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

PROLOGUE

There was a time, back in the spring of 1994, when bellies were perpetually full at Two Penn Plaza.

Back then, Knicks employees who worked in the Madison Square Garden corporate offices were treated to extravagant buffet lunches in the fourteenth-floor hallway—complete with lo mein, gourmet sandwiches, jalapeño cheese poppers, egg rolls, and desserts—whenever the club tallied a three-game winning streak.

The Knicks were transforming into an NBA fat cat, and one of the most feared teams in basketball. After a disappointing 39-win season in 1991, a personnel overhaul helped lift New York to 51 regular-season victories in 1992 and an Eastern Conference–best 60 triumphs in 1993. By then, the free lunches were no longer a rarity. They’d become an expectation.

Then came the mother of all buffets. In March 1994, with coach Pat Riley and the Knicks preying on one foe after another, they strung together 15 straight wins, and those celebratory lunches were held every week for five weeks in a row. It was during one of those jubilant meals that Frank Murphy, the team’s business manager, decided to rain on the lunch parade.

Just make sure to enjoy this, the executive said, because it’ll never be like this again. This is special.

To some in the room, the 54-year-old’s what-goes-up-must-come-down message felt unwarranted. Murphy had said things like this before, sure. But this run—15 consecutive wins—felt different. There was a certain electricity everyone wanted to hold on to this time. "I was in my thirties, with all this optimism. And I remember telling him, ‘Don’t say that. It’ll always be like this,’ says Pam Harris, then the team’s marketing director. But now, looking back, I can better appreciate what Frank was saying."

No one—not even Murphy—could have known just how steep the organization’s fall would be.

The New York Knicks were among the defining teams throughout one of the NBA’s golden eras. They made the playoffs in all ten years of the decade, with three conference finals showings and two trips to the NBA Finals. So the utter ruin into which New York would fall in the following two decades was inconceivable.

Coach Jeff Van Gundy abruptly resigned from the club on the morning of December 8, 2001, quietly taking with him some of the last remnants of the team’s 1990s DNA. By and large, from that day he stepped down to now, the once-proud organization has been nothing short of disastrous. Despite playing in the nation’s largest market and pouring more money into its rosters than any other club, no franchise has burned through more coaches, lost more games, or tallied fewer playoff series wins in that span than the Knicks.

As we approach the twenty-five-year mark since the last time the Knickerbockers reached the Finals—and come up on the fifty-year anniversary of the club’s last NBA title—things have deteriorated to where fans are thrilled by the mere prospect of a functional team. Hell, most fans would settle for the free buffet lunch.

Yet in having to endure such lean years, fans have only become more nostalgic for those nineties-era Knicks. No, those teams never tasted immortality. They were never the league’s most skilled collection of players. But for what the Knicks lacked in finesse, they made up for with fight (often literally) and floor burns; grit that endeared them to countless New Yorkers. When fans looked at John Starks—who became an All-Star despite going undrafted after playing at four different colleges and leaving school at one point to work a $3.35-an-hour job bagging groceries at Safeway—they saw someone who overcame incredible odds by working tirelessly. In the blue-collar underdog Starks, countless fans saw themselves.

Those Knicks made you feel something. The team’s fans felt pride in their hardworking players. League office executives felt the pulsating headaches that came while issuing punishments for the Knicks, whose brass-knuckles physicality was so extreme it led the NBA to alter its rulebook. New York’s opponents felt the bone-rattling pain they had to endure during twelve-round bouts that doubled as basketball games.

When I used to walk into the Garden to play the Knicks, I didn’t always know if we were gonna win, former Bulls forward Horace Grant would say years later. But I always knew we were going to bleed.

The 1990s Knicks were wildly colorful—at times, as flagrant and out of bounds off the court as they were on it. They were a brute-force version of Forrest Gump, repeatedly intertwined with historic moments, from the rise of Michael Jordan’s Bulls dynasty; to the O. J. Simpson chase during the Finals in 1994; to Reggie Miller’s eight-point outburst in nine seconds in 1995; to their blood feud with Riley’s Miami Heat clubs. You can’t tell the story of the league’s most fascinating decade without the New York Knicks.

Despite that, it’s a story that has never fully been told. But now—through hundreds of interviews with players, coaches, trainers, opponents, friends, family members, and executives in and around the team—it can be. The rivalries and rumors. The feuds and fights. The secret histories and stunning revelations.

