CELTICS at KNICKS Tonight – 7:30 MSG TV; ESPN radio (1050 AM)
Stephon Marbury said he won’t confront Wally Szczerbiak tonight before the Knicks host the Celtics, which is a diplomatic show of restraint.
The last time the two tangled, Szczerbiak – then with Minnesota – flattened the Knick point guard with a pick that Marbury deemed “dirty.”
“That’s over with,” Marbury said after practice yesterday.
Marbury missed 11 of the next 16 games with a strained left shoulder – and the Knicks went from bad to awful, losing 14 of those games. A six-game win streak was snapped the game before that Jan. 16 loss, and the season quickly spiraled out of control.
The team lost 16 of 18 games around that time, and there was no escaping that sinkhole.
“It set us way back, and it set him way back,” Knick coach Larry Brown said. “He’s not nearly as aggressive because of his shoulder.”
The Knicks brought a 13-22 record into the Garden on the night Marbury was picked off, and they’ve dropped 22 more games below .500 since. Szczerbiak, who was traded to Boston on Jan. 26, has contended the pick was clean, and that it was the responsibility of Marbury’s teammates to warn him.
Both Brown and Knick teammate Quentin Richardson thought the pick was clean at the time. But reportedly, Marbury told Szczerbiak, “We have a beef,” as he walked off the court that night.
Three years earlier, Marbury elbowed Szczerbiak in the mouth during a game, which led to a root canal.
“It looked like Steph tried to barrel right into him,” Szczerbiak’s father, Walter, said in January. “Wally’s never been known as a dirty player.”
Marbury, whose streak of 280 straight games was snapped by the injury, was asked how the season would’ve turned out if he had stayed healthy.
“I don’t know,” he said “I wish I had a crystal ball.”
Although Brown and Marbury have famously clashed in the second half of the season, the coach heaped praise on his point guard, saying Marbury was playing at “such a high level” before the injury.
“I’ve said it a number of times – the first 30 or 40 games, I thought he got better every game,” Brown said. “His stats might not reflect that, but that’s what we were asking him to do.”
Similarly, Marbury’s teammates look back on the injury as a turning point in the season.
“It affected us a lot,” Eddy Curry said.
Taking a positive view, Malik Rose thought Marbury’s absence allowed Jamal Crawford and Nate Robinson to improve their point-guard skills. And yet, he conceded, that it couldn’t mask Marbury’s absence.
“They’re very, very talented in their own right, but they’re not as adept at getting other people the ball as Steph is and handling the point on a 48-minute basis,” Rose said.
Rose believes there was more than one critical moment in this lost season, but there was no mistaking the impact of Marbury’s loss.
“He’s our best player, and when he went down, it made things a lot tougher for us,” Rose said.