8

“A Policy of Patience”

1982–1983

Racial tension was high in the early eighties throughout the United States. But in New York City, it peaked in the summer of 1982 with the killing Willie Turks, a New York City transit worker. Turks and two Black friends stopped at a bodega on Avenue X in Brooklyn to buy bagels and beer late on June 22. After leaving the store and returning to their car, they were confronted by a group of white men. Turks and his friends tried to drive away, but their car broke down, and Turks, dragged out of the car, was beaten to death by a crowd of fifteen to twenty whites. Six white men were charged and four convicted (by a jury consisting of eleven white men and women and one Latino) of manslaughter but found not guilty of murder. While handing out their sentences, Judge Sybil Hart Kooper admonished the convicted: “There was a lynch mob on Avenue X that night,” she said. “The only thing missing was a rope and a tree.”¹ The local Black community was incensed at the apparent lack of justice. “They let him off with nothing!” one bystander yelled after the verdict was read.² But Willie Turks’s death, argues historian Jason Sokol, “caused only a minor stir in New York.” “His name did not become a battle cry… He was just a black man who had been stomped to death, and who faded from the city’s collective memory.”³

Race remained an issue for the Knicks that fall as well. Red Holzman’s retirement created a great deal of buzz in NBA coaching circles. When he had last left, in 1978, his replacement was already in place. But Willis Reed’s tenure running the Knicks lasted less than a hundred games before Red was called back to coach. In 1982, one of Reed’s teammates, Phil Jackson, was just starting his coaching career after landing the head job with the Albany Patroons of the Continental Basketball Association. Jackson would go on to win eleven NBA titles coaching the Bulls and Lakers, but he wasn’t even a candidate to replace Holzman in ’82.

Instead, on May 10, the New York Post leaked a story claiming that Sonny Werblin planned to bring in DeBusschere and former Hawks coach Hubie Brown to run the Knicks. Werblin denied the rumors but a week later introduced the duo as the team’s new general manager and head coach respectively. “Werblin hired Hubie at the 21 Club [a trendy Manhattan restaurant] at lunch one day in late May,” former director of communications John Hewig explained to me years later. “And at dinner at 21, he hired Dave DeBusschere to be the general manager. And he didn’t tell either one that he’d hired the other one.”⁴ Publicly, DeBusschere backed Brown’s hiring, telling reporters “I picked the coach,” and that “I was hired first and in my discussions with Sonny, Hubie was the one guy who we felt would be a great coach to bring in here.”⁵

Privately, it was a different story.

Brown grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, less than an hour’s drive from Manhattan, in a working-class Irish Catholic neighborhood. Hubie worked hard and received a scholarship to attended Niagara University, where he earned multiple degrees in education before becoming a high school coach in tiny Little Falls, New York. Brown was ambitious and soon gained a reputation for running the best basketball clinics on the East Coast. In 1972, he joined the Milwaukee Bucks as an assistant on a staff led by his former Niagara teammate Larry Costello, and two years later he replaced “Magnolia Mouth” Babe McCarthy as the head coach of the ABA’s Kentucky Colonels. Hubie led the Colonels to the 1975 ABA title and joined the Atlanta Hawks after the two leagues merged, earning NBA Coach of the Year honors in 1978 with a scrappy Hawks squad. “My guys barely make the minimum,” he bragged to Sport magazine at the time. “They’re hungry. Coachable… . I’m not burdened with long-term six-figure contracts.”⁶

Hubie loved players who overcame physical limitations through hard work and effort, and he had little patience for talented loafers. “We play like blue-collar workers,” he explained. “We bring our lunch pails with us and we wear you out.”⁷ Not everyone was sold. “Hubie’s tough on players,” Bucks general manager Wayne Embry explained. “He has a tendency to demand a lot and when he doesn’t get it, he puts the players down. Players just don’t respond to that.”⁸ Cotton Fitzsimmons, a fellow NBA coach, was even more blunt. “He can’t believe that anybody else is doing as good a job as he does. Sometimes when you talk to Hubie,” he said, “you get the impression that he invented the game.”⁹ “I don’t care who likes me,” Brown shot back, “I don’t like everybody myself.”¹⁰

DeBusschere, of course, also had a blue-collar upbringing, raised in Detroit before embarking on a long and successful NBA career. After retiring from the Knicks in 1974, DeBusschere joined the ABA’s New York Nets in a front office role and a year later was named league commissioner and then was instrumental in coordinating the 1976 merger. He left basketball for a while, dabbling in business with a boxing magazine, a TV ad sales firm called “Total Video Inc.,” and restaurants in both Boston and Manhattan’s Upper East Side.¹¹ “I get to the office early and I stay late,” DeBusschere told the Times. “I read the business sections of the newspapers every day. I even go to that before the sports page.”¹²

Whether or not it would pay immediate dividends, bringing in Brown and DeBusschere represented a significant shift for the Knicks. Jack Krumpe, the team president, explained, “The word to use is stability. We brought in Dave and Hubie in hopes of building a foundation… . I’m committed to a policy of patience.” Patience was often preached and rarely practiced in the Knicks front office, but the team finally seemed to be at peace with the past. The Times noted, “The frustrations the Knicks have experienced in recent years may have resulted from living too much off memories.” “John Gianelli,” the article continued, “could never be Willis Reed; Spencer Haywood could not become Dave DeBusschere. Ray Williams and Micheal Ray Richardson could not be Walt Frazier and Earl Monroe. But they were asked to.” Even though DeBusschere had played on the title-winning teams, the dawning of the DeBusschere and Brown era provided a break with the past and an opportunity for a fresh start. “The fans do tend to live in the past and there is an attachment to the old Knicks,” DeBusschere admitted. “But these are new players and they have to establish their own mystique.”¹³

