, who had won an NBA Championship with Philadelphia in 1983. Mo was happy to join our team, and he fit right in with the guys in the locker room. Cheeks is a veteran and a leader.
When the trade was made, Charles Barkley and his big mouth had to chime in. Barkley said: “Are they [the Knicks] crazy? I love Maurice Cheeks, but I just don’t know how much he has left. But I do know that all Rod needs is the opportunity to play and he’d be a star.”
The Knicks should have figured out a way to make it work with Rod and Mark. The NBA was different in the early nineties. It wasn’t as guard-dominant as it is today. When you have talent like that, you don’t get rid of it. But management wanted to end a controversy that was becoming a bigger and bigger story in the New York media.
I liked Rod and didn’t want to see him go. But I was ready to play with Cheeks, who knew how to run an offense. Unfortunately, my season took a dramatic turn when I suffered a hand injury one month after we acquired Cheeks. The injury knocked me out for the remainder of the regular season. I’m not exactly sure when it happened initially, but my left hand was hurting so much before our March 20 game against the Orlando Magic that I told our team physician, Dr. Norman Scott, that I thought I’d broken it. Dr. Scott looked at it for a second, touched it, and said, “I think you’re right. Let’s get an X-ray.”
I told him it would have to wait until after the game.
“You’re not playing tonight,” he said.
Well, I didn’t listen to him. I played the game. In fact, I played forty minutes, scored 14 points, and grabbed 19 rebounds. Then I went for an X-ray, and sure enough, it showed that I had broken the fourth metacarpal bone in my non-shooting hand, which put me in a cast and ended the regular season for me.
The cast was removed on April 16, ten days before our playoff opener and just seventeen days after doctors had treated me. It was a lot faster than the recommended time for full recovery. Our medical staff wasn’t certain I would be ready to play. My thinking was, if the cast is off and I’m wearing this splint, that tells me I’m ready.
“There is very good healing,” Dr. Scott told the media. “There is no tenderness. I can’t say he will be ready for the playoffs. Since there is risk of re-fracture, the ultimate decision will be made by Charles after he sees how the hand feels. Any fracture like the one Charles sustained normally takes three months to heal.”
I heard that as: I could fully recover over the summer. Even though I hadn’t played for a couple of weeks, I was keeping myself in shape. The playoffs were coming and there was no way I wasn’t playing.
I wasn’t available for our last three regular season games, which we lost to the Bucks, the Hawks, and the Cavaliers. We finished 45-37 and drew the Boston Celtics in the first round. The Celtics were getting older, but they were still formidable. We started the series on the road and quickly fell behind 0–2 in the best-of-three, including a 157–128 loss in Game 2. Ewing bailed us out in Game 3 at Madison Square Garden by producing 33 points and 18 rebounds. I had 14 points and 13 rebounds in thirty-eight minutes before fouling out. At least we were making things interesting.
“The biggest thing we did in the series is switching Charles on Robert Parish and Patrick on Kevin McHale,” Stu Jackson said. “For whatever reason, we did a better job defensively with those matchups.”
In Games 3 and 4 McHale and Parish combined for 28 and 34 points respectively, but Patrick had another monster game, with 44 points, and we blew the Celtics out 135–108 to force a Game 5 in Boston. We had life, but the Celtics had history on their side. The Knicks franchise hadn’t won at Boston Garden in twenty-six games, including eight playoff games. That streak of futility dated back to February 29, 1984. Trent Tucker was the only player left on the roster who had won in Boston with the Knicks.
Patrick called it our “destiny” to snap the losing streak, and on May 6, 1990, we did just that. We hung tough throughout the game, and early in the fourth I scored a putback off of a Johnny Newman miss; then I converted a pass from Ewing into a layup and we went up by 6 with 8:15 to play. But two plays really changed the game and ultimately the series. Up 101–99, Patrick hit a short hook in the lane over Parish. On the next possession Larry Bird drove to the basket for an uncontested reverse dunk, and the most incredible thing happened: Bird blew the dunk with 4:30 left.
“I remember saying, ‘We got them, we got them,’ ” Stu said. “The Celtics were a little older and in Game 5 they were tired. We were younger and fresher.”
