1

“Then I’ll Save”

1973–1975

In the Hall of Fame Lounge, up a short flight of stairs from the main lobby in Madison Square Garden, a dozen newspaper reporters held pens poised above notebooks, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the newest New York Knick. Seven years earlier, the team traded for Dave DeBusschere, who helped them win two NBA titles. Now, in October 1975, Knicks fans hoped another young veteran forward could revive the team’s flagging fortunes.

Six-foot-eight Spencer Haywood certainly looked the part. He towered over the reporters, not to mention the team officials sent to introduce him to the press. Haywood was an Olympic hero and five-time All-Star at the peak of his physical prime. A year earlier, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier almost came to blows in the lounge before their January 1974 “Super Fight II.” But on this day calm prevailed: journalists tossed Haywood a few easy questions, and he supplied the expected answers, declaring his intent to blend into the traditional Knick style.” “I’m going to study the films of the Knick games and ask questions.” Blah, blah, blah. Haywood even requested DeBusschere’s uniform number twenty-two, explaining, “I want to do what [he] did for the Knicks.” Team president Mike Burke ran his hands through his silver hair and chuckled, promising the reporters, “Spence can have anything he wants.”¹

What happened next has become part of Knicks legend. One of the reporters—maybe Sam Goldaper, covering the press conference for the Times, or perhaps Mike Lupica, representing the Post—asked Haywood what he thought about being the Knicks’ savior. The All-Star forward grinned and said, “then I’ll save.”² Perhaps realizing he’d gone too far, Haywood quickly backtracked. “Being called a savior is a pretty heavy role. We’re all saviors. My role,” he reiterated, “will be to blend in with traditional Knick style.”³ Years later, Haywood reflected on his original statement. “One or two of the Knicks seemed to feel I came off a little too arrogant,” he said. “If this team picked itself up and flew, [Walt Frazier] would be at least the co-savior and probably the senior savior.”⁴

Why did New York need a savior in the fall of 1975? The Knicks ruled pro basketball earlier in the decade, winning two NBA titles powered by six Hall of Fame players and a Hall of Fame head coach, while Madison Square Garden was arguably the most iconic basketball court in the world. Movie stars like Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, and Robert Redford sat courtside for dramatic moments like Willis Reed gamely taking the floor before game seven of the 1970 NBA Finals despite a torn thigh muscle. Even rival players wanted to play in New York. Freddie Lewis, then a member of the American Basketball Association’s Indiana Pacers, told me, “There were times that I wished I was on their team. They looked like they were living the greatest life that the NBA could offer.”⁵

The 1970 Knicks rank among the most memorable NBA champions of all-time, with dozens of books written about their first league title. But the ’73 team, which added future Hall of Famers Jerry Lucas and Earl “The Pearl” Monroe to the mix, was probably even better. “With this new infusion of talent,” reserve forward Phil Jackson remembered, “we morphed into a more versatile team than we’d ever been before. We had more size and depth, a broader array of scoring options than the 1969–70 team, plus the perfect blend of individual skill and team consciousness.”⁶ Woody Allen watched many games from his usual seat just behind the scorer’s table and believed that the ’73 Knicks “were just such a perfect blend of art and science that they fulfilled every desire the most picayune fan could have.”⁷

Picayune or not, Knicks fans worshipped the title winners long after the players retired. When DeBusschere rejoined the team as an executive in the eighties, he still answered to calls on the street of “Hey, Dave, De-fense!” with a smile and a wave. Archie Bunker, the quintessential New Yorker (as a fictional character hailing from Queens), was a huge Knicks fan and in one episode of All in the Family gave his wife Edith a pair of tickets for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Edith was not impressed, but Spike Lee, then a teenage filmmaker, would have been. In his 1997 memoir, Spike explained the passion New Yorkers felt for their team. “We’re hungry. We’re loud. We boo. We shout. We are dyed-in-the-wool, unregenerate, no flip-flopping Knicks fans.”⁸ Spike would know—he snuck into the Garden many times to cheer on the Knicks during their title runs in the early seventies, including once while thirteen years old after blowing off his father’s jazz concert to see Reed’s remarkable game seven performance.⁹

But there was no bigger Knicks fan in the early seventies, at least as far as it helped his political aspirations, than New York City mayor John Lindsay. Lindsay was Gotham’s answer to John F. Kennedy: young, good-looking, and ambitious. Sure, he was probably not as popular as DeBusschere, Reed, or the rest of the Knicks, but who was? And sure, he let the city spiral toward bankruptcy by expanding city services even as the local tax base eroded, but he still won re-election in 1969. In 1972, he ran for the presidency but abandoned the race during the primaries amid accusations of neglecting city business while traveling to solicit votes. There was no better way to rebuild community goodwill than by hitching his wagon to the “Garden of Eden” Knicks.

And so, on May 15, 1973, Lindsay hosted a celebration at City Hall Plaza, presenting the title-winning players and coaches with diamond jubilee medals commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the formation of New York City. “What better symbol,” the Times asked, “than the five-man-team-minded Knicks could there be to celebrate the anniversary of the five-borough consolidation.”¹⁰ Lindsay also earned a few laughs in his proclamation, citing his own unsuccessful presidential campaign as proof that “it’s not so easy to win on the road.”¹¹

All in all, 1973 was a magical year for Knicks fans. Future Knick Mike Glenn dubbed them “America’s team” because of “how they shared the ball [and] moved the ball.”¹² Longtime fan George Lois said they brought a “romance to [the game], the pure love of an unusual team that basketball hadn’t seen before,” wistfully adding, “you didn’t have to think too much about Richard fucking Nixon.”¹³ In fact, Watergate hearings started just two days after Lindsay’s celebration, and Nixon would resign shortly after the 1973–74 NBA season.

In the spring of ’73, there was no reason for fans to believe that they were nearing the end of the Knicks’ Golden Age. Sure, some journalists joked that the team was made up of basketball’s senior citizens, better suited for canes than championship rings. But with minimal roster turnover and continued good health, the Knicks should have remained the team to beat for at least a few more seasons.

Then DeBusschere dropped a bombshell.

In June, DeBusschere announced that the 1973–74 season would be his last and that, after retiring, he would run the American Basketball Association’s New York Nets. The ABA, founded six years earlier, was emerging as a legitimate challenger to the NBA, and Nets forward Julius Erving, Dr. J., was a budding superstar making headlines in New York newspapers for his high-flying performances. Was this a conflict of interest? DeBusschere didn’t think so. “The Knicks still will be my main job,” he told reporters. “But I’ll be concerned with the Nets the way most people are concerned about their investments in the stock market.”¹⁴ It was a bad comparison; at the time, the stock market was in one of the worst downturns since the Great Depression and, perhaps more importantly for Knicks fans, the team lacked replacement options for their All-Star forward.

