I clearly recall my thoughts aboard the flight from San Francisco to New York.
I’d been ready to move on from the Warriors for some time. I wanted it. But I felt uprooted all the same.
It’s uncomfortable, even disorienting, when you relocate from one city to another. I didn’t have a house waiting for me. I didn’t have an apartment. Training camp was over. The exhibition season was over. I would be walking through the door cold, trying to integrate myself into a new team, with new personalities, a new coach, and a new system. My reporting date was Monday, less than twenty-four hours away. Our first game on the season schedule was Friday night at Madison Square Garden. We were playing the Philadelphia 76ers, who’d added Moses Malone to complement Julius Erving and a formidable roster that included Maurice Cheeks and Andrew Toney.
We. My team. The New York Knicks.
It still seemed unreal.
I didn’t feel pressure. But I had a tremendous sense of responsibility. I wasn’t brought to the team as a complementary player. I was expected to lead them back to their former eminence in a conference with Dr. J and Larry Bird, the two best forwards in the league—athletes at the pinnacle of our sport—as my competitors.
Beyond that, I was a hometown kid. I would be representing the city, Brooklyn, my family and friends, and the storied legacy of the Knicks. When I was on other teams, I’d always looked forward to playing at Madison Square Garden, felt my adrenaline flowing the moment I stepped on the court. Performing there wasn’t just playing basketball. It was something indescribably special and singular. For me, New York was b’ball, and I’d always brought my A-plus game as a visitor.
Now I was a Knick, and the challenge was ready to be met. If our team got off to a good start, the city would be galvanized. If we failed, I knew all eyes would be on me.
We lost our first seven games.
I REMEMBER GARDEN FANS WELCOMING ME as if I’d been there forever. The cheers when I was announced for the first time made it feel like a homecoming.
I could tell the crowd was charged up. New York basketball fans are very knowledgeable. They’d seen me play at Madison Square Garden over the years and knew what I’d achieved with the Nets and Warriors. I was arriving after an All-Star and All-Pro season, and they were excited by my presence as the team’s elite player.
Despite losing our first game to Philly, I felt we gave a strong effort. But we had seven new players on the squad, and many of us had never played together before. I’d only had a few days of practice after flying from the West Coast. Our backup forward Louis Orr had been acquired in trade the same day I was. We were disjointed on both sides of the court.
The roles Ernie Grunfeld and I had on the Knicks were different than they’d been in college. But we had an unbreakable bond, a special kinship. We were friends for life and would eventually move to the same town. As New York kids, we found it incredible to be playing together on the Knicks and often driving together to Madison Square Garden, where the greats we’d emulated on the playgrounds had left their indelible marks on the game and our souls.
But playing in the wake of greatness comes with expectations. The loss to Philly was the first of our 0–7 start, with a rocky cross-country road trip following our season opener.
New Yorkers aren’t known for their patience. The fans are passionate. The tabloids and local news programs are fiercely competitive. The big-city sportswriters traveling with a team have deadlines to make and editors to satisfy, and saying the players just need time to get comfortable isn’t going to make for a splashy headline.
When you’re the Knicks, you are going to be assessed on a nightly basis. The team is critiqued. Every player is critiqued. Each game on the schedule is treated like it’s a must-win.
Our fifth game was in Portland, Oregon, against the Trailblazers, a team that had lost its best players and was trying to find its bearings. They defeated us 110–102.
I hadn’t played well for a variety of reasons. I wasn’t in peak condition. I was adapting to a new system, and my timing was badly off. With Golden State, I’d been a transitional, open-floor type of player. Now I was being pegged into Hubie’s set offense.
I knew I would adjust, but it all added up to a slow start.
Meanwhile, Hubie was taking heat from the press. As the team’s new coach, he was under a magnifying glass. They were on him like we’d lost forty games instead of seven. It put him in a foul mood. And as the team’s major acquisition, I became the target of his fouler mouth after the game.
The locker room door had barely closed when he lit into me.
“You worthless piece of shit! You’re no fuckin’ All-Star! You’re no All-Pro! You ain’t shit! You’re a dog!”
He went on like that for a while. A long while. When Hubie unleashed, he could go on for twenty minutes without a breath.
