Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks

by Chris Herring

According to McDaniel’s teammates in Seattle, he often walked around the Sonics’ locker room fully erect after games, hanging towels on his hardened member.

Their players relied on making the extra pass so frequently that, years later, Jackson revealed the Knicks made a point to slightly deflate basketballs just before games would start. This disadvantaged opponents when they tried to dribble and didn’t get the same bounce they were accustomed to. But it helped the Knicks, who were far more interested in passing the ball than dribbling it to begin with.

In the spring of 1982, the FBI began an investigation into whether three Knick players that season were fixing games as a favor to a drug dealer, who was placing five-figure bets on New York’s opponents.

Wanting to be the highest-paid coach in the game, given what he’d accomplished with the Lakers, was understandable. And while the idea of asking the team to pay for his new home in the area was certainly unusual, if you were going to make that exception for anyone, you’d do it for someone of Riley’s caliber. Beyond that, Riley wanted the team to facilitate a book deal. With the club being owned by Paramount, he wanted a potential movie deal as well. He also asked that his team-issued polo shirts actually be manufactured by Ralph Lauren’s Polo brand. And if that laundry list wasn’t enough, Riley added an actual laundry list. He asked the organization to pay for his laundry and dry-cleaning expenses, too.

Not only was Ewing’s 10-year, $32 million agreement the richest deal in NBA history at the time; it also contained a first-of-its-kind provision that would allow Ewing to become a free agent if his pact fell outside the league’s four highest-paid contracts.

During an early-season practice in Purchase, New York, the new Knicks coach lined six of his players on one side of the free-throw line and six players on the other, telling them to throw every possible shoulder and elbow into guard Gerald Wilkins, who would try his best to somehow race through the lane unscathed.

These were practice sessions on a level most had never experienced. Riley, preaching the notion of dedication, was a man whose workouts regularly ran more than three hours. Most other teams worked out for ninety minutes, or two hours, tops. A number of players contend that New York’s shootarounds—held the morning of a game and designed to help players loosen up as they walk through their game plan—were more involved than other clubs’ full-scale practices. Riley shootarounds often went two hours and were full contact. Riley had his players get their ankles taped up for the sessions, like they would for actual games.

Shortly after getting the Knicks job, Riley took steps to distance a handful of team staffers from the players. Longtime broadcasters Marv Albert and Walt “Clyde” Frazier, whose analysis was pointed at times, would no longer fly with the club.

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.

Yet there was another, more subtle problem with the team’s offense: a handful of players felt starting point guard Mark Jackson had a tendency to play favorites in terms of where he’d go with the ball. “He’d pass it to me, and make it seem like he was doing me some favor,” guard Brian Quinnett says.

NBA officials also made a point to chide the Knicks behind the scenes—and threaten fines—for repeatedly showing certain instant-replay sequences on the jumbotron. Seeking to spare its officials unnecessary ridicule with questionable calls, the league had limitations on how many times clubs were allowed to loop foul-call sequences on the big screens. But because the Knicks were already annoyed by what they saw as nightly overpolicing, they ignored the rule altogether when they felt an egregious call had taken place.

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.

“We’ve found through trial and error that it’s not smart to have young backups,” Krause said. “[Jordan] generally eats those kids up so bad in practice that he destroys them.”

“Mase calls me, and he’s just screeching. Every other word out of his mouth was ‘fuck.’ Fuck this. Fuck them,” Cronson says. “I just told him to lay low. I’d never heard Mase this angry before. And I tell him: ‘Mase, don’t go to the practice facility, since they told you to stay away. Just let the thing blow over.’ ” But Mason, a habitual line-stepper, opted to poke the bear. He attended the Knicks’ game that night at the Garden as a spectator, high-fiving fans while sitting in the 300 level and wearing a New York Rangers jersey. His presence drew enough attention that television cameras spotlighted him in the fourth quarter.