Brown and DeBusschere were both driven, and from the start there was tension between the two men. “They didn’t like each other,” Hewig explained to me.¹⁴ Maybe it was their history dating to the ABA, when DeBusschere was the commissioner and Brown a prominent coach. Or maybe it was simply a clash of personalities; both were outspoken, and each had their own idea of how to return the Knicks to prominence. “I have complete control over all basketball operations,” DeBusschere told reporters. “Period.”¹⁵ Pressed by journalists about who might be on the trading block, DeBusschere admitted that Cartwright was “probably our No. 1 asset, if we wanted to trade him.”¹⁶ A few weeks earlier, he had told reporters “They’re all safe. Until we [Knicks executives] meet.”¹⁷ For his part, Hubie told the Daily News that he considered just three assets untouchable: their first-round pick in the draft, Micheal Ray Richardson, and Cartwright.¹⁸

Brown and DeBusschere had to get up to speed quickly that spring, as trade rumors heated up with the approaching NBA draft. Cartwright and Webster were the two most-mentioned Knicks in trade talks, as management had all but given up hope they could play together. “I still want to stay here,” Webster said, “but I don’t want to be no backup center.”¹⁹ Neither did Cartwright. Unfortunately, Bill had yet to replicate his outstanding debut; as a rookie he averaged 22 points and 9 rebounds, meriting mention in the same breath as fellow rookies Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. That dropped to 20 and 8 in season two, and 14 and 6 in his third season (’81–82). Cartwright was not really regressing, he was just being used less on offense as backcourt players like Ray Williams, Richardson, and Paul Westphal took more shots. Defensively, he was solid if unspectacular. So his talent was wasted if his teammates rarely worked the ball to him on the offensive end. To complicate matters, in addition to Webster and Cartwright, the Knicks still had Maurice Lucas, a power forward probably better suited to playing center. Something had to give.

With the first pick of the 1982 NBA draft, the Lakers—to no one’s surprise—selected All-American forward James Worthy, kicking the team’s “Showtime” era into high gear. Next, the San Diego Clippers picked DePaul big man Terry Cummings before the Utah Jazz snatched Georgia forward Dominique Wilkins (later traded to Atlanta). Dallas and Kansas City chose Bill Garnett and LaSalle Thompson respectively, putting the Knicks on the clock with the sixth pick. Knicks fans desperately wanted Clark Kellogg, a bruising six-foot-seven forward from Ohio State, and chants of “We want Kellogg!” echoed through the Felt Forum (now the Hulu Theater), located beneath Madison Square Garden. When Commissioner O’Brien came to the microphone and announced the Knicks’s choice, University of Minnesota guard Trent Tucker, the crowd of about two thousand loudly booed. “I would have liked a warmer welcome,” Tucker joked when asked about fans’ response.²⁰ Despite fan resentment, Tucker seemed like a perfect fit for Hubie’s system; he was a rangy six-foot-five athlete who led Minnesota to a rare Big Ten conference championship. He modeled his game after Frazier, and his ability to play both guard spots would allow Hubie to shift Micheal Ray to small forward in some three-guard lineups, a group that he hoped could press teams defensively with a collection of long, lanky athletes.²¹

Adding Tucker was not the only significant move the Knicks made that off-season. In early July, they cleared their logjam at center—somewhat—by shipping Lucas to Phoenix in exchange for forward Leonard “Truck” Robinson. “I’m glad to be going to a team with a big dude,” Truck told the Post. “There are few cities in this league where every player wants to play,” he said. “And New York is one.”²² The team also replaced Campy Russell, who tore ligaments in his knee, with rail-thin Pacers forward Louis Orr, and assistant coaches Butch Beard and Hal Fischer with Mike Fratello and Richie Adubato. Beard and Fischer remained with the organization—Beard became the voice of the Knicks on MSG television and WOR radio, while Fischer returned to his former assignment as a scout.

More telling was the direction Brown was going with his choice of assistants. Fratello and Adubato spent their summers with Brown coaching at the famed Five Star Basketball camps held annually in upstate New York. Five Star founder Howard Garfinkel called Brown, “Picasso, Pavarotti, Sinatra with a basketball.”²³ Soon the trio of Knicks coaches joined up-and-coming Boston University coach Rick Pitino, Louisville’s Denny Crum, future Pistons coach Chuck Daly, and legendary Indiana University coach Bob Knight as celebrated members of the “Five Star Group.”

With Brown’s Five-Star staff in place, DeBusschere worked to get his new coach a few “Hubie Brown-type players.”²⁴ In the early eighties, a “Hubie Brown-type” meant someone who was “accountable” and a “team player,” with “discipline” and a “high IQ.” Hubie told me that he expected his guys to give “their heart on a daily basis,” and that all twelve men on the team would always be ready to play.²⁵

Mike Newlin and Randy Smith, brought in to stabilize the backcourt a year earlier, were gone. Neither fit into the defensive scheme Hubie planned to employ. Instead, DeBusschere hoped Tucker, Orr, and swingman Ernie Grunfeld, who Hubie said had a lot of “mental toughness,” could fill their roles off the bench. ²⁶ Grunfeld, now best known as the longtime (and long-suffering) general manager of the Washington Wizards, was born to Holocaust survivors from Romania. He immigrated to the United States in 1964 as an eight-year-old who spoke no English. Occasionally Ernie’s father took him to Knicks games, and the youngster picked up the language playing basketball in Queens.²⁷ At the University of Tennessee, Grunfeld became the school’s all-time leading scorer and earned a second-team All-American nod, even as he was overshadowed by teammate Bernard King in the “Bernie and Ernie Show” (a marketing ploy dreamed up by the Vols’ PR department).

As DeBusschere and Brown shaped the Knicks’ roster in the Garden, hip-hop continued to expand beyond its South Bronx roots.

“Rapper’s Delight” is widely regarded as the first commercially successful rap song. But the first authentic hit from some real B-boys? That was probably produced by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. As with most groups at the time, they focused on live performances instead of albums or cassette tapes. But in 2007, they became the first hip-hop act inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, mostly because of their 1982 hit “The Message” (on the album of the same name). The lyrics have been sampled so often folks can be forgiven for not realizing their origin. “Don’t push me / ’Cause I’m close to the edge / I’m trying not to lose my head.”

