The NBA’s 1983–1984 postseason had two major format changes that are still in place today. First, the number of teams that qualified for the playoffs was expanded from to twelve to sixteen teams. Second, the first-round series went from three to five games.
By late April, the Knicks had clinched a postseason berth. But seeding was important to us.
There was no doubt the Boston Celtics would be the Eastern Conference champions. Red Auerbach was no longer head coach, but he still pulled the strings behind the scenes. As general manager, he’d collected some of the grittiest players in the game with some wily trades and acquisitions. Boston’s roster included four future Hall of Famers: Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, and Dennis Johnson.
We didn’t want to see them in the first round.
Philly was the second best team in our division, and the third best in our conference behind the Milwaukee Bucks. They weren’t the wrecking crew they were the year before, primarily because they hadn’t played well on the road. But Doc and Moses were Doc and Moses.
We didn’t want a first-round matchup with them, either.
We were a confident group, but we had a pragmatic outlook. We were in a close race with the Nets for the fifth and sixth slots. The way things were shaping up, our opponent in the five-game opening round would be Philly or Detroit.
Neither would be an easy opponent. But we wanted the Pistons. We felt we could compete with anyone, but knew they weren’t equal to Boston or Philly. This was three years before the Bad Boy era, when Isiah Thomas was joined by Dennis Rodman. The team’s two best players in 1984 were Isiah and Bill Laimbeer. Laimbeer was also probably the league’s dirtiest player, but I’ll come back to that later.
As we entered our final month of regular season play, I knew we needed to keep pushing to stay ahead of the Nets. Three things stand out when I recall that short string of games. They would all have ramifications for the postseason.
The first happened in a late March home game against the Celtics. Eight minutes into the first quarter, I was driving hard toward the basket with my defender, Cedric Maxwell, riding my hip when I tripped over his foot and fell to the hardwood. I severely dislocated my right middle finger and was sent to the hospital to have it reset and splinted.
I probably should have stayed out. Hubie and Mike Saunders, our trainer, were concerned I might aggravate the injury. But they left the call to me.
I told them I couldn’t be sidelined more than a few days to get treatment. We were in a scramble for a playoff position. I was needed on the court.
Ten days later, we were in Atlanta, my first game back, and I dislocated my left middle finger. At the time, it seemed a total fluke. How do you injure the exact same finger on the opposite hand? Nothing like it had ever occurred to me before.
This time, Mike strongly argued that I sit. I refused again. I knew that if I gave in to my injuries, I would be ineffective for the rest of the year.
My teammates needed me.
I remember the disbelief on his face, but he didn’t try to change my mind. Instead, he taped my fingers together, and I went out and played.
It was really kind of comical for the next few games. I would run the court with my hands up in the air like a surgeon in a scrub room, trying to avoid contact. Finally, Mike and our team doctor, Norman Scott, fashioned special casts for my two middle fingers. They helped, but only by degrees. Dribbling, rebounding, scoring… it hurt all the time.
My fingers took a whole year to heal. I couldn’t even shake anyone’s hand for six months. But what is pain? You can’t allow it to affect what you do. You go within, mentally.
I remember deciding that someone upstairs had sent me a message. Go deep, Bernard. Go deep. Meaning I had to deepen my level of concentration to overcome the constant pain.
The third thing that happened is a memory of a different sort. I was up against Dr. J in the last game before the playoffs—a home game, at Madison Square Garden. With our fifth-place berth guaranteed, my goal was to get in my work without further injuring my fingers. But once the game action started, I didn’t think about the pain. I was wired to compete.
Doc played me straight up—his feet spread wide, never yielding the right or left side to give me an edge. There was a moment in the game when I gained possession of the ball between the top of the key and the foul line. Doc was defending me in his usual stance.
I remember thinking, Are you ready? Come along for the ride.
I raised the ball over my head to freeze him. Then in one sweeping motion, I brought it down from right to left, went around his right leg, and drove left, with a left-hand dribble, into the lane toward the basket.
I was a half step quicker than Dr. J, and that was enough. He stood frozen at the foul line. Moses Malone stepped into the lane and fouled me, but I made the basket and the free throw for a 3-point play.
It felt good to execute and score. It always felt good. But the play held a greater significance for me.
That was the moment I finally knew I had caught Dr. J.
Caught him.
