6

“Colorful yet Colorless”

1980–1981

Even after the release of “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979, hip-hop remained mostly an underground sensation, barely spreading beyond the boundaries of the five boroughs. Spyder D was from Hollis, Queens, where the center of the hip-hop world was slowly shifting. The members of Run-DMC were still in high school, but Russell Simmons (Joseph “Run” Simmons’s older brother) was a popular promoter in the city and included both Kurtis Blow (“Basketball is my fav-o-rite sport”) and Spyder D among his clients. They rapped about a lot of things but often came back to two topics they knew best: living in New York City and basketball.

Just like the Knicks, hip-hop was essentially a nonwhite production. Latino and Black young men performed as MCs and deejays, while few white people witnessed live shows. Still, Afrika Bambaataa, one of hip-hop’s earliest pioneers, had a vision. “I’ve got to grab that Black and white audience and bridge the gap,” he said. In 1981, Bambaataa performed in the Mudd Club—his first exposure to a predominantly white crowd. His popularity grew across racial lines, aided by Blondie’s hit song “Rapture” (a pop song with some rap elements … and a shout-out to Fab 5 Freddy), and Bambaataa started playing at the Roxy Club, a popular roller-skating rink and disco located in Manhattan near Tenth Avenue and West Eighteenth. The area around the Roxy was not as gentrified as it would become but even then was known as a progressive art district—not the usual venue for hip-hop artists to perform. Still, Bambaataa and others persisted, and soon, as B-boy Frosty Freeze later recalled, “the downtown scene connected with the uptown scene.”¹ Bambaataa also fused musical styles, creating “electro-funk” in the process—his song “Renegades of Funk” (not to be confused with Rage Against the Machine’s version a decade later) is the best example of this genre.

By late 1982, rappers were mixing with white fans in downtown clubs, and Bambaataa’s hit “Planet Rock” sold over six hundred thousand twelve-inch singles, many to white suburban kids enamored with this new underground sound.² “If hip-hop had depended only on the Sugarhill Gang’s breakout song, and it had not come downtown and experienced the cultural and media embrace and explosion” journalist Michael Holman argues, “it would not have happened the way it did.” “What put rap music on the map,” he continues, “was when the culture was encapsulated as a multifaceted diamond of dance, writing, song, music, lyrics, visuals, graffiti, and then presented to the world.”³

One person with a foot in both Uptown and Downtown New York City was Earl Monroe. Monroe might have been a hoopster pro in the eyes of Spyder D, but he was about to be a former pro. In the 1980 expansion draft, in which the NBA added the Dallas Mavericks, the Knicks left five players unprotected, including Monroe. The Mavs passed on the thirty-five-year-old, who never again played in the NBA. It was a sad end to an amazing career. Since retiring in 1980, Monroe has had nearly fifty surgeries, including vertebral fusion. “They done made him the bionic man!” Willis Reed joked later. “I used to ask him, ‘All that twirling you used to do, would you have done it if you knew your knees would be as bad as they are? … He thought about it awhile and said, ‘Wellllllll, yeah, but maybe not quite as much.’ ”⁴

With the expansion draft completed, and the last link to the old Knicks unceremoniously dumped, the team turned its attention to the NBA’s annual collegiate draft. New York held the twelfth pick, and everyone in the city, from fans to the team’s front office, had a single name atop their wish list: UCLA sharpshooter Kiki Vandeweghe. Kiki’s father, Dr. Ernie Vandeweghe, played for the Knicks in the 1950s before joining the air force. While Ernie was stationed in Germany, he and his wife had a son whom they named Kiki. Moving stateside to California, Kiki grew to be an outstanding high school basketball player who was smitten with the idea of playing for his dad’s old team. “I like the people in New York and I identify real well ’cause of my father,” he told sportswriters before the draft.⁵ The feeling was mutual.

Was the Knicks’ infatuation with Kiki because he had connections to the team and was an excellent outside shooter? Or was it because he represented a potential Great White Hope for an all-Black squad? It was probably a little of both.

So enamored of one another were Kiki and the Knicks that other NBA teams began to question whether to draft Vandeweghe knowing that, like Bill Bradley a generation earlier, Kiki had other options. He openly talked about attending law school, applying for a Rhodes scholarship, or taking postgraduate classes to delay his entry into the league. With the first overall pick, the Golden State Warriors passed on Vandeweghe to select Purdue center Joe Barry Carroll. Next, the Utah Jazz chose high-flier “Dr. Dunkenstein” Darrell Griffith before Boston made Kevin McHale the newest Celtic with the third pick. Adding McHale (and Robert Parish, as part of a trade that sent the first overall pick—acquired in the McAdoo-to-Detroit deal—to Golden State) created Boston’s legendary front line and the foundation for one of the greatest dynasties in NBA history.

