10

The Frozen Envelope

1984–1985

In March 1984, DJ Run, DMC, and Jam Master Jay (Run-DMC) released their debut studio album with Profile Records. The single “It’s Like That / Sucker MCs” was a hit, and so was their self-titled album, fusing hard rock and hip-hop, a combination highlighted by their 1985 album King of Rock (the first platinum hip-hop album) and 1986 collaboration with Aerosmith, “Walk This Way.”¹ Run-DMC also marked a change in generation. As Grandmaster Caz recalls, “That was the end of our era, when Run-DMC and them came into the game.”² Run-DMC “offered a new sense of blackness,” historian Todd Boyd writes. It was “a way of being seen and, most importantly, of being heard where all other forces attempted to suffocate the Black voice.”³

On the court for the Knicks, more changes were afoot. Ray Williams, acquired a year earlier for a first-round draft pick, was let go. Worse, he signed with the hated Celtics, leaving the Knicks with little to show for the short-sighted trade. After retiring, Ray became a cautionary tale for young players in the league. By his fortieth birthday, Ray was divorced and bankrupt, having lost his New Jersey home. Soon he was living in Florida, working odd jobs, and by the mid-2000s living in his car, fishing to feed himself. Fortunately, a Boston Globe story in 2010 brought attention to Williams’s situation. “They say God won’t give you more than you can handle,” Williams said at the time, “but this is wearing me out.” Former teammate Mike Glenn understood better than most the problems players of his generation faced. “Ray is like many players who invested so much of their lives in basketball,” he said. “When the dividends stopped coming, the problems started escalating. It’s a cold reality.”⁴ Former teammates helped Ray, moving him back to Mount Vernon where he worked with kids in his city’s parks department, before he passed away in 2013.

But in the summer of 1984, the earlier trade for Williams cost the Knicks a first-round choice in arguably the greatest draft in league history. University of Houston center Akeem (later Hakeem) Olajuwon went first to the Houston Rockets, Sam Bowie ended up in Portland with the second pick (some rumors had the Knicks acquiring Bowie for Cartwright), and the Chicago Bulls used the third pick on Michael Jordan. Sam Perkins, Charles Barkley, and John Stockton followed in the next dozen picks.

“We all just cried through the first couple of rounds,” Pitino recalled.⁵ The pickings were slim by the time the Knicks were on the clock—at the end of the third round, and they didn’t add anyone who made an impact at the pro level.

“We are extremely happy with our progress this season,” head coach Hubie Brown told reporters. “It gives us something to build on.”⁶ But the Knicks management was also right up against the new NBA salary cap—which sat at $4.6 million for the following season—and could only recoup part of the salary savings if they cut veteran role players. Plus, any significant cuts would decrease their depth, which had allowed them to run their two-unit system. “That’s the depressing part,” one unnamed Knicks official admitted. “We’re not good enough yet, but we don’t have the maneuverability to improve.”⁷ Despite promising fans that changes would be made, DeBusschere was hamstrung. “I don’t think anybody fully understands the salary cap,” he said, “including the league, ourselves, and the players’ association. No one knows fully what can and cannot be done.”⁸

Hoping to bolster the Knicks roster with players who could help immediately, DeBusschere signed Dallas forward Pat Cummings and Detroit swingman Vinnie “The Microwave” Johnson, to free agent offer sheets. The Pistons matched New York’s three-year, $1.4 million offer, but the Mavericks let Cummings go to New York on a four-year, $2 million deal. After missing on Johnson, the Knicks went after San Antonio Spurs guard John Paxson with a creative offer. Paxson was offered a six-year contract for an initial salary of just $75,000 in his first year, ballooning to $500,000 each of the last five years. Additionally, he would receive a $2.5 million signing bonus and $3.5 million loan.⁹ Skirting the salary cap with a low base salary, but with exorbitant perks that might drive the value of the contract to eight figures, the Knicks hoped to manipulate the salary cap in their favor and keep the Spurs from matching. This proposal went to arbitration, and Paxson ended up re-signing with San Antonio, but the Knicks deserve credit for their creativity.

