Part 6 (1/2)
The only team we worried about in 197273 was the Celtics, who had dominated the Eastern Conference with a 68-14 record. In the four years since Bill Russell's departure, GM Red Auerbach had re-created the team in the cla.s.sic Celtics tradition, with a strong, active center (Dave Cowens), a sly outside shooter (Jo Jo White), and one of the best all-around players in the game (John Havlicek).
Holzman wasn't a huge fan of Auerbach's because he used every trick he could to give his team an edge. Auerbach was a master of gamesmans.h.i.+p. One of his trademark ploys was to light a cigar when he thought his team had won the game, which infuriated his opponents, especially when the score was still close.
But Auerbach outdid himself in the 1973 playoffs, and it ultimately backfired on him. We met the Celtics in the Eastern Conference finals after beating Baltimore 41 in the first round. Boston had the home-court advantage in the series, and Auerbach took full advantage of it. Whenever we played in Boston, Auerbach made our lives miserable: He'd put us in locker rooms where the keys didn't work, the towels were missing, and the heat was set at over one hundred degrees and we couldn't open the windows. For this series, he put us in a different locker room for every game, and the last one-for game 7-was a cramped janitor's closet with no lockers and a ceiling so low many of us had to stoop to get dressed. Rather than demoralize us, as Auerbach no doubt expected, the locker-room gambit made us so angry it galvanized us even more.
No one had ever beaten the Celtics at home in a game 7 before, but we were still confident, because we had dominated Boston with our full-court press early in the series. The night before the big game, we were watching film of game 6 and noticed that Jo Jo White was killing us coming off high screens. Meminger, who was covering Jo Jo, started to get defensive, and Holzman snapped back. ”I don't give a d.a.m.n about the screen,” he said. ”Find a way to get through the screen and stop this guy. Don't b.i.t.c.h about the screen, just get the job done.”
The next day Dean was a man possessed. He went at Jo Jo early and shut him down, effectively short-circuiting the Celtics' offensive game plan. Then Dean came alive on the other end, breaking through the Celtics' press and igniting a decisive 3722 run in the second half. After that, Boston never recovered. The final score was Knicks 94, Celtics 78.
I've never seen Red Holzman happier than he was that night in the Boston janitor's closet. It meant a great deal to him to beat his nemesis, Auerbach, on his own turf. Beaming with joy, he came over to me and said with a wry smile, ”You know, Phil, sometimes life is a mystery and you can't tell the difference between good and evil that clearly. But this is one of those times when good definitely triumphed over evil.”
The champions.h.i.+p series against the Lakers was anticlimactic. They surprised us in the first game, but we closed down their running game after that and won in five. The postgame celebration in L.A. was a fizzle: just a handful of reporters standing around looking for quotes. But I didn't care. I finally had a ring I could call my own.
The next season-197374-was one the best of my career. I settled into my role as sixth man and averaged 11.1 points and 5.8 rebounds per game. But the team was going through a transformation that worried me.
The hallmark of the champions.h.i.+p Knicks was the extraordinary bond among the players and the selfless way we worked together as a team. That bond was particularly strong during our advance to the first champions.h.i.+p in 1970. After the arrival of Earl Monroe, Jerry Lucas, and Dean Meminger in 1971, the team chemistry s.h.i.+fted, but a new bond formed that was more strictly professional in nature yet no less effective. We didn't spend a lot of time with one another off the court, but we meshed brilliantly on the floor. Now the team was going through another sea change, but this time the effect would be more disruptive.
We struggled to hold things together during the 197374 season with Reed, Lucas, and DeBusschere hobbled by injuries, and we limped into the Eastern Conference finals against the Celtics after barely surviving a tough seven-game series with the Bullets. The pivotal moment came in game 4 in Madison Square Garden, with the Celtics up 21 in the series and young backup center John Gianelli and me trying to make up for our diminished big men. But this time there would be no magical Willis Reed epiphany. Boston's Dave Cowens and John Havlicek knew how to take advantage of our lack of strong front-court leaders.h.i.+p and outmaneuvered us at every critical turn in the second half. Boston won 9891.
The Celtics finished us off three days later in Boston en route to another successful champions.h.i.+p run against the Milwaukee Bucks. I remember sitting in Logan Airport with my teammates after that loss and feeling as if our once-glorious dynasty had come to an end. Lucas and DeBusschere had already announced that they were planning to retire. By the time the next season got under way, Reed and Barnett had also moved on and Meminger had been picked up by New Orleans in the expansion draft and traded to Atlanta.