Several of Mason’s buddies recall him buying fifteen or twenty Skytel pagers for his entourage for two reasons. One, to help the group make plans from one night to the next. And secondly, to see how many numbers they could each collect. What those friends didn’t know was Mason had a third reason for buying the pagers: because he bought them, he had the PIN codes for each person’s device. It meant he could not only snatch the women’s phone numbers for himself, but also play practical jokes on his friends because of the back-end access he had to the pagers.

Then Stern announced the Pacers had gotten the No. 2 pick, meaning, by process of elimination, that the No. 1 selection would belong to the Knicks. Lee leapt in the air, raised both arms, and shouted triumphantly. It was around that same time that Burr—tired of waiting to get Lee’s attention—said what she’d been waiting to get off her chest. “Spike, it’s over between me and you,” she said. Stunned, Lee went home and thought about what had taken place. “I considered the error of my ways. Bit my lip. Picked up the phone. Punched the digits. Swallowed my pride. Time for commitment,” he said. But rather than call Burr, he instead placed a call to the Knicks. He wanted to know how he could buy season tickets, given that Ewing would be on the roster.

In particular, he’d developed a tight relationship with Jordan, who was one of a handful of prominent Black celebrities to help Lee cover a $5 million budget shortfall to finish Malcolm X.

“I loved this opportunity. Ernie and Dave were first class all the way. I loved the city of New York. I loved everything except the team,” Nelson said in his farewell press conference, getting in one final dig on his way out.

“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.”

Riley even tried, but failed to get clearance from New York’s front office, to pry Van Gundy from the Knicks upon joining the Heat. “I was kind of upset about it at the time,” Van Gundy recalled about Checketts’s decision. Unable to take Jeff to Miami, Riley hired Jeff’s brother, Stan, as an assistant instead. “I wanted at least one Van Gundy with me,” Riley said.

Oakley, who enjoyed gambling more than anyone and carried around a brown duffle bag with a minimum of $50,000 in cash most trips, had grown annoyed when younger, lesser-paid Knicks said they didn’t have enough cash on them to wager in the six-figure card games during flights. To get around the “I don’t have enough cash” excuse, Oakley bought a credit-card imprint machine—and a pad of carbon-paper slips—to help facilitate teammates’ bets that way instead. “It was one of those old, metal machines that went click-click,” says Childs, referring to the credit-card scanner. “Let’s say you owe him $2,000. He’d charge a fee for using the machine, and make it like $2,300. Basically a shylock. He was the Bank of Oak.”

“We were on a flight coming back from a preseason [win], and I got in trouble for yelling, ‘Yes! Let’s go Mets!’ after they clinched a spot in the World Series [in 2000],” says Hamdan, the club’s assistant trainer. “The next day, he calls me into his office and says I need to have more respect for the sanctity of winning and losing. And I told him: ‘Jeff, the sanctity of winning and losing is why I yelled “Let’s go Mets!” They just made the World Series!’ And he just looks at me and says, ‘Get the fuck outta my office.’ ”

Checketts thought back on 1994, and how Pat Riley’s agitation with how those Finals manifested. The coach had been adamantly against the idea of doing anything to honor the team’s effort that season. “He said he didn’t want a single dinner, a pleasant conversation, a pat on the back. Nothing,” Checketts recalls. “And I said, ‘Pat, you have your rings already. The rest of us don’t. This is still a special thing.’ ”

The defeat marked the sixth time in the 1990s New York had been knocked out of the playoffs by the eventual champion.

Without rings to validate their place in history, it’s impossible to consider the Knicks the focal point of the NBA’s golden era. Yet it’s fitting they stand just outside the limelight. Those blood-inducing, bandage-causing clubs were far more interested in making their presence felt rather than seen anyway.

In 1992, New York became the first club to push Jordan and the title-era Bulls to a seventh game. The Knicks followed that up with the wrenching defeat in 1993, after the winnable Charles Smith sequence. They were a 2-for-18, Game 7 John Starks performance away from winning the whole thing in 1994. A Game 7, Patrick Ewing finger roll at the buzzer away from beating Indiana to make the conference finals in 1995. A bench-clearing dustup against the Heat from getting one last good crack at Chicago in 1997. And then a Ewing Achilles injury away from having the size to go toe-to-toe with the Spurs in 1999.