The Knicks remained a talented bunch heading into the season. At guard, Monroe and Frazier (both twenty-eight) were entering their physical primes. Monroe was a Philadelphia playground legend nicknamed “Thomas Edison” (for his inventiveness) in addition to “Black Magic” and “Earl the Pearl.” He had deked and spun his way to two All-Star appearances with the Baltimore Bullets—teammate Ray Scott proclaimed that “God couldn’t go one-on-one against Earl Monroe”—before a shocking 1971 trade sent the Pearl to the Big Apple, where he gamely accepted a secondary role.¹⁵ “It took a little while for Clyde and I to click as a tandem,” Monroe admitted later.¹⁶ But by 1973 the Rolls-Royce backcourt was firing on all cylinders.

Forwards DeBusschere and Bill Bradley were a little older—thirty-three and thirty respectively—but both were named to the 1973 All-Star team. The Knicks knew DeBusschere was retiring, and Bradley’s future was always up in the air; he played on a series of one-year contracts, and rumors of a congressional run made the rounds every off-season. Future Hall of Fame centers Jerry Lucas and Willis Reed had combined to average 21 points and 16 rebounds during the championship season, despite struggling with injuries, and rounded out the team’s top six. The Knicks and their fans were hopeful they could put together another title run.

Patrolling from the sideline, fifty-three-year-old Red Holzman was one of the best coaches in the game. On defense, Red reminded his players to “see the ball,” and on offense, to “find the open man.” He had joined the Knicks as an assistant coach in 1958 and had 299 career wins as head coach going into the 1973–74 season. Red’s low-key persona perfectly fit the veteran squad. Jack Ramsay, a fellow NBA coach, explained, “Red would come into your building, kick your ass, and tell the local media what a great job you were doing.”¹⁷ Or, as one journalist remembered, “someone once asked Holzman what he would consider a real disaster.” Red thought for a second and said, in a nasally New York deadpan, “Coming home and finding we have run out of scotch.”¹⁸ The old Knicks also knew where not to drink on road trips. According to Bradley, Red had three rules: “See the ball, hit the open man, and if you guys want a drink, go someplace else—the hotel bar is mine.”¹⁹

Holzman’s Knicks were led by Reed, the team captain who won the 1970 MVP award, but by 1973 the captain was no longer the Knicks’ best player. That honor belonged to Frazier. Nicknamed Clyde because of his affinity for a style of hat made famous by Warren Beatty in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, Frazier was a powerful point guard—six foot four and nearly two hundred pounds—whose lockdown defensive skills and quick hands earned him seven straight All-Defense awards. “Clyde,” teammate Bill Hosket joked, “is the only man who can strip a car while it’s going forty miles an hour.”²⁰

Frazier also had style in spades. Decked out in a crushed velvet suit and platform shoes, he would “pat down his ’burns” and “mash down his ’stache” before making his grand entrance into a party.²¹ Clyde rarely drank alcohol but loved hanging out at hip joints like Smalls Paradise and regularly closed them down at three or four in the morning.²² Frazier, who was married for two years while in his early twenties, was one of New York City’s most eligible bachelors for much of the seventies. In 1975, Jet magazine interviewed Clyde after he told reporters he admired Italian actress Sophia Loren; he promised readers, “I dig Black girls more.”²³

On the court, Clyde was just as cool. “The louder the Garden got,” Spike Lee remembers, “the calmer—and quicker—Frazier became.”²⁴ Clyde seemed to play at the same speed all game, picking his spots carefully. He would launch his turnaround jump shot a half-inch above an opponent’s outstretched fingertips and steal the ball when the dribbler glanced away for a split second. Whether or not Clyde was the best guard in the NBA was debatable; that he was the best New York Knick was not.

The Knicks kicked off the ’73–74 season with an opening-night win over the Detroit Pistons, giving Holzman 300 for his Knicks career. But the team struggled over the next several weeks, including an embarrassing 85–69 loss to the Chicago Bulls, their lowest point total since the NBA had introduced the shot clock twenty years earlier. Fans unfortunate enough to witness the event in person loudly booed.²⁵ At least those attending the game missed the latest news; Watergate’s “Saturday Night Massacre” dominated broadcasts that evening, as both the attorney general and assistant attorney general resigned rather than follow Nixon’s order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor.

A few days later, the boobirds were out again as the Knicks lost to the Capital (formerly Baltimore) Bullets, one of their biggest rivals. After the game, a frustrated Reed, who hobbled around for sixteen ineffectual minutes off the bench, was uncharacteristically blunt. “The talent is here,” he said, “but you wonder what the hell is going on.”²⁶ Knicks fans, rarely shy about expressing their emotions, were also curious about what was going on. “They’re playing like they don’t care,” one fan complained.²⁷ Sure, the old Knicks never finished a season 82–0. But not seeing the ball on defense? Missing the open man on offense? That just wasn’t the Knicks way.

Given the fans’ pessimism, it sometimes seemed like the Knicks never won any games in the fall of 1973. But by the time the calendar turned over from 1973 to 1974, the team was 23–16. There was also some levity for Knicks fans over the holidays: during one December game “play was delayed briefly in the fourth quarter when a husky spectator in high spirits wandered onto the court, grabbed the ball and took a hook shot that missed. He spilled popcorn over the court while shooting and then fell down while chasing the ball.”²⁸

If any Knick was in high spirits that winter, it was DeBusschere, who was excited about playing in Detroit for the last time. He had been born and raised in a blue-collar household on the east side of the city and also been two-sport star at the University of Detroit. After college he signed with both the NBA’s Pistons and Major League Baseball’s Chicago White Sox, pitching professionally for three seasons before hanging up his cleats to focus full-time on hoops. In 1964, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, Detroit named DeBusschere their player-coach, making him the youngest head coach in NBA history. Four years later, the Pistons traded DeBusschere to the Knicks, but the Motor City remained home to him. When the Knicks visited the Pistons on February 1, 1974, more than eleven thousand fans packed Cobo Hall to see their hometown hero one last time. New York lost, but after the game DeBusschere received telegrams from dozens of well-wishers, including one from the White Sox scout who signed him to his first baseball contract more than a decade earlier.²⁹

DeBusschere was also a huge star in New York City. Newly elected Abe Beame, who rose through the ranks of Tammany Hall to become the city’s first Jewish mayor, proclaimed April 26, 1974, “Dave DeBusschere Day.” “We express our admiration,” Beame told DeBusschere during the ceremony, “for the skills you developed on the baseball court.” The crowd laughed at the misstep, and the diminutive mayor quickly corrected himself: “the basketball court.”³⁰

The Knicks finished the 1973–74 season with the second-best record in the Eastern Conference and, for the sixth straight season, met the Bullets in the playoffs. The Knicks won, their fifth victory in that stretch, and earned the right to play another hated rival—the Boston Celtics—for a chance to go to the NBA Finals. To win the ’73 title, New York had ruined the best regular season in Celtics history.³¹ Now Boston wanted revenge.