I listened but didn’t say anything. His reputation being what it was, I had thought about how to address that very situation if it occurred, knowing it probably would occur sooner or later. And I’d concluded that I would never respond in front of my teammates, no matter how mad I got. If I did, the press would pick up on it, and it would be all over the tabloids.
I imagined the morning headlines:
KING VERSUS THE COACH. IS STAR FORWARD THE REASON FOR KNICKS’ TROUBLES?
I did not want that kind of thing tagged on me. I refused to be the scapegoat.
Ignoring his tirade, I took my shower and dressed in silence. But I knew I was going to handle it later. I knew that.
On my way out of the locker room, I saw Hubie holding court with a group of reporters. Most were beat writers from the New York papers.
As I passed him, he said, “Goodnight, Bernard.”
His tone was strictly for the reporters’ ears. It couldn’t have been friendlier.
I looked straight ahead and left the arena without a word.
The next day we were at Upsala College in New Jersey, where our team held its practices, getting ready for a two-game home-and-away series with the Nets. Hubie approached me in the gym, acting like nothing had happened.
“Good morning,” he said.
I didn’t acknowledge him. I just went through our practice, not even looking at him if I could avoid it.
We had a second team workout the following day. I was going through my drills when Hubie again walked over to me.
“I said good morning to you yesterday,” he said. “Why didn’t you answer?”
That was all I needed. I looked him dead in the eyes.
“Let me tell you something, Hubie,” I said, and then paused. He had this shocked expression on his face. I realized he’d heard the anger in my voice and tempered it, starting over. “Let me tell you something. I just signed a five-year contract. I’m not going anywhere. Now I’m not yet in the kind of shape I want to be. But at the end of the day, you will have coached the best player you have ever coached.”
Hubie seemed stuck in place. And I was just getting warmed up.
I kept my voice firm but didn’t raise it. I didn’t want to humiliate him in front of the guys. This wasn’t for the rest of the team to hear. It was going to stay between the two of us.
“One more thing,” I said. “Don’t you ever, under any circumstances, dare to speak to me in the manner you did again. Do you understand?”
He stared at me.
I waited.
He opened his mouth, hesitated.
I waited. I was sure no one had ever spoken to him like that before.
“It will never happen again,” he said finally.
And it didn’t. Not with me. But he continued talking to my teammates like that. He saw nothing wrong with it. To him, it was perfectly acceptable.
Hubie Brown was a great coach. Not a good coach, a great coach. I consider him to be without peer in terms of how he saw the game, felt the game, preached the game, and conveyed the game.
The reason Hubie and I meshed so well was that we shared an analytical approach to basketball. He saw the court like a chessboard and was always three moves ahead of the opponent… the game within the game. But his treatment of players kept him from reaching his fullest potential. These were grown men. You don’t speak to grown men that way. To me, that’s not coaching. It’s degrading them.
You might wonder, what about Gil Reynolds? Wasn’t he also tough?
Yes. Tough as nails. But ask anybody who played under Gil, and they’ll tell you how much they loved him. They needed his strictness. They needed his discipline. They needed to be motivated, taught how to focus, shown how to prepare. The things you learned under Gil were qualities you took through life. A lot of guys became very successful as a result of playing for him.
But the NBA wasn’t youth league basketball. The players weren’t inner-city kids looking for direction. They were professionals. As a professional athlete, you want to win. And so, as a team, you band together for that common objective.
Hubie’s ability as a coach was unchallenged. But his treatment of the players created morale issues.
After one early-season loss, a member of the press asked my assessment of what was wrong with the team. There was no single reason. We were falling short in every facet of the game—defense, offense, rebounding. I realized it was all part of our learning curve, and that things weren’t going to turn around for us overnight. But I’d repeatedly told reporters they would. At that moment in time, though, we were simply a bad team. It was the best answer I could give.
Now, Hubie loved to read the newspapers and attempt to manage what his players said in the press. If he saw something he found troublesome, he’d bring it up at the next team meeting. The day the article appeared, he said he was bothered by my comment without naming me.
