The Knicks' painful 50-year title drought continues
TV broadcasts of the New York Knicks’ playoff run this year occasionally interspersed grainy footage of the Knicks’ championship teams from the early 1970s. The message wasn’t subtle: Could this team channel its forebears and bring an NBA title back to the Big Apple?
The answer, of course, was no. With their second-round elimination at the hands of the Miami Heat, the Knicks’ championship drought has reached a half-century — the fifth longest in the NBA.
Like many long-suffering Knicks fans, I’m too young to remember the last title, which New York won in 1973 under Hall of Fame coach Red Holzman, once described as the “maestro” of New York teams famous for their selfless style of play and fluid ball movement. But I did get to experience it vicariously when my late father, Harvey, collaborated with Holzman on his 1987 autobiography, “Red on Red,” which the coach autographed to me, “Best wishes to Freddy, a loyal Knicks fan.”
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Holzman, who was also general manager for much of that era, led the Knicks to three NBA Finals appearances and two titles in four years, starting with the 1969-70 championship. They remain the Knicks’ only titles, and that 1972-73 team marked the end of the high point of professional basketball at Madison Square Garden.
“Holzman was the molder, conductor and architect of one of the most unusual, most thrilling and, for the involved basketball fan, most gratifying teams ever assembled,” the New York Times wrote.
Holzman lived a couple of towns away from our family when I was a kid growing up on Long Island. I remember seeing him at the beach club after his coaching days, but no one made a big deal of it. As he would say: “I’m just an ordinary man. Nobody knows me.”
That even happened when he was coaching. Holzman recalled how a burly usher at the Garden didn’t recognize him and refused to let him on the court. Holzman wrote that the usher told him that “a little squirt like you could never be the coach of the New York Knickerbockers!” (Holzman’s playing height was listed at 5-foot-10.)
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Once, a kid gave him a piece of paper for an autograph, but when someone yelled, “Hey, there’s Walt Frazier!” the kid yanked the paper out of his hand and ran after the star point guard with the other kids. Holzman’s ego was bruised for a bit, but then he realized a good escape plan when he was in a hurry: “I’d yell, ‘Hey, there’s Walt Frazier!’ ”
His coaching tactics reflected that same unassuming approach. He explained why he refused to let mics or cameras into timeout huddles: He had been burned while coaching the St. Louis Hawks in the 1950s, when their presence in the locker room kept him from speaking freely to the team at halftime.
“How could I get mad at any of my players in that situation?” Holzman wrote. “How could I jump on them or use any profanity? All I could do was fume — quietly and politely. That experience taught me to ban electronic media from huddles.”
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When the team was on the road, he would make a point of visiting the local racetrack, which he called “a great form of relaxation.” (This was in the days before iPhone meditation apps — or betting apps.)
He didn’t have a curfew for the players, choosing to treat them as adults. But he did tell them: “Stay out of the hotel bar on the road. That’s where I go, and that belongs to me.”
“That was not a joke,” noted Bill Bradley, a star of those Knicks teams, in a recent telephone interview.
Two titles in four years
New York’s titles helped build the lore of a still-young league. In the 1970 Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers, center Willis Reed, the team captain who had missed Game 6 because of an injury, famously limped onto the court during Game 7 warmups at Madison Square Garden to a raucous reception.
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“Players on both teams just stopped what they were doing and stared,” Holzman recalled. “Our guys got all pumped up by the sight of him out there, and the L.A. guys were given a jolt. They never expected to see Willis out there.” He said the “roof in the Garden trembled” when Reed’s name was announced as the starting center. Reed made a couple of early baskets, providing some instant momentum. New York went on to a 14-point victory, led by Frazier’s 36 points and 19 assists.
The Knicks were champions again in 1972-73 with a starting lineup of five future Hall of Famers: Reed, Frazier, shooting guard Earl Monroe, small forward Bradley and power forward Dave DeBusschere. All five averaged double figures in scoring, with Frazier leading the way at 21.1 points.
Bradley said last month that the balanced scoring was a reflection of the team’s philosophy.
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“We knew that no one of us was as good as all five of us could be together,” said Bradley, who averaged 16.1 points that season.
Bradley, who went on to become a U.S. senator and wrote the introduction to “Red on Red,” said the team embodied the values that people admire in basketball: selflessness, discipline, players helping each other out.
“Red’s one absolute was defense, and out of the defense would come offense,” he said.
That season, New York went 57-25 (a .695 winning percentage) but still finished 11 games behind Boston in the Atlantic Division. The Celtics had dominated the NBA with a league-best 68-14 record.
When the old rivals met in the 1973 Eastern Conference finals, the Celtics relegated the Knicks to an old, beat-up, hot locker room at Boston Garden — “psychological warfare, the Celtic fun-and-game version,” as Holzman wrote. He recalled Frazier griping, “This dressing room is for jockeys, not basketball players.”
