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“You Don’t Get to Rebuild If You Are the New York Knicks”

1975–1977

Spencer Haywood’s move to the Knicks was a big deal. But it paled in comparison to another arrival in the New York City sporting world in 1975. That summer, the New York Cosmos, of the North American Soccer League (NASL), added the most famous soccer player on the planet, Pelé. In June, the thirty-four-year-old Brazilian forward signed a multimillion-dollar contract and immediately reinvigorated the struggling NASL. In three years, he would lead the Cosmos to one league title and help generate interest in the league to the point that thousands had to regularly be turned away from Cosmos home games at the 22,000-seat Downing Stadium at Randall’s Island. By 1977, the Cosmos were the toast of the town. They outgrew Downing and had to play home games at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. “We transcended everything, every culture, every socio-economic boundary,” goalkeeper Shep Messing recalled in 2005. “We were international, we were European, we were cool, we were Americans from the Bronx. We were everything to everybody.”¹

Pelé turned around the fortunes of his team and league almost overnight. New York’s newest hoops star knew turning around the Knicks would be a challenge. But nothing in Haywood’s life had ever been easy. He grew up on a cotton farm in Mississippi and, like many Black southerners in the sixties, faced terrible discrimination. At fifteen, his mother sent him to live with foster families in Detroit where he developed, in his own words, into a six-foot-six teenager with “the physical maturity and coordination of an adult.”²

After graduating from high school, Haywood signed with the University of Tennessee to become the first Black basketball player in the history of the Southeastern Conference. “Somebody had to integrate college basketball in the South,” said Haywood later, “and Mama always told me I was special. Who better to take on this mission?”³

But when Haywood failed Tennessee’s entrance exams, he ended up at tiny Trinidad State Junior College in Colorado. After an exceptional freshman season in which he averaged better than 28 points and 22 rebounds per game, officials invited him to try out for the 1968 Olympic team.

In the United States, the 1968 Summer Olympic Games are best remembered for the black-gloved salutes raised by American sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith. But just as Carlos and Smith represented a stand for civil rights in the Games, so too did the absence of many high-profile college basketball players like the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “It was too difficult for me,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote in his autobiography, “to get enthusiastic about representing a country that refused to represent me or others of my color.”⁴ With less fanfare, other Black college stars pulled out of the Games, leaving Haywood, the only junior college player and youngest basketball Olympian in US history, to carry a heavy load. “The Black players on our team were looked at as Uncle Toms for going to the Olympics,” Haywood later recalled. “We were sellouts.”⁵ Still, he put on a show, and by the end of the Games the precocious nineteen-year-old was a celebrated gold-medal winner.⁶ “In three years’ time,” he remembered later, “I had gone from picking and chopping cotton as a slave to being a hero for the United States.”⁷

Eight years after Mexico City, news of the Haywood trade energized Knicks players and fans alike. Season ticket sales soared, and Bill Bradley was stoked; “when we talk about winning, we can talk about it right now,” the future US senator gushed.⁸ But not all Haywood’s new teammates were excited. Harthorne Wingo was devastated. Wingo was a playground legend who first came to the attention of the Allentown Jets of the Eastern League thanks to his play in a Greenwich Village pickup game.⁹ Wingo worked his way up through basketball’s minor leagues and sat at the end of the Knicks bench for two seasons before finally getting his shot. “I really felt I was coming into my own at that time,” Wingo told me. “But then … they went out and got Spencer Haywood from Seattle, which made me realize that I was pretty much through in New York.”¹⁰ Less than a year later, Wingo was out of the NBA, trying to scratch out a living playing overseas.

With Haywood in the fold, the Knicks expected to drastically improve on their 40–42 record. A lineup featuring a healthy Rolls-Royce backcourt, forwards Bradley and Haywood, and steady center play from a Neal Walk and John Gianelli that could at least be competitive in the Eastern Conference. Maybe 1975 would kickstart the next great Knicks dynasty.

Optimistic New Yorkers packed Madison Square Garden for Haywood’s Knicks debut. Spencer put together a solid game, tallying 8 points and 8 rebounds, and Frazier and Monroe combined for 52 points to steamroll the Cavaliers. A week later, the Sixers came to town; George McGinnis sat out with an injury, and the Knicks won by a dozen to even their season record at 3–3. Against Philly, the Knicks fired on all cylinders. Frazier led the team with 25 points and 10 assists, Haywood scored 23 and pulled down 17 rebounds, Monroe and Bradley each chipped in 19 points, and the center duo of Walk and Gianelli combined for 16 points and 18 rebounds.

In late October 1975, one week before Haywood’s Knicks debut, WNBC-TV aired the second episode of NBC’s Saturday Night (later Saturday Night Live). That night, Simon and Garfunkel performed half a dozen songs, and Chevy Chase took his first on-screen pratfall. Most memorable, though, was the one-on-one game between five-foot-three Paul Simon and six-foot-eight Connie Hawkins, a New York City playground legend now winding down his career with the Los Angeles Lakers. Simon, dressed in a white jersey with red and blue trim (just like the Knicks), pulled the miraculous upset as the crowd laughed. It would be a rare feel-good moment for New York basketball fans that fall.

For years, the Knicks had relied on a patterned offense designed by Coach Holzman emphasizing ball movement and unselfishness. Holzman was born in 1920 on the Lower East Side and grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a Jewish tailor.¹¹ Friends and family described him as “a cultural Jew” who fasted on Yom Kippur and celebrated Hannukah but rarely attended synagogue.¹² During World War II, Red—who earned the nickname because of his head of then-flaming orange hair—enlisted in the navy and attended the City College of New York, where he played basketball for legendary coach Nat Holman.¹³ After a short pro career, Red, at age thirty-three, became the head coach of the Milwaukee Hawks and followed the franchise south when they moved to St. Louis. In 1958, Knicks head coach Fuzzy Levane, an old friend, convinced Red to join him in New York as a scout. Levane lasted only one more season, but Red stayed with the franchise for the next thirty, replacing Dick McGuire as the team’s head coach in 1967.¹⁴

Holzman won two titles in New York with a group of veterans who played with an uncanny ability to anticipate the actions of one other on the court. But in 1975–76 that continuity was gone. “What was wrong?” Haywood later wrote, “Make a list. Red Holzman … had us running the same offensive patterns his teams had been running for fifty years … and then there was this crazy thing called chemistry.”¹⁵ The old Knicks had it, the new Knicks did not.