Everybody knew I was the source. Our lockers were right alongside each other. I’d spoken on the record. I told the reporter the truth and didn’t exempt myself from our poor play. I had nothing to hide from my teammates. But Hubie wouldn’t say he had a problem to my face. He wanted to embarrass me and pretend it was unintentional.
I called him on it.
I said, “Hubie, why don’t you indicate who made that comment?”
He just stood there dumbstruck.
“Come on,” I said. “If the comment bothers you, tell us who made it.”
Well, he wouldn’t. I gave respect and expected it in return. Nothing more, nothing less. And he’d learned back in Portland that I wouldn’t let him disrespect me.
I was very forthright with Hubie. But he was the coach, and I was the player. I never overstepped that line or interfered with his control of the team. Over time, we came to understand each other and developed a lasting mutual respect.
Hubie will tell you I played every practice like it was a game. That he never had anyone who worked harder than I did. That he never had anyone who performed as I did. He’ll tell you I was a leader, and that’s partly because I was coachable. And when your best player’s coachable, then everyone else has to be coachable.
Nothing is more damaging to a team’s cohesiveness than a coach killer. Whatever our failings in that adjustment period, I had to be a stabilizing force for the team. I could never allow myself to fall into a space where I was part of the problem instead of the solution. Hubie was learning about his players even while we learned his playbook. We were all in the cauldron together.
Our skid finally came to an end in mid-November, but we couldn’t manage to go on a sustained run. We won three, we lost four. We won two, we dropped three. Still, I saw positive signs. We were asserting ourselves under the boards, showing defensive resolve, and playing more cohesively as a unit. I’d also grown much more comfortable with Hubie’s schemes, and saw my scoring totals rise toward my career numbers.
I felt we were close to hitting our stride and tried to urge the team on, pumping my fist on the court, encouraging the guys as I’d done back in Tennessee. But we entered December with a dreadful 5–11 record.
On December 3, the Washington Bullets handed us our twelfth loss of the season at Capital Centre in Maryland. We’d blown the game in the third quarter when Washington’s defense shut us down under the boards, and their offense outscored us 28–16.
After the game, we called a players-only meeting in the locker room. Something had to change.
That night, my teammates named me captain of the New York Knicks. I was elected by unanimous vote. It was an indescribable moment. So many memories came rushing back to me. Being a kid on the playground in Brooklyn, scraping snow off the courts with my sneakers in the winter, running across the Brooklyn Bridge on the hottest of summer days, all the hard work and commitment I’d put into climbing to where I was…
When I was back at home in New York, away from the team, the emotions welled up. In my final year with the Nets, I’d locked myself away and cried in shame and despair, thinking my life was near its end.
Now I cried with pride and thought about how far I’d come.
Captain of the New York Knicks. The franchise Willis Reed once led. The team of Walt Frazier, Dave DeBusschere, Earl Monroe, Dick Barnett, Bill Bradley, and so many others.
I dedicated myself to honoring the responsibility and went into overdrive.
THE TEAM SHOWED SIGNS OF IMPROVEMENT. I grew more comfortable on the floor, and that made Hubie more comfortable drawing up plays for me. Over the next six weeks, I got into an offensive rhythm and averaged almost 27 points a game.
In his fourth year with the franchise, Bill Cartwright would emerge as a solid defensive center. Truck Robinson, our power forward, also began to adjust to Hubie’s play calling and my presence on the Knicks. It took him a while. Truck had been the go-to guy in Phoenix, but once I joined the team, Hubie centered the offense around me, asking him to concentrate on defense and rebounds. Truck had trouble with it. He’d expected to play a very different role. My arrival must have been a bitter pill to swallow.
For the first few weeks of the season, he didn’t say a word to me. He’d pass me in the Garden hallways without so much as nodding hello and do the same thing at practice. His resentment even surfaced on the court, where he would refuse to throw me outlet passes up the floor. He didn’t like me being the playmaker. That was the worst of his attitude, because it reduced our scoring opportunities.
But in the end, Truck wanted to be part of a winning team. As we all came together around our common goal, he provided rebounding and scoring support. I saw him as an asset.