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In a bizarre bit of scheduling, the teams alternated between Boston and New York every game, and the series wrapped up in Boston for Game 7. The Celtics, who had scored 134 points in a Game 1 home blowout, dropped off by a whopping 56 points in the finale, which the Knicks won, 94-78.
That set up a rematch with the Lakers and their dominant center, Wilt Chamberlain, who had defeated the Knicks in the previous year’s Finals. New York lost the first game, 115-112, in Los Angeles, then Holzman made some defensive changes that paid dividends. The Knicks swept the next four games to claim the title, holding the Lakers under 100 points each time. Reed, who averaged 16.4 points and 9.2 rebounds, was named Finals MVP for the second time in four years.
Holzman wrote that after their second title of the young decade, there was talk of a Knicks dynasty. “Unfortunately, however, our team was moving into the autumn of its life,” he wrote, noting that the several key players were in their 30s by the next season, when the Knicks’ win total fell by eight games and they lost to the Celtics in the conference finals.
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Holzman argued in his book that even though the Lakers and Celtics have won many more championships than the Knicks, “the two titles that we won really started something in the NBA. We played almost perfect basketball, unselfish basketball. It did a lot for the league at a time when the NBA needed something like that — a great team in New York City.”
Echoes of 1973?
By the time I became a fan, in 1977, Reed had replaced Holzman as coach. The 1977-78 Knicks’ postseason mirrored this year’s — both teams stole home-court advantage with a road win in the series opener against the Cleveland Cavaliers on their way to first-round victories.
But as any New York fan in the past 50 years will tell you, a Knicks postseason — when they make it — always ends with a loss. That year, the Philadelphia 76ers and Julius Erving swept the Knicks in four straight. The next season, the Knicks fired Reed after just 14 games (a 6-8 start) and brought back Holzman, who wasn’t able to duplicate the magic of the early part of the decade, mustering just one winning record in four seasons.
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The Knicks had some excellent teams in the 1990s under Pat Riley and then Jeff Van Gundy but could never close the deal. The 1994 NBA Finals were particularly excruciating: The Knicks fumbled a 3-2 series lead against the Houston Rockets.
But the fans of those 1970s Knicks championship teams — including a kid in Connecticut named Tom Thibodeau, now the Knicks’ coach — still treasured their memories. “In the ’70s, I grew up watching Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Dave DeBusschere, Red Holzman. Those were my heroes,” Thibodeau said in 2021 after winning NBA coach of the year honors. Frazier, a longtime Knicks TV color commentator, in turn observed that Thibodeau shared a lot of coaching qualities with Holzman: “Well-prepared, holds you accountable, defense is the catalyst, teamwork.”
Given the high-water mark of Holzman’s early ’70s teams, it’s not surprising that some players and broadcasters have talked up similarities to today’s Knicks. At a February ceremony to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the most recent championship team, point guard Jalen Brunson said he and his teammates “try to embody their characteristics such as hard work, selflessness and sacrifice. So for us, we try to continue to celebrate these legends and honor them and make them proud.”
“It’s funny: Guys come back, and that’s the beauty of the championship team,” Thibodeau added. “You’re tied together forever.”
Several standouts from that team appeared at the Madison Square Garden event, including Frazier, Bradley, Monroe, Jerry Lucas and Dick Barnett. Reed addressed the crowd in a prerecorded video. He died less than a month later at 80, and the Knicks wore ribbons on their jerseys in his memory.
As the Knicks cruised to their series-clinching victory over the Cavaliers in the first round of this season’s playoffs, play-by-play announcer Gus Johnson marveled at a transition bucket from Josh Hart to Brunson to Obi Toppin that gave the Knicks a 16-point lead, exclaiming: “What a fast break! DeBusschere, Bradley, Clyde, Willis.”
When the Knicks staved off elimination against the Heat with a Game 5 victory May 10, Brunson played all 48 minutes — 50 years to the day after Frazier did the same in New York’s Game 5 victory over the Lakers that brought the most recent NBA title to New York.
The Knicks signed Brunson as a free agent before the season, a move that former longtime Knicks broadcaster Marv Albert called “the best deal in the history of the Knicks, the most significant move since acquiring Dave DeBusschere, and then later on, Earl Monroe.”
Does Bradley see similarities between the teams?
“Other than eliciting hope among the fans? No,” he said. “I mean, it’s a different game. You didn’t have a three-point rule then, and we moved without the ball and we had a lot of different passes, and the goal was to get the easiest shot closest to the basket. Now you run a pick and roll or try to drive to the basket and then you throw it out to 30 feet.”
But Bradley, who was at the Garden for some of New York’s playoff run, was still enamored with the current Knicks.
“I actually was a fan of this team this year — for the first time in a good while,” he said.
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