And rest assured: no punches will be pulled. Which is just how those Knicks would like it.

1

SPEAKING A NEW LANGUAGE

Twenty minutes into his first practice as Knicks coach, Pat Riley looked a bit ruffled.

It was unusually muggy on the morning of October 4, 1991, in Charleston, South Carolina. Inside the team’s practice gym—which lacked air-conditioning and was a sauna in the best of times—the air was stifling. Yet those pressure-cooker conditions were but a small reason why the coach appeared uncharacteristically off-center. Riley, featured on the cover of GQ two years earlier, had long been known for his pristine, slicked-back hair and stylish Armani threads. But now a number of the pomaded strands atop his head had popped out of place. Beads of sweat were showing through his team-issued polo. Momentarily doubled over and breathless, the 6-foot-4 Riley had his hands on his kneecaps.

At 46, he was the most accomplished coach in modern NBA history, having won four rings while leading the Showtime Lakers, a job that had allowed him to stand still on the sideline, relatively relaxed, while his clubs sped up and down the court. Which is why, on that October morning, it was such a change of pace for Riley to desperately sprint across the court to stop two Knick players from killing each other in the first basketball drill of the coach’s tenure.

It had all begun with Riley splitting his team up to conduct three-on-three box-out drills. The smaller wing players headed down to the far end to work with assistants Jeff Van Gundy and Dick Harter, while the post players stayed with Riley and assistant Paul Silas. The concept was simple: coaches would launch fifteen-foot jumpers, and the six players would battle for positioning inside the paint to secure the misses.

In the group of post players, sharp-elbowed forward Xavier McDaniel was dominating the exercise, albeit in a slightly underhanded fashion. As Riley’s and Silas’s shots ricocheted off the rim, and the muscle-bound teammates barreled into one another, McDaniel, a Knicks newcomer and a former All-Star, was quietly hooking opposing players’ legs—a wily, veteran trick that often caused them to trip just before they could leap for rebounds. Doing this, McDaniel twice managed to beat camp invitee Anthony Mason to the ball. Mason wrote off McDaniel’s first hook as an honest mistake. The second time, he grew agitated.

You do that shit again, I’m gonna fuck you up! Mason snarled, pointing in McDaniel’s direction.

McDaniel, apparently undeterred by Mason’s threat, then hooked the leg of rookie big man Patrick Eddie one play later, causing Eddie to tumble as McDaniel skyed for yet another board. By then, the 6-foot-7, 250-pound Mason had seen enough. No more warnings. It was time to follow through on his promise.

The bowling-ball-shouldered southpaw shuffled toward McDaniel and delivered an abrasive left fist to his jaw; a punch that reverberated so loudly players on the other end of the gym heard it. For a split second after Mason’s blow, there was nothing but silence. Stunned, McDaniel briefly grabbed the side of his face, perhaps to make sure it was still intact. Then he set his sights on Mason and charged at the 24-year-old like a bull chasing a matador.

As Mason sought to backpedal toward the sideline, McDaniel rammed into him, landing a right haymaker before pulling his teammate in closer. Finally, after a few more pummeling blasts from each man, Riley and nearly a half-dozen others sprinted in to break up the altercation.

His ass is gonna have to come back this way at some point! McDaniel yelled while being pulled away.

It was the first time the team found Anthony Mason in the middle of things. But it wouldn’t be the last.

Although Mason’s cartoonishly chiseled physique stood out to everyone in the gym that day, he was a relative unknown from a basketball standpoint.

Having endured a nomadic career in which he bounced from one league to another—one part of the world to another—Mason was hell-bent on showing he belonged. He had spent time overseas with pro teams in Turkey and Venezuela, where bus rides to road games were so long his ass would go numb, and the planes they flew on were so small that the seats required passengers to sit sideways. He dealt with two years of language barriers, social isolation, and unfamiliar food for a mere shot at making an NBA team. Not only was this camp a chance to accomplish that goal, it was an opportunity to do it while playing in New York, where he’d grown up and played on countless outdoor courts.

So Mason, who lacked a guaranteed contract and was far from a lock to make the roster, wasn’t about to be punked by McDaniel. Not with the stakes this high. He had come too close to merely become an obligatory world traveler all over again.

Mase treated the box-out drill like it was Game Seven of the Finals, says center Tim McCormick, who helped break up the brawl.