Little by little, game by game, we improved. Still, our record in December was uneven, and that did nothing to take the edge off Hubie’s tongue lashings. I was spared, but the other guys heard them all the time. It became so bad that they had their families moved further back from courtside to prevent them from being exposed to the cussing.
As captain, I felt it was my responsibility to speak up on the team’s behalf.
One day, I pulled him aside. “Hubie,” I said, “I think you need to ease up on the guys. Particularly how you talk to them. A lot of them don’t like you because of it.”
His response?
“I don’t give a shit. I couldn’t care less. I really don’t care if they like me or not.”
I thought for a minute about how to answer. “You know what your problem is?” I said finally. “You do care if they like you. But you know they don’t. That’s your problem, Hubie.”
He didn’t comment or stop insulting everyone. But we kept improving under his coaching. The double-edged sword of Hubie Brown.
Meanwhile, I was settling into being back in New York. A friend of mine was into real estate, and he’d owned a place on Staten Island’s Victory Boulevard. Traffic was a nightmare, but I would smile when I passed my old high school on the drive and get goose bumps on my arms and neck as I neared the city. Being a Knick was personal for me, not merely my job. There was no better place to play than Madison Square Garden, where I could fly down the left-hand side of the court as if on wings.
I could have gladly done without a mid-January game against the Atlanta Hawks at their home arena. With about four minutes left in the second quarter, I slipped on a fast break to the basket and crashed to the hardwood, my ankle twisting under me. As I limped off the court, it was already swelling up. The injury was diagnosed as a moderate ankle sprain and kept me out of action for twelve games.
The team played very well in my absence, going 8–2 in the last ten games before the mid-season break. As much as I hated to watch from the sidelines, I was delighted to see us making progress with each game.
Our defense was super. Guys were grasping the nuances of the system. Hubie’s ten-man platoon gave everybody a lot of playing time, and that kept them in game shape.
I acquired a profound respect for our second unit. Hubie kept his eye on the clock and based his deployment of the bench strictly on minutes. Eight minutes in, the starters were coming out of the game. It didn’t matter how well we were playing. We were coming out. That was Hubie’s coaching style. He believed it helped us stay fresh and threw our opposition off balance. Unless a starter was in foul trouble and forced his hand, Hubie would put in all the reserves at the same time. By January, they’d meshed together well and were their own functional team. I thought they could hold their own against many starting fives.
Although we lost our last game before the break, the team ended the first half at 22–28, positioning us to make a second-half charge. My ankle felt better, and I was eager to get back into uniform and lead the way.
Even before the injury, my slow start—and the team’s below .500 record—would have taken me out of consideration for the All-Star Game in Los Angeles. But the trade-off was that missing it gave me extra time to heal.
I decided to take my first wife on an in-season vacation to Montego Bay, Jamaica, and looked forward to reenergizing on the island’s white sand beaches.
As luck would have it, I’d booked our flight for February 10, the same day a blizzard came sweeping up the East Coast to bury New York in two feet of snow. Our scheduled departure was slightly before the full brunt of the storm struck, so the airline had us board our plane in hopes we’d get clearance for takeoff.
We sat at our gate for deicing as snow fell heavily over the runways. When the captain announced we had been okayed to leave, all the passengers broke into spontaneous applause. I don’t know anyone who likes flying through a storm, but there’s no better incentive than the promise of Caribbean sunshine.
As the plane climbed into the sky, I went to sleep with a smile on my face. We were the last flight out of LaGuardia before it was shut down.
The weather in Jamaica was clear, sunny, and blissfully hot. As I waited for my bags, I felt the trade wind brush my cheeks. It smelled like the ocean. Or heaven.
In the taxi heading for the St. James Club, that scent gave way to something more pungent. I leaned forward in the backseat.
The driver was chomping what might have been a huge cigar.
“Excuse me.” I sniffed. “What’s that you’re smoking?”
He broke into a smile.
“Ganga, mon!” he said, waving the spliff at me. “It’s religion, yah know!” I saw his grin widen in the rearview. “Yah want some?”
I told him no, and lowered all the windows.
The scenery on the resort grounds was spectacular—white sand, flowing royal palms, the blue sea and sky meeting at the horizon. As I entered the lobby, I noticed people with suitcases everywhere.