Holzman blamed a lack of effort, particularly on the defensive end. After years as one of the league’s top defensive teams, New York finished as one of the worst in 1975–76.¹⁶ A frustrated Red told reporters, “You want to win in this league, you get yourself a big mobile center and a lot of defense. Every team,” he continued, “has players who can score, so the emphasis has to be on stopping the other fellow.”¹⁷

On March 30, 1976, with six games left on the schedule, the Knicks were mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, their first missed postseason in a decade. “It hurts not being in the playoffs,” reserve forward Phil Jackson admitted, “but I learned more about basketball this season than any other… . I know why a good bunch of individuals does not necessarily make a good team.”¹⁸

Although neither Jackson nor Holzman mentioned Haywood by name, he was an obvious scapegoat for the team’s failures. Haywood “was supposed to be the new Dave DeBusschere,” Sam Goldaper wrote in the Times. “He was supposed to fit into the offense, score points, grab rebounds, get picks, and insure a playoff berth for the Knicks.” Instead, Haywood was “basically a one-on-one shooter not noted for his defense [and did] not fit into the Knicks ‘helping’ type of team offense and defense.”¹⁹ For the season, Haywood managed just 92 assists, barely more than 1 per game. Sure, Frazier and Monroe did the lion’s share of the shot-creating in New York, but all frustrated Knicks fans saw in Haywood was a ball hog.

Even before the silver-maned Mike Burke introduced Haywood as the newest Knick in his October 1975 press conference, the team knew he had some baggage. Yes, he had won Olympic gold, but he also had attended three different colleges, pioneered the practice of leaving school early for professional basketball, sued the NBA for violating antitrust laws, played for six different coaches in his first six professional seasons, and published his first autobiography before he turned twenty-six.²⁰

Still, Haywood seemed to cope well with the pressure of playing in New York, especially as music became an increasingly important outlet to him. “Jazz,” Haywood recalled, “was my refuge, my church.”²¹ On Saturday afternoons, Haywood spun records on WRVR 106.7 FM.²² “New York is definitely the capital,” he told reporters. “I’ve seen and heard more jazz here in just one summer than in six years any place else.”²³ Spencer filled his apartment, located above the Liberation Bookstore in Harlem, with thousands of records.²⁴ He also embraced religion, taking meals at the Nation of Islam, on 125th Street, and studying the Quran after a long spiritual conversation with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In private, some friends even called him Abdullah.²⁵ Soon a budding romantic relationship would create an even tighter bond between Haywood and the city.

Haywood met Zara Mohamed Abdulmajid, nicknamed Iman, at Cleo’s, a trendy restaurant on Broadway and Sixty-Third featuring hip jazz music and a cool vibe.²⁶ Haywood and Iman hit it off immediately; she had recently broken up with actor Warren Beatty (the “Clyde” in Bonnie and Clyde, source of Walt Frazier’s nickname) and had moved to New York for a modeling career. “I didn’t have nobody,” Haywood wrote, “and she didn’t have nobody so we just clung to each other.” Even better, she was not an NBA fan—as Haywood explained, “she didn’t know basketball for shit.”²⁷ Instead, the two talked about much bigger plans for themselves. “Our dream,” Haywood later remembered, “was that we could unite the Blacks of Africa … with the Blacks of America.” Iman and Haywood quickly became A-listers in New York City and even appeared together on Good Morning America, where they shared their hope to unite people of color from around the world. By then, the couple was the toast of the town; he was one of the highest-profile Knicks, and she scored the cover of Vogue. Iman began sitting courtside to cheer on her boyfriend, and, five months after they began dating the couple was pregnant. Haywood explained, “We decided to get married and let love grow.”²⁸

Haywood managed to cobble together a solid, if unspectacular, first season in New York, finishing second on the team in scoring at 19.9 points per game, and first in rebounds with 11.3. But clearly a 38–44 record was unacceptable in a city not known for its patience. “You don’t get to rebuild,” Frazier explained, “If you are the New York Knicks.”²⁹

With the 1975–76 season in the books, Knicks players scattered across the country. Backup guard Butch Beard flew home to Louisville; Jim Barnett went to the West Coast (probably to juggle chainsaws); Walk vacationed in New England; Jackson took a road trip back to Montana, his home state; Haywood and reserve forward Mel “Killer” Davis started summer classes at New York University; and Monroe kept regular hours at the Tiffany Entertainment Corporation he created, where he teamed with record producer Dick Scott (who later managed New Edition and the New Kids on the Block) to represent and manage recording artists like the BB&Q (Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens) Band and Curtis Hairston.³⁰

That summer, NBA executives, led by rookie commissioner O’Brien, redoubled their efforts to end the long-running feud with the ABA. Officials from both leagues met to renew merger talks despite numerous sticking points, including the right of player free agency. But one of the most pressing concerns was the situation between the Knicks and the ABA’s New York Nets. Unsurprisingly, the Knicks refused to allow the Nets to remain in New York, even though the Nets played home games at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale rather than in Manhattan. Besides understandable concerns about territorial rights, Knicks execs had to be at least a little scared about the Nets stealing local fans. After all, the Nets won the ABA title in 1976, with the most electrifying player in the world, twenty-six-year-old Julius Erving.

In August, the two leagues finally came to an agreement, and the NBA added four former ABA teams: the Nets, Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers, and San Antonio Spurs. Each of the four had to pay a multimillion-dollar admission fee and forego several years of television revenue while the Nets also owed the Knicks $3 million in territorial rights. To pay the steep fee, the Nets sold Erving to the 76ers, decimating the “other” New York team while further strengthening one of the Knicks’ most bitter rivals.³¹

League-wide, the most important change was the arrival of free agency to pro basketball. And while this free agency was restricted, requiring compensation to be sent to teams in return for lost players, within a year there was a nearly 40 percent turnover on NBA rosters.³² Some fans and curmudgeonly owners cried foul at a lack of team loyalty, but proponents of free agency celebrated the ability for franchises to quickly rebuild by buying up talented players. Clearly the Knicks would use their financial power to their advantage. Right?

While basketball bigwigs met on Cape Cod to iron out merger details, residents of the South Bronx were witnessing the birth of a worldwide cultural phenomenon. They just didn’t know it yet.