The amazing Julius Irving. Little Spal, you did it!
Let me tell you, it wasn’t a bad way to head into the playoffs. Throbbing fingers and all.
WE FINISHED THE SEASON 47–35, two games ahead of the Nets. That gave us a matchup with Detroit in Round 1 of the Finals. Although the Pistons’ record was only two games better than ours, they’d beaten us four games out of six that season and held home-court advantage. That was all they needed to be considered odds-on favorites.
Although we had the second best record in the league after the All-Star break, the press called us underdogs. That wasn’t how we felt about ourselves. We were a confident group. We understood that the regular season and postseason were different. You could take lessons from regular season results, but there was no connecting thread.
We believed the New York Knicks could compete—and win—against anybody.
GAME 1 WAS APRIL 17 at the Silverdome in Detroit. The Pistons hadn’t made the playoffs since 1976–1977, when they suffered a first-round loss to the Warriors. Their city was jumping.
I liked playing at the Silverdome. It had a live floor. Some arena floors are dead. You don’t get much lift on them. But I could elevate very well there. The wood had bounce.
Still, we knew it would be difficult capturing that game on the road. But Games 2 and 5 were also in Detroit, and we needed to return to the Garden with no worse than a split. If we took Game 1, the remaining four games would be evenly divided between New York and Motown. While the Pistons would still host a possible fifth elimination game in their arena, we could partially neutralize their home-court advantage.
Detroit came out gunning that night. Rory Sparrow did a great job of keeping Isiah’s scoring in check, but he made up for it with his court awareness, directing his team offense with assists, steals, and rebounds.
Meanwhile, we were cold offensively. Only Bill Cartwright and I were making our shots. Before we knew it, the first quarter was over and we were down by 14.
Hubie decided I’d need to carry the offense and began calling my number on play after play. The frequency of his calls surprised me. But he understood we couldn’t afford to fall any further behind. I would receive the basketball until the other guys found their rhythm.
Kelly Tripucka, Detroit’s small forward, was my primary guard. He was a prolific scorer and had a good night shooting the ball. But he was a flat-footed defender and couldn’t stop me from getting my points. I’d go right up over him time after time.
Now, about Bill Laimbeer.
Early in the game, I went up for a layup, and he smashed my hand against the backboard. I knew he did it on purpose. And he knew I knew. It caused me serious pain, but I couldn’t retaliate. If I were tossed, he’d get exactly what he wanted.
He was a dirty player. No other Piston deliberately tried to take advantage of my injuries.
I got my points despite his illegal hits. But we couldn’t catch up to Detroit. They played tight defense, and Isiah had a sixth sense for finding the open man. By halftime, they’d built up a 13-point lead.
The third quarter was a repeat of the first two. I scored 10 points to put us within 12, but we couldn’t get any closer. Meanwhile, Hubie had gotten tossed for arguing with the officials.
Goddam, I thought. We can steal this game. But we had to get stops.
That was when Rick Pitino called a full-court press on defense. We’d done it throughout the season, and it all seemed preparation for that moment.
We went into lockdown mode.
The Pistons couldn’t run their plays, couldn’t pass, couldn’t do anything offensively.
We’d forced them into a holding pattern. Now we needed to make our push.
At 1:17, the score was 93–87. I drew a foul from Tripucka with the ball in my hands, dropped two free throws, and trimmed the deficit to 4.
Enter Darrell Walker.
Isiah was moving the basketball up court when Darrell cut toward him, stole the ball, and fired it over to me. A perfect pass. I shot from ten feet and made the basket.
I would have known the ball went in without seeing it. I was there and not there. On some other plane.
The score was 93–91.
We had forty-three seconds.
Darrell slipped behind a double team, stole on a bounce pass, and got fouled.
He made one out of two. The score was 93–92. A point separated us.
We had twenty seconds.
It was Rory Sparrow’s turn. Though he had trouble scoring all night, he’d been left in for his defense.
Laimbeer had his hands up to catch a pass. Rory tipped it. And was fouled.
Standing at the key as Rory prepared for his free throws, I was like a high-voltage wire. We all were.
He went two for two.
The score was 94–93. Our favor.
Nine seconds. The ball in Isiah Thomas’s hands. Darrell on defense. He didn’t give Isiah an inch.