Busy! I thought. This place must be excellent!
But I was in for a surprise at the desk. As I gave my reservation information, I was told the room was unavailable.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry, sir. This is terrible! Truly terrible! But no one has left!”
I realized why before the flustered clerk was through explaining. With every airport in the Northeast closed, all the guests who were supposed to check out had stayed on.
I glanced around the lobby. Now I knew why so many people were waiting around with their bags. They’d landed in Jamaica to find their rooms unavailable.
“Excuse me.” It struck me I’d said that way too often since my arrival. “Are we supposed to sleep on the beach?”
“A thousand apologies, sir—”
“Thank you. But I left a deposit. I made a confirmed reservation. I am a member of the New York Knicks, and this is my one chance for a vacation. Do I need to call my attorney and the U.S. embassy to get a room?”
A manager whisked over. He said that some accommodations were open after all. “Please forgive us, Mr. King!”
Before I knew it, a staff member gathered our bags, put them in a car, and drove us to an expansive villa home overlooking the golf course and ocean.
It came with a private cook. And a rental car. At the same rate as the standard room I’d originally booked.
I wasn’t sure whether my playing the Knicks, lawyer, or embassy card did the trick. But all those games of stud with the Warriors had taught me when to show my hand.
Things were looking up.
Jamaican woodcrafters have been renowned for their artisan mahogany furniture for centuries. The morning after our arrival, we drove out to a furniture manufacturer specializing in dining-room tables. The place was in the coastal uplands, its outdoor parking area notched into a mountain that rose hundreds of feet above the sea. The narrow blacktop road hugged the edge of a cliff, and it was dizzying to glance over my shoulder at the sheer drop into the waves. After taking a look at the furniture maker’s inventory, we decided to find a place for lunch.
The island being a former crown colony, you drive on the left-hand side of the road, as they do in England. As I left the parking area, I pulled out onto the road and started to accelerate.
At that instant, a sports car tore around the bend in my lane, coming head-on toward us. The driver must have been doing three times my speed.
As an elite athlete, I’d trained my mind and reflexes to react in milliseconds. In clutch moments, time stopped. The other players seemed frozen in place. Only I was in motion.
I know that’s what saved our lives.
Suddenly, I was in the Zone. There was nothing but the sheer drop to my left.
I wrenched the wheel hard to the right, toward the shoulder of the hill, and jammed up against the embankment. The other driver also swerved toward the hillside to avoid the cliff and overcompensated, barely missing my car. Then he hit the hillside and went careening off it for about fifty yards. I heard the screech of his brakes and a loud, sickening crunch of metal.
I sat behind the wheel, gripping it with both hands, shaking like a leaf. Beside me, my first wife’s eyes were wide and shocked. The sports car driver had almost killed us.
After a minute, I looked around and saw someone crawling out of the sports car’s crumpled passenger door. He was bleeding profusely. Something about his leg wasn’t right.
Then I saw the driver walking toward us on the blacktop. He looked unhurt. I realized he was shouting something and pushed open my door.
“Why didn’t you stay in your lane?” he screamed.
“What?”
“I’m a professional race car driver and was testing the car. You should have stayed in your lane!”
My heartbeat quickened. I could hardly believe my ears.
“Stay in my lane?” I repeated. “So you could decide whether I lived or died?”
I stamped down on my anger. It wasn’t going to do any good. I could already hear the warble of sirens. There were people gathered outside in the parking lot. Eyewitnesses.
I’d let the police handle it.
They arrested the driver on the spot, handcuffing him.
“You had a close call,” one told me. “We know this man. He drives through the streets like a reckless maniac.”
A close call.
No kidding.
We stayed in Jamaica four more days. You could say we enjoyed the rest of our vacation. But twenty years would pass before I could bring myself to visit to the island again.
I returned to New York knowing I’d almost lost my life, but never told anyone. When you’re captain of the Knicks, things get amplified. I didn’t want to spend time reliving that moment for reporters. It would be a distraction.
The season’s second half was coming up, and it was time to turn my full attention to hoops.
IN NEW YORK, avoiding distractions is easier said than done.
