There is no better and bitter way to tip-off a home season.
The Knicks and the Heat get to duke it out at the Garden today, following last spring’s angry encounter where Larry Johnson and Alonzo Mourning went at each other’s throats and Jeff Van Gundy showed he wasn’t afraid to step out of Pat Riley’s shadow and get stepped on in the process.
Van Gundy mixed it up with Mourning and wound up being dragged across the Garden floor but the Knicks got the last laugh, beating the Heat in five games on their own floor.
Add to all this that the Knicks and Heat each came up losers on opening night and you should have two nasty teams ready to turn it on for NBC. The Knicks handed the Magic a 93-85 victory Friday while Miami was drilled at home, 95-81, by the Pistons.
Afterwards, both losing teams who have aspirations of winning the East, admitted they were embarrassed by their long-awaited opening performances.
“It’s embarrassing,” said Knick point guard Charlie Ward, who committed six of the Knicks 17 turnovers. “The one thing I can say is it can only get better after this.”
The Knick point guards were outscored 27-10 by the Magic, including 15 off the bench from little speedster Darrell Armstrong.
Tim Hardaway, Ward’s point-guard counterpoint on the Heat noted, “The fans are used to us playing harder than that. That’s why they were upset. We came in here and laid an egg a big one.”
One team will walk away with a big win today.
As far as Johnson is concerned, though, the rivalry between the teams is much more important than their individual battles. ‘We’ve just got to get a win,” Johnson said. “It’s big [today] because we both lost.”
The Game 4 fight last year is history, Johnson said, because the Knicks took care of business in Game 5 in Miami as Johnson wound up suspended, a replay of the previous season.
“It’s not a big issue,” Johnson said. “We won Game 5. If we had lost, it would be a different story, regardless of whom we’re playing, we just have to play hard.”
Johnson, though, was not happy that he was suspended two games, along with Mourning, but the NBA rescinded Mourning’s second game, which would have been the opener. Johnson had to sit out the first game of the Indiana series and that was a blow from which the Knicks never recovered, losing that game and the series in five games.
The Knicks will try to put a more cohesive offense on the floor today. Friday night in Orlando the ball seemed stuck on the perimeter and Allan Houston had a terrible game, missing 13 of 18 shots as the Knicks trailed by 21 early in the fourth quarter.
It was obvious, too, that Patrick Ewing needs to soak in some WD-40 to get the rust off. “I felt in the flow,” Ewing said, “but it was just a horrible game. We played terrible.”
The one bright spot for the Knicks was the play of Latrell Sprewell, who bagged 24 points, 11 coming in the last 3:43 of the game. In two pre-season games and the opener, Sprewell has started slow and finished strong. “I need to get off to a better start,” he said.
Sloppy play can be expected, especially in a season that was supposed to start 97 days ago. The Knicks, though, appeared to fall into a trance midway through the third quarter.
“I wasn’t as upset with sloppy play in the third as I was with the fact that they were beating us to loose balls,” said Van Gundy. “If you’re not playing well and trying to fight your way out of if, that’s one thing. But at that point, our concentration was lacking.”