Innovative contract structures were a hallmark of the Knicks in the early salary cap era. Mel Lowell handled those negotiations and developed a flair for creativity. There were no Excel spreadsheets, and the math was still new to every franchise. “I used to try and come up with ways to beat the salary cap,” Lowell told me, laughing.¹⁰ DeBusschere and Lowell would regularly go out for drinks at a restaurant on Fifty-Ninth Street and First Avenue known as TJ Tucker’s to discuss cap workarounds. Like the Knicks, another New York city institution got a makeover in the summer of 1984. Nearly one hundred years earlier, President Grover Cleveland had dedicated the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France, following a parade that started at Madison Square Garden. Now Lady Liberty needed a little body work done; her right arm was corroded and her head slightly off center. So the statue was closed to the public for more than two years while undergoing a multimillion-dollar facelift.¹¹

As the 1984–85 season approached, the Knicks were in good position to move up the standings although, if anything, their Atlantic Division rivals improved as well. Boston remained the team to beat in the East, while the Sixers added Auburn’s “Round Mound of Rebound,” Charles Barkley, to their already potent lineup, featuring Moses Malone and Dr. J. The Bullets added high-scoring forward Cliff Robinson, while the Nets’ backcourt of Richardson and Otis Birdsong, flanked by twenty-four-year-old All-Star forward Buck Williams, was young and exciting.

Then disaster struck, giving Knicks fans a taste of what the upcoming season would deliver. During the summer, Cartwright was out jogging, trying to stay in playing shape, when he stepped on a rock. “It kind of hurt my foot a little bit,” he explains. “But being stubborn or stupid, I kept running on it.” Eventually, Cartwright saw team physician Norman Scott, who diagnosed it as a stress fracture and fit the Knicks’ center with a removable cast so he could swim to stay in shape. “I don’t know how well he swims,” Scott joked at the time, “but I guarantee he’ll swim a lot better after these few weeks.”¹²

With Cartwright out and Len Elmore (who spent one season with the Knicks) announcing his retirement to attend Harvard Law School, it looked like Webster might have to step back in as the team’s starting center.¹³ Then more disaster struck. Less than a month before opening night, Webster checked into the hospital, suffering from extreme fatigue. “He came to camp in poor physical shape,” Hubie told the Times, “and we were hoping he would play himself into shape.”¹⁴ As it turned out, it was not a case of Webster being lazy; he was later diagnosed with hepatitis and acute anemia. Like Cartwright, Webster was expected to miss the first two months. A few days later, the prognosis changed again, and the Knicks announced that Webster would miss the entire season. The Human Eraser would play just fifteen more games in his NBA career.

Despite the injuries, opening night, October 27, 1984, was an exciting one for the hometown Knicks, hosting one of their playoff nemeses, the Detroit Pistons. Behind the play of Thomas, Tripucka, and Laimbeer, the Pistons jumped out to an early lead and managed to foul out the Knicks’ big free agent acquisition, Pat Cummings, in just seven minutes of play. But New York came storming back and cruised to an easy 137–118 win, punctuated by 34 points from King.

The real story, though, was the team’s backup center. With Webster and Cartwright (and Truck Robinson) sidelined, unheralded Eddie Lee Wilkins, their sixth-round pick, got a shot. He responded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, scoring 24 points and pulling down 10 rebounds thanks to his energy and hustle. And his excitement was contagious. “The kid played with such enthusiasm that he was getting himself involved,” Pitino told reporters.¹⁵ After every basket, Wilkins busted out a dance and pumped his fists in the air, ramping up the crowd. Maybe this kid could be the second-unit center Hubie loved.

New York’s second game was less thrilling for Knicks fans. Wilkins was sidelined with a sprained foot (which eventually had to be put in a cast), leaving recently acquired James Bailey to back up Cummings, playing out of position at center. Bailey filled in admirably, but injuries were already taking their toll. The Knicks lost that second game, 117–111, to Utah, whose rookie guard John Stockton handed out the fourteenth assist and gained the fifth steal of his professional career. Twenty years later, Stockton would retire with 15,806 assists and 3,265 steals, both NBA records.