New Yorkers grew more excited with each pick that moved Kiki and the Knicks closer to their dream scenario. Then with the eleventh selection—just one before the Knicks—the expansion Mavericks ruined everything and chose Vandeweghe. The New York crowd chanted obscenities and booed the Mavs. Kiki was distraught. “I’m a Knick fan,” he admitted. “Maybe some day I’ll play here … there’s a hope.”⁶ With Vandeweghe off the board, the Knicks scrambled, ultimately deciding on guard Mike Woodson from Indiana University. “We might have drafted Kiki if he was available,” Holzman admitted. “But Woodson has added value because he can also play the big [shooting] guard. We will concentrate on having him fit in.”⁷

Woodson, at least, was excited to join the Knicks. That summer, Mike Burke and his partner joined the newest Knick and his girlfriend on a double date to a Yankees game, where Woodson met Reggie Jackson, who joined the foursome for a late dinner at McMullen’s, “one of the swingingest and most popular pub-restaurants on the East Side.”⁸ Woodson was floored. “This is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me,” the rookie (and future Knicks coach) gushed.⁹

Other than adding Woodson, the 1980 off-season was an unremarkable one for most of the Knicks. Some players relaxed all summer, barely picking up a basketball or running farther than to the refrigerator and back. But others used the downtime to develop off the court. Mike Glenn, heading into his third season in New York, worked on Wall Street that summer while pursuing an MBA. He also started a summer camp for hearing-impaired children. Glenn’s father coached basketball at the Georgia School for the Deaf, so he had grown up around deaf kids, Glenn explained to me decades later. “They taught me sign language and the sport of basketball. They were my best friends.”¹⁰ When Knicks’ PR director Kevin Kennedy approached Glenn about a tournament for deaf schools, Glenn decided to go one step further and create a summer camp at the Mill Neck Manor School for the Deaf, located on Long Island. For the next four decades, Glenn would welcome hundreds of children and NBA players to the camp and early on earned the J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award in 1981 for his efforts.¹¹

Glenn was excited to join his teammates for training camp that fall, and expectations were high for the young Knicks team. Talented guards Ray Williams and Micheal Ray Richardson seemed destined to team up in All-Star games for the rest of the decade, while Bill Cartwright was already one of the best centers in the league and showed up in tremendous shape after dropping twenty pounds with an off-season regimen of running and lifting weights.¹² And Toby Knight, who had come out of nowhere in 1979–80 to average almost 20 points per game, signed a three-year contract extension in the offseason, which should have secured the Knicks’ core for several more seasons. All four were under twenty-six years old. The future was bright in the Big Apple.

“Training camp was long,” Cartwright remembers. “It was a month of two-a-days. So we went down to practice in Monmouth College in South Jersey. Nothing special. Stayed in a regular hotel and went to practice twice a day and ran in practice really hard. By the end of camp, you were in great shape. Training camps were different back then,” he explains. “[You] got into shape if you weren’t in shape.”¹³

But then, in a meaningless exhibition game after weeks of grueling two-a-days, Knight tore cartilage in his knee while chasing down a rebound.¹⁴ Suddenly the Knicks had lost a twenty-point scorer just days before the season began. Hoping to replace Knight internally, the Knicks turned to Sly Williams. But even if Williams, who had averaged less than ten minutes of playing time per game as a rookie, became a competent starter, the Knicks desperately needed depth behind him. So Burke and Donovan once again started working the phones.

At the top of their wish list was Campy Russell, engaged in a bitter contract dispute with the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Knicks offered Cleveland two first-round picks for Russell, but the Cavs turned them down. Instead, Cleveland traded Russell to Kansas City, who then flipped him to New York. In return, the Knicks sent one first-round pick and blue-collar big man Joe C. Meriweather to the Kings. “I was happy with it,” Russell told me of hearing about the trade, “I wanted to be with a contending team.” ¹⁵ It had been a few years since the words “contending team” could unironically refer to the Knicks, but bumper stickers found around the city in the summer of 1980 echoed those sentiments. “The New New York Knicks” one sticker read, while another predicted “A Year Better.”¹⁶

Twelve months after becoming the first team in NBA history composed entirely of African American players, the 1980–81 Knicks again featured an all-Black roster. And once again Peter Vecsey was writing about it for the Post. “At least one white, long-time season ticket holder tells me,” Vecsey wrote, that “as long as the team remains exclusively black and conspicuously lacking in charisma (colorful yet colorless) … pale faces will abstain.”¹⁷ It was no secret that NBA executives searched high and low for the next Great White Hope. In the early seventies, Pete Maravich was that guy; then it was Bill Walton, maybe Jack Sikma, and then Larry Bird and maybe even Vandeweghe. Every team wanted a white superstar because, as they reasoned, most of their fans were white and would relate more easily to a white player than a Black player. Unsurprisingly, then, the Sports Illustrated cover athlete for the 1980–81 pro basketball preview issue was the newest Seattle SuperSonic, Paul Westphal, a white guard.