CBS nationally televised the first game of the Eastern Conference Finals on Easter Sunday, April 14. The game was embarrassingly one-sided. John Havlicek scored 25 points and Dave Cowens chipped in 16 as the Celtics cruised to a 113–88 victory. Perhaps fearing another blowout, CBS executives decided to televise the Western Conference Finals on April 16 instead of the rematch between Boston and New York. They chose wisely; the Celtics won by a dozen.

Game three was an emotional roller coaster for Knicks fans. DeBusschere played gamely through a pulled abdominal muscle, and Frazier contributed another classic playoff performance, tallying 38 points, 10 rebounds, 4 assists, and 3 steals to help the Knicks to an important win. But after the game, Jerry Lucas announced his retirement. Once half of a feared two-headed center monster (with Reed), Lucas, a prodigious intellectual who claimed to have memorized the Manhattan phone book and aspired to be the “country’s best known magician,” contributed just 2 points and 0 rebounds in the Knicks victory.³²

Game four followed an all-too-familiar pattern; New York kept the game close early, but Boston pulled away late. It would prove to be the last game DeBusschere, Lucas, or Reed would ever play in Madison Square Garden.

Headed to Boston for game five, the Celtics were clearly in control of the series. Leading 3–1, in a best-of-seven series, against a depleted Knicks team, Boston felt good about its chances to make the finals. Reed did not play (no last-minute heroics this time), Lucas did not score, and DeBusschere managed only one basket in sixteen minutes as Boston cruised to another double-digit win. Weeks later the Celtics won their twelfth NBA title after defeating Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the Milwaukee Bucks.

After losing to the Celtics, New Yorkers uttered the common refrain: we’ll get ’em next year. But in hindsight, the 1974 playoffs marked the end of the Golden Age. “We knew that was it,” Frazier admitted later. “We’d had our run.”³³ Decades after losing to Boston, Phil Jackson retained a strong emotional connection to that final series together. “I remember sitting in Logan Airport with my teammates after that loss,” Jackson wrote, “and feeling as if our once-glorious dynasty had come to an end. Nothing was the same after that.”³⁴

Some Knicks fans bemoaned the end of an era, and others looked ahead to the next year, but many New Yorkers had more pressing concerns than basketball. In the 1950s, city planner Robert Moses proposed the Cross-Bronx Expressway, displacing thousands of residents to create an eight-mile-long thoroughfare.³⁵ The area bisected by the Cross-Bronx, and the surrounding neighborhoods, slumped into an economic depression as families were forcibly evicted or reduced to living in poverty. During the sixties, this area—much of it encompassing the South Bronx—gradually fell into disrepair. “It happened so slowly,” one longtime resident remembered, “that I wasn’t even aware of changes until one day I decided to take a walk around the block and discovered we had no block. Then I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood and found that we had no neighborhood.”³⁶

By the time the Knicks made their title runs in the early seventies, residents of the South Bronx earned half of what other New Yorkers made, suffered disproportionately from malnutrition and infant mortality, and witnessed a resurgence in gang activity that was, at least in part, race-based: Black gangs battled their Latinx counterparts for racial supremacy and street credibility.³⁷ In 1973, Moses admitted, “This Bronx slum and others in Brooklyn and Manhattan are unrepairable. They are beyond rebuilding, tinkering and restoring. They must be leveled to the ground.”³⁸ Residents responded bitterly. As Luis Cedeño (better known as DJ Disco Wiz, the self-proclaimed first Latino hip-hop deejay) recalled, “the politicians treated the Bronx and the people in it as disposable.”³⁹

Gangs were a part of the fabric of life in the South Bronx and, for many young men and women, served as surrogate families, providing structure for runaways or children from broken homes.⁴⁰ As one member of the Savage Skulls explained, “We like to stay together … that’s the only way we can survive out here, because if we all go our own ways, one by one, we’re gone.”⁴¹ Violent turf wars erupted throughout South Bronx neighborhoods as the Savage Skulls battled the Savage Seven, Black Spades, and dozens of other factions for territory and social status. At their peak, more than three hundred gangs claiming over nineteen thousand members ruled the city streets.⁴²

But even as gang activity increased, a new type of crew was emerging that marked territory in a less violent, if no less controversial, manner. In the summer of 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon; hippies invaded a sleepy town upstate for a music festival dubbed Woodstock; and in Washington Heights, a teenager named Demetrius with no gang affiliation was bored. Demetrius bought a few cans of spray paint and scrawled his nickname (Taki) and street number (183rd) on light poles and subway stations around town. Two years later, Demetrius was still at it, and the Times published an article about the “art” of “TAKI 183.”⁴³

Following TAKI 183’s lead, groups of graffiti artists began staking out the best spots to paint their signatures (“tags”) on open surfaces throughout the five boroughs. TAKI 183’s simple, single-colored signature was superseded by elaborate scrawls, instantly recognizable to fellow artists. Soon graffiti marked nearly every subway car in the city, causing Mayor Lindsay to adopt an anti-graffiti bill in March 1973. Six months later, just before Beame replaced Lindsay in Gracie Mansion, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) completely repainted its 6,800-car fleet, even though clean cars provided would-be artists with a beautifully blank canvas.⁴⁴

When budget cuts gutted city services in 1975, sanitation suffered. Striking workers allowed nearly sixty thousand tons of garbage to accumulate across the boroughs.⁴⁵ But graffiti was an even bigger eyesore to many administrators, who saw it as a stark reminder of the disorder plaguing their city. New York spent millions trying to cover up spray-painted buildings and subway cars, even as graffiti tags became increasingly artistic, and elaborate murals soon urged New Yorkers to reimagine what constituted art.⁴⁶ Some New Yorkers bemoaned the lawlessness and berated city officials for not policing the rampant vandalism.⁴⁷ But fans of graffiti saw beauty in a subway car painted by artists like PHASE 2 with his trademark bubble letters.