Beyond the economic devastation and crippling poverty of the era, the early seventies witnessed a decline in the Black Power movement and in Puerto Rican nationalism across the country. Coupled with deindustrialization and the increasing power of gangs, a Black youth subculture emerged.³³ In the mid-seventies, New York City lost 340,000 jobs, and teenage unemployment skyrocketed. By 1976, 70 percent of Black teens and 80 percent of Hispanic teens lacked jobs.³⁴ “The Bronx was the epicenter of poverty,” DJ Charlie Chase of the Cold Crush Brothers recalls, “the epicenter for kids who were full of energy, who didn’t know what to do with it, didn’t have a lot of activities, didn’t have role models.”³⁵

Many residents of the South Bronx moved there out of necessity, either because they could not afford to live elsewhere in New York or because they were freshly arrived from Latin America and the Caribbean. This immigration helped repopulate areas affected by white flight and profoundly changed the cultural makeup of the area.

Life for these newcomers, as well as for families who lived there for generations, was hard, as Mr. Wiggles, a B-boy dancer, later recalled. “We didn’t call nothing hip-hop,” he said. “We didn’t look at anything as culture. It was just something to do to keep our minds off the bullshit that we had to deal with on a regular basis. And those parts of the Bronx,” he continued, “are the reason why hip-hop was so important—it was the one gift that God was able to give us to help us to get past all that BS.”³⁶

One man who dealt well with “that BS” was a Jamaican immigrant named Clive Campbell, who ran with a graffiti crew called the Ex-Vandals, where his nickname was “Clyde as Kool,” in homage to Walt Frazier.³⁷ Before joining the Ex-Vandals, Campbell was a member of the Five Percenters, a Bronx gang who gained his loyalty after a few of them rescued young Clive from a fight started during a pickup basketball game. “I hung out with them and started picking up the slang,” Campbell remembers. “Pretty soon I was Americanized.”³⁸ His musical tastes also became Americanized after his dad got him hooked on James Brown. Campbell loved the repetitive beats and driving rhythms that were signatures of the Godfather of Soul. He was not alone.

As graffiti crews began to replace traditional gang culture, Campbell spent less time tagging and more time jamming to James Brown. Friends stopped calling him Clive because, as he explained, they “couldn’t recall my name Clive … they’d be like ‘you mean like ‘Clyde’ Frazier’?” After using the nickname “Clyde as Kool” for a while, Campbell began referring to himself as Kool Herc—“Herc” being a shortened version of “Hercules” and a nod to his rough play on the basketball court.³⁹ In the summer of 1973, just weeks after Frazier and the Knicks won their second NBA title, Kool Herc threw a birthday party for his sister in the community room of his apartment complex at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. At the party, he revealed a new technique he called the Merry-Go-Round, switching back and forth between two records to extend the break—the part of a song when the singer steps aside and the drumbeat carries the rhythm. Kids throughout the neighborhood heard about the party, and his next one drew a bigger crowd, many of them high schoolers too young to hit the downtown clubs.⁴⁰ “With the music outside, you went to a jam,” MC Debbie D recalls. “There’s a thousand kids standing there. We ain’t got nothing else to do.”⁴¹

By the fall, Herc had to relocate to a bigger space, eventually landing at Cedar Park, where he wired his speakers and record players into light poles. “When Kool Herc hit the scene he started to get the buzz that something was different,” DJ Disco Wiz recalls. “The funk he threw on the turntables and the soul that came across with African beats, was something I could relate to. I could feel it.” Kool Herc dubbed his close associates the Herculoids and his speaker system the Herculord.⁴² “We heard the music way down the block,” Spice Nice remembered. “The closer we got, the louder the bass got.”⁴³

DJ Kool Herc is rightfully celebrated as the godfather of hip-hop. But others improved on the Merry-Go-Round, introducing exciting new elements. Grandmaster Flash brought a new quick-mixing technique, while his protégé, Grand Wizzard Theodore, developed scratching and needle-dropping with pinpoint precision. And in the fall of 1976, Afrika Bambaataa, another hip-hop pioneer, threw his first official party as a deejay at the Bronx River Community Center.⁴⁴ Little is known about Bambaataa’s early life, but by the 1980s his influence spread from the Bronx to lower Manhattan, breaking down barriers between the predominately Black neighborhood he grew up in and the “white art-crowd and punk-rock clubs” located downtown. As a young man, Bambaataa was heavily influenced by the 1964 film Zulu, and he adopted the film’s pan-Africanist message to cross New York City turf boundaries and form bonds with rival gangs. He transformed his own street gang—the Black Spades—into a music crew, renamed them the Universal Zulu Nation, and helped forge a truce between rival crews throughout the city.⁴⁵

Thanks to the efforts of Bambaataa and others with similar goals, street gangs slowly faded into the background of the Bronx, replaced by hip-hop crews that carved out their own space in the city and jealously guarded their turf. Now, instead of guns, knives, and fists, groups mostly battled with toasts, dance-offs, and deejay contests (though sometimes gang members acting as bouncers did get a little violent).⁴⁶ “We had the support of the whole community,” remembers Jazzy Jay. “It’s like, we’d rather see them doing that, doing something constructive, than to be down the block beating each other upside the head like they used to do in the gang days.”⁴⁷

Battles between rival deejays and B-boy crews required large open spaces capable of hosting several hundred spectators if the crews were well-known. High school gymnasiums were ideal, but they cost money to rent and in the summer months were closed. When the weather cooperated, crews preferred the flat concrete surfaces found at the parks that also played host to pick-up basketball games.⁴⁸ Asphalt courts across the city provided space for crews to practice and hosted many battles between rival dancers and deejays as playground basketball continued around them.⁴⁹ “You had different levels of people at the jams,” DJ Disco Wiz explained. “There were b-boys and b-girls mixing it up on the dance floor, stick-up kids looking for prey, dudes looking to hook up with girls, and gangbangers looking really out of place because by this time the street gangs had been all but shut down in the city.”⁵⁰ In fact, when the blackout of 1977 hit, Wiz was playing at a park on 183rd and Valentine and was afraid his sound system, illegally plugged into the streetlight, had blown out the electricity in the neighborhood.⁵¹

When Herc hosted his first party on Sedgwick Avenue, the Knicks were the reigning NBA champions. Although just ten miles separated Herc’s neighborhood from Madison Square Garden, these were two completely different worlds. But within a few years, hip-hop and basketball would be all but inseparable.