The Knicks got off to a strong start to the 1980–81 regular season, winning five of their first six. Ray Williams was so excited about his team’s hot start that, after leading the Knicks to a 114–109 win over the Milwaukee Bucks, he told reporters, “I wanted this victory more than I wanted Ali to beat Larry Holmes.”¹⁸ Muhammad Ali had lost to Holmes a week earlier in Las Vegas in what was billed as “The Last Hurrah.”

Williams and New York continued their winning ways, and when they landed in Denver for a November 7 game against the Nuggets, they stood at 7–3. “I feel like I’ve been reborn,” Russell, freed from the doldrums of Cleveland, told reporters.¹⁹ The game in Denver was physical, and in the second half it quickly escalated when Marvin Webster squared off with Denver center Dave Robisch. Webster threw a left hook that connected with Robisch’s chin and then shoved an official who tried to intervene, drawing an immediate ejection.²⁰ After the game, which the Knicks won by nine, Webster’s teammates razzed him for his pugilistic performance, chanting “Ali … Ali” when he boarded the team bus. “Inside the airline terminal in Salt Lake City,” the Post reported, “Ray Williams passed the hat to raise money for Webster’s automatic $250 fine.”²¹ As it turned out, the league’s ruling was much harsher. The December 1978 punch by Lakers forward Kermit Washington that nearly ended the career of Rockets forward Rudy Tomjanovich had resulted in greatly increased punishment for fighting. So Webster, instead of $250, owed the league $2,000 for decking Robisch.

Unlike the Garden of Eden Knicks, who tended to go their separate ways after games, this new generation of players seemed to enjoy socializing with one another. A few weeks after Webster’s right hook, Ray Williams made the society pages in Jet magazine for his early December birthday bash. As befit one of the new faces of this fresh and young Knicks team, Ray and some teammates met at Justine’s in Manhattan, a Black-owned disco five blocks from Madison Square Garden on Thirty-Eighth Street. There Williams “celebrated his birthday in grand style,” which included “a soul food buffet and a giant X-rated birthday cake.”²²

The young Knicks were winning on the court and growing together as a team off it. Even the forward positions, which looked like problem areas in October after Knight’s knee injury, were becoming a strength as the combination of Russell and Sly Williams proved to be greater than the sum of its parts. “Sly and I played well together because we complemented each other,” Russell told me. “We both could handle the ball. We both could pass the ball. We both could rebound the ball.”²³ Williams and Russell were long, lanky, and athletic, able to switch to cover guards or even centers, helping the Knicks force a lot of turnovers. On the other end of the court, they rarely turned the ball over themselves, allowing the Knicks to control the tempo of games.²⁴

Sly, Campy, Ray, and Cartwright all contributed to the team’s hot start, but Micheal Ray Richardson was quickly becoming the face of the franchise. “I think I’m the leader of this team,” he told reporters. “The guys look for me to get them the ball, and I want to. I get off on passing, and they get off on scoring and you kill two birds with one stone.”²⁵ Hoping to keep their young core intact and trying to get a discount before Richardson got even bigger, the Knicks convinced the third-year guard to sign a contract extension in late 1980. He would receive a few bonuses before the three-year deal, worth a total of approximately $1 million, would kick in before the 1982–83 season. “What I completely fail to fathom,” Vecsey wrote of the contract at the time, “is why Richardson agreed to such skimpy terms.”²⁶

If Sugar was as talented as everyone believed him to be, why not hold out for a mega-deal like the one the Los Angeles Lakers were negotiating with Magic Johnson (a startling twenty-five-year, $25 million contract signed the next summer) or even something like the Nuggets had given David Thompson a few years earlier ($800,000 per year)? It was simple. Richardson wanted to be a Knick. He wanted to be wanted. And so he signed a contract that probably cost him millions of dollars. Perhaps as a thank-you for his diligence in re-signing Sugar, in December Eddie Donovan was offered and inked a three-year contract extension that also earned him a promotion from general manager to vice president. Donovan was also promised that Holzman would succeed him as GM when Red chose to re-retire.