“The Message” was groundbreaking, transforming rap from party music into social commentary. Later called conscious hip-hop or political hip-hop, the song spoke to living in urban poverty. There was no “hip hop and you don’t stop to the bang, bang boogie” nonsense here. Instead the lyrics are sobering. “I can’t take the smell, can’t take the noise / Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice.” This was real, speaking to the frustrations of young Black men and women living in poverty—in the South Bronx or elsewhere—matching, as historian Jeff Chang argues, “a rising disgust with Reaganomics.”²⁸

Unfortunately, the group soon divided over disputes about royalties and created two separate crews; one led by Grandmaster Flash, the other by Melle Mel. They reunited half a dozen years later, but their second (and only other) album, On the Strength, was neither as well-conceived nor as well-received as The Message. Rolling Stone ranked “The Message” number 51 on their list of 500 greatest songs of all-time in 2004; it was the highest-ranking hip-hop song and highest position for any song released in the 1980s. It also became the first hip-hop recording chosen by the Library of Congress as part of its National Recording Registry.

It was a transformative summer for the Knicks and for rap music, for sure. But the biggest on-court change in New York City took place in the weeks leading up to the first game. Richardson, still privately battling a drug addiction, was very excited about the opportunity to play for Hubie. “I never saw a guy so organized,” he told Werblin. “I’m learning. I’m learning.”²⁹ But Richardson never got his chance to prove he was a Hubie Brown guy. The new coach was looking to clean house and told the Times that he “had to get rid of a couple of drug users before he would feel comfortable with his new team.”³⁰ Although Brown did not name names, when Sugar tried to renegotiate his contract (again), he was as good as gone. Hubie said later, “He was constantly worrying about his contract and he was letting it affect his attention and concentration and that became a source of disruption for the team.”³¹

On the other side of the country, Brooklyn native Bernard King, like Richardson, was frustrated with his team’s front office. Twenty-six years old, King was a free agent coming off his first All-Star appearance and averaging 23 points and 6 rebounds per game for Golden State. But negotiations with Warriors owner Franklin Mieuli were going nowhere. Sensing an opportunity to make a deal that would pay dividends both on the court and at the box office, the Knicks offered King a contract for nearly $4 million spread over five years. Mieuli was outraged.³² He took as long as possible to decide whether to match the Knicks’ offer, calling a press conference at New York City’s Sheraton Centre Hotel to make the announcement that King would remain with Golden State. Mieuli blasted the Knicks to the press, calling them “a carpet-bagging conglomerate … [that] used to be run in dignity by Ned Irish.”³³ “Bernard is part of our inventory,” he complained. “We found him, developed him and what stature he has attained is due to us.”³⁴ King and his agent, Bill Pollak, disagreed. “Franklin never intended to keep Bernard,” Pollak said later. “When he matched the offer sheet, one reporter here said he welcomed Bernard back with closed arms.”³⁵

Publicly, King issued a statement regarding Mieuli’s determination to match. “I accept Golden State’s decision with mixed emotions,” King wrote. “Having grown up in New York City, I always dreamed of playing in a Knick uniform before my mother and father at Madison Square Garden… . It almost became a reality.”³⁶

Privately, King was fuming about being treated like a piece of property. He refused to report to Golden State, claiming Mieuli had withheld a signing bonus owed him. Neither Mieuli nor King was happy with the outcome.

Fortunately, the Knicks had something the Warriors wanted.

On October 22, just a week before the start of the regular season, the Knicks stunned the basketball world by announcing a trade sending Richardson to the Warriors for King. Sugar was heartbroken. “I’m gonna wear Hubie’s butt out when we play them,” he promised. “It’s gonna be an ego game.”³⁷ While Richardson was feeling hurt and unwanted, King was ecstatic. “My God, I was excited,” he remembered later.³⁸ “I wanted to play in New York. I wanted to play for the Knicks.” King did have some reservations about playing for Brown, however. As King told reporters, “I don’t know Hubie personally, but the man is a winner and a teacher, and I want to learn and improve. And I will under Hubie Brown.”³⁹ King was well aware of Brown’s deserved reputation for belittling and demeaning his players. “The thought of having to put up with Hubie Brown’s abuse made me seriously consider turning it down,” King later wrote in his autobiography.⁴⁰

On opening night, October 29, 1982, the Knicks hosted the Philadelphia 76ers, who were headed toward the NBA title. The crowd booed the visiting Sixers but erupted when King made his Knicks’ debut. “The cheers,” he wrote later, “made it feel like a homecoming.”⁴¹ New York fell behind early but clawed back to keep the game close until the very end, when Philadelphia pulled away for the win. Still, the Knicks had reason for optimism. It was the first opening game sellout in years, and the first sellout for any game since Dave DeBusschere Night in March 1981.⁴² On the court, Hubie judged the team’s effort “terrific” and claimed he “didn’t hear one boo out there,” an unofficial first for an Garden crowd in years.⁴³

Following their exciting opening night loss, the Knicks left New York for a four-game road trip. After losing to Milwaukee, the Knicks held a nine-point lead in Golden State to open the fourth quarter before falling by two. Richardson watched from the bench, already suspended by his new team for trying to renegotiate his contract again. New York sportswriter Harvey Araton took to calling Richardson “Micheal Raise” and dubbed the Warrior backcourt, Richardson and World B. Free, “Sugar-Free.”⁴⁴ Two more losses, to Seattle and Portland, dropped the Knicks to 0–5, pushing the volatile Brown over the edge. As King wrote in his autobiography, Hubie decided to take out his frustrations on the team’s new superstar. “You worthless piece of shit!” Hubie allegedly yelled at King in the locker room after the game. “You’re no fuckin’ All-Star! You’re no All-Pro! You ain’t shit! You’re a dog!”⁴⁵ Two days later, King wrote, he confronted Hubie about the incident. “Don’t you ever, under any circumstances, dare to speak to me in the manner you did again. Do you understand?” King remembered that Hubie paused and then told him, “It will never happen again.” “And it didn’t,” King wrote. “Not with me. But he continued talking to my teammates like that. He saw nothing wrong with it. To him, it was perfectly acceptable.”⁴⁶