Trapped, Isiah got the ball to Laimbeer. With the game’s final seconds evaporating, he hurled it toward our basket from midcourt.
You could see right off that it wasn’t going in.
We won the game.
Oh my goodness! I thought, and leaped toward the pileup of Knicks on the court.
I SCORED 36 POINTS IN GAME 1, but couldn’t have cared less about my total. We’d topped the Pistons in their house. That was my only concern.
Two nights later at the Silverdome, Detroit’s head coach, Chuck Daly, rotated my defenders to throw me off my game. Tripucka. Earl Cureton. Kent Benson. Cliff Levingston. They came at me one after another and really beat up on me, trying to bang me out of my sweet spots.
I concentrated on their vulnerabilities. They were weaknesses I’d been filing into my mental database all season long. I could jump right over Tripucka. Cureton always bit at my fakes, and Benson couldn’t match my speed. Levingston could jump and had a slight edge in height, presenting the most difficulty. But most players jumped away from a taller defender. I jumped right into Levingston. It’s hard to block a shot at close range.
I hit 46 points that night. Twenty-three came in consecutive baskets, all during a five-and-a half-minute span in the first quarter. I found out afterward that the 23-in-a-row broke a record set by Wilt Chamberlain. Again, our names were linked.
But we lost despite all that. 113–104. The Pistons’ defense held the rest of our team down, and we couldn’t stop Isiah.
On the plane home, I told our coaching staff we had to get Bill Cartwright more involved in the offense. We needed a second scorer, and he was one of our best. To me, the handwriting was on the wall. If we didn’t get Bill some shots, we were going to lose the series.
I didn’t care about my numbers. I didn’t care about broken records. Someday I’d have time to look back at things of that nature, but none of it really mattered to me.
What mattered, all that mattered, was that we needed to win Game 3 back home in New York.
MY TEAM WAS HUNGRY FOR A WIN, and our fans shared that hunger. When Madison Square Garden got loud, your bones would shake. We felt it stepping on the court for the tip-off, and so did the Pistons.
We played our best first half of the season in Game 3. Defensively and offensively, it was a complete team effort.
Hubie wanted to avoid falling into predictable defensive patterns and used a switching defense that kept Isiah Thomas off balance. Thanks to Rory Sparrow and Darrell Walker, he didn’t score a single point before the break. Neither of them gave Isiah any breathing room as they rotated their assignment guarding him.
On the offensive side, Hubie called Bill Cartwright’s number all night.
“Thirty-five!”
That was Bill’s play. We’d set a three-man screen on the right, have one of our guards pass him the ball on the left side of the key, and then cut through the key to draw off the defense. The idea was to force Detroit into a one-on-one against him.
It worked. Bill had unusual quickness for a seven-foot-one center and could outmaneuver anybody guarding him.
We were up 54–36 at halftime. Isiah finally figured things out in the third and fourth quarters, scoring 29 points in one of his whirlwind offensive tears. But we were playoff tested. It was one of our advantages over the Pistons. We knew they would make a run at some point and didn’t panic when it happened.
Bill dropped 22 points that night. I scored 46 for a second game in a row.
We beat the Pistons 130–113, taking a 2–1 series lead that had them on the brink of elimination.
Nobody on the Knicks felt like heading back to Detroit for a Game 5.
We had our foot on the Pistons’ throat and wanted to put them away on our home court.
DETROIT HAD DIFFERENT INTENTIONS, though you couldn’t tell from the way they started out.
We hit 8 unanswered points in the opening three minutes. When Detroit had the ball, they rushed their shots. When we had possession, we either put it in the hoop or drew fouls that sent us to the free-throw line. Ray Williams started out looking like he’d have his best game of the series. Truck Robinson scored on a snap pass from Ray in the paint, and the Garden crowd went wild.
Chuck Daly smelled a rout and called a twenty-second time-out. I don’t know what he told his guys. Maybe he was just giving them a chance to exhale. But they came out sharper and more determined and put themselves right back in the game.
Kelly Tripucka had an excellent night from the floor. He made 21 points, only 1 less than Isiah Thomas. If you study that basketball game, though, it had Isiah’s handprint all over it. The story isn’t in his point total but in his 16 assists and control of the tempo. He was mercurial running through traffic and feeding Tripucka and Laimbeer the ball. He played forty-two minutes and got the most out of his second unit. Four out of five men on their bench were in double digits. Earl Cureton, a backup power forward, hit some key baskets.