Nothing was the same after that. I stepped in as a starter the next year to replace DeBusschere and played pretty well, but only three other members of the core team remained-Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, and Earl Monroe-and it was difficult to forge the kind of unity we'd had before. Times were changing, and the new players flooding into the NBA were more interested in showing off their flashy skills and living the NBA high life than in doing the hard work of creating a unified team.
Over the next two years, we added some talented players to the roster, including All-NBA star Spencer Haywood and three-time NBA scoring champion Bob McAdoo, but neither of them seemed to be that interested in mastering the Knicks' traditional combination of intense defense and selfless teamwork.
Every day the gap between generations became more apparent. The new players, who were accustomed to being pampered in college, started complaining that n.o.body was taking care of their laundry or that the trainer wasn't doing good enough tape jobs. The old Knicks were used to taking responsibility for our own laundry because there was no equipment manager then, and strange as it may sound, was.h.i.+ng our own uniforms had a unifying effect on the team. If the newcomers weren't willing to wash their own gear, we wondered whether they would take responsibility for what they had to do on court.
It didn't take long to find out. Within a remarkably short time, the Knicks transitioned into a dual-personality team that could run up 15-point leads, then collapse at the end because we couldn't marshal a coordinated attack. We held several team meetings to discuss the problem, but we couldn't agree on how to bridge the gap. Nothing Red did to stimulate team play worked.
In 1976 the Knicks failed to make the playoffs for the first time in nine years. A year later Bradley retired and Frazier was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Then Red stepped down and was replaced by Willis Reed.
I thought the 197778 season would be my last, but in the off-season the Knicks made a deal to send me to the New Jersey Nets. I was reluctant at first, but I agreed to come on board when coach Kevin Loughery called and told me that he needed my help to work with the younger players. ”I know you're at the end of your career,” he said, ”but coming to New Jersey could be a good bridge between playing and coaching.”
I wasn't that interested in becoming a coach, but I was intrigued by Loughery's maverick style of leaders.h.i.+p. After training camp, Loughery said he wanted to move me over to a.s.sistant coach, but before that could happen forward Bob Elliott got injured and I was activated as a player. Nevertheless, I got a chance that year to work with the big men as a part-time a.s.sistant coach and take over for Kevin as head coach when he was thrown out of games by the refs, which happened fourteen times that season.
Loughery, who had won two ABA champions.h.i.+ps, had an exceptional eye for the game and was gifted at exploiting mismatches. But what I learned from him was how to push the envelope and get away with it. Loughery was the first coach I knew who had his players double-team inbound pa.s.sers at half-court, a high-risk move that often paid off. He also adopted Hubie Brown's ploy of double-teaming the ball handler and made it a regular part of the defense, even though it wasn't strictly legal. One of his biggest innovations was developing out-of-the-box isolation plays for our best shooters. That tactic didn't exactly align with Holzman's model of five-man offense, but it fit the Nets lineup, which was loaded with good shooters, and opened the way for new forms of creativity to flower in the years to come.
Our star player was Bernard King, an explosive small forward with a superquick release who had averaged 24.2 points and 9.5 rebounds per game as a rookie the year before. Unfortunately, he also had a substance-abuse problem. One night that season he was found asleep at the wheel at a stop sign and was arrested for drunk driving and cocaine possession. (The charges were later dropped.) This incident pushed Loughery over the edge. He was known for being good at managing self-absorbed stars, but he felt he wasn't getting through to King and was losing control of the team. So he threatened to quit. When general manager Charlie Theokas asked Loughery to suggest a replacement, he put my name forward. I was a little stunned when I heard this, but it felt good to know that someone of Kevin's stature thought I could handle the job. Eventually Loughery backed down. Several months later, the Nets traded King to the Utah Jazz, where he spent most of the season in rehab.
At the start of the 197980 season, Loughery told me that he was going to cut me from the active roster but offered me a job as a full-time a.s.sistant coach at a substantial pay cut. This was the moment I had always dreaded. I remember driving my car to the Nets' training center in Piscataway, New Jersey, and thinking that I was never going to feel the thrill of battle again. Sure, I said to myself, I might have some high moments in the future, but unless I had to go through a life-and-death crisis of some kind, I'd probably never have another experience quite like the one I'd had as a player in the NBA.
Being a coach was not the same, or at least that was how I felt at the time. Win or lose, I'd always be one step removed from the action.
Somewhere on the outskirts of Piscataway, I found myself having an imaginary conversation with my father, who had died a few months earlier.