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It’s impossible to overstate how much of a can’t-miss prospect Johnson was. He had been far and away the best player on perhaps the best team in modern college basketball history.
“You get a lot of guys in this business who have just been spoon-fed,” Oakley said. “But Larry? You can tell somewhere down the line Larry had to learn to eat soup with a fork.” The by-any-means-necessary mentality made Johnson a solid fit with New York, even if he wasn’t the dominant force he’d once been.
“Like most professional basketball players, he chose to practice what he was already good at, shooting, rather than what was obviously hard for him, passing,” Halberstam wrote.
Among the worst: a “Ewing Can’t Read ‘Dis’ ” sign at a game at Providence; a bedsheet at Villanova that read, “Ewing Is an Ape”; and at the same game, a banana peel that a fan threw at Ewing’s feet as starting lineups were being announced.
So on April 20, Checketts’s phone rang again. It was Lustgarten. “Jimmy wants it to be Ernie,” Lustgarten said, in a line that sounded like an ordered hit straight out of The Sopranos.
When the executive asked Van Gundy why he was continuing to lobby the officials, even after the win, Van Gundy gave him a matter-of-fact response. “I’m coaching the next round, too, Dave. I’ve gotta put these [referees] on notice,” Van Gundy told him.
The defeat marked the sixth time in the 1990s New York had been knocked out of the playoffs by the eventual champion.
Yet the near-misses also illustrated the strength and consistency of the organization. It’s not easy to get that close that many times. Something was being done the right way.
And even if the story didn’t have a happy ending, it’s one nearly all the players—and their millions of fans, who’ve longed for a team like that ever since—would gladly relive.