The Knicks’ early season success brought back fond memories for the team’s Hall of Fame head coach. Sportswriters often asked Holzman to compare his team with the title winners of a decade earlier. At first, Red brushed off the questions, telling reporters that “what’s past is past.” But after being asked repeatedly, Red finally decided to answer truthfully. “This team I’ve got now has more raw talent than my other team,” he admitted. “But thinking-wise, and defensively, the old team was better.” This was great copy, but it didn’t play well in the locker room. “I’m not saying the fans should forget Frazier and the Old Knicks,” Webster told reporters. “I’m just saying ‘Look at us, we’re pretty good too.’ ” Glenn agreed. “Ever since I’ve been here,” the fourth-year guard told reporters, “I’ve been hearing about the old Knicks. We just got tired of hearing about it. It’s like having a new wife and having to hear all the time about what the old wife did.”²⁷

By 1981, Holzman was the team’s only remaining link to the old Knicks. Henry Bibby, a rookie on the title-winning team in 1973, still played in the league. But he was a bench player for the San Diego Clippers who probably spent more time chasing his three-year-old son (and future NBA guard) Mike than he did playing. Phil Jackson was still in the league, as an assistant coach with the Nets, but the other ’73 Knicks had moved on with life after basketball.

Assistant coach Butch Beard, who played for Seattle when the Knicks won their last title, might have linked the old Knicks and the New Knicks most clearly, having played in both eras and coached under Holzman for several seasons. Like many former players, Beard lamented the lack of fundamentals in the modern game and compared it to the generational gap facing America in the early ’80s, when the post-boomers came of age. Young men and women in their early twenties were in elementary school during most of the sixties and only knew about Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X because they had read about them in their textbooks. They did not remember the assassinations of those leaders, nor those of John and Bobby Kennedy. Their memories were of Jimmy Carter, stagflation, and the terror at the 1972 Olympic Games. It was a different generation. “The real problem,” George Vecsey (Peter’s brother) asserted, “is that kids today don’t have discipline. They can’t learn.” Beard told Vecsey, “In the old days, you tried to make basketball players into athletes. Today you try to make athletes into basketball players.”²⁸

Perhaps it was that generation gap, or maybe just the changing nature of professional basketball, rather than the race of the players on the court that kept fans away from Madison Square Garden. Even with the team’s success early in the 1980–81 season, tickets were not a hot item. A December 16 game against the Jazz (in their second season playing in Utah) drew barely ten thousand fans to see rookie Darrell Griffith and All-Star forward Adrian Dantley come to town. Russell and Cartwright led the Knicks that night with 22 points apiece as the team pulled out a strong 112–97 win, but the attendance figures were troubling. In the early seventies, home games regularly sold out: more than nineteen thousand fans packed the arena forty-one times a year (not including the playoffs). As the seventies progressed, attendance slowly dropped, and this was only loosely tied to the team’s won-loss record. In 1975, the 40–42 Knicks averaged over eighteen thousand fans per game, but the 1978 team won 43 games in front of around fifteen thousand per game. In 1981, the Knicks won 50 games but barely drew ten thousand per game. Sonny Werblin claimed that spring that Madison Square Garden had lost $3.7 million in 1980, roughly the amount they paid the city of New York annually. “How long can you expect a company to keep losing money?” he asked reporters, ultimately hoping to drop the Garden’s annual tax bill closer to what new Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss was paying for Inglewood’s Forum: approximately $1 million per year.²⁹

Unfortunately, the situation facing the Knicks reflected a league-wide trend that many outsiders blamed on the racial makeup of NBA rosters. Attendance across the league was down 10 percent for the 1980–81 season. And with fourteen of twenty-three teams sporting losing records by mid-December, the NBA was increasingly becoming a league of haves and have-nots. For the season, the SuperSonics led the league in attendance with over sixteen thousand per game, while Cleveland and Detroit eked out barely five thousand. In Cleveland’s Richfield Coliseum, which could seat twenty thousand, and the Pontiac Silverdome, with a basketball capacity of twenty-two thousand, the stands appeared almost entirely empty on television and sounded like a crypt over the radio.

Identifying the problems was easy. Solving them would be much more difficult. One factor the NBA had to consider was the length of the season. In 1980, teams opened on October 12, right in the middle of the Major League Baseball playoffs. During the first week of the NBA schedule in 1980, the Philadelphia Phillies beat the Kansas City Royals in an exciting six-game World Series and captured the highest television viewership in MLB history with a 32.8 Nielsen rating.³⁰ Going head-to-head against the MLB playoffs seriously handicapped NBA ratings in the early season and cost the league a prime opportunity to capture new viewers. Unsurprisingly, the Sixers—with the Philadelphia baseball team headed to their first World Series title—felt the crunch in October. “The whole city was engrossed in baseball the way they should have been,” Sixers general manager Pat Williams admitted. But not even the end of the baseball season helped his team: “Now the interest is in pro football and the Philadelphia Eagles, rather than us.”³¹

Williams blamed the loss of interest in basketball on both season start date and the perception that the NBA had lost the parity it celebrated in the seventies. “I can’t remember such a dramatic difference between the top and bottom teams,” Williams told the Times. “We have seven or eight elite teams while the others are floundering … when teams like Detroit and Dallas come into your building, it’s tough getting people to come and see them.” Speaking of Dallas, Knicks president Mike Burke blamed league expansion for his team’s decline in attendance. “We were against expansion,” Burke declared. “Nobody is thrilled about seeing San Diego.”³² The San Diego Clippers were not an expansion team—they had relocated from Buffalo in 1978—but after a 2–7 start to the season, the Clippers were tied with the Mavericks for the NBA’s worst record.