On November 8, the Knicks, with a gruesome 1–6 record, hosted another rookie sensation: Michael Jordan. Nearly twenty thousand fans packed the Garden to see the young Bull, who stole the show. As the clock wound down on the third quarter, Jordan stole the ball from Grunfeld and drove the length of the court for a one-handed dunk, tongue wagging the whole way, to extend Chicago’s lead to 23. Knicks fans knew greatness when they saw it, and gave Jordan a standing ovation, even as their team dropped to 1–6 on the season.

Things went from bad to worse a few days after the embarrassing defeat to Chicago. While rehabbing with a light workout, Cartwright reinjured his left foot, fracturing the same bone he had hurt in the off-season. The cast went back on, and Dr. Scott estimated his return as January at the earliest. Because the Knicks were above the salary cap, they could only replace Cartwright with a player earning the league minimum, and they had a hard time finding any takers. It didn’t help that one potential replacement already on the roster, Truck Robinson, was unhappy with his role. “Right now, all I want out of basketball is to get rich,” he told reporters. “If the Jazz will pay me another year, I’d be happy to play for them.” Robinson never played another game for the Knicks, or any other NBA team for that matter, finishing his eleven-year career with a forgettable twenty minutes in New York’s 105–93 loss to Houston’s Twin Towers of Ralph Sampson and Akeem Olajuwon. Hubie was happy to get rid of Truck, once the apple of the coach’s eye. “The guy’s a child,” he told the Sporting News. “He’s got to face the fact that he’s not the player he once was.”¹⁶ Hubie wasn’t done piling on his centers, either. Of an injured Cartwright, Hubie told reporters, “He’s got limitations, and that’s why he’s making $500,000 instead of $1 million a year.”¹⁷

Throughout the turmoil, one constant was King. Two days after Thanksgiving, now improved to 6–9, the Knicks hosted the Indiana Pacers. King hit 14 of his first 18 shots from the field, finishing 19 for 31, and knocked down 14 free throws to finish with 52 points, shattering the record for points scored in the new Madison Square Garden, opened in 1968. “We tried everything on him tonight,” said Pacers’ coach George Irvine, “we doubled and tripled him, but when he gets going, he can’t be stopped.”¹⁸

With King at the top of his game, the Knicks won six straight to pull their record to a respectable 8–9. Then King pulled a groin muscle and missed two weeks; the Knicks lost six of the next seven and suddenly found themselves back at the bottom of the division. With King out, the low point came in a 112–83 loss at home against the Mavericks. It was the Knicks’ worst loss in three years and set a Mavericks franchise record for fewest points allowed. Cummings had signed with New York, at least in part, because they were a team competing for a title. Now Rolando Blackman, Mark Aguirre, and Sam Perkins formed a strong, young core for Cummings’s former team. The next night, the Knicks roared back from an early double-digit deficit to the Bulls, only to watch helplessly as Jordan hit a buzzer-beating twenty-footer, the first of many game-winners in his NBA career.

On December 11, King returned to the Knicks lineup in a game against the 76ers. Despite 23 points from Moses Malone, 16 from Erving, and 7 (along with 7 rebounds) from Barkley, King’s 34 points were enough to give the hometown team the win. King went on a roll after returning from his injury. Including the game against the Sixers, King scored 34, 30, 21, 29, 28, and 43 in his first six games back, setting up a huge Christmas Day game against the cross-river rivals from New Jersey.

One of the most beloved, mainstream hip-hop songs from the late-eighties is Run-DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis,” with its music video featuring Santa Claus on a sled pulled by a dog. In the 1988 film Die Hard, the limo driver Argyle jams to the song while waiting on John McClane to take out the bad guys in Nakatomi Plaza. Less well-known today, though it was huge at the time, was another hip-hop holiday single: Kurtis Blow’s debut “Christmas Rappin.’ ” Released by Mercury Records in 1979, Blow’s rendition includes Santa joining a house party, dancing, handing out TVs and stereos as gifts. Then Blow raps, “The dude in red’s back at the Pole / Up north where everything is cold / But if he were right here tonight / He’d say Merry Christmas and to all a good night.”