Little did they know it at the time, but artists like TAKI 183 and PHASE 2 were pioneering a new urban youth culture. New York City was divided by ethnicity and social class; graffiti art, transported by subway cars throughout all five boroughs, transcended traditional boundaries.

In the summer of 1974, many New Yorkers saw spray-painted subway cars as a nuisance and knew nothing of the musical sensation that would soon join graffiti art to create a new, Black aesthetic. What they did know, however, was that the Knicks might be in trouble.

DeBusschere and Lucas were gone, but the team hoped Reed could hobble through one more season. After working out all summer to coax his body into playing shape, however, the captain announced his retirement in September.⁴⁸

In 1974, NBA free agency was still two years away, so the Knicks could not sign top players from other teams to replenish their suddenly depleted frontcourt. Instead, they hoped to find help through the NBA Draft. That June, the Knicks connected with the other seventeen NBA teams via conference call to choose top collegiate players. UCLA’s seven-foot, redheaded, hippie center Bill Walton was everyone’s consensus number one pick, landing in Portland to play for the Trail Blazers. Unhappy with the players available by the time their pick rolled around, the Knicks traded their top draft choice to the Chicago Bulls for Howard Porter, who would last just half a season in New York. In the sixth round, New York chose Terry Mikan, the son of legendary Minneapolis Lakers center George Mikan. Terry would never play an NBA game, but Holzman joked of the Knicks’ pick, “You never pass up a chance to draft a Mikan.”⁴⁹

Entering training camp that fall, the Knicks hoped third-year center John Gianelli could replace at least one of the three lost frontcourt Hall of Famers. Gianelli had attended Pacific University and, with his “Shirley Temple-like curls and long sideburns,” looked every bit the laid-back West Coast dude.⁵⁰ He tried lifting weights after college but told reporters, “The weights and I just didn’t get along. It’s hard work and boring.”⁵¹ Still, he pushed himself during the ’74 offseason and looked good in camp. Holzman, at least, was thoroughly impressed. “We thought we had the next Bill Russell,” he later said.⁵² But when Gianelli told reporters “I don’t expect basketball to be my lifetime career. It fills the void now,” it was clear he was no Russell (or Reed, Lucas, or DeBusschere).⁵³

With Gianelli manning the middle, Holzman’s Knicks clung tenuously to third place in the Atlantic Division in late 1974, sporting a 19–15 record at the end of the year. Yet Holzman feared their modest success was unsustainable. He lengthened practice times and required players to watch hours of game film in a vain attempt to recapture the unselfish play that had been the hallmark of his championship-winning teams. Slowly, Red had to abandon the free-flowing offense emphasizing ball movement (“find the open man!”) and relied more and more heavily on the individual creativity of the Rolls-Royce backcourt.

“We just aren’t getting enough scoring out of our frontline,” Frazier complained to reporters. “We got nothing up front. No rebounds. No points. No nothin’. There isn’t anybody who can win with a guard offense.”⁵⁴

But if any backcourt player could carry his team, it was Clyde. On January 2, 1975, Frazier tallied 32 points, 7 rebounds, 6 assists, and 6 steals in a win over the Phoenix Suns. Two days later, the Cleveland Cavaliers traveled to New York and, with seven seconds left, led by one. Everyone in the Garden knew the ball was going to Frazier. It didn’t matter. His twenty-foot jump shot swished through the net as time expired to give New York a thrilling 103–102 win.

In February, Clyde traded his Knicks orange and blue for a gaudy purple uniform to team up with a dozen fellow Eastern Conference players for the annual NBA All-Star Game. For the first time in league history, fans voted for All-Star starters, and Frazier finished second in overall votes, earning a spot on over ninety-one thousand ballots (a few thousand shy of high-scoring Buffalo Braves center Bob McAdoo).⁵⁵ Monroe started alongside Frazier and helped the East to a 108–102 victory, which earned Frazier, on the strength of his 30-point performance, All-Star MVP honors. There was no longer any doubt; Clyde was the best guard, and one of the best players, in the entire NBA.

Lost in the rise of Frazier to superstardom was a changing of the guard in the changing room. NBA locker rooms in the early days of the league were like clubhouses: players smoked, drank, and might as well have put up a sign reading “No girls allowed.” But in January 1975, two female reporters were granted access to the locker rooms at the National Hockey League All-Star game. A month later, Jane Gross, a reporter for Newsday, entered the Knicks locker room for the first time. Some of the players were shy, or at least respectful, covering themselves with a towel. Others “didn’t care,” Knicks ball boy Keith Blauschild told me, “almost like they didn’t want them there.”⁵⁶

Returning from the All-Star break and growing used to having female reporters in the locker room, teams began to settle into a pecking order in the Eastern Conference. The Bullets and Celtics led their respective divisions, Buffalo was hot on Boston’s heels in the Atlantic, and the Knicks and the Houston Rockets won about as often as they lost. While playing .500 ball marked a step forward in Houston, where fourth-year players Rudy Tomjanovich and Calvin Murphy were just entering their primes, New Yorkers saw it as unacceptably mediocre. Hoping a roster shakeup might pull the team out of its rut (this would become a recurring theme), the Knicks traded reserve guard Henry Bibby to New Orleans for center Neal Walk and guard Jim Barnett.

Trading Bibby for Walk and Barnett dramatically transformed the Knicks’ locker room; something like swapping out lite beer for moonshine. Bibby, whose son Mike would go on to a fourteen-year NBA career, made the most of his athletic talent. Henry’s toughness and headiness served him well in a long and successful playing, and later coaching, career.⁵⁷

Barnett, nicknamed “Crazy Horse,” could not have been more different. Sporting wavy hair, long sideburns, a bushy moustache, and a perpetually mischievous grin, Crazy Horse was like a grown-up Dennis the Menace who fully embraced his wild side. “Two years ago between playoff games,” he told reporters, “I went 70 feet up an oak tree in the forest where we live, sawing off a limb with a chainsaw.” He shrugged. “I like to live dangerously.”⁵⁸ Tales of Barnett’s exploits are Bunyanesque; he punted a football into the third tier at Oakland Coliseum, spent a road trip sleeping in the luggage rack of a bus, and once tossed around lit firecrackers during practice.⁵⁹ On the court, Barnett was just as reckless. “I’m just Jim Barnett and that’s how I play,” he explained, “I pick up fouls and don’t always see the open man because my head is down. But I can’t change.”⁶⁰ Not quite the Knicks way.