In some ways, McDaniel was Mason’s opposite. Where Mason had to wander the globe before getting his audition in Charleston, McDaniel was a South Carolina native who’d traveled all of ninety minutes for the first practice. Months earlier, the scoring-challenged Knicks traded with the Phoenix Suns for the former No. 4 overall pick, who was coming off a season in which he’d averaged 17 points and seven rebounds. The Knicks planned to make him their starting small forward. Unlike Mason, McDaniel’s place with the club that year was as secure as superstar Patrick Ewing’s. He had nothing to prove that day in camp.

Yet McDaniel was no more willing to back down than Mason. McDaniel prioritized manhood. Specifically, his own manhood. 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. Also, he fought people—and he fought them constantly.

"X wanted to fight everybody, says Frank Brickowski, a Sonics teammate during McDaniel’s rookie season. There were certain guys in the league you didn’t fuck with, and X made it known very quickly that he was one of those guys." Brickowski learned the lesson quicker than anyone. In the 1985 preseason, in McDaniel’s very first practice as a professional, he abruptly dropped Brickowski with a blow to the face. A few days later, as if to prove it was nothing personal, McDaniel also drilled fellow teammate Reggie King in the face with a three-punch combination.

Then, once there were actual games, McDaniel got to fight players who weren’t on his team. By the end of his 1985–86 rookie campaign alone, he’d been in a total of nine separate scuffles. His most enduring image came one season later, in 1987, when McDaniel, in the words of Sports Illustrated writer Bruce Newman, attempted to do the neck version of the Heimlich maneuver on Wes Matthews, choking him out to the point that Matthews’s eyes began rolling into the back of his head.

I never wanted to back down and be branded a wimp, McDaniel says years later of his scroll-length NBA fight card. And in order to get respect, sometimes that was how we had to settle things.

Fortunately for Mason and McDaniel, that way of thinking wasn’t a problem for their coach, who learned the importance of toughness at the age of nine. In grade school, Riley routinely received after-school beatings from older, bigger kids at a park in Schenectady, New York. One day, a boy wielding a butcher knife chased Riley home, leaving Riley so fearful that he hid in his garage for hours after being pursued. When Pat never came to the dinner table that night, his dad fished him out from the garage and told him enough was enough. Riley’s father instructed his older sons to take Pat to the park the next day.

When the older boys asked why, Riley’s father said the first step in developing Pat’s toughness was to face his fears head-on.

I want you to teach him not to be afraid, he told them.

From then on, Riley not only lost his fear of fights; on some level, he grew to crave them. In 1968, on his first date with girlfriend Chris Rodstrom, Riley took her to a San Diego boxing club to watch a bout. Rodstrom wore a white dress, which turned out to be an unfortunate choice. The couple was sitting ringside, and one of the very first punches of the fight sprayed blood all over Rodstrom’s outfit. When Rodstrom didn’t seem too bothered by it all, the scrappy Riley told himself, This is my kind of girl.

Two years later, they were married.

If there was value for Riley in finding a wife who could tolerate seeing a little violence, the trait would also prove valuable for Knicks fans during the Riley era. Mason and McDaniel’s run-in was far from the only one to take place during the team’s training camp at the College of Charleston.

Even when there weren’t skirmishes, physicality defined the practices. John Starks, who was entering his second year with the Knicks that fall, recalls hearing an array of Batman-like sound effects—POW! THWACK! BONK! ZWAP!—as bodies collided during that initial box-out drill.

Within minutes of that practice beginning, the usually fearless guard decided he had no interest in penetrating toward the hoop once scrimmages began. Man, I’m not going to the basket today—I’m not going in there, he told himself. Another preseason invitee, Dan O’Sullivan, described layups in that training camp as miracles due to the sheer assault someone would have to endure in order to get one. You were honestly a lot better off taking a twenty-footer, O’Sullivan recalls. At least you’d live.

It was on that first day of camp the Knicks learned that this was Riley. This—not Showtime—was the culture Riley wanted to establish. One that would epitomize toughness by making teams pay for having the audacity to wander into the paint. One that would put a premium on conditioning so the club would have the stamina to finish close games. One that would treat Knick players like royalty, while normalizing the notion of a nasty streak by issuing fines to players who were kind enough to help up fallen opponents.