On October 21, 1976, the Knicks retired Willis Reed’s number nineteen, the first jersey to hang from the rafters in Madison Square Garden. It was opening night, and the Los Angeles Lakers were in town, poised for a breakout season behind reigning NBA MVP Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The Knicks pulled out a five-point win thanks to six players in double figures, led by Monroe, but only drew an abysmal 13,675 fans, the lowest opening night total ever at the New Garden. And that was the paid attendance; as the Times noted, “many didn’t show up.”⁵² The Knicks sold just 7,250 season tickets that year, down from over 12,000 in 1976 and far below the 16,000 they regularly sold when the Garden was Eden.

Despite fan lack of interest, New York won their first three games of the season, posting wins over the Lakers, Spurs, and Braves. But they crashed back to earth with four straight losses, and in November injuries began to pile up. By Thanksgiving, Monroe, Haywood, and Bradley watched from the sidelines. Frazier, who managed to stay healthy, was growing frustrated with the team’s effort. After a misstep cost the Knicks a game in late November, Frazier’s post-game comment was simply, “bad pass, lost the game.”⁵³ The cool, collected cat who held New York City in the palm of his hand as Clyde in the early seventies was slowly being replaced by the naturally quiet, shy, and introverted Walt.

Formerly there was a clear hierarchy among players. Now, as the team struggled, there was locker room tension regarding playing time. Luther “Ticky” Burden joined the Knicks after the NBA merger with the ABA, where he had starred as a member of the Virginia Squires and earned first-team All-Rookie honors. Now he was unhappily sitting on the bench and not shy about sharing his discontent with reporters. “I’m the fifth guard on this team and to think I’m behind Mo Layton and (Butch) Beard,” Burden told the New York Amsterdam News, “I think it’s a joke.” Burden even asked management for a trade, insistent that he should be in the starting lineup—if not on the Knicks, then somewhere else in the NBA.⁵⁴ Little did he know at the time, but Burden was about to slide even further down the pecking order.

On Tuesday, December 7, Americans commemorated the thirty-fifth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor; in New York, residents read headlines warning of potential transit system cuts; in Madison Square Garden, the Knicks dropped to 10–13 after a seventeen-point loss to Portland; and sportswriters across the country reported that the Braves’ all-star center Bob McAdoo was on the trading block.⁵⁵

In late October, McAdoo and his agent began meeting with the Braves about a contract extension. Coming off his second straight All-NBA team and third consecutive scoring title, McAdoo was clearly one of the best players in the NBA. And he expected to be paid like it. More specifically, McAdoo wanted Julius Erving–level money after news broke that Dr. J had signed a six-year, $3.2 million deal with the Sixers. Braves co-owner Paul Snyder balked at McAdoo’s demands and insisted they already had a handshake deal in place. “He had agreed to sign,” Snyder said, “but … his lawyer would not accept the deal. He wanted some other things, and I told him to go to hell.” As negotiations broke down, Snyder decided to trade McAdoo, sending him and backup center Tom McMillen to New York for John Gianelli and cash (reportedly $3 million).⁵⁶ McMillen, like Bradley a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and future US congressman, was in the checkout line at the supermarket when he heard about the trade; McAdoo was Christmas shopping in Toronto with teammate Randy Smith when Mrs. McAdoo called to tell him they were headed to the Big Apple, giving the Knicks their next “store-bought Messiah.”⁵⁷

McAdoo was born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, during the height of the civil rights movement—he was nine years old when Black college students sat-in at a Woolworth lunch counter two miles from his elementary school.⁵⁸ In high school, McAdoo chose to enroll at Smith High instead of all-Black Dudley, while Greensboro residents heatedly debated school integration and busing. At Smith, McAdoo played the saxophone in the marching band and excelled athletically, setting the state high school high jump record by leaping 6 feet, 7 inches his senior year. Poor college entrance exam scores kept McAdoo from playing Division I basketball after high school, so he attended Vincennes Junior College in Indiana for two years. In 1971, he enrolled at the University of North Carolina, becoming the only junior college transfer legendary UNC coach Dean Smith recruited in his thirty-six years in Chapel Hill. He immediately led the Tar Heels to the Final Four before declaring for the NBA Draft—also becoming the first player Smith lost early to the pros. “I was ten years ahead of [Michael] Jordan and [James] Worthy doing it,” McAdoo said, “I guess I helped clear the way for those guys because I caught hell for leaving.”⁵⁹ Then-commissioner Walter Kennedy advised teams to pass on McAdoo in the 1972 draft because of rumors about a possible secret contract with the ABA’s Virginia Squires, so, Portland selected LaRue Martin, one of the greatest busts in draft history, before the Braves ignored Kennedy’s advice and selected the precocious Tar Heel with the second overall pick.

As a rookie, the Braves played McAdoo out of position at small forward, starting him alongside second-year center Elmore Smith and burly All-Star power forward Bob Kauffman. McAdoo still finished second on the team in scoring (18 points per game) and earned Rookie of the Year honors. That offseason, Kauffman and Smith left the Braves, allowing McAdoo to move to center, his natural position. All McAdoo did as a sophomore was lead the NBA in scoring (30.6 points per game) and field goal percentage (54.7%). Paired with dynamic rookie point guard Ernie DiGregorio and electrifying wing players Randy Smith and Jim McMillian, McAdoo thrived in the up-tempo, high-scoring offense head coach Jack Ramsay created in Buffalo.

What set McAdoo apart from other NBA centers was his ability to shoot accurately from long distance. In the 1970s, teams expected their centers to set up near the basket, grapple for position inside, and try to navigate the painted area for easy baskets or rebounds. A handful of centers—Reed, Dave Cowens, and Jerry Lucas, for example—could step out for a 15-foot jump shot, but McAdoo was comfortable past the modern three-point line. As legendary center Bill Russell said of McAdoo, “he’s the best shooting player at any position I’ve ever seen.” “You try to get him out of range,” Russell continued, “but he never is.”⁶⁰ Cowens, who guarded McAdoo for half a dozen years, agreed. “My whole thing was protect the rim, protect the basket,” Cowens told me. “And now all of a sudden you’re out on the perimeter … you’re like ‘wait, it’s not supposed to be this way!’ He wore my ass out.”⁶¹ In 1974–75, McAdoo was named league MVP after scoring 2,831 points. At the time, it was the most ever recorded in a season by anyone other than Wilt Chamberlain, and it still ranks as the eighth-highest single-season point total in NBA history.