Despite the losing streak, which peaked at seven straight to open the season, and the flare-up between he and Hubie, Bernard supported his new coach. “Hubie Brown was a great coach,” King wrote. “Not a good coach, a great coach.”⁴⁷ Brown understood that changing the team’s fortunes would take time, but he also knew how important that turnaround was to New York City. In the preseason, Hubie wrote three things on the chalkboard for his players to focus on: “1) The only thing that matters in New York is to win. 2) Play an exciting style of basketball… 3) Victory equals fun for everyone.”⁴⁸ Brown drilled his players incessantly, running long, grueling sessions when many coaches were beginning to lighten their practice regimens. The hard work paid off when the Knicks finally broke their long losing streak by beating the Washington Bullets to improve to 1–7. “It was a victory we needed,” a sweat-soaked Brown told reporters after the game. “It takes pressure off everyone—management, the coaches and the kids.”⁴⁹

While Brown might have used the term “kids” to refer generically to his team (he was, after all, pushing fifty—nearly twenty years older than his oldest player, thirty-two-year-old guard Paul Westphal), he was more accurately describing his inexperienced backcourt. With Richardson in Golden State, the point guard position fell to a trio of rookies: Ed Sherod, Vince Taylor, and Tucker. DeBusschere insisted the team did not need a pure point guard, asking reporters sarcastically in the preseason, “Why can’t both guards handle the ball?”⁵⁰ But it became apparent that the young backcourt was woefully inconsistent. King liked to receive passes while on the move, bulling his way to the basket for high-flying slam dunks or close-range jump shots. But the Knicks guards were reluctant to push the pace with fast breaks. In fact, the Knicks finished the season last in the league in pace of play (the number of possessions per game). In an early December game at cavernous Richfield Coliseum in Ohio, only two thousand fans turned out to see the Cavaliers (the next-slowest team in the league) host the Knicks. After a high-scoring first quarter, the teams reverted to form and chants of “Boring! Boring!” echoed through the near-empty stadium by the second half.⁵¹

Struggling rookie guards were frustrating but also expected. Two-time All-Star power forwards, on the other hand, were not supposed to play so poorly. In stints with the Bullets, Hawks, Jazz, and Suns, Truck Robinson had earned a well-deserved reputation as a relentless rebounder and powerful inside scorer. In 1977–78, he led the league with 15.7 rebounds per game while scoring almost 23 a night. Even by 1981–82, his last season in Phoenix, Truck averaged 19 points and almost 10 rebounds per game. Now he was shooting under 50 percent from the field and less than 60 percent from the line, both near career lows. Making matters worse, Knicks fans began yelling “No!” when he caught the ball, urging him to pass rather than shoot, killing his confidence.⁵² As Robinson struggled, the boobirds became louder and more difficult to ignore. “People can boo,” Robinson said. “I don’t like it, but that’s their prerogative.”⁵³ Soon Brown also lost confidence in Robinson and replaced him in the starting lineup with Sly Williams, back in the team’s good graces after being suspended several times by Holzman the preceding season.

By midseason, Knicks execs realized that they had failed in their roster construction. Hubie conceded, “We need a point guard,” while DeBusschere admitted, “The trade for Truck has not turned out the way we would have liked.” Werblin, never one to mince words, told the Times, “the whole season has been most upsetting. I never expected something like this would happen.”⁵⁴

Like Robinson, Cartwright was also falling out of Brown’s good graces. As a rookie, Cartwright drew favorable comparisons to fellow first-year All-Stars Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. By the fall of 1982, Larry and Magic were superstars while Cartwright was becoming an afterthought. He was still a strong offensive player, averaging almost 16 points per game, but he was a non-factor on the defensive end, averaging 1.5 blocks and pulling down just 7 rebounds a night. “Cartwright is too passive,” the Sporting News wrote, “and that’s difficult to change.”⁵⁵ He had his moments, to be sure, including a 21 point, 18 rebound performance against Hubie’s old Hawks, but Cartwright was increasingly relegated to being the second or even third most important offensive player on a mediocre Knicks team. Harvey Araton, writing for the Daily News, opined that the Knicks should trade Cartwright “for a draft pick or a warm body or a cold turkey on rye with lettuce and tomato.”⁵⁶

Cartwright fans held out hope and seemed to be rewarded when, after an ankle sprain sidelined King for several weeks in late January, the team posted a 9–5 record and their center showed flashes of his early career brilliance, topping 20 points nine times. Asked about his turnaround, Cartwright told reporters, “It’s simple. I’m just getting the ball.”⁵⁷ “With Bernard out,” he continued, “Paul [Westphal], Truck, and myself have been shooting it up more. If you shoot more,” he added sagely in his gravelly voice, “you score more.”⁵⁸

While Cartwright and the veterans shouldered the scoring load in the absence of King, the team shored up its problems at point guard by trading for Rory Sparrow. As a kid, Sparrow had patterned his game after Pete Maravich, but now Hubie called him “one of the best defenders in the league” and “one of the people [the Knicks needed] to build a future on.”⁵⁹

Hubie was excited to work with Sparrow but got a little too enthusiastic during a February 25 game in Indiana when, in the second quarter, he split his trousers down the back. Brown emerged from the locker room for the second half wearing a sports jacket … and red, white, and blue Knicks warmup pants.⁶⁰ To his credit, Hubie had good reason to be excited; Cartwright shot 9 for 10 in the first half against the Pacers and finished the game with 32 points in the Knicks’ win.

Three days after Hubie’s wardrobe malfunction, more than one hundred million Americans tuned in to CBS to watch the final episode of the hit television show M*A*S*H. In the special two-hour finale, series regulars like Hawkeye Pierce and Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan witness the final ceasefire of the Korean War and say “goodbye, farewell and amen” (the episode’s title) to the 4077th surgical unit.

