The Rites of '73

All they did was win the NBA Championship, the last one this franchise has seen, and yet we don’t hear or talk or reminisce about that team nearly as much as the one that went all the way in 1970.

Here’s a little test. Name your favorite moment from the 1970 season (provided you’re old enough, of course).

Well, now. . .there was the 18-game winning streak, and the miracle comeback against Cincinnati, and Fred Carter goaltending (?) Dick Barnett’s layup in the first round, and chanting “Goodbye Lewie” after winning the East, and beating the Lakers after West hit the 60-footer, and Willis getting hurt, and Willis coming back, and Willis hitting his first two shots, and. . .

Now, name your favorite moment from the 1973 season.

Well, OK. . .there was. . .there was. . .the big comeback against Milwaukee, right?. . . and. . . and. . . gimme a minute. . .

See the problem?

Maybe, as they say, you can only win it the first time once. Closer to the truth is that the ’73 title run simply didn’t have a series of indelible, defining, unforgettable moments that had abounded in ’70.

Those of us who saw it know that it shouldn’t be this way.

Look at the 1973 team picture and you’ll see eight Hall of Famers: six in uniform and two in suits. Only the early-dynasty Celtics can make a claim like that. No other team in the history of the NBA comes close.

Four of the 1970 stalwarts – Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley and Dave DeBusschere – were already on their way to Springfield. Now they had been joined by Jerry Lucas (from Golden State) and perhaps their number one tormentor, Earl Monroe (from Baltimore). Add head coach Red Holzman and club president Ned Irish, the team’s founding father, and you’ve got dinner for eight in the most exclusive club in basketball.

And here’s another distinction that team had, one that just about everyone has long forgotten: For decades, the 1973 Knicks stood alone as the only team in NBA history that defeated two 60-plus win teams en route to the championship. Not only had it never been done before, it wouldn’t be done again for 20 years. Then the Jordan Bulls made a habit of it, in 1993, 1996 and 1997. But the footprint had already been laid in New York.

Bill Bradley celebrates after a road win against LA in the 1973 Championships. From the Lens of George Kalinsky

It’s easy to look back and call it a time of change. An eager historian can do that with any year, any time. But 1973 really was. In many ways, we were between eras. These were the last days of the Broadway Joe/Muhammad Ali years of sideburned non-conformity. The Vietnam War ended in January, and the word “Watergate” was appearing on the front page with alarming regularity. Disco was still a few years away.

For those just gaining their first real sports impressions, there was a romantic air of mystery about the Knicks of that era. They were so good, so talented, and yet you didn’t see a whole lot of them. Channel 9 did a schedule of road games, mostly on Friday nights so at least you could stay up and watch. Up would come the old Garden logo animation and the distinctive brass-and-flute theme music and there would be Bob Wolff and Cal Ramsey – amazingly still part of the scene 30 years later – at courtside from the Hofheinz Pavilion in Houston or The Aud in Buffalo or Cobo Hall in Detroit.

But so much of their magic came at home, at the Garden, and that was where the real mystery came in. Because the Garden was a place you never saw. Certainly not in person. That was for grown-ups and rich folks and kids who knew somebody who knew somebody who could maybe get them tickets for a game against Cleveland.

You never saw it on television, either, except for Bob’s Saturday afternoon highlights show (“Knicks Highlights”. . . how imaginative!). In midtown Manhattan, there was something called “Cable TV” which did bring the home games into several dozen bars. But for everyone else, a young radio announcer named Marv Albert would be our eyes for all those unforgettable Garden nights.

Every once in a while someone you knew would actually go to a game, and come back all wide-eyed about the huge building, of the lights and the organ and the wagon-wheel roof and the seats all red and orange and green. . . or bring back a program laden with This-is-a-Man’s-World ads for booze, cars and cigarettes. Or maybe you’d be in the back seat on a family outing, going up the West Side Highway, and you’d squint through the maze of buildings in the lower ‘30s and, just for an instant, you’d see it. . . all burnished brown and polished black. That’s it, you said. That’s where all the magic comes from.

After two years of hype, the 1970 Knicks were expected to win it all, and nothing less than a championship would have made that season a success. But in 1973, they were just one of a handful of really good teams, like the John Havlicek Celtics and the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Bucks and the Jerry West Lakers.

After two years of hype, the 1970 Knicks were expected to win it all, and nothing less than a championship would have made that season a success. But in 1973, they were just one of a handful of really good teams.

In fact, there had been post-season failure in their immediate past. Defending their title in 1971, they fell victim to a Baltimore team they had tormented in the Playoffs in both of the prior two years. After going a combined 37-10 at home, they dropped Game Seven on the Garden floor, with Bradley missing a last-ditch jumper over the hulking Wes Unseld. In 1972, a crippled Reed was sidelined for virtually the entire season, but Lucas stepped into the pivot and the Knicks outlasted Baltimore and Boston to win the East. But with Frazier and DeBusschere injured for the Finals, they had no shot against the 69-win Lakers and went out in five.