Walk was another odd duck. In 1969, a coin flip between the Bucks and Suns sent Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to Milwaukee and Walk to Phoenix. Despite the pressure of being the-guy-picked-after-Kareem, Walk flourished in the Arizona desert and peaked in his fourth season, averaging 20 points and 12 rebounds per game. Walk stood six foot ten, wore his hair in an unruly mop, kept a frizzy black beard, and might hold the unofficial league record for most body hair. Like Bill Walton, the NBA’s newest sensation, Walk embraced vegetarianism and the freedom of the counterculture. “I liked being back here in New York City,” Walk said later, “for two days. That’s all I can take. Personally I enjoy being outdoors, seeing blue skies and tall mountains.”⁶¹ After one game, Holzman saw Walk getting dressed and noticed that he pulled on his blue jeans without putting anything on first. “No underwear, huh?” Red asked. Walk looked at him and said, “Nonfunctional, Red. Nonfunctional.”⁶² Unlike Barnett, Walk was not known for his fiery play. “He has become a latter-day flower child,” Boston sportswriter Bob Ryan would mock in 1975, “whose competitiveness is in question.”⁶³

Reporters asked Holzman about his new players. The old coach shrugged and responded, in a thick New York accent, “What the hell, all trades are a gamble.”⁶⁴

Approval for the Bibby trade came from Holzman’s boss, Knicks president Mike Burke, who had recently succeeded the legendary Ned Irish in the role. Irish founded the Knicks in 1946 and, as Harvey Araton explained, “was arguably more powerful than the league commissioner” in pro basketball.⁶⁵ But by the mid-seventies, Irish had served as team president for almost thirty years and was burnt out. “It’s not fun anymore,” he complained to reporters. “Lawyers … agents … players’ associations … suits … countersuits … you get a little tired of it.”⁶⁶ Irish stayed on as an honorary chairman until he passed away in 1982 but provided little input on player or personnel decisions after Burke arrived on the scene.

Irish was an institution in New York City, but if anyone could follow that act, it was Burke. Burke was a renaissance playboy who wore his silver hair long and favored plaid turtlenecks or dress shirts unbuttoned to the navel. Hey, it was the seventies.

Before coming to the Knicks, Burke had, among many other endeavors, run the New York Yankees with George Steinbrenner. Unsurprisingly, Burke’s partnership with the notoriously difficult Steinbrenner was short-lived, and he joined the Knicks a few months after it dissolved. Initially Burke ran Madison Square Garden, giving him oversight of the main arena as well as a smaller five-thousand seat venue and a rotunda. Each year, hundreds of events took place on site; in one three-day span under Burke, the Garden hosted an Ali-Frazier fight, a Knicks-Celtics game, and a Bob Dylan concert. But Burke’s top priority was stopping the Knicks’ on-court free fall. “A championship team had disintegrated,” Burke explained later, “its holdovers were in decline, and I knew even less about basketball than baseball.” Maybe most problematically, at least for Burke, “the magic had fled the court at Madison Square Garden.”⁶⁷

The Madison Square Garden Burke inherited was the fourth building with that name. The first, located at the corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-Sixth (Madison Square) was originally run by P. T. Barnum as the pompously named “Monster Classical and Geological Hippodrome” before the Vanderbilt family bought the property in 1879 and renamed it. A decade later, this Madison Square Garden was demolished and a new structure put in its place, featuring an eight-thousand-seat arena and the world’s largest indoor swimming pool. By the 1920s, Manhattan needed an even larger venue to host boxing matches promoted by the legendary Tex Rickard, and the Madison Square Garden name relocated north to the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-Ninth Street. In 1946, the Knicks played their first home game in that arena, a 78–68 loss to the Chicago Stags; twenty-two years later, they beat the Philadelphia 76ers in their final game at “Garden III” before the “New Garden” opened in February 1968.⁶⁸ The New Garden (also known as “Garden IV”—today just Madison Square Garden) opened about halfway between Madison Square and Garden III, above Penn Station between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and 33rd and 31st Streets, standing thirteen stories tall.⁶⁹ Fittingly, Walt Frazier scored the Knicks’ first points in the New Garden, helping the team to a 114–102 win over the San Diego Clippers as the team embarked on its garden of Eden era.⁷⁰

Trading for Walk and Barnett, Burke hoped, would help the team recapture the magic of these early days of the New Garden. But the trade did little to stop the Knicks’ decline, and the team dropped five games in a row and eight of their next ten. By the end of February 1975, it was becoming increasingly clear that shuffling bench players was not enough of a shakeup to make a real difference. And so, in a move defined as “a separation of the two functions,” Burke relieved Holzman of his personnel decision-making duties.⁷¹ Red would stay on the bench to coach the players, but Buffalo Braves general manager Eddie Donovan, the architect of New York’s Golden Age, Garden of Eden title-winning teams, would return to help Burke negotiate trades and make draft choices.⁷²

In March 1975, the race for the final two playoff spots in the Eastern Conference was heating up. Despite their losing streak, the Knicks remained in the hunt; with five games remaining, New York, at 37–40, trailed Cleveland and Houston by a single game in the standings. The Knicks won their next two, setting up an important game against the Cavaliers. The game set an NBA attendance record as 20,239 fans packed into the Coliseum at Richfield, the Cavs’ brand-new, state-of-the-art suburban arena. The Knicks led by four at halftime, but Cleveland guard Jim Cleamons scored 17 second-half points, hit a key free throw, and stole the ball from Monroe as time expired to secure a Cavs win, sending the Knicks to the brink of elimination from playoff contention.

With their loss to Cleveland, New York needed a miracle. Not only did they have to beat a very good Buffalo team, they also needed the mediocre Kansas City–Omaha Kings to upset the surging Cavs. The first half of their own game was a disaster, but a 14–0 run in the third quarter gave the Knicks a lead they never relinquished. Their season now hinged on a single game that they had to helplessly watch play out on television.