I’d no sooner returned from the Caribbean than I was blindsided by something I read in the newspapers. In a piece about the Knicks’ improved performance during my injury, one sports columnist suggested that they might be better without me. According to an anonymous source within the team, he wrote, some guys had complained to Hubie about the number of shots I took each game.
The columnist’s speculation about the team’s improvement didn’t bother me. I could not control what was written in the papers. But it was hard to believe any of the guys had an issue with my scoring.
I prided myself on being a very unselfish player. I averaged 3 assists per game over my career, which wasn’t bad for someone who also scored 22.5 points. However, if I had the ball, and another guy was in a better position to score, I passed it over to him unless the game was on the line. Then I would do what was expected of me.
You try to refrain from making on-court statements against your teammates. But at our first practice after the winter break, I drove the lane, rose up so high to the basket you would have thought Dr. J was defending me, then threw the ball down with an emphatic rattle of the hoop. It was an unspoken message to everyone on the floor.
I was convinced the source of the comments was Truck. His attitude toward me hadn’t changed, and he was later openly quoted as saying my absence had benefited him.
That night at the Garden, I played a different game. I looked to pass first, no matter if I was in position to make the shot.
Paul Westphal was a veteran guard on our team, a five-time All-Star nearing the end of a long, extraordinary career. It was obvious to him that something was wrong, and he came up to me during a time-out.
“Listen, B,” he said quietly, “we need you to play your game.”
I just looked at him. That was leadership. I never forgot what he did for me.
When the whistle blew, I went out and played my game.
I never changed it again.
WE ENDED THE REGULAR SEASON 44–38, and had the second-best record in the league after the All-Star break, capturing a playoff berth despite our slow start.
I was very proud of that accomplishment. We’d overcome our growing pains to catapult our newly rebuilt team from the embarrassment of the previous year to the postseason. Knick fans appreciated our hustle play and embraced us. From a personal standpoint that couldn’t have been more gratifying. I loved our fans. At heart, I was one of them. As a Brooklyn kid, I played like my life depended on it. I played for the organization, the city, and for those fans.
In true New York fashion, our first-round playoff series had some extra drama. We would be matching up against the New Jersey Nets. The team that drafted me, where I’d made my early mark on the NBA. That, in itself, would have been enough to excite the fans of our respective teams. But it wasn’t all.
My younger brother, Albert, was the Nets’ starting small forward, the same position I’d played three years earlier. I believe it was the first time in NBA history that brothers would face off in the postseason.
Albert and I were never close. He was three years younger. When you’re in twelfth grade, you don’t usually hang out with your brother who’s in ninth grade. Since I always played on the basketball courts with the older kids, the gap between us felt even wider.
When Albert was in high school—he attended Fort Hamilton, where he’d followed in my footsteps and become a Tiger—I’d already gone off to Tennessee. I doubt he ever saw me on the court; I only got to see him play once, when I was home from college for a visit. By then, he was considered a basketball phenomenon, the best high school player in the country.
Albert always had great talent, great skills. But it was difficult for him living in my shadow. When he was drafted into the NBA, I tried to prepare him for what to expect. I helped him with the game’s strategic aspects and shared how to mentally approach it as a sport and business. I don’t know how much of it resonated with him. I was his brother, and I loved him, and did what I could do.
The first time we went up against each other on the basketball court was during my second year with the Warriors—Albert’s rookie season in New Jersey. It wasn’t something I’d looked forward to, but I didn’t dread it either. I scouted him like any other opponent, guarded him like any other scorer, and treated him like any defender I had to beat.
On the court, he was just another player.
I don’t remember who did what statistically that night. It didn’t matter. I do remember that my team won. That did matter.
Albert and I got together after the game. He came over to my apartment for dinner. When the season ended, I stayed on the West Coast, so we didn’t have any social interaction at all. No phone calls, even. But in the fall, I signed with the Knicks, and that changed our whole dynamic.
After essentially playing in different worlds our whole lives, we were both on the East Coast, just across the Hudson River from each other, and playing for bitter rivals. And now we would be meeting in the playoffs.
This was very different from the regular season. When you are in the playoffs, everything is at stake for your franchise, for your teammates, and for you individually. That’s the way I approached every postseason series. That was how I approached the series against the Nets.
