The New York Knickerbockers

New York's professional basketball team, known popularly as the Knicks, has been a vital part of the city's sports land scape since 1946. Winners of two NBA titles, the Knicks are one of basketball's best-known and most prestigious franchises.

An original member of the Basketball Association of America—forerunner of the NBA—the club played its first game in Canada against the Toronto Huskies on November 1, 1946. The first home game took place ten days later at Manhattan's Madison Square Garden. In those early years the Knicks fielded a team of mostly white Jewish and Catholic players, drawn from the city's public university system. That began to change in 1950 with the signing of Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, one of the first black players in the NBA. The team enjoyed only mixed success through its first two decades, consistently making the playoffs but failing to capture even one world championship.

Knick fortunes took a turn for the better in 1968, when Red Holzman took over as head coach. The no-nonsense Holzman preached a philosophy of aggressive defense, fluid passing, and team-first self-abnegation. This approach would have produced results even with mediocre players, but Holzman was blessed with some of the great performers of his era. Center Willis Reed, guard Walt "Clyde" Frazier, and forwards Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley were all destined for the Hall of Fame. Together they led the team to a world championship in 1970. The crowning moment came in the seventh game of the finals, when an injured Reed limped onto the court to the delight of the Madison Square Garden faithful.

Few teams have captured the imagination of the city in which they played quite like the Knicks of this period. The cerebral Bradley, a one-time Princeton stand-out who went by the somewhat unbefitting appellation "Dollar Bill," helped bring an intellectual patina to the pro game that appealed to the city's New York Times -reading cognoscenti. He would later cement his reputation as the world's smartest jock by being elected U.S. Senator from the state of New Jersey, where he served for eighteen years. By contrast, the high-living Frazier was the walking apotheosis of the sports star as man-about-town. With his luxurious afro, feathered hat, and long leather coat, "Clyde" was the embodiment of uptown cool. Like Joe Namath before him, he brought a style and sex appeal to his team that attracted the attention of many nonsports fans.

For the next several seasons, the Knicks remained one of the NBA's elite teams. The addition of sharpshooting guard Earl "the Pearl" Monroe in 1971 gave the squad an explosive backcourt complement to Frazier. Finalists in 1972, the New Yorkers won the NBA crown for the second time in 1973. Then the inevitable slide into dormancy began. The popular Frazier was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers in 1977, and the team's other great players retired. Seeing the writing on the wall, Red Holzman himself gave up the coaching reins, signaling the end of an era in New York basketball.

A new era finally dawned in 1985, when now-general manager Dave DeBusschere drafted Patrick Ewing of Georgetown University to be the team's new franchise player. A towering, physically gifted center, Ewing battled injuries in his first few seasons but finally blossomed under head coach Rick Pitino, who stressed an up-tempo, pressing attack. The Knicks regularly made the playoffs, but the championship continued to elude them. When Pitino left to coach the University of Kentucky in 1990, the organization began to drift again. Only the hiring of former Los Angeles Laker coach Pat Riley in 1991 returned the club to marquee status.

The fiery, dictatorial Riley, recognized as much for his impeccably moussed coiffure as his coaching prowess, harnessed the mercurial talents of such temperamental players as Patrick Ewing, Anthony Mason, a former Turkish league cast-off, and John Starks, a supermarket grocery bagger. Playing a suffocating brand of defense, the team made the Eastern Conference finals in 1993, and the NBA Finals the following year. There they fell by turns to the Chicago Bulls and I'm Walkthe Houston Rockets, establishing a precedent for falling short in the big games that was to infuriate the team's fans throughout the decade.

—Robert E. Schnakenberg

Further Reading:

Jackson, Kenneth T. The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1995.

Kalinsky, George. The New York Knicks: The Official Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration. New York, New York, Macmillan, 1996.