The coach’s blueprint, which he loosely explained to his players inside the practice gym’s locker room that morning, would dictate how the Knicks played basketball for the better part of the next decade.

Given the team’s makeup—led by Ewing, and far more established in the frontcourt than in the backcourt—there was no point in Riley trying to craft an uptempo attack like he’d employed in Los Angeles. Instead, the Knicks were uniquely positioned to exploit their advantages on the defensive end.

By the fall of 1991, the smashmouth Bad Boys Detroit Pistons had been dethroned after back-to-back title runs. They were aging and running out of steam. But to Riley, their ideology remained sound. And with the Knicks being younger than the Pistons, the coach figured New York could maximize its chances of beating Michael Jordan and the defending-champion Chicago Bulls by tapping into the same bloody-knuckle, back-alley defensive tactics Detroit once thrived with.

Adopting that strategy might inch up to and occasionally step over the boundaries of what the NBA allowed. But for a team that desperately needed to close the talent gap—Jordan and the Bulls had swept the Knicks the postseason before—it might help. Riley even hired Harter, an ex-Pistons assistant credited with designing tenets of Detroit’s brutal attack, to implement those same defensive principles in New York.

If the club was going to wear out opponents by bludgeoning them, and wear down referees by hacking so much that they’d simply stop calling fouls, the Knicks themselves would need to be in elite shape.

The first fifteen minutes of that camp-opening practice were devoted to an easy run, Riley’s ironically named exercise that sapped players of oxygen by requiring them to dart up and down the court with their arms raised to make their breathing more shallow. Later on, each Knick would take part in 17s, which meant seventeen sideline-to-sideline runs in under a minute’s time, briefly resting, then repeating the process over and over until the coach saw fit. A few players grew light-headed from the exertion and sweltering conditions in the gym, which left the floor so wet that the team was forced to move to another court during practice.

We weighed in to start the workout, and weighed out at the end. I was nine pounds lighter after, says forward Brian Quinnett, adding that players were handed bottles of Ensure after the session to rehydrate.

Quinnett was far from the only one who’d pay a physical price during practices that year. McCormick, the backup center, was tasked with serving as a practice partner to the mean, manhandling Charles Oakley.

That tackle-dummy role would have been highly unenviable for any player, let alone an aging vet going into his eighth year, with retirement on the horizon. Like most people, McCormick valued his limbs, and wanted to keep them—something that was never a given when sparring with the likes of Oakley. Each day, the men battled on the glass and in the low post. And most days, things played out the way you’d think.

He was just so much stronger than me, and was beating me up in drills every day, McCormick says.

The beatings weren’t exactly softened by an underlying friendship, either. In fact, for months, the two men never spoke. About their families. About opponents. About anything. McCormick simply showed up, day after day, and silently got the hell beaten out of him by Oakley.

Then, one day, when he’d finally had enough of Oakley’s elbows in a drill, McCormick thrust his arm back wildly with the power forward standing behind him, catching Oakley in the mouth and causing him to bleed. As Oakley walked away to find a trainer, he shot McCormick an unmistakable death stare.

I was convinced he was gonna kill me that next day, McCormick says. "But instead, he walks up, slaps me on the back, and asks how I’m doing. I was so confused, because it was the first time he had said anything to me. Then, as I thought about it, I realized: Charles never really respected me until I hit him."

That bizarre blossoming of a friendship between Oakley and McCormick was emblematic of those 1990s Knicks. They often didn’t need words to get their message across. Instead, they spoke volumes and fundamentally altered the makeup of the sport through their primal physicality alone.

2

THANK GOD THEY DIDN’T HAVE HAND GRENADES

The Knicks were mercifully approaching the end of yet another brutal campaign when, on March 17, 1987, it looked like they might catch a break.

Temperatures outside were wintry, between 35 and 40 degrees. Still, more than one million New Yorkers—many drunk off green beer and dressed like leprechauns—had packed the city sidewalks to take in the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

There had also been a fair amount of anticipation heading into that Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden. Not because of anything fans expected from their lackluster team, which carried a 20-44 mark and was in the midst of a three-game skid. More so because of New York’s opponent: the lowly Denver Nuggets, who were on a seven-game losing streak of their own. Maybe, just maybe, victory-starved fans would have a shot of leaving the Garden with smiles for a change.

As ticket holders entered the arena from the cold, they were handed rolled-up, life-size posters of Patrick Ewing—it was St. Patrick’s Day, after all—complete with tick marks for each inch of his 7-foot frame.