On Christmas Day 1984, the New York Post published an article relaying the holiday wishes of the Knicks’ players. Backup center Ron Cavenall said, “I have my Christmas present … playing for the Knicks.” King cracked, “I wish someone would teach Trent Tucker how to play blackjack.” James Bailey also joked, “[I hope that] Louis Orr and I could exchange some pounds—a few of mine for him, which would mean less for me.” Orr, apparently not in on the joke, wished for “peace and love throughout the world,” while exuberant rookie center Eddie Lee Wilkins said, “I just want Santa Claus to bring us a win.”¹⁹

Early in their game against the Nets, it looked like Wilkins would get his wish. New York jumped out to a double-digit lead, stretching it to as much as 16 points late in the second quarter before finishing the half with a ten-point advantage. But the real story was King, who had 40 of his team’s 64 at halftime. “We wanted to hold King to 40 points,” Nets center George Johnson joked, “but not in the first half.”²⁰ Nets’ coach Stan Albeck—that old washerwoman—switched the 36-year old center onto King in the second half, reasoning that “there was no one else left on the bench to go but George.”²¹ King started to slow down, but still got to 50 in the third quarter and seemed well on his way to setting the Knicks single-game record. In 1959, Richie Guerin tallied 57 points against the Syracuse Nationals. And now, on Christmas Day 1984, King hit 19 for 30 from the floor, and 22 of 26 free throws, giving him an even 60 points. But Johnson’s height bothered King. Bernard hit just 1 of 9 shots facing the bigger man, and the Nets won the game, 120–114. Micheal Ray Richardson scored a career-high 36 for the Nets, including 24 in the second half, to ruin King’s herculean effort.

Bernard King scoring 60 points on Christmas Day 1984 is a happy memory for long-time Knicks fans, most of whom probably forget that the Knicks lost that day. For King, the individual record was far less important than the team’s record. “I’d rather score 15–20 points and win the game,” he groused afterward. “The record just doesn’t mean as much. This game should have been a blowout.”²² Still, King generally remained upbeat, even as the team around him failed to match his level of play. “We have a deficiency,” he admitted, “but I think in the second half of the year we’ll be able to turn it around. And you’ll see an improved basketball team.”²³

King was also very forward-thinking in considering how his game might evolve into the 1990s. “When I get into my 30s,” he explained, “I want to keep playing. It is important for a player to do more than one thing if he expects to prolong his career.” One thing King certainly recognized was how taller players with greater skill ranges might affect the league in the future. “There is a trend in this league toward bigger players, and I want to stay ahead of the trend. If you look at the way this league is going, you’ve got 7–4 centers shooting 25-foot bank shots.”²⁴ He was probably referring to Ralph Sampson, the second-year sensation for the Rockets. But even someone as prescient as King would have been hard-pressed to imagine players like Dirk Nowitzki or Karl-Anthony Towns, seven-footers who stretched defenses far beyond what Sampson accomplished in the early eighties.

Even with King playing at an All-NBA level, the losses continued to pile up. With a 12–22 record as 1985 began, the Knicks clung to playoff hopes; the Pacers (9–22) and Cavaliers (6–22) remained behind them in the Eastern Conference. But King was playing hurt—and then had to take time off because of a series of nagging groin and ankle injuries. And after managing only six minutes of action in a sixteen-point loss to the Bulls on January 11, King shut it down for several weeks. After a loss to the lowly Pacers, Hubie was livid, estimating that his team managed only one basket in “20 or 21 possessions” during one stretch in the second quarter. Before he talked to the press, Hubie slammed the locker room door closed and yelled at the team for a solid fifteen minutes. It didn’t help. Their January 12 loss (100–95 against the lowly Pacers) set a club record with their twelfth straight road defeat and dropped them to an abysmal 13–27 on the season. A week later, an exasperated coach Brown admitted to reporters, “It’s evident we can’t win with this team.”²⁵

After missing almost a month of action, King came back strong in early February, putting up 23 points in each of his first two games and scoring 40+ on back-to-back nights. Then, on February 16, Bernard torched the Nets for the second time in three months, scoring 55 points in another losing effort against New Jersey. As usual, King’s stat-line was impressively efficient. He took just 33 shots from the field (connecting on 19) and hit 17-of-23 free throws. He also pulled down 11 rebounds for good measure. By mid-March, the Knicks were far out of playoff contention, but King was still putting in his work. He topped 40 points thirteen times during the season—half after recovering from ankle, groin, and shin injuries.