Whether a later start to the season, greater parity, or an end to expansion might help the NBA, many owners and league executives realized that one potential solution to decreasing viewership was a still-emerging technology: cable television. In New York, the Madison Square Garden (MSG) Network began showing Knicks games on pay television in 1970. But the rest of the nation was slow to catch up. Then, in September 1979, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) debuted on cable with its flagship program Sportscenter. Eventually, when cable use became more widespread and profitable, ESPN would provide twenty-four-hour coverage, giving sports junkies an around-the-clock fix while showcasing the best in pro basketball and other sports. For now, the NBA had to deal with flagging ratings on free TV. The 1979–80 NBA Finals, featuring the Los Angeles Lakers and Philadelphia 76ers, was famously preempted by CBS in favor of reruns of The Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas. Although not as well known, maybe because they lacked the flair and drama of Magic Johnson’s unforgettable 1980 game six performance, four of the six games in the 1981 finals were also tape-delayed, causing the Boston Celtics and Houston Rockets series to play in the lowest-rated NBA Finals in the twentieth century.

After the heart-wrenching assassination of John Lennon, gunned down outside his apartment near Central Park in December 1980, the Knicks managed to string together eight straight wins later that winter.³³ It was their longest winning streak since 1973 and, just like with the old Knicks, every player contributed to winning basketball: Richardson averaged 15 points per game during the stretch, Russell and Ray Williams chipped in 18 apiece, Sly Williams added 16, and Cartwright led the way with almost 22 per game. The Knicks were playing smart, unselfish team basketball, rarely turning the ball over on offense while forcing turnovers on defense without fouling. Nearly all their shots were taken either near the basket or from the mid-range, although they attempted the fifth-most three-pointers in the NBA that season (around three per game). As Holzman explained, “you don’t count on winning games with 3-pointers. You never look for a 3-pointer when you’re ahead.”³⁴ Unsurprisingly, the Clippers and Cavaliers were at the top of the league in three-pointers attempted and at the bottom of the standings. Only Boston, thanks to Larry Bird, made the playoffs by shooting more three-pointers than did the Knicks.

As the end of the season approached, the young Knicks remained optimistic about making the playoffs. Only three of their players had postseason experience, and just one, Ray Williams, remained from the last Knicks team to make the playoffs, in 1978. But it was Richardson who was on the cusp of superstardom as the season entered its final days. On March 21, the Knicks hosted the Cavaliers, led by All-Star small forward Mike Mitchell. Mitchell scored 26 points but was outclassed by the Broadway-worthy show Richardson put on for the New York faithful. Barely eleven thousand fans showed up, but those in attendance saw peak Micheal Ray, who finished with 27 points, 19 assists, 15 rebounds, and 2 steals. After the game, Mike Glenn gushed to reporters about his friend’s play. “Nothing Sugar does amazes me anymore,” Glenn told them. “He’s incredible. He reminds me of the small town storekeeper who also serves as the sheriff, the fire chief and the justice of the peace. Sugar is an incredible player, the best point guard in the league.”³⁵ Hyperbole, perhaps, given where Lakers’ point guard Magic Johnson was headed. But in 1981, Magic missed three months with a knee injury, feuded with coach Paul Westhead, and demanded a trade, missing the All-Star game for the only time in the twelve seasons before his 1991 retirement. Although Sugar missed out on first- and second-team All-NBA honors (Dennis Johnson and George Gervin made first team, Tiny Archibald and Otis Birdsong the second), Richardson had a brighter future than any of the four and might have had a better season: he earned first-team All-Defense honors and was one of only two players to average at least 15 points, 5 rebounds, and 7 assists per game. The other was Larry Bird.

After fifty wins in the regular season—the highest win total for the Knicks between 1973 and 1989—New York’s opponent in the first round of the 1981 playoffs was the Chicago Bulls. The Bulls, winners of their last eight games, were not only the hottest team in the NBA but also the tallest. Guards Ricky Sobers (6′3″) and Reggie Theus (6′7″) joined forwards Larry Kenon and Dave Greenwood (both 6′9″) and monstrous center Artis Gilmore (7′2″) to overpower smaller teams. The Knicks were better equipped than most to deal with this size, but none of the Knicks (even Cartwright, who was of a similar height) was as physically imposing as Gilmore, a muscular 240-pounder whose Afro made him seem closer to eight feet tall than to seven. Gilmore was confident that he could dominate the Knicks on the inside. “I think they have to establish another game,” he bragged. “I’m gonna be there to block their shots if they bring it to me.”³⁶ In the regular season, Gilmore averaged 18 points, 10 rebounds, and more than 2 blocked shots per game, leading the league in field goal percentage by connecting on almost 70 percent of his attempts. He rarely shot outside of five feet, but he didn’t need to. He usually bullied his way to the rim for offensive rebounds and dunks.

