When the Garden Was Eden (45 page)

The addition of Stoudemire enabled the Knicks to trade David Lee, who played the same position and instantly became trade bait to keep the payroll flexible under the salary cap, presumably for the next free-agent star trying to strong-arm his way to a bigger market. Technically, these moves made sense, though many fans and organizational insiders were saddened by Lee’s departure.

As the last pick of the first round in 2005, he was Thomas’s signature achievement—however modest. Lee was a rebounding vacuum, an earnest if not ultra-blessed specimen who improved his game every year to the point where he was the franchise’s best and most popular player during some very bleak years. Mario Cuomo, for one, argued that Lee was the only reason to watch a Knicks game during that period and was never anyone’s problem, and therefore deserved to be part of the solution. “He played center for you, he gave up his body, and now he has to go?” Cuomo said. “Why? To bet on some superstar to be your savior? How many times have we seen that before?”

Cuomo’s point was that there was much more to love about Lee than his improved jumper or his nose for the ball. He was one of those players committed to a cause higher than the padding of his stats, who seemed to say and do the right thing. Days after Lee was traded to Golden State, in fact, he attended the funeral of a longtime and beloved NBA and Garden security official, Scott Jaffer, who had battled cancer for three years without saying a word. Stunned by the news, worried that the Knicks would not be represented, Lee flew to New York from his home in St. Louis, drove an hour north of the city, and took a seat in the back of the funeral home, where Jaffer’s wife noticed him during her eulogy.

After writing a column about Lee’s last act of hustle for the Knicks—and noting that he had also been the only current Knick to attend Dick McGuire’s funeral—I received a Facebook message from Arthur Pincus, a former
Times
editor, who wrote that the piece had reminded him of another funeral, many years earlier, when the father of Sam Goldaper, the paper’s Knicks beat reporter, had died. “One player from the Knicks came out to pay his respects,” Pincus wrote. “You would not be surprised to know that it was Willis Reed. And he sat in the back with his head sticking out of the crowd, just like David Lee’s.”

Old Knicks—Reed and Bradley, in particular—had taken notice of the throwback qualities in Lee, and had made a point of telling him as much on the night of their 40th anniversary title celebration—when only Lee had left the locker room at halftime to watch the ceremony. “I enjoy watching him play because he’s what I call a 100 percenter,” Reed said. “David may not be having a good night, but it won’t be because he’s not putting out, and those are the guys the fans can relate to, the guys that bring teams together.”

These were attributes that were impossible to quantify but easy to recognize. But to Stoudemire’s credit, he adjusted beautifully to his new environment, surprising even Mike D’Antoni, his former coach in Phoenix, who had moved to the Knicks in 2008, with leadership skills he had not shown out west. Younger teammates such as Danilo Gallinari, Raymond Felton, and Wilson Chandler formed an immediate bond with Stoudemire, and a rookie shooting guard from Stanford, Landry Fields, drafted in the second round, earned a starting position. Early on, Fields even drew some premature and exaggerated comparisons to John Havlicek and Bradley with his instincts and willingness to move without the ball.

D’Antoni’s entertaining up-tempo, motion offense had helped restore elegance to the NBA product with the high-scoring Suns in Phoenix, and the Knicks executed it well enough for much of the 2010–11 season to support Stoudemire’s declaration. They were back, at least in the playoff mix following a seven-year absence. Everyone agreed they needed to make another move or two to make a deep run, but there was considerable debate—even within the organization—on how to best complement Stoudemire and nurture the promising dynamic they had established.

Three days before the February trade deadline, they reeled in one of the bigger names and sexier talents. Carmelo Anthony arrived from Denver after a months-long game of chicken with the Nuggets’ management over Anthony’s ability to opt out of his contract in the summer of 2011. On cue, New York revved up as if the Stoudemire-Anthony tandem were the second coming of Magic Johnson’s Los Angeles alliance with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Walsh, a Bronx native, was 70 when he made the deal—or at least was forced into it by Dolan—that also brought the respected but aging point guard, 34-year-old Chauncey Billups. In return, the Knicks were forced to surrender four young rotation players (Gallinari, Chandler, Felton, and a young Russian center, Timofey Mozgov) plus multiple draft picks. Walsh wanted Anthony, but not at that price. He had planned to wait until the final hours before the trade deadline in an attempt to force the Nuggets to negotiate on the Knicks’ terms. But given a looming labor crisis that would diminish the value of the long-term contract, Dolan had good reason to fear that
Anthony
would go to New Jersey if the Knicks didn’t agree to what was tantamount to gutting their roster.