Alan Alda—the actor who portrayed Hawkeye Pierce—was a big Knicks fan and soon had more reason to attend games than he had in several years. “It was almost like the old-time chic at Madison Square Garden last night,” Michael Katz wrote in the Times following the near-sellout crowd assembled to watch the Knicks and Sixers game in early March. “The stars, like Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, and Peter Falk, returned from wherever stars go when their team is not winning.”⁶¹ With King back off the injured list, the team finally seemed to gel. “Before,” Westphal explained, “Bernard was the only one scoring and Hubie was going to him out of necessity. Now we’re playing the way Hubie wanted us to all along.”⁶²

Despite an improved offense, defense remained the calling card of the team, as the Knicks blitzed opponents to force turnovers. “If we score on the trap,” Hubie explained, “we stay with it until you prove to us you can beat it or until fatigue sets in. Some nights,” he admitted, “the trap works. Some nights, it doesn’t. It still comes down to people.”⁶³ By mid-March, the trap was working, and the team was four games over .500. Asked to compare the mid-March Knicks to the same team two months earlier, which started 14–26, Cartwright shrugged his shoulders and told the Times “We’re no longer that team.”⁶⁴

One reason for the turnaround was Hubie’s use of what he referred to as his “second unit.” Brown’s starting lineup was very traditional: Sparrow ran the offense, Westphal and King created shots from the wings, Robinson battled for rebounds, and Cartwright provided solid low-post offense. The “second unit” was entirely different. For one thing, there was no traditional point guard or power forward; Tucker, Grunfeld, Williams, and Orr were all between six foot five and six foot eight, best suited to playing on the wing. At center, Webster anchored the defense, reminding folks why he earned the nickname “The Human Eraser,” allowing his teammates to gamble for steals or double-teams knowing he had their backs. Sure, Hubie wasn’t entirely sold on Marvin, and he sometimes enlisted the help of Knicks’ VP Mel Lowell. “Can you stand here,” Mel told me Hubie asked him during one practice, “and every time someone who Marvin is guarding gets the ball, say ‘Marvin, put your hands up!’ He’s 7-foot-2 and he doesn’t put his fucking hands up!”⁶⁵ Statistically, Marvin remained underwhelming, averaging just five points and five rebounds a night. But now, for the first time as a Knick, he seemed confident in his role—and even Hubie admitted as much. “I can’t say enough about what this second unit has meant to us,” Hubie said. “Not only are they quicker than our first unit, but they play a different style … they are able to change the tempo of the game, and it confuses opposing defenses.”⁶⁶

The Knicks’ surge in the spring of 1983 coincided with the first public inklings that the newest Knick had a darker side. King was naturally intense and quiet, generally keeping to himself and rarely socializing with teammates. Then, in late March, the Times published a long article detailing King’s history of alcoholism and sexual violence. “I wasn’t the bad boy in the headlines,” King claimed, blaming police harassment for his poor reputation, which included five arrests in eighteen months as an undergraduate in Knoxville. He did understand, though, that he was becoming dependent on alcohol. ⁶⁷ “My problem wasn’t that I drank because my body needed it,” King now says, “I drank because it was the only way I could enjoy myself.” Although always sober for games, King admits that his alcoholism took control of his life as a Net. “I believe if the Nets had not traded me, I wouldn’t be alive today, due to the fact that I did a lot of driving under the influence of alcohol.” Not even sending King to Salt Lake City had sobered him up; three months after joining the Jazz, police arrested King on charges of forced sexual abuse, sodomy, and possession of cocaine. He received a fine and a one-year suspended sentence and then checked into St. John’s Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica, California, causing him to miss the end of the 1979–80 season. His time in Utah was brief. “I had a serious problem,” King says, “and they didn’t care.”⁶⁸ In September 1980, the Jazz dealt Bernard to Golden State for a backup center before King revived his career, and reputation, with the Warriors.

Just as news of Bernard’s checkered past broke in the local papers, an emerging phenomenon in New York City’s largest borough was about to explode in popularity. Yes, many young people heard “Rapper’s Delight.” And some bought copies of “Planet Rock” or “The Message.” But few people outside the Bronx knew of Grandmaster Flash or the Cold Crush Brothers in early 1983. That year, a film produced by Charlie Ahearn gave outsiders a taste of real hip-hop. Wild Style had a limited release in 1983—Return of the Jedi and Terms of Endearment dominated at the box office that summer and fall—but the film and its soundtrack quickly became cult favorites.

Wild Style was part documentary and part fictional film featuring dozens of hip-hop pioneers. Melle Mel called it “the one movie that captured the true essence of hip-hop.”⁶⁹ Basketball played a particularly important role in the film. “I was later at West Fourth Street one time, and that’s probably one of the best streetball game spots in all of New York,” Ahearn recalls. “And there was a DJ on the other side of the court practicing records, and that combined with this whole thing of Grandmaster Caz writing his rhymes while he’s playing basketball, it was maybe one of my favorite inspirations of making the film.”⁷⁰

In one particularly memorable scene, the Cold Crush Brothers and the Fantastic Five square off on a basketball court. They start with a rap battle (appropriately dubbed the “Basketball Throwdown”), invoking several well-known NBA players in their rhymes, including Master Rob rapping that “I’m the M like all the pretty girls, I serve your monkey ass like Earl ‘The Pearl.’ ” Once the pickup game between Cold Crush and the Fantastic Five starts, the rappers try to one-up each other on the court as well, bragging after every made shot or highlight-reel move. Even though one rapper boasts about his team’s “Eighteen-to-oh” lead, the score clearly takes a backseat to style.⁷¹ Wild Style brought hip-hop to film audiences and remained influential decades later. In fact, a 1997 Sprite commercial re-created the basketball court rap battle, featuring Tim Duncan and Kobe Bryant, with Missy Elliot rapping alongside Grandmaster Caz of Cold Crush and Prince Whipper of the Fantastic Five.