And they were old. As the 1972-73 season opened, Barnett was 36, Lucas and DeBusschere were 32, and Reed was 30 and hurting. Even the idol-worshipers among us knew that this was probably going to be this team’s last shot, that Boston was coming on fast and was probably already the class of the East, on paper at least.

The 1970 team had been acclaimed as that most democratic of athletic squads, including everyone from the strong, silent leader (Reed) to the stylish defensive artist (Frazier) to the blue-collar foreman (DeBusschere) to the future politician (Bradley) to the wise and laid-back Jewish coach from Brooklyn. But now added to the mix was a brilliant master of mind games and memory (Lucas), a nonconformist, iconoclast forward (Phil Jackson, who missed the ’70 party with injury) and a man whose streetballing prowess earned him the name of Black Jesus back home in Philly (Monroe).

They were good enough to go 57-25 that season, but that was still only fourth-best in the League and miles behind the division-winning Celtics, who won a mind-blowing 68 games. Dee-fense, which won for them in 1970, was the name of their game again as they led the NBA by averaging only 98.2 points per game.

The game that would come to define them was played on Saturday night, November 18, 1972. Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson and the rest of the Bucks had them down by 18, 86-68 with less than six minutes left, and folks were heading for the Garden exits.

“I always felt that you’ve got no place to go anyway,” Holzman would say two decades later. “You can’t go to the movies until the game’s over. You can’t go out to dinner until the game’s over. So you might as well give it your best shot ‘til it’s over. Then you go home.”

So they scored 19 straight points and held the Bucks scoreless over the final 5:50. Monroe had 11 of the 19, including a jumper with 36 seconds left that made it 87-86 Knicks and sent the Garden into a frenzy.

And completely forgotten is the fact that the Knicks committed two huge blunders in the final minute, yet still escaped. With 47 seconds left and Milwaukee up by one, Monroe fouled Lucius Allen off the ball. . . and Allen, a 71% shooter that year, bricked both free throws. Then, with the ball and a one-point lead, the Knicks thought they could run it out, not realizing there was a two-second differential between the shot clock and game clock. Look on the tape and you’ll see Monroe, in the frantic final second, trying to call time-out. Too late. Twenty-four second violation, Bucks ball with :02 left. But Kareem shot long at the buzzer, and the comeback was complete.

The Milwaukee game was only one of 82 in the regular season, only one of the 57 they’d win. But it has endured partly in memory, partly in legend, and mostly because somebody back in the control room of what was then called Madison Square Garden Productions had the good sense to hit the “record” button on the tape machine, and uptown somebody at WNBC Radio was doing the same, so that every bit of Marv’s and Bob’s and Cal’s breathlessness that November night has been preserved for all time.

Baltimore was up first in the Playoffs, the fifth of six straight years the Knicks would face the Bullets in the post-season. With Monroe ringing up 21.6 ppg against his old mates, the Knicks advanced easily in five games, including three double-digit triumphs.

That meant Boston in the Eastern Finals, and anyone who thought that this was the end of the road had a perfect right. The Celtics, now completely rebuilt following the end of the Russell Era, had finished 11 games ahead of New York in the Atlantic Division. And they were loaded, with MVP Dave Cowens and superstars Havlicek, JoJo White, Paul Silas, and a defensive specialist named Don Chaney who spent much of his time clinging to Frazier like a wet suit.

Willis Reed against Boston in the 1973 Eastern Conference Finals. From the Lens of George Kalinsky

But after getting routed in Game One, the Knicks returned the favor with a 33-point laugher in Game Two. Then they won Game Three, at Boston, as Havlicek was forced out with a bum shoulder after running into a DeBusschere pick. So they came home for Game Four, an Easter Sunday classic played on a scorching New York afternoon.

Boston led by 17 points late in the third quarter, and by 16 heading into the fourth, but the Knicks ran off 13 straight to ignite a frantic fourth-quarter rally. Frazier sent it into overtime with a fallaway with 17 seconds left, then Jackson nailed two free throws to force a second OT.

By this time, Reed and Dean Meminger had fouled out. Frazier and DeBusschere started the second OT alongside second-stringers Jackson, rookie Henry Bibby and a 6-foot-10 California beanpole named John Gianelli, who was only being asked to contain the League’s reigning MVP (“Cowens you know just feels as though he can eat him up,” said Marv’s new radio partner, John Andariese).

But then Jackson stole the ball from White and drove the length of the floor for a layup. Gianelli drew two key fouls down low. . .including Cowens’ sixth. Frazier finished with 37 points. The Knicks ended the game with an 11-4 run and won by seven in a war of attrition in which five players fouled out. The game ended with Boston coach Tom Heinsohn, clad in a test-pattern blue-and-green-plaid blazer, berating officials Jake O’Donnell and Jack Madden all the away into the center court tunnel.