The notion that the Nets and their new Russian owner, Mikhail Prokhorov, would land a marquee name like Anthony to bring to downtown Brooklyn upon the completion of their new arena made Dolan queasy. On top of that, he was planning a major ticket price increase for the 2011–12 season to help fund the Garden’s ongoing renovation. He knew the acquisition of Anthony, a charismatic player born in Brooklyn and married to a gorgeous TV celebrity named La La Vasquez, would provide cover.

Those who had been around the longest, fans for life of the Old Knicks, were furious when the invoices arrived in the mail. The increases averaged 49 percent across the arena but the price of courtside seats skyrocketed—in some cases from an already painful $330 to as much as a staggering $900 per game. Fifty-nine-year-old Lewis Dorf of South Orange, New Jersey, had been going to Knicks games since the mid-sixties, when he was a teenage ball boy assigned to the visitors bench. He was 15 when he struck up a friendship with Willis Reed and invited him over for dinner at his parents’ Stuyvesant Town apartment. Naturally, Reed showed up. After that, there was no way Dorf could ever kick his Knicks fix, and he wound up sitting directly behind Woody Allen, even coaxing a few lines of actual conversation from the reticent director.

But Dorf, the owner of a small business, was hardly in Allen’s league when it came to disposable income. For him and others, the price increases were a potentially fatal low blow, forcing the most faithful of fans to find and beg a rich benefactor to lay out the cash with the hope of buying back a few games. “A normal person cannot afford almost $2,000 to go to a basketball game 44 times a year,” Dorf said, voicing the fury of those who had continued digging deep during the darkest of Knicks decades, praying for a miracle.

The Knicks proceeded to lose 9 of 10 games, with Anthony struggling mightily to mesh with Stoudemire. The Knicks looked and played like the team of strangers they were, further hamstrung by a shallow roster of players who seemed incapable of stepping up to meet the most routine of defensive challenges. Meanwhile, Denver, with its superstar-less roster deepened by the new band of “Knuggets,” went on a tear that only magnified New York’s misery.

There was no arguing that Anthony—at 6'8", with 230 pounds of finesse and power—showed extraordinary skills as a natural-born scorer, and was lethal at just about any spot on the offensive end of the floor. Anthony was no defensive stopper, that was for sure, but he was certainly more intimidating with the ball at the end of a close game than, for comparison’s sake, LeBron James. As a sample demonstration, he won a game for the Knicks in Memphis with a last-second jumper, then did it again in Indianapolis as the team went on a tear—albeit against downtrodden opponents—over the final two weeks of the regular season.

Hopes were raised that the Knicks were peaking for the playoffs, but what worried the old-timers like George Lois and Freddy Klein was that, overnight, Anthony became the essence of what they loathed: a gifted player who demanded the ball on the wing and often reduced his teammates to four statues spread across the hardwood. In other words, what fell into the category of what Lois called “fucking unwatchable.” Still, the city was on high basketball alert when the Knicks drew the Celtics in the opening round, the first postseason meeting of the two old rivals in 21 years. The ghosts of playoffs past—Havlicek and Heinsohn to Bradley and Barnett—seemed to hover over the series in the days leading in. The Celtics were three playoff springs removed from their 17th championship, with the same core of Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, and Rajon Rondo. But a February alteration of their roster and an injury to Shaquille O’Neal had left them shallow at center and slumping at the end of the regular season. Despite finishing 14 games ahead of the Knicks, there was a sense that the Celtics might be vulnerable. Peter Vecsey, the
Post
’s impertinent NBA columnist, talked himself into picking the Knicks to win the series in six games, despite the Celtics’ 4–0 regular-season sweep.

