01
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1992–1999
New York
Knicks
No Easy Baskets
The best team that never won
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Title
7
Years
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A Pat Riley Knicks game often ended 86-84.
That was not an accident. That was the plan.
Riley had arrived from Los Angeles in 1991 with four rings won by letting Magic Johnson run. In New York he did the exact opposite: slow the game to suffocation, win every possession physically, and accept that basketball could be ugly as long as it was won.
It worked almost every time. That "almost" is the subject.
1993, conference finals against Chicago. Game 5 at the Garden, final seconds, Charles Smith gathers the ball under the rim and tries four consecutive times to put it in. Four times a Bulls arm appears from nowhere. New York would lose the series.
1994, Jordan has retired. The door is finally open, and the Knicks walk through it: they eliminate Chicago, then Indiana in seven, and reach the Finals against Houston. Game 7. John Starks, who had carried the team for a fortnight, finishes 2 of 18 from the field.
1999, one last attempt. The eighth and final seed, they knock out Miami on an Allan Houston runner that rattles on the rim, sweep Atlanta, eliminate Indiana, and lose Ewing to injury along the way. They reach the Finals without him and win a single game.
Eight years, two Finals, no title.
There is a condescending way to tell this, the one about teams that "never learned to win the big game". It is wrong. These Knicks lost to the greatest player who ever lived, then to Hakeem Olajuwon at his peak, then to the Spurs of Duncan and Robinson. There is no failure to explain. There was simply an era in which somebody else was slightly better, and they turned up every year to verify it.
Context
The era
New York saw itself in this team more than in the one that won.
The Garden in the nineties was a bad-tempered place. The city was coming out of the Koch years and the record crime of 1990, the subway was still covered in graffiti, and its basketball crowd was the most demanding and least forgiving in the country. A team winning 89-85 by throwing elbows matched the mood exactly.
Spike Lee in the front row was part of the apparatus, not the scenery.
There is a television story here too. These Knicks supplied the NBA with its ideal antagonist at the precise moment it was selling Michael Jordan to the world: a hard, slow, physical team against whom genius had to strain. Without the wall, there is no feat.
And there is Patrick Ewing, who deserves better than his reputation.
Drafted first overall in 1985 into a city waiting for a saviour, he played fifteen seasons in New York, carried eight of them, and was never voted MVP. His failures are remembered because they happened in June, in front of everyone. What gets forgotten is how enormous he had to be to get that far.
Losing for a long time at the highest level takes a consistency that winning once does not.
The players
The architects
The players who defined this era.
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John Starks
03
Charles Oakley
04
Allan Houston
Philosophy
The system
Slow the game until the opponent grew bored, then make him pay physically. Pat Riley built a defense that contested every shot and made every drive expensive, in an era when post contact and hand-checking were still legal. On offense everything ran back to Patrick Ewing at the elbow, with a mid-range jumper that fell when nothing else would.
The Garden in late spring, Spike Lee courtside, 86-84 games and a building that roared at a charge call
Key moments
The defining games
The moments that sealed the legacy.