As excitement over the series reached a crescendo in the Tri-State Area, I prepared to win.
GAME 1 OF OUR BEST-OF-THREE was on a beautiful Wednesday night in April. The Nets had seeded higher than us, giving them home-court advantage. That meant the series opener would be at Meadowlands Arena, their new home in East Rutherford across the road from the Giants stadium and the racetrack. It made them the presumed favorite.
There was no shoot-around that afternoon. We’d practiced and prepared the day before, keying our defensive schemes on New Jersey’s All-Star big forward, Buck Williams.
Buck had been my brother’s teammate at Maryland University, and they’d been drafted by the Nets the same year. Our defense also had to make sure we were ready for their crafty, ultra-talented point guard, Michael Ray Richardson—the same player Golden State had received from the Knicks in a trade for me. I’ll say it again: The NBA is a small brotherhood.
During this time, I’d bought a home in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, about a half hour’s drive from the Meadowlands Sports Complex. The morning of the game, I got a fresh haircut, making sure I looked and felt my best. As I pulled out of my driveway, I began focusing my concentration on what lay ahead between the lines.
I knew winning Game 1 in a short series was imperative. Ironically, I’d learned it through hard experience when I was a Net and we were swept from the postseason by the Sixers.
Now I was a Knick and would dominate anyone wearing a Nets uniform. Dominate Albert. I had to. I had no choice. It was what I was supposed to do. My team had signed me, brought me back home to New York, for moments like this. It was time to deliver when it counted, in the playoffs, like the Knick greats of the past.
As I exited my vehicle in the arena’s parking area, I allowed myself a few final thoughts: I was the captain and leader of the team. I would take my emotions deep.
The Nets couldn’t stop the unstoppable.
OUR MIND-SET GOING IN was to jump on them from the starting tip-off—and we succeeded, hitting five of our first six field goal attempts. That took the Jersey crowd right out of it.
Everyone on the team did his job. Cartwright was effective under the basket. Our shooting guard, Rory Sparrow, a former Net, got into a quick rhythm nailing outside shots. Hubie assigned Truck Robinson to one-on-one defend against Buck Williams, and he was all over him.
I was also rolling. I went 7–7 to score 14 points in the first quarter, hitting mid-range shots, posting up, and moving off screens without the ball.
I think our full-throttle charge rocked the Nets back on their heels. They seemed to rush their early shots, failing to make any of them.
Albert picked up a couple of personals against me in the first two minutes. With the first one, I knew I had him. I was making good on my commitment to myself. All I saw was his Nets uniform. He couldn’t guard me.
In the second quarter, our reserve unit went to work. On defense, they trapped and pressed at the half court to hold the Nets down. Ernie led the offensive attack. He scored at will from everywhere on the floor. An eighteen-foot jumper. A layup. A dunk. That put us up by 11 or 12. It was his best game of the season.
The Nets made a run late in the quarter, inching to within 4, and Hubie put our starters back on the floor. I missed my first shot, but then went 4–4 to end the half with 25 points.
By then, we’d doubled our lead and there was no looking back. Albert had gotten into foul trouble, and the Nets’ head coach, Bill Blair, tried mixing up his defense to shut me down. I think he tried four different defenders against me.
Blair had only coached the team for a few weeks after taking over from Larry Brown. Larry had coached the team for a couple of years after Kevin Loughery’s departure, but left six games before the end of the season to accept a job at the University of Kansas. I can’t think of another instance of a coach doing that near the conclusion of a playoff run.
Blair was a first-year assistant coach, and being handed the team at that stage couldn’t have been easy. He was no match for a master tactician like Hubie.
He pulled Albert off me and tried Buck Williams. It didn’t work. He double-teamed me. It didn’t work. I made my moves to beat the second guy, not the first guy.
One third-quarter play stands out above the rest.
Rory Sparrow was driving the lane, running a fast break on the left side of the floor. But Darwin Cook, a Nets guard, got a hand on the ball, deflecting it off Rory’s foot. Close behind Rory, I saw it carom toward the left sideline, rolling out of bounds, and dove to the hardwood to save the possession.