Larry Legend didn’t miss shots like that. We buried the Celtics for good when I threw a pass to Patrick that missed its mark and bounced toward the corner. Patrick chased it down in front of our bench, and with the shot clock running down and our medical trainer Mike Saunders screaming “Shoot it! Shoot it!” Patrick turned and fired. The shot was perfect. Patrick had made just one three-pointer all season, back in March against the Washington Wizards. And yet here he was back in his hometown of Boston plunging the dagger into the Celtics’ hearts. That basket made it 113–101 with 2:03 left, and we eventually won 121–114.
“This is about as low as it gets since I’ve been here,” Bird said.
Bird’s missed dunk changed the series. Boston was like Chicago; they got all the calls. But Bird was the only guy who could put the ball on the floor against us and do something. We just tried to stop him. We weren’t worried about the rest of the guys. Patrick finished with 31 points and came within 2 rebounds of a triple-double. I had one of the best games of my career; 26 points on just eleven shots with 17 rebounds in forty-four minutes. I couldn’t beat Bird and the Celtics when I was in Chicago, but I got my revenge with the Knicks.
We were flying high, and we didn’t have to face Michael Jordan in the second round. Instead, it was the Detroit Pistons, the defending NBA champions. We didn’t put up much of a fight. Two nights after our big win in Boston, the Pistons brought us back to reality with a 35-point beatdown. With Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars, Bill Laimbeer, and Mark Aguirre, the Pistons had too much talent and experience. They were physical like Boston, but more dynamic, and had the best record in the Eastern Conference. We took just one game in the series—Game 3 at home—and failed to score more than 97 points in the four losses.
* * *
We ended up with a new coach just fifteen games into the 1990–91 season, when Stu Jackson was fired after a 7-8 start. He was replaced by John MacLeod, who was fifty-three years old and had coached fourteen seasons with the Phoenix Suns and three seasons with the Dallas Mavericks. Al Bianchi had been MacLeod’s assistant coach for eleven seasons at Phoenix and had tried to hire him in 1987 before he hired Rick Pitino.
Again, this is how the NBA works. It seems like everyone is connected. But this time things were getting messy. Bianchi let Johnny Newman walk as a free agent and Johnny signed with Charlotte. Mark Jackson was unhappy during the season and was suspended two games for “conduct detrimental to the club.” Patrick wasn’t happy and talks about a contract extension were going nowhere. Plus, we were losing and attendance was down.
Ironically, we had won four straight when ownership fired Bianchi in March 1991 and hired Dave Checketts, who had been the president of the Utah Jazz and the Denver Nuggets. Checketts was only thirty-five when he got the job, and he admitted, “I don’t claim to be a terrific basketball personnel guy. What I claim to be is to make the decision on who is.”
That meant Ernie Grunfeld, who had worked as an assistant coach under Stu Jackson, and then moved into the front office prior to the season, would have a more prominent role. There was a lot of change and uncertainty happening as we played out the end of the season. We finished at 39-43, and it seemed like we were trending in the wrong direction.
It didn’t help that we failed to win a single playoff game, as the Chicago Bulls eliminated us in the first round in three games. Game 1 on April 25 set the tone for the entire series. We were trailing 65–36 at halftime and lost 126–85 as Michael Jordan scored 28 points in thirty-two minutes. In Game 2, we held them to 89 points. The Bulls held us to 79. We just couldn’t hang with them.
The defining moment of the series, however, and really one of the defining moments in our battles with Michael Jordan, was in Game 3 at Madison Square Garden on April 30, 1991. It was a sequence that took place in the second quarter of our 103–94 loss.
Jordan caught the ball on the wing and was being defended by John Starks. Starks was in his first year with the Knicks. He had gone undrafted, and after spending thirty-six games with the Golden State Warriors and then being released by them, he bounced around the Continental Basketball Association and the World Basketball League. Then he had gotten an invite to the Knicks training camp in the fall of 1990. He was about to be cut on the final day, but he injured his knee in the last practice when he tried to dunk over Patrick. That injury may have saved his career. Since the Knicks weren’t allowed under league rules to cut an injured player, Starks remained on Injured Reserve for a few weeks, and when he was healthy enough to play, the Knicks put him on the roster.