Game one in the best-of-three series started well for the hometown Knicks. Despite a disappointingly low attendance (14,822—nearly 5,000 less than a full house), famous fans dotted the arena. Woody Allen, taking a break from working on A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, which opened the following July, joined Mia Farrow at courtside while Ken Howard, who played fictional high school basketball coach Ken Reeves in CBS’s The White Shadow, and players from the New York Rangers, New York Giants, and New Jersey Nets held seats in the lower bleachers. When the Knicks jumped out to a 22–8 lead, the fans were loud, chanting “De-fense! (clap, clap), De-fense!” every time the Bulls got the ball. “When the Garden is rocking and the team is good,” Rory Sparrow told me, “I’m not sure there’s a better place to play basketball.”³⁷ “It was like the glory days,” mused one sportswriter. “Then it stopped. The Knicks went cold. The Bulls dominated them, outrebounded them, outshot them, outthought them.”³⁸

Most glaringly, New York had no answer for Gilmore. The mighty one finished with just 13 points on nine field goal attempts, but he dominated the interior, pulling down a game-high 16 rebounds and blocking 7 shots. “He intimidated us,” Glenn admitted after the game. Reserve forward Larry Demic saw it a little differently. “He’s a bitch,” Demic said of Gilmore, promising that the next game would be different.³⁹ Most of the blame for New York’s game one collapse, though, fell squarely on the shoulders of Cartwright. Like Gilmore, Cartwright took just nine shots, but he managed just 8 rebounds and 1 blocked shot. And, in one third-quarter stretch, Cartwright missed a layup, shot an airball, committed a turnover, and watched Gilmore swat away two other shots.⁴⁰ “Oh nooo, Mr. Bill,” Gary Myers wrote in the Daily News, referencing a recent Saturday Night Live sketch of clay figurine Mr. Bill. “Sluggo stomped all over Cartwright.” Cartwright, as usual, was unruffled. “I’m not going to lose any sleep over it,” he told reporters. “I’m just going to do what I’m supposed to do next time.”⁴¹

More than twenty-two thousand packed Chicago Stadium for game two as the Bulls hosted their first playoff game in four years. Again New York jumped out to an early lead, this time thanks to an intense full-court pressing defense used to harass the Bulls guards. At halftime, the Knicks’ lead was 14, but Richardson and Ray Williams each had several fouls, forcing them to dial back their aggressiveness in the second half. Relieved of the pressure, the Bulls found their mojo and slowly chipped away at the Knicks’ lead before Theus took over, following up a subpar game one with a sizzling 37-point game two performance, including making 17 of 18 free throw attempts. During the regular season, the Knicks excelled at limiting their fouls. Now the Bulls were living at the line. At the end of the third quarter, the Knicks clung to a seven-point lead, but free throw problems from Richardson and Williams (who combined to shoot 12 for 21 from the charity stripe) allowed the Bulls to inch closer, and Sobers’s eight-footer as time expired sent the game into overtime. With ten seconds left in the extra period and the Bulls up by one, Theus drove the lane, and his shot was blocked by Webster (replacing the ineffectual Cartwright). But the ball kicked away, and all ten players scrambled for possession; before either team could secure the ball, the final buzzer sounded. The game—and the Knicks season—was over.

Sly Williams sat in the locker room after the game, tears streaming down his face. He had a breakout season, replacing Knight far better than anyone could have expected. But the emotion of how it ended was overwhelming. Across the room, Ray Williams looked shocked, amazed that he and his team had blown a double-digit lead and lost in overtime. Only Richardson seemed to take the loss in stride. “It’s over, we can’t do anything now,” he said. “We have nothing to be ashamed of.”⁴² Holzman agreed. He looked at Donovan, who was consoling players in the locker room, and told him, “Let’s get down to working on next year.”⁴³

Would the Knicks who walked off the court in Chicago be the same ones who suited up for New York in the fall? They were a young team who had finished 50–32 but many questions remained. Could Sly, a wiry six-foot-seven 210-pounder, hold up against the league’s top power forwards over a full season? Could the Knicks afford two highly paid centers, one who specialized on offense (Cartwright) and the other on defense (Webster)? And would the Knicks open the checkbook wide enough to keep free agent Ray Williams in the Big Apple? His brother Gus had sat out the entire season in a contract dispute with Seattle; Ray was younger and more athletic, probably in line for a bigger payday. But with Richardson signed to a team-friendly, multiyear contract, did the Knicks really need another playmaking guard?