Holzman tuned into the Kings-Cavs game on a small black-and-white television in his office, nervously smoking a stogie and knocking back scotch while wringing his hands and sweating through his blue Oxford shirt. Monroe entirely avoided watching or listening to the game and instead attended a showing of The Wiz, a new Broadway musical with an all-Black cast featuring Brooklynite Stephanie Mills in the role of Dorothy. Frazier, whose reputation as a man about town hid his natural introversion, hosted a rare party (“I’m a partygoer, not a partygiver”) in his forty-fifth-floor apartment at the Excelsior, located on Fifty-Seventh Street at Second Avenue. Several Knicks brought wives or girlfriends to watch the game on Clyde’s television set. Frazier was too nervous to sit, instead pacing around his bedroom, which featured shag carpeting, a huge circular bed with a custom-fit white mink blanket and matching round ceiling mirror (complete with “Clyde” sandblasted on one pane).⁷³

In Frazier’s living room, Knicks players watched helplessly as Cleveland had the ball, down by one point, with three seconds left. An eternity. The Cavs caught the inbounds pass, but Kings swingman Ron Behagen (born and raised in the Bronx) blocked their last-second shot attempt, sending the Knicks to the playoffs for the ninth straight season. Frazier and his teammates erupted in cheers, and the next day the host was still ecstatic. “This is the first party I’ve ever thrown,” he said. “I guess I couldn’t have picked a more perfect time.”⁷⁴ But even the usually cool Clyde admitted, “I can’t take many like that!”⁷⁵

Sizing up the 1975 playoffs, two things were clear: the league’s two top teams played in the Eastern Conference, and neither of them was the Knicks. At 60–22, the Celtics were defending NBA champions poised to repeat behind Cowens, Havlicek, and guard Jo Jo White. The renamed Washington Bullets finished with an identical regular-season record and boasted three All-Stars of their own: guard Phil Chenier and big men Elvin Hayes and Wes Unseld.

For the first time in league history, the playoffs included ten teams and featured a best-of-three first-round matchup between the lowest two seeds in each conference. In the West, the Seattle SuperSonics pulled out a 2–1 series win over the Pistons, while, in the East, the Rockets held home-court advantage for their short series against the Knicks.

Bettors installed Houston as 2.5-point favorites in game one, and the Rockets destroyed the spread, pulling away late to win by fourteen. Frazier, as usual, played superbly in the high-stakes playoff atmosphere, and after the game a reporter suggested that Clyde looked like the Lone Ranger on the court with performance in a losing effort (21 points, 8 rebounds, 11 assists, and 4 steals). Frazier ran his hand through his short Afro and said, “Yeah, and I thought Tonto had deserted.”⁷⁶

The Knicks won game two in the Garden behind Frazier’s 26 points, but their season ended with a fizzle on April 12, when the Rockets mauled the Knicks 118–86 in front of a raucous Houston crowd. Weeks later, New Yorkers watched Rick Barry and the Golden State Warriors shock the basketball world, sweeping the heavily favored Bullets in the finals.

“The 1974–75 season was a crossroads for the Knicks,” Holzman later wrote, “because our roster changed in dramatic ways.”⁷⁷ Despite making the playoffs, the team’s 40–42 record marked the first losing season in Holzman’s tenure in New York. Also, not only had Reed, Lucas, and DeBusschere retired, Burke had replaced Irish as team president and Alan Cohen became the CEO of Madison Square Garden. Cohen “was more of a corporate man,” Holzman wrote, “a bottom-line type of guy.”⁷⁸ In fact, Mel Lowell, another team executive, told me they nicknamed him “Bottom Line Cohen” because when asked about potential trades or signings, Cohen’s stock response was “What’s the bottom line?”⁷⁹ Cohen must have hated the Knicks’ lackluster performance in his first year on the job. For years, the Knicks regularly sold out the Garden; now they filled the building in less than half their games. Sure, they still led the league in attendance by a wide margin, attracting more than eighteen-thousand fans per game, but that was their lowest total in nearly a decade—and it was about to get much, much worse.⁸⁰

For the Knicks, the summer of 1975 was shaping up to be another busy off-season. At least this year, they did not have to replace three future Hall of Famers; in fact, if rumors were true, the Knicks might add at least one future Hall of Famer to their roster.

In the mid-sixties, Lew Alcindor became a high school phenomenon at Manhattan’s Power Memorial Academy. The “Tower from Power” led his school to a 71-game winning streak and three City Catholic titles. Alcindor, now known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar following his conversion to Islam, was a six-time All-Star and three-time NBA MVP asking for a trade away from the Milwaukee Bucks. “Milwaukee is middle America,” Abdul-Jabbar told reporters, “and things that are for me and what I am have nothing to do with middle America.”⁸¹

Kareem wanted to play in a big city, ideally New York, but how could the Knicks convince Milwaukee to give them the best player on the planet? Hoping to open negotiations in person, Donovan and Burke hopped on a plane (this too would become a recurring theme) and flew to Wisconsin. “We put $1 million on the table for openers and asked what more we could add to it in players and draft choices,” said Burke later.⁸² Even with a seven-figure check literally on the table (Bottom-Line Cohen must have been having fits), the Bucks remained noncommittal. In fact, they already had another deal in place, and, by the time Burke and Donovan returned to the Big Apple, the news broke that Abdul-Jabbar was going to Los Angeles.⁸³ The Knicks and their fans were stunned.

With Kareem headed to Hollywood, New York turned to the second name on their wish list: forward George McGinnis of the ABA’s Indiana Pacers. McGinnis was built like a linebacker; in high school, in fact, he fielded two hundred football scholarship offers before committing to play basketball at Indiana University. He left Indiana early and was drafted by both the Philadelphia 76ers of the NBA and the Pacers of the ABA. He chose Indy and, in 1975, was coming off an amazing season in which he shared league MVP honors with Julius Erving after averaging a gaudy 30 points, 14 rebounds, and 6 assists per game. He was even better in the playoffs and in game seven of the ABA semifinals, McGinnis tallied 40 points, 23 rebounds, and 8 assists in the Pacers’ victory. McGinnis was great in the finals too, although Indiana lost to the Kentucky Colonels and their fiery head coach Hubie Brown.

McGinnis was a stud. Unfortunately, Philadelphia thought the same and still held his draft rights. The Sixers tried to sign Big George but were told “he insists on playing in New York.”⁸⁴ Less than twenty-four hours after the Pacers lost to the Colonels, McGinnis filed suit in US District Court challenging the legality of the NBA’s collegiate draft, arguing that his selection by the 76ers restricted his right to negotiate with multiple teams.⁸⁵ Rather than wait on the court’s decision, McGinnis quickly signed a contract with the Knicks. He was thrilled, saying, “Coming to New York is a big step for me. It bothered me that no one knew much about me while I was playing in the ABA. The Knicks are the guys everybody watched on television.”⁸⁶ Sure, he was a celebrity in Indianapolis, but McGinnis was relatively unknown outside the Hoosier State, and part of what sold McGinnis on the Knicks was the chance to be a household name on the level of Frazier, Joe Namath, and Mickey Mantle. The next summer, George Steinbrenner used a similar tactic to lure Reggie Jackson to the Big Apple. Could McGinnis be the straw that stirred the Knicks’ drink? After signing with New York, McGinnis dropped his lawsuit against the league, allowing his fate to be decided by the NBA commissioner, who just happened to be on his first week on the job.