During this hot streak, the Knicks approached King about a contract extension, and Bernard—making a little less than $900,000 per year—was open to discussions. Larry Bird earned more than double King’s salary, and Bernard’s agent, Bill Pollak, hoped to extract a similar sum from New York. Later King recalled that he had an offer from the Knicks for a five-year contract at about $1.6 million per season, a little less than Bird made but a hefty raise nonetheless. But Pollak and King decided to wait it out, expecting that league-wide interest for a player of Bernard’s caliber would only go up when the summer free agent battles began in earnest.²⁶

On March 22, again playing the Pacers, King put on a clinic, scoring 45 points and hauling down 12 rebounds to lead his Knicks to a 118–113 victory, giving them 24 wins (against 46 losses) on the season. That day, Pitino announced he was leaving New York to take the head coaching position at Providence College. Two years later, he would rejoin the Knicks as their head coach before—ultimately—having his greatest success as a college coach at the Universities of Kentucky and Louisville.

A day after Pitino made his announcement, the Knicks suffered an even greater loss. It started like a normal late-season game between two struggling teams. The 24–46 Knicks stopped booking chartered flights when the team was eliminated from playoff contention and had to fly to Kansas City on an early-morning commercial flight to make their March 23 game against the 27–43 Kings. The game was close for the first three quarters, and the Knicks clung to a one-point lead entering the fourth. Kansas City surged ahead and, with less than two minutes left, threatened to pull away. But then Orr intercepted an inbounds pass and threw the ball ahead to a streaking King, who tried to slip a pass to Wilkins near the basket. It was tipped, and in the scrum, the ball made its way to Reggie Theus, waiting at half-court. Theus scooped it up and drove for a layup. King put his head down and sprinted back on defense, meeting Theus at the rim as both men rose toward the hoop. “He didn’t have to chase down Theus,” Tucker said later. “But Bernard made the extra effort. He always did.”²⁷

As King planted, his knee popped. From the bench, Hubie said it sounded like gunfire, “like somebody shot him with a rifle,” he explained to me.²⁸ On the video, it sounds like King yells “oh shit” and then “oh God,” while Marv Albert, doing commentary for WWOR (Channel 9), simply said, “Look out … King hurt himself as he gave the foul.” Teammates and medical personnel on the Knicks bench, just a few feet from where King landed, rushed onto the court as Bernard slammed his fist on the ground in pain. Neither Dr. Scott nor Mike Saunders, the team trainer, immediately knew the extent of the injury. It was initially diagnosed as a severely sprained knee, and Hubie was optimistic in the postgame, telling reporters, “[I hope] it is not something that will be devastating for him in the future.”²⁹

With an abundance of caution, the Knicks had Bernard travel by ambulance to Lenox Hill Hospital for evaluation. There King learned he had a broken bone, a torn lateral meniscus, and a ruptured ACL. He and his agent interviewed several top orthopedists from across the country before deciding that Dr. Scott should conduct the needed surgeries to repair the damage. Forty-one metal staples held his knee together after surgery, and Bernard hallucinated about Bengal tigers thanks to a generous dose of morphine.³⁰

Publicly, Bernard was optimistic about his recovery, and his teammate (and longtime friend) Ernie Grunfeld noted that his spirits were improving.³¹ Privately, though, King was distraught. He and an old high school teammate sat together in the hospital room that first night without talking. “I just sat there in the wheelchair and cried,” King admitted. “I couldn’t handle the prospect of my career being over.”³²

In the nearly four decades since King blew out his knee, modern medicine has made great strides in treating many sports-related injuries. Today, the estimated recovery time for an ACL tear is generally between nine and twelve months.³³ But in 1985, it was a career-killer.

The Knicks lost the game against the Kings and then spiraled out of control, dropping their last eleven games to end the season 24–58. After their final game, an 88–84 loss in Milwaukee, Hubie lashed out to the assembled press. “Who can you depend on from day to day?” he asked. “Who do you go to on offense? Hell, you have no idea what he’s going to do or where he is. We only have one guy (rookie Ken Bannister) who can post up, and the guards are shooting terrible from the outside.”³⁴ For the season, Knicks players missed 324 combined games, setting a new league record (one they would top the next year). Clearly the team had to make some changes. Eight Knicks were entering free agency, while two of their star players (Cartwright and King) had suffered serious injuries. Cummings and Orr were probably their best returning players, and—while both had carved out nice careers—neither had been a good enough collegiate player to be drafted in the first round.