But it wasn’t long after fans took their seats that things turned as sour as a day-old Guinness. In what should have been a fair fight between NBA welterweights, the Knicks punched like armless mannequins. New York’s offense handled the basketball with the care of an infant; on the defensive end, the Knicks hacked Denver even more than they turned the ball over. The second-year Ewing, the franchise savior, was struggling badly. Everyone in a Knicks jersey was. Midway through the third period, the Nuggets, who’d lost 13 of their last 17, were up by 27 points.

New Yorkers had never been known for their patience, and tonight would prove no exception. A chorus of boos rained down from the crowd. And then, with New York down three touchdowns and two field goals, a fan launched his Ewing poster onto the court. Which prompted another to do the same. Then another. One particularly fed-up fan, sitting courtside, ripped his poster to shreds like a rabid animal.

This one guy took his poster, unrolled it, and stuck his head through the middle of it, recalls Knicks assistant Brendan Malone, describing an image that brings to mind Jack Nicholson in The Shining. I just felt bad for Patrick, because it got really ugly that night, and [the fans] seemed to take it all out on him.

Soon, the arena’s ball boys began sprinting around the hallowed hardwood, furiously picking up dozens of the posters. John Condon, the team’s longtime public address announcer, all but begged the fans to stop airmailing them from the stands. We have ten excellent athletes on the floor, he pleaded, sounding like a helpless middle-school principal trying to break up a food fight.

Eventually, the game ended with the Knicks losing by 22. After the dust settled, general manager Scotty Stirling fielded a question from a reporter about the poster-throwing episode and what it said about the team’s fans. After pausing for a moment, he responded.

Thank God, Stirling said, they didn’t have hand grenades.

The New York Knickerbockers of the early 1970s were the hoop aficionado’s team of choice. The kind of team that, years later, people would brag, "Back in my day…" about. The kind of team that won a certain way.

They won with their brains. Aside from having a couple of players who’d become NBA head coaches—including Phil Jackson, an eventual Hall of Famer—New York’s roster possessed a future PhD; a Rhodes scholar who’d become a US senator and presidential candidate; and a man who could memorize vast portions of the New York City phone book in one sitting.

Those clubs possessed skill. They packed the court with players capable of hitting open jump shots. They had an abundance of talent, yet were almost balletic—defined by synchronization, savvy, and on-court selflessness. 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.

To many, this share-the-wealth mentality represented basketball in its purest form—a tribute to how the sport was meant to be played. And with it, the Knicks won two world championships, in 1970 and 1973.

Yet by the time the next decade rolled around, it was abundantly clear that those Knicks were not these Knicks. The Garden has become a tomb, Providence Journal reporter Bill Reynolds wrote of the arena’s lack of electricity in the 1980s. The banners immortalizing the great Knicks of the past hang from the Garden rafters and stare down accusingly, as if the current Knicks are their wastrel sons.

Since they’d won their last title, the Knicks had devolved into a special kind of awful—the type of ball club that presented endless opportunities for grade-school cut-downs.

The Knicks are so bad, they play like they don’t even bother practicing.

The Knicks are so bad, they play like they’re on drugs.

The Knicks are so bad, they play like they’re shaving points.

And here’s the kicker: at the low point of the decade, all three of those things might have been true.

The first two certainly were.

Consider the 1981–82 season. Those Knicks had plenty of talent, having brought back nearly the exact same roster from a 50-win unit the campaign before. But instead of giving coach Red Holzman a worthy send-off in his final season on the bench, they spiraled into last place, playing uninspired basketball. As the Knicks fell into an ugly midseason tailspin, it would have been fair to expect the team would hold more practice sessions to tighten things up.

Yet after a while, no one even bothered to schedule workouts. Players had simply stopped showing up for them. The drug thing was just killing the NBA, and guys on our team had more than their fair share of that problem, too. It was causing things to fall apart, says Paul Westphal, a Hall of Fame guard who joined the Knicks late that year, near the end of his career. To not have practices because you know guys won’t even bother to come to them? It was certainly a low point in Knicks history—you can say that.

