The nineties were a decade of tough basketball. The one that followed the Bad Boys Detroit Pistons, the one that elevated Michael Jordan between low-scoring games, lots of punches and free throws, defenses that seemed linebackers of the NFL and talent squeezed into star clarifications who sought points in one-on-one plays that required courage to get into areas that were Comanche territory. One of the teams that best represented that spirit was the warlike version of the Knicks that Pat Riley trained, which left the Showtime of the Lakers and sunny California in 1990 and a year later he took over the team of the Big Apple, who had not returned to a conference final in nearly two decades, since the glorious stage of the three Finals (between 1970 and 1973) that resulted in the only two titles in the franchise.
Afterward, Riley went to the Heat, where he remains The Godfather, the alpha and omega of the franchise who paid for him a first round of draft and a million dollars. Because of him … or rather to avoid an investigation that would discover his illegal contacts with the coach who would later be a bitter rival in a very racy series between Knicks and Heat, two reversals of the same coin. In The Riley stage (1991-95), the Knicks met Michael Jordan’s Bulls three times in a row and his first threepeat (1991-93), led them to seven games in the 1992 East semi-final and two years later, in 1994, they took advantage of the first withdrawal of the 23 to sneak into the NBA Finals. The closest they have come to winning a title in almost 40 years. In 1999 they returned to the Final but lost it in five games against the Spurs. In 1994, however, they were on the verge of being champions: they lost in the seventh game (the third in a row they played in those playoffs) in Houston, against the Rockets of Hakeem Olajuwon against those who had been in favor 2-3 before traveling to Texas. Two options to be champions went to limbo.
Hakeem Olajuwon’s final … and OJ Simpson
The 1994 NBA Final was ugly. It was arid, unbreathable, damn tough. Seven barbed-wire and trench battles that finally made the Houston Rockets champion. In full series, Madison Square Garden was the epicenter of a city that did not even fall asleep and that barely learned that, on June 12, the ex-wife of OJ Simpson was found dead with her friend Ronald Goldman. Days later, Knicks and Rockets played in Manhattan the fifth game of a series that marched 2-2, already in a climate of arms tension. In the middle of the third quarter, and with 59-53 for the Knicks, the NBC cut the broadcast to show OJ Simpson driving down Interstate 405 in a white Ford Bronco with all the LAPD behind. He hardly reconnected with the party in what the journalists involved later defined as the prehistory of reality TV.
After that fifth game that the Knicks won, Rockets forward Mario Elie wandered around the hotel, unable to sleep an eye after seeing how his team had turned 2-1 into a 2-3, on his way back to Texas. Until he crossed the corridors with the gigantic figure of a Hakeem Olajuwon who smiled and said: “Easy Mario, we go home”. At that moment he knew they would be champions, a perception that guard Kenny Smith had maintained since Olajuwon received the MVP of the Regular Season and refused to lift the trophy if he was not accompanied by all his teammates. From there arose the spirit that brought down some Knicks for whom each training session at that time was “like a rugby match”, the team that had one of the frontcourts hardest (to the full extent of the term) in history: Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, Charles Smith, Anthony Mason …
The Rockets flipped the final on their track to a 4-3 tremendous in a final tremendous in which there was not a single broken game before the last minutes and in which the average difference was just over 7 points. And the oldest, 9. The Knicks actually averaged 86.9 points to the champion’s 86.1, some Rockets who were saved in the sixth game thanks to a play that is playoff legend: Hakeem Olajuwon reached the line of three to punctuate John Starks’ final shot and leave the score at 86-84 final. Starks had brought the Knicks closer to the title with 16 of their 27 points in a sublime last quarter that only missed that winning shot that went to limbo and that the electric point guard’s spirits crunched to lead him to a nightmare seventh game: 2/18 in shots, 0/11 in triples.
Starks was marked by that triple that he did not complete in the sixth game and that would have been worth a ring. And, of course, for his disastrous, historically bad night in the seventh. Something that Pat Riley has always been carried away with: “Without him there would not even have been a seventh game. He had the balls and the heart to gamble on those shots, in a game in which everyone was giving up their lives in defense and no one was scoring clearly”. Riley used to remember, to finish off his argument, that there was a lot of talk about that 0/11 in triples but little about it Starks had scored in double digits in the final quarters of games fourth, fifth and sixth. He had made several tremendous shots in momentous moments in the Final, in which he averaged 17.7 points and 5.9 assists. He was coming from a 19 and 5.9 season in which he had been all star. A year earlier he had entered the Second Defensive Quintet, and in 1997 he was Best Sixth Man of the year. The departure of Riley and the arrival of Don Nelson, with whom he had collided with the Warriors, sent him to the bench, from where he later knew how to shine with Jeff Van Gundy as coach.
Despite his 1.91, Starks was a front-row member of that iron defense (the best in the NBA heading to those 1994 Finals) that Pat Riley built with Patrick Ewing as an anchor and the philosophy of no layup: not even a tray could be granted. His fights with Reggie Miller in the seething Knicks-Pacers and his grit against the Bulls made him a Garden favorite.. In the 1993 playoffs, in the second game of the East final, he left a dunk legendaryThe Dunk) before Horace Grant and the gaze of Michael Jordan. Pure heart, Starks broke (1994-95) the record for triples in a season: 217, a figure now absolutely obsolete. In fact, he is still (982) the leader in triples scored with the Knicks jersey. And the most incredible, truly amazing of its history, is that it shouldn’t even have been there.
Because Starks wasn’t a high school sensation or a movie star. College highly anticipated in the draft. Born in Tulsa (Oklahoma) 55 years ago, He didn’t play basketball until his senior year of high school and went through four colleges afterward. At Rogers State he was part of a reserve team and was only used if there were injured or penalized players. He did not even wear his tracksuit in most matches and, to top it all, he was expelled for stealing a sound system from a colleague who he accused of having destroyed his room. The revenge it cost him the change of university and, later, a sentence of five days in jail.
En Northern Oklahoma he had his first moments of success as a player but left after being caught smoking marijuana. In the third, Tulsa Junior, he proposed to get a business degree but finally received a scholarship to play at Oklahoma State, from where he jumped into the 1988 draft without being selected by any franchise. He signed as a free agent with the Warriors, who did not give him minutes because they had the Rookie of the Year that season, the tremendous Mitch Richmond who had been selected with the number 5 and who, like Starks, was a guard.
Between the CBA (Cedar Rapids Silver Bullets) and the World Basketball League (Memphis Rockers) he rushed a stretch of basketball (1989-1990) that seemed to permanently distance him from the NBA until his luck changed, ironically, thanks to a run-in with Pat Ewing. In a test with the Knicks, he tried to crush over the center, which took the idea from his head with an ugly action that injured him. The Knicks couldn’t cut him off while he was out, so this way he gained enough time to carve out a niche for himself. “Pat Ewing was my savior”, He used to say wryly this guard that is part of our memory of that brutal basketball of the nineties, which went further than the same logic said and which, of course, was much more than that 0/11 in triples in the last great assault of the Knicks to the ring.
