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The New York Knicks were among the defining teams throughout one of the NBA’s golden eras. They made the playoffs in all ten years of the decade, with three conference finals showings and two trips to the NBA Finals.
“When I used to walk into the Garden to play the Knicks, I didn’t always know if we were gonna win,” former Bulls forward Horace Grant would say years later. “But I always knew we were going to bleed.”
You can’t tell the story of the league’s most fascinating decade without the New York Knicks.
“Mase treated the box-out drill like it was Game Seven of the Finals,” says center Tim McCormick, who helped break up the brawl.
Unlike Mason, McDaniel’s place with the club that year was as secure as superstar Patrick Ewing’s. He had nothing to prove that day in camp.
Yet McDaniel was no more willing to back down than Mason.
Fortunately for Mason and McDaniel, that way of thinking wasn’t a problem for their coach, who learned the importance of toughness at the age of nine.
This—not Showtime—was the culture Riley wanted to establish. One that would epitomize toughness by making teams pay for having the audacity to wander into the paint. One that would put a premium on conditioning so the club would have the stamina to finish close games. One that would treat Knick players like royalty, while normalizing the notion of a nasty streak by issuing fines to players who were kind enough to help up fallen opponents.
Given the team’s makeup—led by Ewing, and far more established in the frontcourt than in the backcourt—there was no point in Riley trying to craft an uptempo attack like he’d employed in Los Angeles. Instead, the Knicks were uniquely positioned to exploit their advantages on the defensive end.
By the fall of 1991, the smashmouth “Bad Boys” Detroit Pistons had been dethroned after back-to-back title runs. They were aging and running out of steam. But to Riley, their ideology remained sound. And with the Knicks being younger than the Pistons, the coach figured New York could maximize its chances of beating Michael Jordan and the defending-champion Chicago Bulls by tapping into the same bloody-knuckle, back-alley defensive tactics Detroit once thrived with.
“I was convinced he was gonna kill me that next day,” McCormick says. “But instead, he walks up, slaps me on the back, and asks how I’m doing. I was so confused, because it was the first time he had said anything to me. Then, as I thought about it, I realized: Charles never really respected me until I hit him.”
Eventually, the game ended with the Knicks losing by 22. After the dust settled, general manager Scotty Stirling fielded a question from a reporter about the poster-throwing episode and what it said about the team’s fans. After pausing for a moment, he responded. “Thank God,” Stirling said, “they didn’t have hand grenades.”
In 1987, the Knicks hired the 35-year-old Pitino to be their new coach. He won 38 games his first year, 52 in his second, with the Knicks reaching the playoffs each season.
The sustainability of his strategy was up for debate. (Particularly the notion to have the team run a full-court press on defense for long stretches, which can wear down players—especially veterans—over the course of an 82-game season.)
Riley was noncommittal. But after the way things had unraveled with the Lakers, any situation he stepped into would require unity. “We all would need to speak with one voice,” Riley said.
By just about any measure, Riley was a fantastic NBA coach. But no one in the history of sports had ever handed someone a longer list of demands than Riley handed Checketts.
At some point in the talks, he told Checketts he’d agree to take the job only if Patrick Ewing chose to stay with the team.
Riley studied the team names on the list for a moment before focusing his attention back on Ewing. He knew the big man was frustrated. He legitimately understood his desire for a fresh start. But for Riley, everything came back to a relatively simple concept, one he’d grown familiar with in Los Angeles. “I want you to think about something,” Riley said. “Close your eyes and think of a championship parade on Broadway. Think about what that would mean to New York. And what it’d mean to you.”
The drill, which Riley privately called “Suicide Alley,” was an insight into the kind of physicality he demanded from his players, even in practices. It spoke to how a distinguished-looking, Motown-loving coach, who’d presided over a smooth attack with the Lakers, could flip the script into something violent.
“I drafted you, my job is depending on you, and that is the worst five minutes of basketball I’ve ever seen,” McMahon told him. When Riley, a forward in college, told McMahon he’d never played guard before, McMahon shot back, “You’d better learn.”
For Riley, who won the 1972 title with the Lakers, the strong effort stemmed from fear of losing his spot. He didn’t know what he’d be without basketball. And given the way his father’s life had crumbled after leaving professional baseball, Riley wasn’t in any rush himself to find out.
Lee Riley lost his job in the fall of 1952, when the Phillies cut their farm system from twelve teams to nine. That same night, a despondent Riley walked into the attic of his home on Spruce Street, grabbed every bit of baseball memorabilia he could, and burned it, blazing two decades’ worth of work.
“We didn’t want anybody who could come in and change the systems we had. The best coaches leave the players alone,” Lakers guard Norm Nixon said. “The years I was there, Riley… man, he just let us play.”
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.
Maniacal as it was, this was Riley’s way of trying to build a foxhole, and an us-against-the-world sort of bond. And for how extreme Riley’s tactics could be, he managed to earn the respect of most players, especially ones who had been with the Knicks in earlier seasons.