Despite his on-court success, McAdoo grew increasingly unhappy in Buffalo. Teammates and friends accepted that some of it was just his personality (he could be moody), but it was more than just that.⁶² McAdoo felt underappreciated. “I don’t think anyone pays much attention to what I do,” McAdoo told a reporter.⁶³ Playing in a small market also limited McAdoo’s exposure. Nationally televised games were rare and usually featured big-market teams. Buffalo was the twenty-eighth largest city in the United States and the second smallest with an NBA team (ahead of only Portland). And, even in Buffalo, McAdoo was second to Bills running back O. J. Simpson in terms of media visibility.

New Yorkers were excited about the newest Knick, although even McAdoo’s attorney admitted that adding another star player to the roster meant that “they’re short about four basketballs there.”⁶⁴ Fans packed the box office to buy tickets after the trade was announced. As one police officer said, “we get [large crowds] when tickets go on sale for a rock show, but not for the Knicks.”⁶⁵ Veteran Knicks also recognized the difference. “The Garden was a ghost town,” Frazier admitted later. “There were no lines outside. No people. No ticket requests.” With McAdoo in the fold, that changed overnight. “Now the beautiful people are trying to get their tickets back,” Frazier said; “the Garden is the place to be seen again.”⁶⁶ Not all Knicks players were convinced the trade would prove beneficial. “He can help the team,” Burden admitted, “but I think some of the veterans will slack up and not carry their weight.”⁶⁷ Still, McAdoo remained humble at his introductory press conference. “I’ll just try and blend in with the rest of the fellows,” McAdoo told reporters, “and bring a banner back to New York.”⁶⁸

Maybe more than McAdoo’s other new teammates, the thirty-three-year-old Bradley was excited about the potential for one more NBA title. Bradley was a throwback. He was a six-foot-five Rhodes Scholar who made the most of limited natural athleticism. “His shoulders slope, his muscles are unimpressive, he is a poor jumper, and he is not an unusually fast runner,” Pete Axthelm wrote in The City Game. But Bradley “forced the other Knicks to keep in motion, virtually assuring the perennial presences of that nightly Knicks hero, the open man.”⁶⁹ Despite being dubbed a “Great White Hope” in leading the Princeton Tigers to the 1965 NCAA Final Four, Bradley resisted the label and became, according to Frazier, “the least prejudiced player I’ve ever met.”⁷⁰ Like other brilliant minds, he could also be somewhat flighty. Bradley met his wife, Ernestine Schlant, a comparative literature professor, in his apartment building. “There were times when he was without a telephone or electricity,” she later wrote, “because he had forgotten to open the mail and pay the bills.” The two married during the 1974 All-Star break so Bradley would not miss any games; it was a small ceremony, and they kept it secret so no one would make a fuss.⁷¹ It was classic Bradley. On the title-winning teams, Bradley quietly did all the little things; he would score about a dozen points, secure three or four rebounds, and drive his opponent crazy with his physical defense. Holzman almost never called a play for Bradley but knew he would always be in the right place at the right time.

Even as Bradley’s role on the Knicks became more marginal, expectations soared. Haywood, replaced by McAdoo as the team’s star attraction, raved about his new teammate. “We’re getting the ball out and playing my kind of game now,” Haywood told reporters after McAdoo’s second week with the team. “McAdoo has opened things up for us and I can go inside more.” Frazier, asked to dial back his role on offense, said, “The pack is back,” and he told reporters, “So far there are no egos on this team.”⁷² The Knicks won six of their first seven with McAdoo in the lineup; their only loss was a one-point, Christmas Day heartbreaker against the Sixers witnessed by a capacity crowd of 19,694 in which scalpers were getting as much as $50 for $12 Garden seats.⁷³ Mel “Killer” Davis was blunt when reminding me, years later, “There was a lot of talent out there.”⁷⁴

The honeymoon between the Knicks and McAdoo was short-lived, however. New York went 4–10 in January, and McAdoo complained that Frazier and Monroe walked the ball up the court rather than pushing the pace.⁷⁵ Sometimes during timeouts, taking a break from chomping on a towel, McAdoo would encourage teammates to pass him the ball more. “I haven’t had a shot in three times down the floor,” he would tell guards like Butch Beard, who tried to spread the ball around to keep everyone happy.⁷⁶ “It’s not Red’s fault,” Frazier said when asked about Holzman’s struggles to adapt. “He’s coaching the talent he has. This team is more of a one-on-one team than a team that runs plays like we were then. Red still relates to the players, he’s still in control of the situation. He’s the same coach. He’s a great coach.” Despite Frazier’s support, the Knicks named Holzman’s eventual successor in the middle of the season, announcing that Willis Reed, captain of the legendary Garden of Eden squads, would one day replace his old mentor.⁷⁷

As the Knicks remade themselves with new frontcourt players McAdoo and Haywood, the cultural phenomenon known as hip-hop was slowly spreading beyond the boundaries of the South Bronx.

Kool Herc might have created record-mixing, but he was not a songwriter and was not recording new music. Instead, he repurposed older or obscure tracks like James Brown’s “Give It Up Turn It Loose,” “The Mexican” by Babe Ruth (the English rock band), and a rare piece called “Apache,” covered by the Incredible Bongo Band. Eddie Luna, the founder of the Dynamic Rockers dance crew, still got excited decades later about Apache. “Apache?” he said, “forget it! I can’t listen to Apache. I just—I start sweating, you know! And I get angry! And it’s like, I wanna hit the floor!”⁷⁸ Soon, wannabe Hercs were trolling local record stores in search of rare singles to one-up the master.⁷⁹ Downtown Records, located in the Forty-Second Street and Sixth Avenue subway station, fielded telephone calls from kids throughout the South Bronx looking for copies of obscure cuts like Dennis Coffy’s “Son of Scorpio,” Jeannie Reynolds’s “Fruit Song,” or, as Grandmaster Flash put it, “crazy beats from the Philippines and India with sounds I didn’t know a human being could make.”⁸⁰ Many of these hip-hop pioneers used disco music for their tracks. “If you listen to early rap,” DMC (of Run-DMC) argues, “everybody would use disco. People minds is blown away how connected disco’s presentation was, just a hybrid form or cousin of hip-hop.”⁸¹

Herc and other deejays following in his footsteps used the extended breaks created by the Merry-Go-Round to give kids more time to show off their best moves on the dance floor.⁸² Dancers called themselves B-boys or B-girls—the B stood for break or beat or Bronx, depending on who you asked—but the media dubbed them break dancers (a name authentic B-girls and B-boys despised).⁸³ Twins Kevin and Kieth Smith became two of the first top-shelf B-boys after showing up to early Kool Herc parties. Kevin was only twelve years old at the time, but the duo tore up the dance floor with their moves, including pioneering the practice of taking their dancing to the floor, mixing in the toprock and, later, the downrock.⁸⁴ Herc dubbed them the “Nigga Twins,” and they soon joined the Herculoids.⁸⁵