I scored 41 that night for my third 40-plus point game in a row. Bill hit 24. Between us, that came to over half our team’s total points. And that was the problem.
For most of the night, we were nip and tuck with the Pistons. But we didn’t match their collective offensive production, and in the third quarter, they finally pulled ahead of us.
Still, we kept things close. Near the end of the third, the score was 87–83, their favor. Then 87–86. In the fourth quarter, we were still neck and neck. The score was 92–90, theirs. Then 101–97.
But we couldn’t overtake them again. The Pistons made 6 out of their last 8 shots, and Isiah managed the clock well in the final minutes. I could tell he’d grown over the course of four playoff games and learned how to protect the lead.
Detroit won the game 119–112. As we walked off the court, the loudest thing in the Garden was the sound of the Pistons high-fiving each other.
We were headed for a Game 5 showdown in Motown.
IT WOULDN’T BE AT THE SILVERDOME. The arena had booked a tractor pull and was unavailable for the game. I know how crazy that must sound. It sounded crazy to the Knicks. We were in the NBA playoffs. How do you schedule a tractor pull? But I guess somebody or other didn’t think the Pistons would be successful enough to reach Game 5.
Anyway, the game moved downtown to a place called the Joe Louis Arena. It was home to the Detroit Red Wings hockey club.
We didn’t like it. They didn’t like it. The Pistons’ fans didn’t like it, either.
I don’t think there could have been a worse time to come down with the flu. But it hit me like a freight train the day before the game. When we got to our hotel, I had a sore throat and high fever. My dislocated fingers weren’t making me feel any better.
I was in rotten shape.
I didn’t attend shoot-around on game day. When our team left the hotel for the arena, I went down to get on the bus and then realized I needed to stay back and conserve my strength.
“I have to go back upstairs,” I told Hubie. “But I’ll be ready tonight.”
He and Mike Saunders were skeptical. But I knew I’d take the court.
When I was a kid, my father always said, “You have to work even when you’re sick.” It was one thing I learned from him that stuck with me my whole life.
My teammates had fought all season long for the opportunity to make the finals. I was their captain. I wasn’t going to let them down.
Rick Pitino had also caught it; the day before, he’d checked into Lenox Hill Hospital in New York with a 104-degree fever. Somehow, he made it to Detroit for the game.
Meanwhile, I was still suffering from the flu, my throat so sore I could hardly swallow. I refused to look at a thermometer. I didn’t need one to tell me I was burning up.
The Joe Louis Arena looked like a gigantic airplane hangar. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst was that the air-conditioning system was broken. I’ve read it was 95 degrees in there. That’s wrong. It was closer to 125 degrees. Ask Hubie Brown; I think he checked.
Hubie was dripping sweat all night. Later on, he’d say that he would slosh around in his shoes whenever he walked the baseline. They were filled with perspiration.
Chuck Daly didn’t enjoy the sweltering heat any more than Hubie. He was a clotheshorse, the kind of guy who wore a silk shirt and diamond cuff links. His light-blue Brioni sports jacket must have cost plenty. Before the game was over, it darkened to navy blue from sweat. He grumbled later that the dry cleaners could never restore it.
That game was the most intense I ever played. I concentrated so deeply that I hardly remembered anything about it afterward. All I know was that every time we seemed to have victory in our hands, Detroit came back at us. They wouldn’t give up. They just kept coming back.
Hubie insisted we stay on our feet during time-outs. He’d never done anything like that before. I think he was afraid the heat would overcome us if we took our seats. We were going on pure adrenaline. Meanwhile, I was still burning up with the flu. So sapped of strength I could hardly stand, I sat on the floor.
We started the fourth quarter up 85–79, then added some points and went ahead by 8. That was a big lead down the stretch. Or it should have been. But Isiah was relentless. He would score. I would score. He would score. Then I would come back and score…
We were carrying our teams, and we knew it. All we didn’t know was which of us would outlast the other.
Then Isiah exploded. With ninety seconds of regulation left in the game, he went off, scoring 16 consecutive points.
Think about it. 16 points in 90 seconds. You can’t even do that in the playground. It was unheard of.