Suddenly there was a serious talent shortage in the Big Apple.

In the early days of the NBA, teams were allowed “territorial” selections in the draft to stock their rosters with regionally familiar talent. Beginning in 1966, the worst team in the Eastern Conference and the worst team in the Western Conference participated in a coin flip, with the winner receiving the first pick in the draft and the loser the second. In 1969, that process sent Lew Alcindor to Milwaukee while the Suns settled for Neal Walk. Five years later, Portland got Bill Walton while Philadelphia chose Marvin “Bad News” Barnes, who ended up signing with the ABA Spirits of St. Louis. And in 1979, the Lakers kicked off the Showtime Era with their choice of Magic Johnson while the Bulls ended up with Dave Greenwood.

After the 1984 NBA Draft, in which the Rockets made headlines for having lost on purpose to earn a better shot at University of Houston center Akeem Olajuwon, and two years after Clippers owner Donald Sterling admitted that his team could “win by losing” to earn a better draft pick, the NBA’s Board of Governors determined that the bottom seven teams would have an equal shot at the top slot in the 1985 draft through a lottery system.

Recognizing an opportunity for publicity, new NBA commissioner David Stern decided to promote the event as live theater, televising the draw on CBS (Channel 2 in New York City) at halftime of the first game of the Eastern Conference finals. Instead of just two teams with a shot at the top pick, there were now seven. And one of them was the Knicks.

Even as the wheels came off for the team after Bernard’s injury, the Knicks front office remained hard at work preparing for the upcoming draft. In early April, reporters got an insider’s view of the team’s “war room,” a conference room with a wallboard listing the top one hundred college seniors and a handful of eligible underclassmen. The Knicks’ big board was color-coded; players with a first-round grade were printed on an orange card, while powder blue cards designated later round options. One orange card included the name Chris Mullin, a local kid from Brooklyn who led St. John’s to the Final Four. DeBusschere admitted he was a Mullin fan but told reporters, “If there is a good big man, you always have to take him.”³⁵

In the 1985 draft, there was only one “good big man”—at least one who was a surefire NBA superstar. And it was a player whose team who had bounced Mullin and St. John’s out of the NCAA tournament that spring, Patrick Ewing. Born in Jamaica, Ewing developed soccer and cricket skills before immigrating to Massachusetts at the age of twelve. As an immigrant, Ewing often felt like an outsider and faced intense racism as a teenager. Later in life, it left him guarded and distrustful of the media.³⁶ Yet he developed into an elite athlete and signed to play collegiate basketball with Georgetown, where larger-than-life head coach John Thompson was turning the program into a national powerhouse by recruiting and developing talented centers like Ewing, Alonzo Mourning, and Dikembe Mutombo. Ewing made national headlines by dominating the 1982 NCAA tournament as a freshman (despite losing to freshman Michael Jordan and North Carolina in the finals) and then helping the Hoyas win it all two years later. Now, coming off a disappointing tournament final-game loss to Villanova, Ewing was clearly ready for prime time.

As the draft lottery approached, it was clear who would be chosen with the first pick. But the identity of the team he would land on was, of course, still up in the air. Each of the seven eligible teams was allowed to send one representative to the proceedings. The Knicks chose DeBusschere. Dave, always superstitious, brought a lucky horseshoe with him from a horse named On the Road Again and attended morning Mass at St. Joseph’s Church near his home on Long Island.³⁷ “I said some prayers, like I always do,” DeBusschere told reporters, “and then I thought, I’ll be a little selfish and ask for Patrick Ewing in the lottery.”³⁸ The seven men sat awkwardly next to one another at a long table, knowing the future of their franchise rested with which envelope Stern pulled from the hopper. All eyes were on the commissioner.