Even after 30 years, the mere mention of 1973 – especially the Havlicek injury and the controversial calls in Game Four -- is guaranteed to jumpstart the blood pressure of any member of Celtic Nation. A few years ago we engaged one such fellow in a nostalgic lookback. No sooner had we said the words, “that double-overtime game. . .” than the retort came: “Robbery! Robbery! Robbery committed by evil forces!!” Yikes. Imagine how ticked off they’d all be if they hadn’t won those 16 championships.

Now the Knicks were up three games to one. But they lost Game Five by one, in Boston, as Reed’s last-second shot was grabbed by Silas. Then they lost Game Six, at the Garden, by 10. And so they went to Boston for Game Seven, knowing that the Celtics had never lost Game Seven of any Playoff series. Ever.

Now, think about that for a minute. Applying today’s every-day-a-new-chapter-in-the-soap-opera style of coverage, can you imagine what would it be like to be on the verge of blowing a 3-1 lead in the East Finals? There would be screaming headlines, screaming talk show hosts and screaming fans, all part of the non-stop, minute-by-minute account of The Knicks In Crisis.

But so much of what exists today didn’t exist 30 years ago. It was a tough situation, to be sure. But that’s all it was perceived as. . .no more, no less.

“The feeling was that it was gonna be tough,” said Holzman many years later. “It wasn’t a feeling of `We can’t go up there and win’. It was just a feeling that it was gonna be tough.”

Of course, in some quarters, the panic was indeed on. An enduring Knick legend is that moments after the Game Six loss, a member of the Garden’s upper echelon – some say Irish, some say Irving Mitchell Felt – barged into the locker room and berated the team, calling them losers, choke artists and stiffs.

“When we got up there,” said Holzman, “things started happening. We did certain things early, like pressing, picking up, putting constant pressure on them. Now, you can get burned that way. But it worked out.”

It worked out to the tune of 25 points for Frazier, 15 for Reed and 13 points and six rebounds for Meminger off the bench. Havlicek, who could barely lift his arm, finished with four points on 1-for-6 shooting. The Knicks won by 16.

So it was a Knicks-Lakers Finals for the third time in four years. And although they had a 60-win season, these weren’t the Lakers that had blitzed the League the year before. West was playing with a pair of pulled hamstrings. Wilt Chamberlain, at 36, was inching toward retirement. This year, perhaps, they could be had.

And after losing the first game, the Knicks ran off four straight.

There were no blowouts; the biggest margin of victory in any game was nine points. But the Knicks never lost control of the series following back-to-back wins at the Garden in Games Three and Four.

The Knicks never lost control of the series following back-to-back wins at the Garden in Games Three and Four.

Game Four belonged to DeBusschere with 33 points. The Knicks saw a 10-point fourth quarter lead melt down to two in the final minute. Then Bradley missed a jumper, but DeBusschere wrestled the rebound out of Wilt’s hands, threw in a fadeaway, got fouled, and nailed the free throw to seal the game. It remains the greatest play in Knicks history that absolutely no one remembers, except Dave DeBusschere. Two nights later, Monroe scored eight of his team-high 23 points in the final four minutes to nail down the series. Reed, a spectator the year before, ran off the Forum floor with both the game ball and Finals MVP honors.

There was a flight home the next morning (commercial, not charter), and a reception at City Hall with Mayor Lindsay a few days later. But there was none of the city-wide hysteria that greeted the first title.

Oh, it meant everything to those involved. Especially Monroe and Lucas, who waited so long to earn their first (and only) championship rings, and to a happy-go-lucky free agent named Harthorne Wingo, who was plucked from the obscurity of the Eastern League to become a Garden cult hero. But no slew of newly-published books would greet this Knicks championship team. No stream of nationwide endorsements, no highlight films, no syndicated TV shows, no Las Vegas appearances.

Dave DeBusschere puts up the jumper against Wilt Chamberlain in the 1973 Finals. From the Lens of George Kalinsky

More and more, it was evident that an era was ending.

A year later, following Boston’s playoff revenge in a five-game wipeout, Reed, DeBusschere and Barnett all retired. In 1975, the Knicks didn’t even survive the first round, losing to Houston. And pretty soon, all that was left of the 1973 champions was the big-as-a-house, white-and-blue banner that hung alongside its 1970 twin in the Garden rafters (Don’t strain your neck looking for it now, though. The two original Knicks title flags were taken down during the Garden’s 1989-91 renovation and, when last heard from, were resting in a Brooklyn warehouse).

So while Reed’s bravery and Frazier’s coolness and all those wonderful things from 1970 live on forever, we have to strain sometimes to remember just how special the 1973 team was, how it banded together for one last stand just before, it seemed, everyone got old at the same time.

You’d think that now, 30 years later, there’d be a little more respect, a little more love, for the squad with eight Hall of Famers in the team photo.

And you know what? In a few years, it’s going to be nine Hall of Famers. Remember that nonconformist, iconoclast forward we mentioned? Well, let me tell you what happened to him. . . .