I managed to get my hands on it even as the breath woofed from my lungs. Down on my belly, I saw Ernie out the corner of my eye and fired the ball into his hands. He caught it chest high, took two dribbles, and nailed a jumper, forcing the Nets to call a time-out.
As we walked off the court, Ernie and I exchanged glances and the slightest of nods. We both knew what that meant. We were back doing it. Ernie and Bernie. Two New York kids doing it for our hometown team.
The Nets tried to marshal a rally after that, but we put the game out of reach in the fourth quarter, controlling the tempo, making sure we kept up the pressure.
The defining moment of the period came on another fast break. Rory and I were in sync all night, running the floor in transition. This time, when he passed the ball, I received it with my brother defending me again. I went right at him, driving toward the basket as if he wasn’t there, making strong contact to draw the foul. I made the basket and sank the free throw.
That was the backbreaker for New Jersey. You could feel the air leave the arena.
We beat them 118–107. It was a complete team victory. I scored 40 points on 21 shots in my first playoff win as a Knick. As captain, as team leader, I’d delivered, and that was very satisfying.
But it was too soon for anyone in our locker room to celebrate.
Game 2 was coming up the next night.
THAT ONE WAS AT OUR HOUSE, and it was packed with Knicks fans. After seeing the team miss the playoffs the year before, they were fired up.
The Nets took the court like they’d been rocked by the previous night’s loss. We sensed it and went for the knockout.
This is one time when the box score says it all. We took a 9-point lead in the first quarter, but overpowered them in the second. The score at halftime was 62–39, and Louis Orr, our power forward off the bench, added to it to start the third.
Albert had a good game for the Nets. Truck was even better for us. They made a push in the third quarter but never had a lead. It felt almost like a replay of the first game, with two major differences.
That night, we knew we’d swept the series and advanced.
And we celebrated.
OUR SECOND-ROUND POSTSEASON OPPONENT was the Philadelphia 76ers. In name, it was the same team I’d met back when I was a Net. But this was an even higher-octane version, one of the greatest squads ever assembled. Julius Irving, Maurice Cheeks, Bobby Jones, and Andrew Toney had been joined by Moses Malone, who came over in a blockbuster trade with Houston to give them an All-Star at every position. No one was surprised when they plowed through the league like a battering ram and went 65–17 in the regular season.
When Moses was named league MVP, a member of the press asked him to predict how the Sixers would do in the playoffs.
“Fo’, Fo’, Fo’,” he replied, meaning his team would sweep all its opponents in four games.
They almost did just that.
We were the first team to fall to the battering ram, but if there was any consolation, it was that we were in good company. After defeating us in Moses’s predicted four games, the Sixers needed five games to beat the Milwaukee Bucks in the Eastern Conference finals. Then they crushed the Lakers in four in the NBA finals.
Losing always hurts. But we reminded ourselves we’d opened the postseason beating the Nets on their home floor. Our final two games against the Sixers were decided by 2 and 3 points, respectively. We didn’t feel so bad. In fact, we felt pretty good about what could happen the following year.
Typically, my second season with a team was better than the preceding one. I would be more comfortable with the system, my teammates, the coaching staff, and even my housing arrangements. I was anxious to see how we’d grow after our second-round loss to the eventual champs.
I definitely used it as a learning experience. For instance, I recalled a play where I received a lob pass that wasn’t high enough to dunk, so I snared the ball in midair, landed, and went up with a shot that was immediately blocked by Dr. J and Moses. But it didn’t end there. Before anyone else could pull in the basketball, I retrieved it, went up on the other side of the rim, and dunked.
I had never executed a move like that before. We lost the game, but I mentally recorded that play.
I always tell young players, “If you successfully perform a new move in a game, go into the gym the next day and practice it. Make it part of your repertoire.”
In that first playoff series with the Knicks, I realized there was more to my game than I’d realized. I would carry that forward into the 1983–1984 season.
I knew what kind of player I was. I knew we had a tremendous team, guys who were willing to put aside their egos, accept their roles, and put in their best effort every night.
I went into training camp with a fire, believing we’d have a special year.
I couldn’t have foreseen the heights to which I’d rise or realized how magical that year would be for all of us.