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February 28 - March 7, 2022
There were the feuds, like when guard Darrell Walker engaged in a shouting match with coach Hubie Brown during a practice in January 1986, then staged a sit-in during the team workout in Atlanta… by plopping down in the middle of the lane, forcing his teammates to shoot around him.
There were the distractions, like when a few players learned that one of the coaches on the team’s staff was having an extramarital affair with a woman who lived in guard Trent Tucker’s apartment complex—which irked the players, who’d been criticized all year for not showing professionalism.
Yes, the staffer was liked by many, he acknowledged. “But sometimes in a situation, you have to shoot a hostage in the head, then look around and say, ‘Who the fuck is next?’ ” Riley said in a serious tone.
“Honestly? I think you come from a white, middle-class background, and you play like you’re not hungry enough,” Riley said. The response stunned
“He’d group players from 1 to 10, with a 1 being a point guard, a 5 being a center, a 6 being a backup point guard, and a 10 being a backup center,” Salmi says. “And he’d have me feeding all their data—scoring, efficiency, rebounding, defense—into a spreadsheet system.
Among other things, Riley had Salmi track how New York performed in each player’s minutes, a universal metric in today’s game known as plus-minus.
There was the time before a game when Riley told his players they didn’t want to win badly enough, then abruptly dunked his head into a bucket full of ice-cold water seconds later.
An hour and a half before a different game, Riley asked assistant trainer Tim Walsh to run down to Gerry Cosby’s, the sporting goods store across the street from the Garden, to buy him a pair of baseball spikes. When Walsh returned, Riley took the cleats, retreated into his office, and closed the door behind him. About fifteen minutes later, with the team waiting in the locker room for Riley’s pregame talk, the coach sprinted out of his office and broke into a baseball slide just in front of the players. As he came to a stop, the Knicks realized Riley was wearing cleats. “You’ve gotta do
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For five minutes, the players watched displays full of carnage. Ones showing brutal car crashes, spliced with clips of PBS programming that illustrated bighorn rams headbutting one another for supremacy.
But then, guard Greg Anthony—in street clothes due to a bum ankle—decided it wasn’t quite over. Walking up from behind Johnson, the lefty uncorked an enormous left hook of a sucker punch, igniting the biggest fight the NBA had seen in years just moments after the flame had almost been put out.
It reached a point where Smith was so spent that Riley—normally the take-no-prisoners type—softly grabbed the forward and called off his remaining 17s, recognizing Smith couldn’t finish them. Then Riley turned to his assistants, saying he’d never let someone off the hook during a conditioning drill. “It’s the only time I’ve actually felt bad for a guy,”
“Hey!” Jackson yelled. “We’ve got practice! Can you stop for a bit? You’re not supposed to be here!” There was a brief silence that hung in the arena after Jackson’s request. After all, this was Phil Jackson, a man who’d coached the Bulls to two straight NBA championships, and, for those who knew their history well enough, had been a beloved member of the two Knicks championship teams in the 1970s. Beyond all that, it was a reasonable request: to give the Bulls a few uninterrupted minutes to lock in their game plan. After a few seconds of thinking Jackson’s request over, a member of the small
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It didn’t take long for him to get his answer. As his children took a swim, Riley turned speechless as he saw the doors to the suite’s balcony fly open. Michael Jordan, of all people, had been handed the suite, and was now sporting a comfy bathrobe, peering down at Riley, blissfully waving to the coach.
holding eight straight foes under the 90-point mark, becoming the first club since 1954—the year the shot clock was introduced—to
Other friends of Mason’s, who were in a pair of cars trailing his when the accident occurred, pulled over, loaded Mason into their vehicle, then whisked him away in an effort to keep their buddy out of legal trouble. And it worked. When police arrived, Mason’s name never came up. The story never hit the papers. Instead, Corey Kelly, Anthony Kelly’s younger brother, took the fall, receiving a ticket for reckless driving—and the 1,000-plus-foot skid marks the accident left on the highway.
“Me and Maxwell got drafted the same year, and were summer-league teammates,” says Greg Butler, an ex-Knick who took part in a couple of Riley’s New York training camps. “One day we had each other’s summer-league jerseys by mistake. So I walk into Vernon’s room to give him his, and his floor is just covered with beers. Two cases’ worth, with cans scattered everywhere, empty. He was sipping on another as I walked in. But a few hours later, he drops something like thirty points that day. The guy was different.”
Simply looking for ways to pitch in at times, Van Gundy occasionally noticed one of the team’s secretaries, a single mother, was forced to bring her five-year-old son to the office when she couldn’t get a babysitter. Knowing she was swamped and unable to entertain the boy, Van Gundy would whisk the child away to do puzzles or play cards. “He was incredibly sweet to do that,” the woman says years later.
“These guys only care about you having four qualities: that you’re competent, sincere, reliable, and trustworthy,” Riley told him. “If you are those four things, you can accomplish anything in this league.”
“If this were football, every time [his teammates] shoot, they’d be accused of intentional grounding,” New York Post columnist Peter Vecsey wrote.
So reporters had no idea that, early in his career, Ewing paid for each of his teammates to come down to spend a few days with him in his native Jamaica during the offseason. Or that Ewing would regularly tell the younger players to buy whatever they wanted at Friedman’s Shoes during trips to Atlanta, because he’d pay for it. Or that when he learned the wife of Chris Jent—someone he was teammates with for just three months in 1996—developed a brain tumor, he and Van Gundy sent checks the next week to cover the entirety of her chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
The affair was a nonstarter for Rita, his wife of eight years, who quickly initiated separation proceedings. She hired a powerhouse divorce attorney three weeks later, and later that year published a novel with Crystal McCrary—then the wife of Greg Anthony—about the challenges of being an NBA spouse. (Surely it was mere coincidence the novel was built on the temptation swirling around a New York superstar, who plays for a clothes-obsessed coach and is represented by a powerhouse sports agent.)
“Ernie was a friend and an old teammate of mine who had taught me so much about life,” Carter says, recalling an eye-opening book Grunfeld had given him about Eastern European Jews immigrating to America in the late 1800s and early 1900s. (Grunfeld, born in Romania in 1955, was the son of Holocaust survivors.) “I was trying to save him from taking Marcus.”
When they arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, they didn’t have a direct line to Oakley, but managed to reach one of his acquaintances, who shared the power forward’s whereabouts. Racing against the clock, Grunwald and Carter found Oakley inside the Atlanta Ritz-Carlton’s fitness center, bench-pressing. In the weight room, Grunwald and Carter pleaded with Oakley to make the trip back to Toronto with them. “He didn’t want to leave the Knicks. And we told him we could fully appreciate and understand why he might not be excited about being traded to us, but that we really needed
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course Checketts wanted to know if Sprewell was remorseful for going after Carlesimo. But he’d also been bothered by a story from a few years earlier, when one of Sprewell’s pit bulls attacked his four-year-old daughter, severing her right ear in the process. The issue that didn’t sit well with Checketts: when asked by reporters about that traumatic episode in 1994, Sprewell responded, “Shit happens.” “Look, I’m a father with six kids, and they mean more to me than anything,” Checketts said to Sprewell, saying he found the player’s response to be callous. “I told myself, ‘[Sprewell] is totally
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