Breaking was physically demanding and mimicked violent action; every movement from entering the dance floor through the performer’s exit was deliberate, if unscripted. Certain songs became clearly identified with dance battles. “The Mexican,” for example, was “more for fighting,” explains one B-boy. “That’s the type of song you just wanna uprock. Like when you doing ‘Mexican,’ man, you always wanna go out there and just fight. Like battling.”⁸⁶ B-girls and B-boys drew inspiration from old-fashioned dances like the Charleston and Lindy as well as recent phenomena like kung-fu (which was popular at the time) and capoeira, the acrobatic Afro-Brazilian martial art.⁸⁷ At least they looked like they borrowed from capoeira. “We didn’t know what the fuck no capoeira was, man,” remembers Crazy Legs. “We were in the ghetto!”⁸⁸ Bambaataa’s crew, the Zulu Kings, integrated increasingly difficult moves into their repertoire, working in “ass spins, spider walks, footwork, and mime similar to the electric boogie.”⁸⁹ Just like playground basketball players, breakers, according to Trac 2 of the Star Child la Rock Crew, competed for “ghetto celebrity status.”⁹⁰ To be known as a highly skilled baller or a nasty downrocker with sick footwork? That was ghetto celebrity.

Hoping to shake the Knicks out of their funk, the team’s biggest ghetto celebrity, Clyde Frazier, stepped down as team captain, a position he had inherited a few years earlier from Reed. “The captaincy is not my bag,” Frazier told the Times. “I’m not a verbal guy. I’m not a leader. If the players want to follow me, let them follow my leadership on the court.”⁹¹ At the same time, management was also growing unhappy with his on-court performance. Frazier was still solid defensively but was no longer elite and had lost a little quickness. Tellingly, he was left off the All-Star team for the first time in the seventies and some fans questioned his motivation after signing a $450,000 per year contract.⁹² On February 1, Holzman left Frazier out of the starting lineup and, for the first time since 1969, brought him into the game as a reserve.

While Frazier faltered, the new captain, Monroe, regained some of his old swagger. In November 1976, the team traveled to Philadelphia where Earl the Pearl, born and raised in South Philly, met up with old friends after the game. “I get them all tickets for that first game with the Sixers,” he said, “and I found out that they’d all become Sixers fans. Damn.”⁹³ Perhaps motivated by his buddies, Monroe looked like the “Black Magic” of old, spinning on a dime and using his backside to pin defenders on his hip. When Monroe was at his best, trying to guard him was—in the words of David Halberstam—like facing a “ghost.”⁹⁴

In the 1960s, Monroe was a playground hero whose legend was only surpassed by the real thing. He was “Black Jesus” and “Magic.” But now, in the late seventies, Monroe struggled with creaky knees and bone spurs, reminders of hours spent pounding up and down hot asphalt courts. Still, he was one of Woody Allen’s favorite Knicks (alongside Frazier), and a young Spike Lee called Monroe “the Miles Davis of hoop” for his improvisational brilliance.⁹⁵

When Earl the Pearl reemerged in the middle of the 1976–77 season, sportswriter Mike Lupica compared him to “a retired magician who has taken his full box of tricks from deep in the closet, dusted it off, and said to a new audience every night, ‘This is the way it used to be.’ The Magic Show.”⁹⁶ That winter, Earvin Johnson was just a seventeen-year-old kid attending high school in Lansing, Michigan; in basketball, there was only one Magic—and his name was Earl Monroe.

After a rough January, February brought a few bright spots for New York and the Knicks. The rock band Kiss made their Madison Square Garden debut, filling the arena for their show, Monroe made the All-Star team for the fourth (and final) time, and rookie Lonnie Shelton was looking like the blue-collar forward the team lacked since DeBusschere retired.

Then Pistol Pete happened.

On February 22, the Knicks hosted the New Orleans Jazz and won 119–102, limiting NBA scoring leader Pistol Pete Maravich to 28 points. Three days later, the teams met again, this time in New Orleans. Maravich came out firing, and on the Jazz’s first possession he connected on a baseline layup, converting the three-point play when officials called a foul on Tom McMillen. Maravich kept scoring, and the Knicks had no answer. They started Frazier against him, but turned to Monroe, Beard, Burden, and even Dean Meminger in a futile attempt to slow down Maravich.

Nothing worked.

By the time Maravich fouled out with two minutes left in the game, he had tallied 68 points, the most ever for a guard at that point in NBA history. Only Elgin Baylor (who was coincidentally coaching Maravich and the Jazz that night) and Wilt Chamberlain had ever scored more in a single game. For the entire fourth quarter the New Orleans crowd stood, cheering every time Maravich touched the ball. Monroe was spellbound. “There was no way we could stop him,” he admitted afterward. “The Pistol was hot tonight, he was really going off. The thing that came to mind was that he was hitting shots from everywhere. Unconscionable shots.”⁹⁷ Holzman was also impressed. “It was a beautiful thing to watch for the fans here,” said Red. “We didn’t play well, but he was phenomenal.”⁹⁸

After losing in New Orleans, and five of their next eight, Holzman dropped a bombshell, announcing his retirement at the end of the season. “Red was done,” Haywood wrote later. “He didn’t want to coach no more.”⁹⁹ According to Holzman, he was basically fired by Alan “Bottom Line” Cohen. And to keep Reed, named coach-in-waiting two months earlier, from interviewing for other coaching vacancies, the Knicks felt they had to pull the trigger mid-season.¹⁰⁰

The Knicks went 10–7 after Holzman’s announcement, but their 40–42 season record earned them a third-place finish in the Atlantic (behind Boston and Philly) and another spring spent watching the playoffs from home and seeing Bill Walton lead the Trail Blazers to their first NBA title.