New commissioner Larry O’Brien was born to Irish immigrant parents in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1917, just twenty-six years after James Naismith invented basketball at the YMCA down the street. Larry loved basketball as a boy, but any aspirations of a professional career were dashed long before he emerged as a prominent political figure in the state. O’Brien grew close to the Kennedy family, especially young John, in the early 1950s when the future president was still in the House of Representatives; he later joined Jackie Kennedy in Air Force One after his friend’s assassination. The Kennedys often joked about O’Brien’s love of “roundball” (they preferred football) and encouraged O’Brien to handle Bobby Kennedy’s run for the presidency in 1968, which ended with another Kennedy assassination.⁸⁷

In the early seventies, O’Brien rose to national prominence as the chair of the Democratic National Committee after burglars attempted to break into his office at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. “It was my phone that the Watergate burglars tapped and my personal files that they photographed,” O’Brien wrote in his autobiography. “But I had long since come to regard the whole sordid affair as a national tragedy.”⁸⁸ Nixon resigned the presidency following the scandal started in O’Brien’s office, and less than a year later the NBA needed a new commissioner to replace outgoing Walter Kennedy. O’Brien was reluctant. “I had really no knowledge of the operation of the league office,” he admitted.⁸⁹ He had season tickets for Knicks home games, but that hardly qualified him to be the new commissioner. Walter Kennedy spent months courting O’Brien until finally he agreed to give it a shot.⁹⁰

Before the ink could dry on his new contract, Commissioner O’Brien faced a full slate of problems, including the pending Oscar Robertson lawsuit (which ultimately brought free agency to the NBA), a potential merger with the rival ABA, and the McGinnis situation.

Waiting on O’Brien’s ruling about McGinnis and the legal entanglements posed by an NBA team trying to sign an ABA player already claimed by a different NBA team, Knicks execs prepared for the 1975 collegiate draft. Selecting ninth in the first round, they chose Jackson State forward Eugene Short, who would go on to play just thirty-four NBA games. New York’s subsequent picks were even less inspiring. In the second round they chose Luther “Ticky” Burden, who later went to jail for bank robbery; third-rounder Larry Fogle had been kicked off his college team for disciplinary reasons; and fourth-rounder David Vaughan had dropped out of two colleges.⁹¹

A week after the draft, O’Brien handed down his decision on McGinnis, invalidating George’s contract with New York. Not only did the Knicks lose McGinnis, they also lost their 1976 first-round draft pick as a penalty for the premature signing. Sixers general manager Pat Williams was relieved, adamant that the “other teams were just waiting for O’Brien to deal out major punishment for the Knicks, who thought they could do anything.”⁹² Five days later McGinnis became a Sixer.

In September 1975, ABC aired its newest sitcom, Welcome Back, Kotter, starring Gabe Kaplan in the title role. In Welcome Back, Kotter teaches a group of remedial students, collectively nicknamed the Sweathogs, at Brooklyn’s fictional James Buchanan High School. In the second episode, Freddy “Boom Boom” Washington struts into the classroom proudly wearing a Buchanan basketball jersey, convinced he is on the fast track to a pro career. “I’m gonna be a star,” Washington informs his classmates, “and stars ain’t got to do nothin’ but shoot baskets.”⁹³ Vinnie Barbarino, played by John Travolta, offers to be Washington’s manager. “I’ll negotiate your college scholarship, and then after college we sign a fat contract with the New York Knicks,” the coolest Sweathog promises. “Stick with me, and you’ll be up to your 'fro in dough.” By the time Mr. Kotter returns to the classroom, Boom Boom is perched behind the teacher’s desk, practicing his commercial pitch. “Where you gonna play? Forward?” Kotter asks his student. Freddy responds, “No … star. I’ve got the moves of Walt Frazier and the finesse of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.” “You’ve also got the modesty of Muhammad Ali,” Kotter quips. Of course, by the end of the episode Washington realizes the importance of an education (“I don’t have that contract with the Knicks sewn up yet”).

With Abdul-Jabbar, McGinnis, and, apparently, Boom Boom Washington unavailable, Burke and Donovan were growing increasingly desperate to sign a star. So they called Wilt Chamberlain. After retiring from the Lakers in 1973, Wilt signed with the ABA’s San Diego Conquistadors. But when a California court ruled him ineligible to play, Wilt became the team’s unwilling, and mostly disinterested, coach. Now, nearly thirty months after his last on-court appearance, Chamberlain was again a hot commodity. Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke told reporters, “Wilt could be the ingredient that makes the Knicks a success as they ought to be for the New York fans.”⁹⁴ But the NBA’s reserve clause, threatened by the pending Oscar Robertson suit, kept Chamberlain’s rights with Cooke in L.A.; without free agency, Wilt could only play for the Lakers. If he wanted to sign elsewhere, the Lakers had to trade or release him. Cooke had the Knicks over a barrel and wanted to extract as much as he could for his retired superstar. New York hoped for a cash transaction, but Cooke wanted players—asking for some combination of Monroe, Jackson, and a high draft choice.⁹⁵ “I’m not interested in money,” the multimillionaire owner declared, “I can’t play money.”⁹⁶

This time, O’Brien ruled in the Knicks’ favor. Chamberlain had to report to Los Angeles, and the Lakers could either employ him at his previous salary, trade him, or release him. Chamberlain, vacationing in Hawaii at the time, had no interest in flying home to fulfill O’Brien’s decision, and, further complicating matters, ABA commissioner Dave DeBusschere sent telegrams reminding both the Knicks and Lakers that Chamberlain’s contract with the Conquistadors ran through 1976.

As opening night neared, Wilt remained unsigned, Knicks season ticket sales were down by nearly two thousand, and without a box-office draw like Chamberlain (or McGinnis or Abdul-Jabbar or, hell, Boom Boom Washington), even fewer fans might venture to the Garden.⁹⁷ “Without Wilt Chamberlain,” one journalist wrote, “the Knicks might be the highest paid last-place team in history. With him, the Knicks might still be the highest-paid, last-place team in history. But at least there will be more people in the stands watching them lose.”⁹⁸

With Wilt scheduled to return from his Hawaiian vacation in mid-October, Burke and Donovan flew to L.A. hoping to meet with Chamberlain. Everyone expected Wilt to sign with New York; the Knicks even packed a jersey with the number thirteen and Chamberlain’s name stitched on the back.⁹⁹ But when Burke and Donovan arrived, Wilt was nowhere to be found, and a few days later they learned he was still in Hawaii. Wilt blamed the Knicks for the miscommunication. “I’d like to play for the Knicks,” Chamberlain told reporters, but he joked that he would be happier if they “sent out two fine New York women and a corned beef sandwich with a little mustard.”¹⁰⁰ Burke and Donovan were livid. Although Wilt briefly flirted with a comeback in the eighties, he never played another game of professional basketball.