By late 1983, hip-hop was spreading out of the South Bronx to the far reaches of the world. “There was a lot of parties, and a lot of underground music was making the scene,” Rory Sparrow told me. “It was original, it was loud, it was in your face, and it was real. You knew it was going to catch on, you just didn’t know how big it was going to get,” he said. Later in life, Sparrow traveled to Africa as an NBA ambassador, and he told me about his experience. “In the middle of Africa is hip-hop. Basketball on red clay … [There’s] one television in the village, but they knew basketball and they knew hip-hop.”⁷²

New York City had just one professional hoops team—the Knicks. But dozens of high school and college squads played within the five boroughs. In March 1983, the Big East first held their postseason tournament in New York City, at Madison Square Garden. St. John’s, led by a pair of New Yorkers (head coach Lou Carnesecca and leading scorer Chris Mullin) defeated Boston College in the final. Even in defeat, BC’s head coach Gary Williams, born in New Jersey, admitted that he loved playing in the Garden. “It was a great experience coming to New York to play in this tournament,” he told reporters. “This is the best place in the world to have a basketball tournament.”⁷³

From 1938 until 2021, Madison Square Garden also hosted the National Invitational Tournament (NIT). The NIT was the premier postseason college basketball tournament for decades before the NCAA’s March Madness eclipsed it during the early seventies. Now, with the Big East tournament, MSG had its own signature collegiate event, and New York became, as George Vecsey described it, “the spiritual as well as the geographic center” of the Big East.⁷⁴

New York City was also the epicenter of high school basketball. As Rick Telander describes in Heaven Is a Playground, playground basketball produced amazing teenage talent like the King brothers (Bernard and Albert). Dozens of other stars from the seventies and eighties played their high school ball in and around New York as well, including Lew Alcindor of Power Memorial, Tiny Archibald from DeWitt Clinton, Julius Erving from Roosevelt, World B. Free from Canarsie, the Williams brothers (Gus and Ray) from Mount Vernon, and Pearl Washington from Boys & Girls in Brooklyn.

New York State banned high school basketball state championships from 1933 until 1978 due to concerns about eligibility and gambling, so many of these star players never had the opportunity to compete for a state title. So winning a local title, like the PSAL (Public Schools Athletic League) or CHSAA (Catholic High School Athletic Association) meant even more then than it does now. At Power Memorial, Alcindor helped his team to a 95–6 record and three City Catholic High School titles. By 1983, the recently reinstituted state tournament had four classes—A for the largest down to D for the smallest—and was held in the Glens Falls Civic Center, about two hundred miles north of New York City. Kids from downstate were well-represented in the tournament finals. That year in Class A, North Babylon (of Long Island) defeated Springfield Gardens (of Queens); Bishop Loughlin (Brooklyn) won the Class B title; Wayandanch (Long Island) finished second in Class C; and Our Saviour Lutheran (Bronx) won the Class D championship.

In later years, Madison Square Garden hosted a handful of high school games—including the PSAL championship—but in March 1983, the team brought back the doubleheader, a format that had been successful under Ned Irish in the 1940s and 1950s. This time, it was the Knicks battling the Portland Trail Blazers a few hours after Mullin and Carnesecca led St. John’s to the Big East title. Rory Sparrow’s last-second three-pointer (one of only two made three pointers for Sparrow that season—the team made just 33) gave the Knicks a 97–95 victory and a 32–30 record on the season. It was their eighteenth win in twenty-two games. In early April, the Knicks clinched a playoff berth.

It should have been a time to celebrate, but instead rumors swirled around the team about the future of their hot-headed head coach. Two weeks before the end of the regular season, Nets coach Larry Brown resigned to take over at the University of Kansas, where he would eventually lead Danny Manning and the Jayhawks to an improbable 1988 NCAA title. Now there was some speculation that the Nets would replace one Brown (Larry) with another (Hubie). “The way I hear it, the deal has been done,” the Daily News reporter wrote. The Knicks, though, denied that Hubie was going anywhere; they were supposedly working out a multiyear contract extension.⁷⁵ For his part, Hubie was livid that Larry’s abrupt departure led to questions about his own future in New York. “I have not asked permission to talk to the Nets, and the Nets have not talked to me,” he insisted. “It all started with the little guy who left a great team to look for happiness on the plains. I hope to hell he gets it,” he continued, “because he has made my life miserable for me, my family, and my team.”⁷⁶

Despite losing their coach in midseason, the Nets finished 49–33 and earned homecourt advantage in their best-of-three first round playoff series against the 44–38 Knicks. Darryl Dawkins, the Nets’ eccentric center who liked to give his rim-rattling dunks names like the “Yo Mama” and the “Spine-Chiller Supreme,” dubbed the series between the two New York–area teams the “Function at the Junction.” “This is the first time since I’ve been in New York that people are getting excited about a playoff series,” Webster told reporters. “And it’s about time.”⁷⁷

Nearly sixteen fans packed into Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey, for the Nets-Knicks game on April 20, 1983. On paper, the series appeared to be an even matchup. The Nets’ stars were forwards Buck Williams, who averaged 17 points and 12 rebounds in just his second NBA season, and Albert King, Bernard’s younger brother and a key figure in Rick Telander’s book Heaven Is a Playground, who chipped in 17 points per night. Another familiar face was the Nets’ new starting point guard, Micheal Ray Richardson, acquired after just half a season in Golden State. Unfortunately, Richardson’s running mate in New York, Ray Williams, had already left New Jersey, shipped to Kansas City, and Sugar was struggling mightily with drug use. He even went AWOL for several days before the playoffs began. As teammate Len Elmore explained to me decades later, “He wasn’t particularly ready to play; it was somewhat of a distraction, there’s no question about it.”⁷⁸

Despite the focus on the Nets’ star forwards and the whereabouts of Richardson, backcourt play decided the first game in the best-of-three series. Richardson reappeared, and he and Darwin Cook, the Nets’ other starting guard, shot poorly and turned the ball over half a dozen times while Sparrow put up 22 points on just 12 shots and handed out 7 assists for the Knicks.