Arriving back in New York, the newly retired Holzman became a consultant who was never consulted, swept into a small office in a quiet corner of Madison Square Garden. Still, Red didn’t mind. In fact, Holzman loved retirement. “Some guys retire, their friends tell ’em, ‘You won’t like it,’ ” Red said. “I loved it. I’ve always been a great relaxer.”¹⁰¹

Without the calming presence of Holzman on the sideline, and with a rapidly aging team, the Knicks were in a rut. “This team has got to change the whole direction in which it’s moving,” Jackson said after the season’s last game. Asked if the Knicks could be successful with their current roster, Jackson pulled out a timely analogy. “Hiring five movie stars for $5 million apiece doesn’t mean a movie will be good.”¹⁰²

The 1976–77 Knicks had one of the league’s highest payrolls, led by the quartet of McAdoo, Haywood, Frazier, and Monroe. Newly installed Coach Reed further muddied the waters when he told reporters the Knicks “would be so much better off if they had a guy like Dave Cowens, who exemplifies hustle and drive. Every guy would play harder because he does.” Reed was right, of course, but every team in the league would have been better off with a Hall of Fame center like Cowens in the lineup. McAdoo, understandably sensitive to Reed’s remark, fired back. “I don’t think the Lakers and Knicks of those days that Reed … [is] talking about would be able to win as much today. The league,” McAdoo argued, “is tougher as a whole.”¹⁰³

Much of the tension among the Knicks came from unfiltered statements made to the press and published in local newspapers. Likewise, on the streets of New York, verbal posturing became an important component of the Black youth culture emerging in the South Bronx. DJ Kool Herc’s Merry-Go-Round not only provided an instrumental break encouraging dance battles but also allowed time for speaking rhythmically on the microphone. As Grandmaster Caz remembers, “MCing evolved from the DJ having a microphone to make announcements … then people started to embellish on how they said things.”¹⁰⁴ Rapping to the beat, what Caz calls MCing, originated from many sources: prison toasts, the dozens, and maybe Jalal Nuriddin’s 1973 Hustlers Convention album (released under the name “Lightnin’ Rod”).¹⁰⁵ Toasts were “violent, scatological, obscene, and misogynist,” one historian writes; in prison they had been “used for decades to while away time in situations of enforced boredom.”¹⁰⁶ Think of dirty “your mom” jokes. On the streets of the South Bronx, toasts became a competition to see who could come up with the most-obscene insults. In the Herculoids, the king of toasts was Coke La Rock who, at Herc’s first party back on Sedgwick Avenue, grabbed the microphone to shout out greetings to his friends. Over time, he began to rhyme his shout-outs (“You rock and you don’t stop!”), entirely improvisational. As with Herc, folks began borrowing La Rock’s technique, and soon MCs throughout the South Bronx were rapping as part of their performances.

Despite the coaching change, the summer of 1977 was relatively quiet for the Knicks. On a corporate level, the team was still navigating its relationship with the Nets, who wanted to move from the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island to New Jersey’s Meadowlands Sports Complex, where a multisport arena planned next to an extant horseracing venue and Giants Stadium. “New Jersey is a valuable part of our franchise territory,” Burke argued.¹⁰⁷ Commissioner O’Brien agreed. “Operation of the N.B.A.,” he reasoned, “is grounded upon the principle that teams must be accorded exclusive territorial rights.”¹⁰⁸ Ultimately, the Nets did move to New Jersey in the summer of 1977, but for four seasons they played in the RAC—the Rutgers Athletic Center—forty miles down I-95 from the Meadowlands, much to the chagrin of Meadowlands manager David “Sonny” Werblin.

With the Nets situation temporarily resolved, the Knicks turned their full attention to the NBA draft. The Milwaukee Bucks made Indiana University center Kent Benson the top pick—teams still loved big-bodied, white centers from programs like IU—while the Nets plucked Brooklynite Bernard King out of the University of Tennessee with the seventh pick.

Selecting tenth overall, the Knicks chose University of Minnesota guard Ray Williams. “This is great,” Williams gushed to reporters, “it’s the only ball club I was with since I was a kid.”¹⁰⁹ Williams, born and raised in the Bronx with his older brother Gus—then a Golden State Warrior—would sneak into Knicks games by picking up ticket stubs outside the Garden.¹¹⁰ He vividly remembered watching the iconic Knicks teams from the era of Eden and desperately wanted to be a part of the next great New York basketball dynasty.

Williams was long, lean, and muscular. “I don’t think Ray ever lifted weights,” former trainer Mike Saunders told me, “but he had a body like Adonis. He could do anything on the court.”¹¹¹ Before college Williams had led Westchester County’s Mount Vernon High to two state basketball championships. As teammate Mike Glenn informed me, “Ray was just stronger than everyone on the team. They left Ray alone.”¹¹² Little did Knicks fans know, but drafting Williams marked the first step in a real rebuilding of the team.

Summers as a New York Knick in the late seventies meant a break from the grueling schedule that began with training camp in early October and stretched to April or May. Including preseason, regular season, and the playoffs, they played at least one hundred games and traveled thousands of miles crisscrossing the country, spending countless hours in airports or scrunched into seats on commercial flights. No private jets for NBA players back then. It was easy to lose track of days or even forget what city you were in. By Memorial Day, Knicks players scattered across the country. Some left New York City for home elsewhere, and those who stayed did their own thing. Few players lived in Manhattan. Frazier had to because, well, he was Clyde. But most of his teammates rented apartments in nearby communities like Flushing, Queens (only a thirty-minute commute to the Garden), or across the river in New Jersey.

Thus, few Knicks were in New York City when, on July 13, 1977, lights across the five boroughs flickered and then went out entirely. The weather was hot outside, pushing 100°F even at 9:30 pm, so thousands of New Yorkers were hanging out on stoops or curbs when the streets went dark. At Shea Stadium, Chicago Cubs pitcher Ray Burris stopped mid-windup in his pitch to Mets third baseman Lenny Randall; Mayor Beame, seeking reelection that fall, paused mid-sentence during a speech about mortgages; Rahiem of the group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five was shooting hoops at his housing complex; and actors from the Broadway musical The Wiz broke character and chatted with patrons to pass the time in the semi-dark, hoping it was just a brief outage.¹¹³

It wasn’t. And the looting started about fifteen minutes later.

Blackout looting was “an explosion a long time in the making,” explains one historian. “Thousands of residents were angry and frustrated enough to generate an unprecedented rampage of destruction focusing on neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and public and private disinvestment.”¹¹⁴ Poor and disempowered New Yorkers were already on edge, and a loss of electrical power acted as a catalyst for action. Almost simultaneously, looters broke into Black- and white-owned businesses indiscriminately across the city, from Harlem through Brooklyn, and the Upper West Side through Midtown.