I had a friend in the city who would call me up and say, ‘Hey, man: so-and-so is up here buying drugs,’ says Butch Beard, an assistant coach with the Knicks that year. There were things I didn’t even bother telling [Holzman], because he wasn’t ready to hear that. He was used to the Clyde Fraziers and Willis Reeds, who were true pros. But those early-eighties teams were wild as hell, and the city gobbled them up.

Drug use may have had a role in the alleged point-shaving, too. 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. A source observed heavy betting toward the latter part of the season… on the Knicks to lose certain games. In each case, the Knicks did lose, or failed to cover the spread, reads the bureau’s file. (The probe, which redacted the names of the three players in question, closed in 1986 with no arrests due to a lack of confessions and physical evidence in the case.)

There were the feuds, like when guard Darrell Walker engaged in a shouting match with coach Hubie Brown during a practice in January 1986, then staged a sit-in during the team workout in Atlanta… by plopping down in the middle of the lane, forcing his teammates to shoot around him.

There were the distractions, like when a few players learned that one of the coaches on the team’s staff was having an extramarital affair with a woman who lived in guard Trent Tucker’s apartment complex—which irked the players, who’d been criticized all year for not showing professionalism.

There were the never-ending ailments—including major ones to key players like star scorer Bernard King and big man Bill Cartwright—which led to the Knicks shattering NBA records for most team games missed due to injury. (After breaking the league-record mark in 1985, the Knicks then blew past their own record in 1986.) There was even the rock-hard court they ran on at the team’s practice facility at the time—Upsala College in New Jersey—which some felt played a role in the team’s struggles to stay healthy. It was complete shit. That facility was horrible, says Butch Carter, who played in 74 games with New York in 1984 and 1985. I hadn’t played on a floor that bad since seventh or eighth grade.

And then there was simply terrible basketball. During that decade, the Knicks occasionally finished quarters with more turnovers than points. Interim coach Bob Hill once jokingly threatened to fine his players for their horrendous rebounding, and things might have worked out better for everyone if he’d actually followed through. They ranked dead last by a wide margin in defensive rebounding in 1986–87. One columnist noted that the 7-foot-1 Cartwright was somehow grabbing fewer boards per minute than 5-foot-3 Muggsy Bogues, the NBA’s shortest player by three inches, to start the season.

There was Ken Bannister, a seventh-round big man forced into action due to the laundry list of centers who’d been sidelined with injuries. Bannister might have been the worst free-throw shooter to ever don a New York uniform. He once left spectators slack-jawed when he grazed the right lower corner of the backboard on an attempt in one game. And he’d go on to miss ten straight free-throw tries in another contest.

There was Kenny Sky Walker, the University of Kentucky All-American taken with the No. 5 overall pick in the 1986 draft, who despite his pedigree had no idea how to throw a pass without shuffling his pivot foot and committing a traveling violation. When coach Rick Pitino stopped a passing drill during training camp in October 1987 to show Walker what he was doing wrong, Walker continued repeating the mistake. Flabbergasted that a heralded second-year pro couldn’t grasp the concept of a pivot foot, Pitino ended up asking one of his assistants to take Walker to a side court to teach him, literally, how a pivot foot worked.

But perhaps most baffling of all during those 1980s years was the team’s management group.

From 1986 to 1990 alone, the club’s executives burned through five different coaches and three general managers. And for every move that worked out (dealing Cartwright for Charles Oakley, who’d become a foundational piece), there was an equally egregious one (trading away the first-round draft pick that would yield Hall of Famer Scottie Pippen for eighth-year guard and journeyman Gerald Henderson). There were times, in those first three years after I got season tickets, that I was glad the executives running the Knicks weren’t juggling chainsaws instead of running the Knicks. Because that would have been as ugly as some of those teams played, wrote Knicks superfan Spike Lee in his memoir.

Then, for a brief moment, there was hope. In 1987, the Knicks hired the 35-year-old Pitino to be their new coach. He won 38 games his first year, 52 in his second, with the Knicks reaching the playoffs each season. The sustainability of his strategy was up for debate. (Particularly the notion to have the team run a full-court press on defense for long stretches, which can wear down players—especially veterans—over the course of an 82-game season.) But after enduring three straight years with 24 wins or fewer, everyone embraced Pitino’s tenure and the playoff trips that came with it.

Well, just about everyone. Knicks general manager Al Bianchi, who felt his bosses at the Garden had forced him to hire Pitino, had his differences with the coach. Bianchi was traditional; Pitino, with his press defense and ahead-of-its-time, bombs-away offense, was unconventional. And winning wasn’t enough to salvage things. There was a basic mistrust, both ways, from the start, Pitino said back then.