Oh, and Bernard dropped 40 on his little brother Albert. “I wanted this badly,” Bernard said after the game. “The team wanted it badly.”⁷⁹

The Nets were reeling, still adjusting to life after Larry Brown. During the regular season, New Jersey had the best defense in the league, but they surrendered 40 to King in game one and now, with their season on the line, had to travel across the Hudson River for a win-or-go-home game two. New York jumped out to a nine-point lead in the first quarter and stretched it to 23 at half (62–39). The rowdy capacity crowd at the Garden cheered loudly, starting a “We want Philly” chant even before halftime began. The Nets refused to give up and slowly chipped away at the lead, but then Grunfeld iced the game by hitting all ten of his free throws to gain a 105–99 win for the Knicks. Hubie, soaked in sweat, was in a jovial mood after the game, swigging a beer while answering questions from reporters. Asked about their upcoming series against Philadelphia, Hubie said, “What the hell? Bring ’em on. Those guys in that locker room believe in themselves now.”⁸⁰

Before the 1983 postseason, reporters asked Sixers center Moses Malone for his playoff prediction. Malone, rarely quotable, responded “Fo’ Fo’ Fo’,” meaning that each series would last just four games, resulting in a twelve-game playoff sweep for Philadelphia. Malone, named the league’s MVP for the second straight season after averaging 25 points and 15 rebounds per game, had missed the last four games with knee soreness and claimed to be about 75 percent healthy at the time. Fortunately for Malone, he had one hell of a supporting cast to back up his bravado. Julius Erving may not have been the otherworldly high flier he had been when he played in the ABA half a dozen years earlier, but Dr. J could still be counted on for twenty points and at least one highlight reel dunk almost every game. In the backcourt, Maurice Cheeks, the Philadelphia point guard, played hard-nosed defense and directed the offense, while shooting guard Andrew Toney earned the nickname “The Boston Strangler” for his post-season play. “He was a deadeye shooter with the demeanor of a hired gun,” one columnist wrote of Toney, “a grim gamer, in awe of no one.”⁸¹ If the Knicks could force Erving and Cheeks to shoot from the outside, and if they could keep Toney away from the basket, and if Moses’s bum knee kept him from dominating, then they might have a chance.

Unfortunately for Knicks’ fans, a hobbled Malone played game one like a man on a mission, finishing with 38 points, 17 rebounds, and 3 blocked shots. “If that’s 75 percent,” teammate Clint Richardson joked afterward, “I’d hate to see him healthy.”⁸² Losing the game was bad, but the Knicks suffered a more painful blow in the second quarter when King slipped and re-sprained his right ankle, the same injury that had forced him to miss a month earlier in the season. Norman Scott, the Knicks’ team physician, began working on a special shoe designed to support King’s ankle, but New York, already an underdog, would have to try to even the series with their best player hobbled.

Like Moses had in the first game, King gamely battled through pain in the second. Before tipoff, King had electrotherapy on his injured ankle and put on supportive orthotics to cushion the impact. Even injured, King willed New York to a twenty-point first-half lead. “It’s like he’s playing for his life,” Erving told reporters after the game, “a man possessed.”⁸³ But then Malone took over. After halftime, Moses scored 19 and pulled down 10 boards, dominating his matchup against Cartwright, who finished with 0 points and just 4 rebounds (against 30 and 17 for Malone). “The contest between the redoubtable Moses and Cartwright jumped off the court and slapped you right across the face,” wrote Harvey Araton.⁸⁴ Behind Malone, Cheeks, and Erving (who combined for 76 points), Philadelphia overcame a twenty-point first-half deficit to pull out a deflating 98–91 win.

Down 2–0 in the best-of-seven series, it would have been easy for the Knicks to fold. Instead, “Hubie Brown’s scrappy little army,” kept game three close, trailing by just one at the end of the third quarter.⁸⁵ With just five seconds left in the fourth, the Knicks tied the game, giving Philadelphia a chance to win in regulation or for New York to force overtime. The Sixers tried to work the ball to Erving, but the Knicks double-teamed Dr. J, forcing a pass to little-used reserve Franklin Edwards. Edwards tossed up a ten-foot shot off the backboard as time expired. It dropped through the net, and the Knicks lost again. “We couldn’t have played any harder,” Hubie told reporters after the game. “It is physically impossible for us to play any harder.”⁸⁶

Now trailing 3–0, every game was a must-win. Unfortunately for Knicks fans, the Sixers jumped out to an eight-point lead at halftime of game four and never looked back. This time, with five seconds left, the Knicks were down by six. There would be no last-minute heroics. Then something surprising happened. Instead of booing the home team for losing, Knicks fans packing Madison Square Garden gave their team a standing ovation, even while being swept. “If we played like this in any other series against any other team, we win,” King said later. “The ovation we got from the fans was the nicest thing that ever happened to me.”⁸⁷ Hubie agreed. “No man likes to go out 0–4,” the coach told reporters, “But I’ll tell you something, it was no knockout.”⁸⁸ In four games, the Sixers outscored the Knicks by just twenty-two total points. And in the next series, the Milwaukee Bucks ruined Malone’s prediction, losing in five games instead of four, but then Philadelphia swept the Los Angeles Lakers in the finals, giving the Sixers their first NBA title since 1967.

In the 1983 offseason, the Knicks hoped to build on their playoff success, looking forward rather than backward. But that summer, the past came rushing back as the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame inducted Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley, joining Willis Reed (1982) and Jerry Lucas (1980) from the Knicks’ title teams. Eventually seven players from the ’73 team (DeBusschere, Bradley, Reed, Lucas, Monroe, Frazier, and Phil Jackson) as well as Coach Holzman earned plaques in Springfield.