“We took every precaution with this lottery,” Stern told reporters later. “An internationally-known accounting firm, Ernst and Whitney, that handles the Miss America pageant handled it for us. Jack Wagner sealed the seven envelopes with the team logos in a room all alone. We placed them in the drum and turned the drum while I turned my head. I didn’t look at the drum until I pulled out the first envelope.”³⁹

Why envelopes? Later the league would turn to a clandestine system of ping-pong balls. But in 1985, as Brian McIntyre, then head of the league’s media relations department, remembers, “We were afraid of having the thing pop open and all the balls fly out.”⁴⁰ In fact, during a dress rehearsal, one of the envelopes did fall out of the drum. Stern was horrified at the thought of that happening on national television. So, with cameras rolling, Stern pulled out the winning team’s envelope, took a deep breath, and set it aside. Then he began selecting the remaining six envelopes one by one from the clear plastic drum, counting down the picks from seventh to second.

The first envelope Stern opened revealed the logo of the Golden State Warriors. Coach Al Attles dropped his head and smiled in disbelief. Instead of receiving one of the top two picks, as they would have been guaranteed under the old system, they now had to choose seventh. (Don’t feel too bad for Golden State. They would pick Mullin, who would later successfully team with Mitch Richmond and Tim Hardaway as “Run TMC.”) Next, Stern pulled the envelope of the Sacramento Kings—recently relocated from Kansas City—followed by that of the Atlanta Hawks. Kings owner Bob Cook and Hawks general manager Stan Kasten each sighed in resignation.

Only four teams remained: the Indiana Pacers, Los Angeles Clippers, Seattle SuperSonics, and the Knicks. On the West Coast, Seattle had recently hosted a St. Patrick Ewing Day, but their envelope was the next pulled, disappointing their representative, Coach Lenny Wilkens. In Los Angeles, the Clippers required switchboard operators to work on Sunday to field calls for season ticket requests in case they landed the first pick. As general manager Carl Scheer looked on, theirs was the next envelope Stern revealed. Now there were just two.

A CBS camera briefly showed three men side by side—Herb Simon (the Pacers owner who two years earlier had lost a coin flip that would have sent Ralph Sampson to Indy), Carl Scheer (general manager of the Clippers), and DeBusschere—before it zoomed in on Scheer, smiling in resignation, and then moved to DeBusschere, whose closed his eyes briefly, with his hands folded in front of his face. Then Simon and DeBusschere were shown at once, with a divided screen. Simon’s eyes were wide, staring intently at Stern. Then the commissioner drew the final envelope. “The second pick in the 1985 draft,” Stern began, furiously trying to tear open the envelope, “goes to …”

You could hear a pin drop in the Starlight Roof on the eighteenth floor of the Waldorf Astoria in midtown.

“The Indiana Pacers,” Stern finished. Simon stood up and then sat down again as if unsure how to move properly. DeBusschere slammed his huge fist on the table and visibly exhaled as Pat O’Brien, covering the event for CBS, said, “The horseshoe worked. Basketball is back in New York City, my friend!”⁴¹ Stern shook hands with DeBusschere and handed him the card bearing the Knicks logo. Then CBS cut to commercial. After Stern announced the Knicks pick, Ewing, O’Brien interviewed DeBusschere, who admitted to being “very nervous” but also said he was excited about winning the lottery and showing off a Knicks jersey with Ewing’s name and number, 33, stitched on the back.

Almost immediately, conspiracy theorists cried foul. Stan Kasten, the Hawks’ general manager, claimed a “high-ranking-team executive” had told him weeks before the lottery, “[Ewing is] going to the Knicks. It’s all arranged.” Ernst and Whitney, who ran the lottery, also audited accounts for Gulf & Western. Stern claimed he did not know about the connection, but could Jack Wagner, the law partner responsible for sealing the envelopes backstage, have thrown one in the freezer so Stern could tell by feel which one was the Knicks’ envelope? Likewise, the video from that day has been broken down frame-by-frame like the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination and even analyzed by professional magicians for signs of trickery. Wagner did bang one envelope against the inside of the plastic drum—was it accidental?—and Stern clearly took a deep breath before reaching in to grab the first envelope. Was he feeling guilty? “If people want to say that [the lottery was fixed], fine,” Stern said at the time. “As long as they spell our name right. That means they’re interested in us. That’s terrific.” Later, Stern would walk that back, calling accusations of a lottery fix “crazy” and “ridiculous.”⁴²