“You take your chance when you get your chance,” said a Brooklynite clutching a half-empty wine bottle in one hand and a television, stolen from a nearby store, in the other. Looters hit all five boroughs with no rationale for the destruction. It was not a political protest or outgrowth of civil rights activism, and there were no demands for change or chants from the marauders. In the eyes of at least one police officer, “A bunch of greedy people took advantage. That was it, plain and simple,” the cop told a reporter. “Don’t go with all that sociological bullshit.”¹¹⁵

In fact, the police force—or the lack thereof—was one of the biggest problems that day. Many cops ignored the callout, and those who reported did so in areas far from the looting, near where they lived in “white ethnic enclaves on the outskirts.”¹¹⁶ Nearly 40 percent of the off-duty police force refused to report, angry at how City Hall had treated them in the past. Still, cops on the job managed to arrest nearly four thousand looters while showing relative restraint. ¹¹⁷ “If we’d have shot just one person,” a Brooklyn officer said, “we’d have a war on our hands.”¹¹⁸

Within a day, the electric company had restored power to the city, calling the outage an “act of God” and blaming lightning strikes. Mayor Beame disagreed and charged the utility with “gross negligence.”¹¹⁹ The electric company later admitted that human error and systematic machine failure caused the surge.¹²⁰ Either way, the aftermath of the blackout was shocking.

Particularly hard hit was the South Bronx. Even there, despite the devastation, President Jimmy Carter refused to declare New York City a disaster area, calling the damage man-made. Carter visited in October as residents yelled “Give us money!” and “We want jobs!” at his passing motorcade. “It was a very sobering trip for me to see the devastation that has taken place in the South Bronx,” he admitted. “But I’m impressed by the spirit of hope and determination by the people to save what they have.”¹²¹ As noted earlier, the creation of the Cross Bronx Expressway in the 1960s exacerbated existing poverty in the area, prompting white flight to the suburbs, which further eroded the local tax base. Banks stopped granting loans to businesses and potential homeowners in these redlined districts, and by the mid-seventies “it was more profitable to burn than to build.”¹²²

The blackout of July 1977 also jump-started the nascent hip-hop culture emerging from the devastation of the South Bronx. Some would-be deejays scored sound systems in the looting, taking advantage of the chaos to grab an otherwise unaffordable stereo. Yet others saw in the blackout an opportunity. “I look at the blackout as the official birth date of hip-hop,” says James TOP. “It was really established in the summer of 1977.”¹²³ Rahiem agrees. “The blackout is what changed the scope of things,” he argues. “It really gave the majority of kids who would have probably been victimized or involved in gang violence in some way, it gave them an option. Gang violence began to diminish because being involved in hip-hop culture, it gave latchkey kids something.”¹²⁴ Sure, their new record players and mixers might have been stolen, but they justified their actions because the equipment was too expensive for them to purchase.

On October 12, 1977, the Knicks were wrapping up their preseason tour. After playing the Celtics in Dayton, Ohio, they were headed to Landover, Maryland, for a game against the Nets. But more New Yorkers were interested in baseball, as the Yankees were hosting the Los Angeles Dodgers in game two of the World Series. During the game, cameras cut to a live shot a few blocks from the stadium on the west side of the South Bronx where fires engulfed a nearby school. Announcers discussed the blaze several times throughout the broadcast, and journalists spun their discussion into the phrase attributed to, but never uttered by, Howard Cosell: “ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.”¹²⁵ In one Bronx neighborhood, Hunts Point-Crotona Park East, the police station earned the nicknames “Fort Apache” and “The Little House on the Prairie” because it was “the only building left standing in a desert of rubble.”¹²⁶

The conflagrations continued for years after the Bronx burned on national television. But in the early 1980s, big insurance companies decided to stop pay out claims on tenement housing in the South Bronx. “In the year before they stopped paying insurance,” one historian explains, “thirteen hundred buildings were destroyed by fire in the Bronx. The year they stopped, only twelve were.”¹²⁷

Thanks to the popularity of the World Series, and the attention paid to the area by President Carter after his predecessor metaphorically told the city to drop dead just two years earlier, the South Bronx became “an iconography of urban ruin in America.”¹²⁸ Soon after Cosell’s phantom call and Carter’s visit, this area of New York City became synonymous with depredation and decay. Charlotte Street, which runs just three blocks between Crotona Park and Jennings Street, was mostly empty lots and burned-out shells of tenement buildings, taking on an air of apocalyptic neglect. As such, the residents of this neighborhood were cast as victims to be pitied and ignored, lepers best seen from a distance on a television program warning of the ills of urban living. Why did graffiti artists growing up in the South Bronx tag subway cars? Why did young deejays spin records at Crotona Park, scratching them or back-spinning to create a catchy beat? They wanted to be a part of something bigger than themselves; they wanted to attain a measure of individualism and personal autonomy in a nation that typecast them as pitiful victims.

And so, from this burning Bronx, which city administrators pledged millions to rehabilitate, a cultural phenomenon would emerge that not only engulfed the neighborhoods around Yankee Stadium but would also spread throughout the world.

• 1975–76 Knicks
• Record: 38–44
• Playoffs: Did not qualify
• Coach: Red Holzman
• Average Home Attendance: 16,408
• Points Per Game (102.7–14th of 18)
• Points Allowed Per Game (103.9–7th of 18)
• Team Leaders:
  • Points: Earl Monroe (20.7 per game)
  • Rebounds: Spencer Haywood (11.3 per game)
  • Assists: Walt Frazier (5.9 per game)
  • Steals: Walt Frazier (1.8 per game)
  • Blocked Shots: Spencer Haywood (1.0 per game)
• All-Stars: Walt Frazier
• Notable Transactions: Traded Gene Short and a 1979 first-round draft pick to the Seattle SuperSonics for Spencer Haywood

• 1976–77 Knicks
• Record: 40–42
• Playoffs: Did not qualify
• Coach: Red Holzman
• Average Home Attendance: 15,727
• Points Per Game: (108.6–7th of 22)
• Points Allowed Per Game: (108.6–18th of 22)
• Team Leaders:
  • Points: Bob McAdoo (26.7 per game)
  • Rebounds: Bob McAdoo (12.7 per game)
  • Assists: Walt Frazier (5.3 per game)
  • Steals: Walt Frazier (1.7 per game)
  • Blocked Shots: Bob McAdoo (1.3 per game)
• All-Stars: Earl Monroe and Bob McAdoo
• Notable Transactions: Drafted Lonnie Shelton in the second round of the 1976 NBA draft; traded John Gianelli and cash to the Buffalo Braves for Bob McAdoo and Tom McMillen