Despite striking out on Chamberlain, Burke and Donovan’s trip to L.A. ultimately netted them an even bigger prize than Chamberlain. While waiting on Wilt, the Knicks received a call from Seattle SuperSonics owner Sam Schulman. He was in town and wanted to discuss Seattle’s All-Star power forward Spencer Haywood, who was at odds with coach Bill Russell. Over a few cups of coffee, the men discussed a possible Haywood trade. When the meeting with Wilt fell through, Burke called Schulman back, packed up Chamberlain’s never-to-be-worn Knicks jersey, and boarded a flight back to New York.

Why were the Knicks so hell-bent on luring a superstar to New York? Sure, they needed frontcourt help; Gianelli, Walk, and Jackson could never replace DeBusschere, Lucas, and Reed on the court. But it was more than that. As Spike Lee later wrote, “I’m a Knicks fan. I’m looking for The Answer—to recapture the championship seasons of 1969–70 and 1972–73.”¹⁰¹ Like Spike, the Knicks front office wanted another run at the top. Luckily, it looked like “The Answer” was dropping like manna from heaven (or at least from Seattle) in the form of Haywood.

Unbeknown to Spike or other rabid Knicks fans like real estate magnate Donald Trump—a new season ticket holder—Burke worked tirelessly to close the Haywood deal.¹⁰² Having already lost out at acquiring McGinnis, Abdul-Jabbar, and Chamberlain that summer, Burke was not about to let Haywood slip away. He kept Schulman on the telephone and, in the middle of the night, finalized the deal. New York would send cash and Eugene Short, the Knicks top draft choice a few months earlier, to Seattle for Haywood.

While Burke and Donovan were in California trying to buy a savior, the Big Apple faced a crippling financial crisis. During Lindsay’s tenure as mayor, and continuing when Beame took office in 1974, New York City officials annually outspent city income to realize their goal of “socialism in one city.”¹⁰³ Meanwhile, federal funding cuts, deindustrialization, and white flight shrunk the city’s tax base while health care costs, employee pensions, welfare, and subsidizing the City College of New York increased expenditures. Each fiscal year, city administrators sold bonds to cover annual expenses, hiding shortfalls through creative accounting practices even as interest on their loans crept higher and higher.

When he served as city comptroller in the sixties, Beame recommended using bridge loans to plug the gap between income and expenses. Now banks refused to market any more New York City bonds, and eventually even Beame, as mayor, had to admit defeat. In the summer of ’75, Beame laid off nearly fifty thousand municipal employees, including 20 percent of the police force and elementary school teachers.¹⁰⁴

It wasn’t nearly enough.

“Fear City” became the label of the day. Angry off-duty cops papered the city with “Welcome to Fear City” pamphlets, which, a forty-year-retrospective piece in the British Guardian said in 2015, “read like one more piece of the dystopia porn filling American cinemas … Taxi Driver, The French Connection, Marathon Man, Escape from New York, Death Wish, and The Warriors.” The pamphlets infuriated Beame with their lurid description of the dangers of city life and urging visitors to “stay away from New York City … until things change.” Some municipal workers demonstrated downtown, and others picketed on major roadways during rush hour. Garbage collectors staged a walkout, chanting “This isn’t Fear City, it’s Stink City!,” and out-of-work teachers marched with signs reading “Fear City, Stink City and now, Stupid City.”¹⁰⁵

By October 1975, New York City stood on the edge of civil war and the brink of bankruptcy. “We needed to figure out which services were essential, and which weren’t,” Beame’s press secretary said. “Teachers weren’t life-or-death. Hospital services and keeping the highways open were essential.”¹⁰⁶ On October 17, New York was less than an hour from defaulting on its loans, and a car idled outside City Hall containing documents officially declaring the bankruptcy of the largest city in the United States. An eleventh-hour reprieve provided by borrowed teacher pension funds was the only reason the city remained solvent.¹⁰⁷ In desperation, local leaders asked President Gerald Ford for a bailout. From the podium of the National Press Club in Washington, Ford issued his response. “I can tell you, and tell you now, that I am prepared to veto any bill that has as its purpose a federal bailout of New York City to prevent a default… . Why should other Americans,” he continued, “support advantages in New York that they have not been able to afford for their own communities?”¹⁰⁸

The next day, New York’s Daily News paraphrased his opposition with the sensationalist headline, in 144-point type, reading: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”¹⁰⁹ Ultimately, the headline doomed Ford and became a rallying cry for New Yorkers. But in 1975, all hope seemed lost. Maybe Haywood could save the Knicks after all. With Ford unwilling to bail out a city on the brink of bankruptcy, graffiti artists tagging subway cars, and street violence in the South Bronx at its peak, surely something had to go right for Gotham.

• 1973–74 Knicks
• Record: 49–33
• Playoffs: Lost Eastern Conference finals to Boston Celtics
• Coach: Red Holzman
• Average Home Attendance: 19,133
• Points Per Game: (101.3—15th of 17)
• Points Allowed Per Game: (98.5—1st of 17)
• Team Leaders:
  • Points: Walt Frazier (20.5 per game)
  • Rebounds: Dave DeBusschere (10.7 per game)
  • Assists: Walt Frazier (6.9 per game)
  • Steals: Walt Frazier (2.0 per game)
  • Blocked Shots: Willis Reed (1.1 per game)
• All-Stars: Dave DeBusschere and Walt Frazier
• Notable Transaction: Traded a 1974 first-round draft pick to the Chicago Bulls for Howard Porter

• 1974–75 Knicks
• Record: 40–42
• Playoffs: Lost Eastern Conference First Round to Houston Rockets
• Coach: Red Holzman
• Average Home Attendance: 18,556
• Points per Game: (100.4—14th of 18)
• Points Allowed per Game: (101.7—8th of 18)
• Team Leaders:
  • Points: Walt Frazier (21.5 per game)
  • Rebounds: John Gianelli (8.6 per game)
  • Assists: Walt Frazier (6.1 per game)
  • Steals: Walt Frazier (2.4 per game)
  • Blocked Shots: John Gianelli (1.5 per game)
• All-Stars: Earl Monroe and Walt Frazier
• Notable Transaction: Traded Henry Bibby and a 1975 first-round draft pick to the New Orleans Jazz for Jim Barnett and Neal Walk