Those issues, and Pitino’s preference for the college game, prompted the coach to ask for, and receive, the okay to negotiate with the University of Kentucky just two seasons into his five-year deal with the Knicks.

When Pitino took the Kentucky job, Bianchi was eager to show he could win without the coach. So he installed one of Pitino’s assistants, Stu Jackson, to take over. It worked for a while, with the Knicks jumping out to an Eastern Conference–best 26-10 mark to begin the 1989–90 campaign. The hot start led Garden higher-ups to reward Bianchi with a multiyear extension offer in the middle of that season.

Curiously, Bianchi opted against signing it. Not because of money, or a disagreement on vision. The real reason? He was in the midst of a divorce. And the situation was messy, so he decided to wait so his wife wouldn’t be entitled to half, says Jehudith Cohen, Bianchi’s executive assistant during those years.

Just one problem: shortly after that offer, the Knicks struggled mightily, losing 20 of their last 30 games before the postseason—a tailspin so severe that the Garden’s bigwigs took Bianchi’s unsigned extension off the table.

Jackson and the team managed to upset the Celtics in the first round, which perhaps saved Bianchi’s job. But only temporarily. He landed a one-year extension that made him little more than a lame duck. That might as well have been my death warrant, Bianchi would say decades later.

The short extension put Bianchi on notice, which then led the general manager to put Jackson on notice. And when New York slumped to begin the 1990–91 season, Bianchi quickly ousted the second-year coach before desperately replacing him midyear with someone from the outside, in John MacLeod. The Knicks snuck into the playoffs as the No. 8 seed, but the organization was a mess. The club would be swept in the first round by Michael Jordan and the Bulls, who’d go on to earn their first NBA title that summer.

Bianchi was terminated. The Garden replaced him with Dave Checketts, a 35-year-old who, seven years earlier, had become the youngest chief executive in league history. The 6-foot-4 man of Mormon faith had spent six years running the Utah Jazz, overseeing the drafts that landed John Stockton and Karl Malone.

Checketts would quickly discover how different New York City was from Salt Lake City.

Well before he became the Knicks president, Checketts knew whom he wanted to coach the team.

Checketts had walked away from Utah in 1989, and now, two years later, was settling into a new job with NBA International, which sought to broaden the sport’s popularity into other countries. Commissioner David Stern had done a lot to land Checketts in the office, signing off on a relocation payment of thousands of dollars to move Checketts and his family of eight to Connecticut. But while Stern was thrilled to have Checketts on board, Checketts himself quickly grew bored with the job.

I missed the competition so much. It becomes a way of life. You get addicted to winning, he says.

Checketts knew he wasn’t alone in having that feeling. Months earlier, Pat Riley, in search of something to do after a nine-season, four-title run with the Lakers, had taken a job as an analyst with NBC Sports.

Checketts had spoken with Riley in passing a few times for different clinics with NBA International. But after a few months, he asked the ex-coach if he’d be up for having lunch in New York City.

When the two men met at the Regency Hotel in the fall of 1990, they reminisced about the fiery seven-game Western Conference semifinal series between the Jazz and Lakers back in 1988.

There has to be some part of you that misses that, right? Checketts asked Riley.

Then he pivoted.

Checketts told Riley he had a good feeling he’d be offered an opportunity to take over the stumbling Knicks sometime in the future. (The Knicks had expressed interest in Checketts before, but at the time, he hadn’t been interested in leaving the ascendant Jazz.) If and when it actually happened, Checketts wanted to know whether Riley would consider coming with him to take the coaching job.

Riley was noncommittal. But after the way things had unraveled with the Lakers, any situation he stepped into would require unity. We all would need to speak with one voice, Riley said.

The use of a hypothetical we left Checketts feeling hopeful.

Six months later, Checketts got the nod to take over the Knicks. He orchestrated a soft landing for coach John MacLeod—as the 1990–91 season ended, he quietly reached out to Notre Dame in hopes of getting MacLeod hired there—then shifted his focus to securing Riley. But he had no idea how challenging the task of hiring him would turn out to be.

By just about any measure, Riley was a fantastic NBA coach. But no one in the history of sports had ever handed someone a longer list of demands than Riley handed Checketts.

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,