Even when the team was in Charleston for training camp, Riley wanted things a certain way for his players. One particular night, he asked team officials to rent out Garibaldi’s, an upscale Italian restaurant near the club’s hotel, to hold a dinner for players, coaches, and trainers only. He gave specific instructions about how he wanted the room laid out. And upon inspecting the venue himself, Riley was just as particular, bending down to pick up a folded cloth napkin on one table. “Then he changed the configuration of the napkin, flagged someone down, and said he wanted them arranged that way
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Riley had players unite in a hotel ballroom during a walk-through in Oakland. When they got there, players saw four round tables—with chairs surrounding each one—in different pockets of the space. Riley assigned Charles Oakley, Ewing, Jackson, and McDaniel to sit down at the first table. He sat Starks, Anthony, and Gerald Wilkins at a second table. VanDeWeghe, Quinnett, and center Tim McCormick were at the third. Anthony Mason, Patrick Eddie, and Kennard Winchester sat at the final one.
Once they were seated the way Riley wanted, he diagnosed what he saw as a lingering problem. “We’re a bunch of cliques rather than a team, and that’s the way we’ve been playing lately,” Riley said, adding that he’d arranged the groups that way because it was how the players generally split themselves up anyway.
When word reached Riley about how high the stakes had gotten, his concern was how it might impact the team dynamic. “How the hell do you expect someone to pass you the ball if you owe him $30,000?” Riley shouted. “That’s fucking tuition for a kid!”
“You’ve done everything I’ve asked of you,” Riley said. “So, we’re not gonna practice today. Instead, we’ll watch a movie that just came out. It’s about Tim McCormick. It’s called White Men Can’t Jump.”
Before the postseason, Riley had a two-hour sit-down with McDaniel, the team’s on-again, off-again forward. “I need you to go back to being the old, Seattle version of X,” the coach told him. By that, he meant going back to the player who had a well-documented mean streak—who took, rather than politely waiting for defenses to give.
While it certainly wasn’t the equivalent of the Bulls’ watershed victory over Detroit in 1991, the Knicks’ series win did mark a sort of changing of the guard. In beating the Pistons—who saw Chuck Daly step down after the first-round defeat, officially ending the Bad Boys—the Knicks had effectively become the new bullies on the block.
Dating back to the team’s training camp in October, he’d had the Bulls in his sights. “Pat told us on Day One: ‘Listen, we already know we’re gonna have to go through Chicago,’ ” recalls Wilkins. “He was a champion, and he made it clear that he ain’t come to New York to lose. So he instilled that confidence in us right away.”
“One of you is gonna step up, knock Michael Jordan to the floor, and not help him up,” Riley continued. “We can’t show him deference just because of who he is, or how good he is. Not anymore. You can achieve whatever you want in life, but no one—especially not Michael Jordan—is gonna give it to you. You have to take it. Michael isn’t just gonna play poorly. You have to force him to play that way.”
Moss’s clock-punching style, full of aches and pains, influenced Oakley’s work mentality. It’s why, to this day, Oakley himself can be found hunching over to scrub down vehicles that drive into the car washes he owns. He sees honor in doing the grunt work other people shy away from.
“Right then, I told myself, ‘This summer, I’m getting two guys just like [Oakley].’ Because players like that would immediately change the makeup of our team.”
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. As the players looked on with concern for two or three minutes, wondering how long their coach could possibly hold his breath for, assistant coach Dick Harter finally pulled out a soaking Riley, who gasped for air before composing himself. “Now that’s how bad you should want to win—as badly as I needed that breath!” Riley said, his adrenaline still spiking.
The nature of the defeat infuriated Riley, who ridiculed the Knicks two days later during a morning shootaround. Hours before they were due to host Portland at the Garden, Riley stood near the basket and chirped at his players, repeatedly yelling, “Soft!” as each man took turns approaching the rim for layups. “I’d bet he said it a hundred times [during that shootaround],” Rivers recalls. “He was mad.”
“You have to remember: this is after he’s been calling us soft all day. Us, soft? The last thing you think when you look at our group—Oak, Mase, Patrick, Starks—is that we’re soft. I just remember walking onto the floor thinking, ‘Someone might die tonight.’ That’s how amped I was. You knew we were gonna win, and that Portland had no chance.”
‘Hey, we’re gonna win something tonight—we’re either gonna win the game, or win the fight,’ ”
“On a team full of buffaloes, you can use a butterfly every once in a while.
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,” Riley said.
“New York is this city of eight million people, where plenty of people don’t give a shit about sports. But the Knicks were somehow this unifying force that could bring everybody together,” says Chris Smith, a New York magazine reporter who wrote features on the team during those years.
“People came to the Garden straight from work—some in their suits—so there was all this added energy, because it was a spiritual release.… Almost like a church service. And the Garden’s angles and lighting made it feel like a stage.”
It marked the Knicks’ third straight elimination at the hands of the Bulls, who would go on to win their third title in a row.
A number of people from that Knicks club, including Riley himself, believe the 1993 group was the franchise’s best to suit up during that era. “We had a championship team. We really did. That year, I thought our team was better than anybody else in the league,” Riley said. “We just could not get past MJ.”
this was one of the downsides of having a Ford-tough roster like New York’s, with so many players who were willing to play through just about anything. Because so many of the players in the rotation had played through intense pain and significant injuries before, they lacked sympathy for those who weren’t wired that way.
Though he said nothing in the moment, Smith, who’d long sought to win over his coach and shed his black-swan feathers to better fit in with his more physical teammates, felt wounded by Riley’s comment.
“Charles was pissed [about that],” says Brig Owens, Smith’s agent. “He wanted to win, like anyone else. As a coach, you don’t question how bad your guys are hurt. They’re putting it on the line the best they can.”
And unfortunately for [Charles], I think Riley just pushed him too hard to be something he wasn’t. In a way, I sort of think he broke him.”