Unsurprisingly, the Ewing draft lottery conspiracy was a hot topic around the water cooler. “Hopefully this is all a coincidence,” the Dallas Morning News said, “but the NBA has put itself in a position where suspicion clouds the lottery situation. Ewing to the Knicks—there’s just something too convenient about that arrangement.”⁴³ “How could you blame everyone for thinking the lottery was an out-and-out hoax?” Peter Vecsey admitted.⁴⁴ Even Kevin McHale got in on the ribbing. “It was rigged,” he deadpanned before starting to laugh, “just kidding, guys.”⁴⁵ Hubie saw the outcome as divine providence. “It’s kind of an atonement for the incredible suffering of last season,” he said.⁴⁶ “We need medical miracles. But … it’s been a great day for the Knicks.”⁴⁷

Even other teams understood, if reluctantly, the potential value of having a marquee player like Ewing in New York City. “There is no question in my mind that it was done fairly,” the Clippers Scheer. “But I would be less than honest and candid if I didn’t say it’s good for the league.”⁴⁸ Jack Krumpe joked with reporters, “I told them how to fix it 60 days ago. You call up Ernst & Whitney and you say ‘If we don’t get Ewing you’re fired!” Then, maybe understanding that this would only fuel the conspiracy theorists, he quickly qualified his statement. “If it was fixed,” he told reporters, “I would’ve just gone to the beach.”⁴⁹

Rigged or not (that argument is not going away anytime soon), Knicks fans were ecstatic about the outcome of the lottery. “The Knicks will win the championship next season,” one fan told reporters. The Madison Square Garden box office was flooded with season ticket requests. “For two or three hours after the lottery ended,” one Knicks employee told the Times, “we received more than 1,000 calls.” Krumpe also told reporters that the team might need to “redesign some of our season-ticket stratagems,” hinting that their existing prices ($688 per seat for lower-level season tickets down to $344 for the mezzanine) might need to be increased with Ewing coming to town.⁵⁰ Even with a potential price increase, the number of season tickets almost doubled for 1985–86, skyrocketing from around 5,700 to nearly 11,000 after the lottery.⁵¹

In the Bronx, Spike Lee took a break from shooting She’s Gotta Have It, in which he played a young B-boy bike messenger named Mars Blackmon, to buy his first set of season tickets. ⁵² It so happened that on the night of the lottery his girlfriend told Spike she was breaking up with him. “I considered the error of my ways,” Spike remembered, “bit my lip. Picked up the phone. Punched the digits. Swallowed my pride. Time for commitment.”⁵³ But the number he dialed wasn’t his now-ex-girlfriend’s; it was the number of the Knicks box office. Tickets would go on sale the next morning at eight, he was told, and the next morning he arrived three hours early. Spike’s first seats were green seats in section 304 on the second promenade. Eventually he would have courtside seats. In the 1994 Eastern Conference finals, after Indiana Pacers’ guard Reggie Miller hit five three-pointers in the fourth quarter of game five, NBA fans would gain the lasting image of Miller’s throat-choking motions toward Lee at courtside.⁵⁴

Knicks fans like Lee predicted a return to greatness for their beloved team. “In New York,” Walter Leavy wrote in Ebony, “embarrassment has almost become a way of life. It’s not a situation that New Yorkers cherish. However, Ewing’s arrival signals the beginning of a new era.”⁵⁵ Surely after a decade of the team wandering the desert, Ewing would finally lead the Knicks to the promised land.

• 1984–85 Knicks
• Record: 24–58
• Playoffs: Did not qualify
• Coach: Hubie Brown
• Average Home Attendance: 11,154
• Points per Game: (105.2—22nd of 23)
• Points Allowed per Game: (109.8—12th of 23)
• Team Leaders:
  • Points: Bernard King (32.9 per game)
  • Rebounds: Pat Cummings (8.2 per game)
  • Assists: Rory Sparrow (7.1 per game)
  • Steals: Darrell Walker (2.0 per game)
  • Blocked Shots: Ron Cavenall (0.8 per game)
• All-Stars: Bernard King
• Notable Transactions: Signed Pat Cummings as a free agent