In Game 1, powered by a dominating 28-point performance by Stoudemire, they had the Celtics all but beaten, leading by 3 with 37.8 seconds left. But the Celtics—aided by a questionable offensive foul call against Anthony—proceeded to run two inbounds plays that were brilliantly choreographed by their coach, Doc Rivers, and beautifully executed by five players thinking as one. When Allen’s 3-point shot from the left wing nestled in the bottom of the net, the Celtics had a 2-point lead with 11.6 seconds left. Out of time-outs, the Knicks rushed the ball past midcourt, where Anthony dribbled into a fast-approaching double-team about 25 feet out to the right of the key. A few feet away, the guard Toney Douglas—an erratic but fearless second-year player who had accounted for the 3-point lead with a long jumper moments earlier—was waving his arms, wide open.

Anthony might have passed to Douglas. Or, down by just 2, he might have driven the ball to the basket to score, gotten fouled, or opened a passing lane to Stoudemire. Wearing Dean Meminger’s old number 7 (Anthony had been given permission by Earl Monroe to un-retire number 15, which had also been Dick McGuire’s, but chose not to), Anthony pulled back for an off-balance 3 that clanged short. Game over. His maiden Knicks playoff voyage earned him a well-deserved roasting on the back pages of the New York tabloids.

Much to their credit, the Knicks flirted with victory again in Game 2, despite Billups’s being out with a strained knee suffered in the final minute of Game 1 and with Stoudemire stuck on the bench in the second half with severe back spasms. Left to his born calling—dominating the ball without having to answer to anyone—Anthony drew resounding praise for a 42-point, 17-rebound, 6-assist masterpiece. At least until he found himself in an end-game situation almost identical to the one that befuddled him in Game 1.

After Garnett gave the Celtics a one-point lead with a jump hook in the lane over Jared Jeffries with 13.3 seconds left, D’Antoni called his last time-out. Without Stoudemire and Billups, his options were limited. But by running the play through Anthony, knowing the Celtics were guaranteed to double-team, D’Antoni succeeded only in turning his best and arguably only legitimate option into an observer once he made the prescribed pass to the low post—to Jeffries, one of the worst offensive players in the league. Smelling blood, the long-limbed Garnett hustled over, and Jeffries, all thumbs, tried to pass to a cutting forward, Bill Walker—who had taken 11 shots and missed them all. Garnett deflected the pass and dived on the loose ball as if it were his wallet, a sequence that would not be readily apparent in a box score but was an unmistakable sign of true championship character.

Anthony, conversely, sometimes came across as a genial diva, not particularly bothered or burdened by much of anything in his wonderful celebrity life. After Game 2, he seemed more relieved to have made “the right play” with the pass to Jeffries than upset by its outcome and another crushing defeat. He uttered a word to describe the night—“fun”—that would never have left the mouth of a Jordan, a Bryant, a Reed, or a Frazier under such circumstances.

When the series returned to New York, the big story was whether Stoudemire would be able to play. An hour and a half before game time, he strolled to the court, wearing a soft brace on his back, to shoot jumpers, mostly flat-footed. Naturally, Willis and the Old Knicks were invoked, as they typically are whenever an injured athlete had to answer the bell in some significant degree of pain. Reed was the industry standard, almost to the point of cliché. But by the middle of Game 3, it was clear that Stoudemire’s admirable determination would not be defined as an act of heroism. Anthony and what was left of the Knicks—a virtual cast from the West Fourth Street playground—proved to be no match for the Celtics. The games at Madison Square Garden became a throwback clinic of fundamental excellence that might have elicited smoke rings of eternal satisfaction from Red Auerbach’s grave.

The point guard Rondo in particular toyed with the Knicks, penetrating their defense at will, finding the shooters Pierce, Allen, and Garnett, who roamed the perimeter and met the kind of limited resistance generally seen in all-star games. After winning the first two games by 5 measly points, the Celtics wrapped things up with a 17-point blowout and a 12-point victory in which they led by 23, extending the Knicks’ winless playoff streak to a full decade and their championship-less vacuum to a confounding 38 years.

Afterward, the Celtics were kind to the Knicks, both Rivers and Pierce going out of their way to forecast longer playoff runs to come. So, too, did Anthony, in the wake of his seventh first-round playoff exit in eight NBA seasons. “This is the first step of something great,” he assured Knicks fans. But how many steps would be required for a squad lacking in so many areas to become cohesive, much less a contender? Old Knicks fans remained skeptical. They had seen their share of saviors—Spencer Haywood, Bob McAdoo, Bernard King, even Patrick Ewing—come and go, and still the Knicks remained on the treadmill.