HOPE, THY NAME IS BALKMAN

A Look at the Knicks
by Greg Olear

When then-GM Ernie Grunfeld stole Latrell Sprewell from the Golden State Warriors in ‘98, the New York media was ready to pounce.  Here was a guy who choked his coach and was suspended for a full year!  He was Artiste pre-Artiste.  He was a nutjob.  And damn if the boys at the Post and the Daily News weren’t gonna let him know how they felt.

 But a funny thing happened on the way to the podium.  Sprewell showed up in a snappy suit and rimless glasses and opened his mouth…revealing himself to be gentle, articulate, and smarter than anyone on the Knicks roster by half.  Understand, this was a surly bunch.  Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley and Larry Johnson were legendary media pricklers, reticent to the point of hostility.  Charlie Ward and Allan Houston couldn’t speak without invoking Jesus Christ.  The only guy who would willingly talk was Chris Childs, and who was he?  Now the press had a bona fide star, in his prime—and one who was a) well-spoken and b) eager to give them quotes.  And so the stoning of Sprewell was forgotten.

 When Sprewell choked his then-coach, the volatile PJ Brown, he did so after a heated practice, in a room full of his teammates.  What was telling is that none of said teammates tried to intervene.  Guys stopped shooting free throws, checked out Spree going postal, and resumed their drills.  Donyell Marshall said something to the effect of, “One of us was going to choke that windbag eventually.  I’m glad it was him and not me.” 

Spree, in other words, has always had his finger on the pulse of things (except for when he thumbed his nose at that $21 million contract extension; but that’s neither here nor there).  So when the dead ringer for Sam Jackson in Pulp Fiction returned to the Garden after his trade to the hinterlands, it speaks volumes that he chose to cuss out—and I mean cuss out—Knicks owner James Dolan.  Dolan was responsible, Spree was saying, for the current mess of things.

What do you know?  He was right.

Dolan is the black sheep of the Cablevision family, its Gob Bluth, its Fredo.  He was given the sports teams to run because the damage he might do would be minimal.  The guy still thinks he’s a rock star, for God sake, but he looks like one of the beavers from Narnia.  He has no touch with reality.

 And so he installed Scott Layden, the second-least-qualified guy in the NBA, to run the team.  These were boring years.  Spree and Camby, the pistons that propelled the Knicks to the Finals in ’99, were gone.  Allan Houston’s best years as a pro were wasted.  He botched draft after draft, passing on several gems to take Nene and then trade him to Denver for an injured Antonio McDyess.  Knicks fans got bored waiting for the guy’s knee to heal.  Layden sat on his hands. 

 Then Dolan came to his senses and fired Layden.  What a Christmas present that was!  Unfortunately, he replaced him with the only guy in the NBA less qualified—snake-oiled Isiah [sic] Thomas.

Thomas has made many, many mistakes since he took the helm.  The signing of Jerome James and the Eddy Curry deal come to mind.  But his biggest mistake, by far, was hiring Larry Brown.

He was trying to make a splash.  He’s been good with splashes, to his credit.  The Stephon Marbury deal, although not so hot in retrospect, instantly rejuvenated the bored fans and gave us faith in his GM abilities.  But Brown?  Everyone knows Brown is overrated, and more trouble than he’s worth.

 His stay in Detroit ended badly, as did his previous stays anywhere else.  He ran the Olympic team to the ground, refusing to play the players who were actually good (see James, LeBron).  And he ran his mouth and alienated the entire team—not the best way to motivate the hypersensitive Marbury.

 The thing is, the Knicks roster, while not the most balanced thing on earth, is good.  They have a lot of good players.  More than they need, actually.  I honestly think that I could have won more games with that roster than Brown did last year.  Was he screwing up intentionally?  Was he going slowly mad?  Who knows.  But the mistake, thankfully, has been corrected, and now, to use the phrase of Bill Parcells, the guy who bought the groceries is the guy doing the cooking. 

The Knicks faithful are rooting against their own team this year, thinking that a losing record will mean the end of the Isiah era.  So what?  Dolan will just find a lesser person to run things.  Personally, I find Isiah mean-spirited, arrogant, and in way over his head.  But I’m still pulling for him.  And I think they’ll make the playoffs next year. 

A starting five of Marbury, Jamaal Crawford (who was probably the only guy to play well last year under Brown), Quentin Richardson, Channing Frye and Eddy Curry is pretty decent.  The bench, featuring Steve Francis, David Lee, Nate Robinson (who I don’t like particularly), Maurice Taylor, James, Jackie Butler, and the Roses, Jalen and Malik, is deep and experienced.  Why can’t a team like that run and pass and play up-tempo and win some games? 

Yes, Isiah mucked up the draft.  Renaldo Balkman?  Wha?  But so what?  He already has the tools.  Maybe a small trade or two, to lose some of the guys and balance the roster, but they’re right in this thing.  And if Sprewell ever started talking to the press again—he threatened to call the dogs when ESPN’s Chris Sheridan showed up at his front door; can you blame him?—we might learn that he agrees.

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