Peter Vecsey perhaps best summed up the problems facing the Knicks in the offseason. “I’ve never seen a team win as much as the Knicks did this season, yet receive so much well deserved grief from the media, and turn off so many fans,” he wrote. “Fundamentally impure players assembled by one of the most feeble, unimaginative management teams since the Pittsburgh Condors [who folded after two ABA seasons],” Vecsey continued, were “neither enjoyable nor fun to be around.” Ray Williams fired back at Vecsey. “I’m tired of all the negative press this team constantly gets,” he complained. “If you guys don’t like how we play, don’t pick on us. We didn’t put this team together. We aren’t the GM and we aren’t the coach. We just follow orders and do the best we can under the circumstances.”⁴⁴

Looking back, 1980–81 was a false spring for Knicks fans. “All the players on that 1980–81 team knew their roles,” Holzman reflected years later. “We had a good system.”⁴⁵ “They didn’t understand,” Russell told me wistfully in 2017. “Our chemistry was so dynamic it allowed us to win games even though we were not able to outrebound most teams … it was a better thing to … create turnovers and get easy baskets.”⁴⁶

Once again, with an earlier-than-hoped-for end to their season, the Knicks had their eyes on landing a big fish in the summer of 1981. One was Otis Birdsong, a young All-Star guard for the Kings who had just earned a spot on the All-NBA second team. He averaged almost 25 points per game, sinking over 54 percent of his shots, and, as a better outside shooter than Ray Williams, seemed like a perfect fit next to Richardson in the Knicks’ backcourt. To beef up the team’s front line to better compete with bullies like Boston and Chicago, the Knicks were looking at Mitch Kupchak. In 1981, decades before becoming a punchline as a Lakers and Hornets executive, Kupchak was a rugged six-foot-nine power forward. He was also white and had grown up on Long Island. That summer, both Birdsong and Kupchak were free agents, looking to sign big contracts.

While negotiating with Birdsong and Kupchak, New York traded its first-round draft pick (seventeenth overall) to the Cavaliers for veteran guard Randy Smith. Smith had been an All-Star for the Buffalo Braves in 1976 and 1978 thanks to his exceptional athleticism; one coach made him wear a weighted belt in practice so his teammates could keep up.⁴⁷ In New York, management hoped he could mentor the young Knicks guards as well as provide insurance in case the Knicks failed to sign their big free agent targets. Smith was also a native New Yorker, having grown up on the South Shore of Long Island before going to college at Buffalo State. “New York is definitely my home,” Smith told reporters, “I feel I can play 25 or 26 minutes a game and give a nice contribution.”⁴⁸ On paper, the deal made sense for both teams. New York didn’t need another rookie, and Holzman told reporters, “We felt we would never get a player of Randy Smith’s quality on the 17th pick.”⁴⁹ And the Cavaliers regained a first-round pick after trading a host of draft choices under owner Ted Stepien, which had forced the NBA to institute the so-called Stepien Rule limiting pick trading.

In retrospect, the Knicks probably wished they’d had a pick after all, as the 1981 draft was one of the best ever. Top choice Mark Aguirre would average 20 points per game over a thirteen-year NBA career, while third choice Buck Williams would be an All-Star power forward for the Nets before transitioning into an excellent role player for Portland. But the pick between Aguirre and Williams was the best of the bunch: Isiah Thomas. Thomas would become the heart and soul of the Bad Boy Detroit Pistons teams of the late eighties and in 1997 be named one of the fifty greatest NBA players of all-time. Outside the top three, Tom Chambers, Larry Nance, Rolando Blackman, and Danny Ainge (hated by Knicks fans in later years) all would have solid NBA careers. Unfortunately, the Knicks picks were forgettable. Only Frank Brickowski, a third-round choice, would play more than forty NBA games, and he never even suited up for New York after being cut in the preseason.

With only Randy Smith to show for a lackluster 1981 draft day, the Ray Williams situation took a bizarre turn. Werblin informed reporters he had inside intelligence that Williams was going to sign with the Cavaliers for $700,000 a year plus a bonus of $0.50 per ticket the team sold above five thousand per game. Based on the Cavs’ attendance in 1981, that totaled an extra $20,000 dollars per season, give or take.⁵⁰ Cleveland owner Stepien had already inked center James Edwards and forward Scott Wedman to above-market deals, so signing a guard like Williams made sense, especially since they now had Randy Smith’s contract off the books. But other owners were incensed at Stepien’s liberality. One told reporters, “He set the early free-agent pattern by offering crazy salaries, and we’re going to have to live with it. It seems that the average going price for a free agent is $750,000; some of them had been getting less than $200,000 per year.” Stepien defended his spending, arguing, “I had to induce them to come to an unglamorous market.” “I didn’t create free agency,” he insisted, “but as long as it’s there, I want to take advantage of it.”⁵¹ Werblin was adamant that the Knicks were not going to follow suit, telling Harvey Araton of the New York Post, “There is no way in the world that I’m going to pay Ray Williams $700,000 a year.”⁵²

