01
2
1970–1973
New York
Knicks
Hit the Open Man
Nobody was the star. That was the point.
2
Titles
3
Years
Scroll
May 8th, 1970, Madison Square Garden, minutes before Game 7 of the Finals. Willis Reed limps out of the tunnel.
He has a torn muscle in his right thigh. He did not play the previous game, which New York lost by twenty-two.
He scores the first two baskets of the night. Then nothing for the rest of it.
That is the image New York kept, and it is misleading. Reed did not win that game.
Walt Frazier finished with 36 points and 19 assists, one of the most complete lines ever produced in a deciding game. Nobody remembers it, because everyone was watching the man who limped.
Which is fitting, for a team built on the idea that individual credit is not the point.
Red Holzman had one commandment, repeated until it wore thin: find the open man. Not your best scorer. Not whoever is hot. Whoever is free.
That sounds ordinary now. In a league that ran on isolation and post-ups, it was very nearly an ideological position, and these Knicks imposed it by beating the Bullets, then a twenty-three-year-old Kareem's Bucks, then the Lakers of Chamberlain and West.
Three years later, with Earl Monroe added, they did it again against the same Lakers. Two titles, and a way of playing that is still taught.
Context
The era
New York had never won anything in basketball before 1970.
It was the city of the game: the playgrounds of Harlem and the Bronx had been producing the country's best players for twenty years, and the professional league had remained a curiosity there. The Knicks had existed since 1946 without ever being champions.
The 1970 title changed what basketball meant in the city.
What followed had less to do with sport than with sociology. This team was an improbable assembly: Bill Bradley came from Princeton and Oxford and would become a senator for New Jersey; Walt Frazier wore wide-brimmed hats and drove a Rolls, which is how he came to be called Clyde after the film; Dave DeBusschere came from working-class Michigan and had been a player-coach at twenty-four.
Nothing connected them except how they played.
That is what New York recognised. A city that thinks of itself as an assembly of people with nothing in common watched a team organised on exactly that principle, and never quite got over it.
The Knicks have won nothing since 1973. Fifty years on, the Garden still stands up when Frazier walks in.
The players
The architects
The players who defined this era.
02
Walt Frazier
03
Dave DeBusschere
04
Bill Bradley
Philosophy
The system
The ball never stopped in anyone's hands. Red Holzman had reduced his offense to four words, "hit the open man", and applied them without exception: the best available shot belonged to whoever was free, whatever his name. Defensively it was constant pressure on the ball, hands everywhere, and Walt Frazier stealing possessions in a way the crowd never quite saw coming.
The old Madison Square Garden, cigar smoke in the aisles, a city discovering that a team could look like it
Key moments
The defining games
The moments that sealed the legacy.