Isiah was six foot one and weighed 185 pounds. The smallest guy on the court. He was stealing the ball and hitting 3-point outside jumpers. He was burying 2-point field goals and getting fouled for the extra point. Bank shots, layups. Time and time again. Rory couldn’t stop him. Darrell couldn’t stop him. He just went to another place. That’s the only way to put it. I’ve been to that place myself.
With about forty seconds on the game clock, we led 112–106. Then Isiah was fouled on a layup to make the score 112–109. After his free throw, Bill Cartwright inbounded to Louis Orr, but Detroit forced Louis out over the baseline, and Isiah once again had the ball on our side of the court. He dribbled into the paint, took a short jumper, and put it in for two.
Detroit was within a point of us. The game clock down to thirty-six seconds.
Hubie called a time-out. He wanted to talk about our next possession, knowing it could be the last of the game.
He got onto one knee and put his board on the floor. As I sat there in the huddle, I saw he was diagramming a play for Cartwright.
I couldn’t believe it. I was the best player on the team. I was averaging over 40 points a game. It was my responsibility to take the final shot. Win or lose, I had to own it.
I’d never in my basketball life questioned a coach. No one had to teach me that. The coach is the coach. You’re a player, you play, and allow yourself to be coached.
But our season was on the line. Not just the game. Our season.
“Hubie,” I said.
He kept drawing something up for Bill. His head down.
“Hubie,” I repeated. “Do I have the right to take it myself?”
He didn’t respond. It was very noisy in the arena. So I said it louder to get his attention. Much louder.
“Do I have the RIGHT to take it myself, Hubie?”
He looked up at me. I was telling him I was going to break his play.
You hear about players feeling pressure in big moments. Hubie must have felt some kind of pressure in that huddle. But he never showed it.
Finally he said, “Yeah.”
The time-out ended. We inbounded the ball, and I waved Bill off.
Earl Cureton was my defender. He’d had a big game in Game 4 and was feeling it.
“Come on,” he growled. “Bring it.”
I heard him. But his challenge didn’t faze me. I wasn’t going to change what I wanted to do. Namely, make a play for us to win.
I dribbled and then did something I ordinarily didn’t do. I put the ball between my legs.
I wasn’t being flashy. I did that for one reason alone.
I had nine half-court King spots on that side of the lane. They were numbered in my mind, and I wanted Spot Number Five. But sometimes the defense was good enough so I couldn’t just go my spot. I had to set up my move. Disguise what I wanted.
Earl was six foot ten and a solid defender.
I set him up, the ball between my legs to throw off his rhythm. Then I drove left to slow his lateral movement, took one, two dribbles…
Spot Number Five.
I faded and shot and the ball went in.
The score was 114–111 with twenty-six seconds left in the game.
With twenty-three seconds to go, Isiah drained a three to tie the game at 114–114 and send us into overtime.
LAIMBEER SCORED THE FIRST SHOT coming out of overtime. That can take the wind out of the opposition.
We didn’t let it. One of our second-unit guards, Trent Tucker, answered with a jumper to tie the score again. Then I followed up on a missed shooting attempt by Louis Orr and slam-dunked to put us up by two.
As I started toward the opposite end of the court, my injured hands sang out in agony.
What is pain? Go within.
That set us on a roll. I think we scored 7 straight after the dunk.
But Isiah wouldn’t quit. He bucketed another 3 from twenty-six feet. I answered with a turnaround jumper from sixteen feet. Then he drove to the net and dropped 2.
It was a relief to everyone in a Knicks uniform when Isiah fouled out of the game with about a half minute on the clock. The Pistons came back at us one more time, but we knew we had them the instant he left the court.
Bill Cartwright scored the last two points on free throws and then it was over. We beat them 127–124. I’d scored 44 of our points.
I might have dropped from fever and exhaustion if my teammates hadn’t held me up with their hugs.
IN THE LOCKER ROOM, a beat reporter told me I’d scored 213 points in the five-game series. It broke a playoff record set a quarter century before by Hall of Famer Elgin Baylor.
I remember grinning at the reporter. Baylor was an incomparable player. But at that moment…
“Who cares?” I said. “We won!”
Of course, we couldn’t bask.
The Celtics had eliminated their first-round competition, the Washington Bullets, in four games. They would be our opponent in the semifinals.
We were flying up to Boston that very night.