As noted earlier, free agency arrived in the NBA in 1976, as Gail Goodrich left the Lakers for the Jazz. A few big names changed teams in the late seventies, but rules changed when the collective bargaining agreement in 1980 called for the free agent’s team to retain the right of first refusal, allowing them to match any free agent offer sheet signed by the player. Now only exorbitant contracts like those offered by the Cavs to Edwards, Wedman, and maybe Williams made it likely that players could change teams. Not until Tom Chambers in 1988 would unrestricted free agency allow unfettered player movement. And while Stepien was willing to open his checkbook to improve his team, the Knicks continued to largely rely on an outdated model of trading young players and draft choices for established NBA veterans to build their squad.

Still, Williams’s contract dispute highlighted a constant problem during Larry O’Brien’s tenure as NBA commissioner: team ownership. Stability was a real concern; between 1971 and 1982, the league had forty-five different ownership groups. As Larry Fleisher, general counsel for the NBA Players’ Association (NBPA), explained, “[New owners] buy in and take a very active role for two years or so, until the novelty wears off. Then they begin to disappear and are gone completely after four years, maximum five.”⁵³ By early 1982, some team payrolls were as much as ten times greater than they had been a decade earlier, with TV ratings on the decline.⁵⁴

O’Brien met with owners constantly to discuss potential solutions. Some of the ideas were drastic, such as a franchise merger of the Utah Jazz and Denver Nuggets, and maybe of the Indiana Pacers and Kansas City Kings.⁵⁵ More realistically, the owners, aware of the approaching expiration of the collective bargaining agreement on June 1, 1982, wanted a salary cap. But the NBPA would not agree to that without a fight. Owners grumbled about salary escalation, but they were the ones offering the contracts and signing the checks. “We have no intention of saving them from themselves,” Fleisher told reporters. “They say they’re a sick and dying industry. That’s ridiculous.”⁵⁶ To make matters worse for owners, during these contentious negotiations in which they claimed poverty, the 76ers signed free agent Moses Malone to the richest contract in NBA history, proving—to players at least—that some owners were far better off financially than they were leading people to believe. Malone’s signing galvanized players. As future commissioner David Stern explained in late 1982, “We are not at an impasse but we’re getting there.”⁵⁷

Unsurprisingly, Ray Williams was determined to take advantage of the market created by free-spending owners. So he found himself a new agent to represent him during these negotiations. “Ray wanted a black agent,” Fred Slaughter told Black Enterprise magazine, “and Gus [Ray’s older brother] referred him to me.” Slaughter was a thirty-eight-year-old former dean of admissions at the UCLA School of Law and a member of the 1964 Bruins national championship basketball team. He was also a new breed of sports agent: a Black man representing other Black men. “Clearly the white agents don’t want me to do well,” Slaughter said, “and they undercut me whenever possible. Some general managers and owners have been tougher in dealing with me than they would have been with whites.”⁵⁸ Whether or not Werblin and the Knicks played hardball with Slaughter because of his race, Fred was blunt in replying to allegations that Williams to the Cavs was a done deal, telling reporters, “Cleveland ain’t offered us bleep.”⁵⁹ Also, per free agency guidelines of the day, the Knicks retained the right to match any contract Williams might sign with another team. “They call this free agency,” Slaughter said, “but it isn’t really very free.”⁶⁰ With the two sides at a standstill, Knicks fans began to fear that Ray would join his brother on the sidelines and sit out the entire season.

And so, heading into the 1981–82 season, the Knicks were again in flux. With Williams unsigned, the chemistry the team built in putting together their best season since winning the 1973 title was in jeopardy. Would Williams be a Knick come October? Or would the team continue to try to buy a contender—maybe whitewashing the team in the process?

• 1980–81 Knicks
• Record: 50–32
• Playoffs: Lost Eastern Conference first round versus Chicago Bulls
• Coach: Red Holzman
• Average Home Attendance: 13,328
• Points per Game: (107.9—12th of 23)
• Points Allowed per Game: (106.3—9th of 23)
• Team Leaders:
  • Points: Bill Cartwright (20.1 per game)
  • Rebounds: Bill Cartwright (7.5 per game)
  • Assists: Micheal Ray Richardson (7.9 per game)
  • Steals: Micheal Ray Richardson (2.9 per game)
  • Blocked Shots: Marvin Webster (1.2 per game)
• All-Stars: Micheal Ray Richardson
• Notable Transactions: Drafted Mike Woodson in the first round of the 1980 NBA Draft; traded Joe C. Meriweather and a first-round draft pick to the Kansas City Kings; received Campy Russell from the Cleveland Cavaliers as part of a three-team trade