While New Yorkers celebrated the nostalgia of two old Knicks joining the Hall of Fame, team execs were working overtime to make changes to the new Knicks. There would be several new faces, as Campy Russell and Toby Knight (who combined for $600,000 in salary and zero games played in ’82–83) were gone. Likewise, the team’s starting backcourt of Westphal and Sparrow as well as sixth-man Sly Williams and backup center Webster were all free agents. And although he still had several years left on his contract, the team was unsure about what to do with Cartwright. When they drafted him in 1979, the Knicks thought Cartwright was their center of the future and someone they could pencil in for 20 points and 10 rebounds a night for the next decade. But while Cartwright was a very good offensive center, his defensive and rebounding flaws were exposed by Malone in the playoffs as they had been by Gilmore a few years earlier. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, now thirty-five years old, was a free agent, and DeBusschere tried to convince him to finish his career in New York. But there was no way Kareem was leaving the Showtime Lakers. He re-signed with L.A. and won three more titles before retiring in 1989 as the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. With Abdul-Jabbar off the table, rumors of a possible Cartwright-for-Sikma swap with Seattle made the rounds, but it never materialized. Instead, the Knicks had a shot at another big man who could both help New York and hurt one of their archrivals.

In mid-June, Werblin and DeBusschere met with free agent Kevin McHale of the Boston Celtics about potentially signing in New York. McHale came off the bench for Boston, backing up center Robert Parish and forwards Larry Bird and Cornbread Maxwell, but was widely regarded as one of the NBA’s premier defensive players. He also possessed a dizzying array of post moves that twisted defenders in knots. Boston loved McHale and wanted to keep him, but New York hoped a big money deal and a guaranteed starting position could convince him to trade Celtics green for Knicks blue and orange. Upon hearing that DeBusschere and Werblin had met with McHale, the Celtics quickly signed three of the Knicks’ free agents (Webster, Williams, and Sparrow) to offer sheets, forcing New York to decide within fifteen days whether to match or to risk losing three quality players for nothing.

Red Auerbach, the Celtics’ president, thought the Knicks had no chance of signing McHale. “They’re just wasting their time,” Auerbach told reporters, “McHale won’t play for the Knicks, you can bet on that.”⁸⁹ And although McHale’s agent insisted that his client was listening to other offers, Red was right. McHale re-signed with Boston on a huge multiyear deal and stayed with the Celtics until his retirement in 1993. Hoping to salvage something from the McHale fiasco, the Knicks matched the Celtics’ offer sheets on all three of their free agents.

Missing out on a superstar in free agency again, New York turned to the NBA draft to shore up their team. For the first time since 1979, when the Lakers took Magic Johnson, the first pick in the draft was a no-brainer, as the Houston Rockets chose Ralph Sampson, a three-time consensus first-team All-American from the University of Virginia. The Indiana Pacers then selected Steve Stipanovich from Purdue, a plodding center who would play just five NBA seasons, as the Knicks waited patiently for their pick, twelfth overall, to come up. Whether they were willing to admit it or not, the Knicks targeted one of two guards: Jeff Malone, a sharpshooter from Mississippi State, or Derek Harper, a hard-nosed player from Illinois. Unfortunately, Malone and Harper were the tenth and eleventh picks. Then, while some fans chanted “We want Drexler! We want Drexler!,” referring to University of Houston high-flyer Clyde Drexler, the Knicks selected University of Arkansas guard Darrell Walker, a player from Chicago who earned the nickname “Junkyard Dog” for his toughness. In hindsight, passing on Drexler—a future Hall of Famer—was a mistake, but Walker was another great fit in Brown’s defense-oriented scheme (although he and Hubie would clash repeatedly).⁹⁰ Keeping his remarks to the press brief, Walker told them simply that, “I’m going to play hard every night.”⁹¹

While the Knicks struggled to build their team, either through free agency or the draft, the league had more pressing problems.

After being hired in 1976, Commissioner O’Brien had been forced to quickly learn on the job, shepherding the league through merging with the ABA and making sticky decisions like the McGinnis ruling. Two years later, O’Brien continued to cement his legacy by hiring an attorney with extensive knowledge of the league’s operation as its general counsel. It didn’t take long for that attorney, David Stern—a rabid Knicks fan whose father ran “Stern’s Deli” on 8th Avenue between 22nd and 23rd streets—to emerge as the de facto leader of the league.⁹²

Stern was promoted to vice president in 1980 with an eye on expanding the NBA’s footprint through extensive marketing and television deals. In 1982, his efforts bore some fruit as the NBA and CBS signed an $88 million contract extension; but this deal paled in comparison to the $2.4 billion earned by the NFL across multiple networks and called for fewer nationally televised games than did the previous contract.⁹³ Stern also helped create NBA Entertainment, which emphasized promoting its players. “We were really the first league to sort of marry the pop culture, music, entertainment, with NBA players and its lifestyle,” Don Sperling, the senior VP of NBA Entertainment remembers.⁹⁴ One of the company’s early developments was a tagline Stern helped create: “America’s Game: It’s Fantastic.”⁹⁵ Commercials for the league used the phrase over and over, finally getting celebrities to utter the line on camera. Peter Falk was the first, captured after a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden.⁹⁶

Despite Stern’s efforts to build the league’s brand, the biggest concern in the NBA around the time the Knicks drafted Walker was the collective bargaining agreement set to expire on June 1, 1982.

Fearing a strike like the one Major League Baseball had experienced a year earlier, O’Brien asked owners to explore the possibility of employing replacement players, an option the NFL had used during the 1987 work stoppage. Instead, hoping to avoid losing the whole season—and especially the playoffs, which were a financial windfall—owners agreed to provide the players with copies of their team financial statements. Reviewing the documents, players’ counsel Larry Fleisher could see that some teams actually did have legitimate financial struggles. But, he noted, most losses were not due to player salaries. In Cleveland, for example, Ted Stepien spent more on advertising than his team took in as revenue.⁹⁷

Krumpe, representing the Knicks in these negotiations, remained quietly in the background; his team was in good shape financially. But Werblin was on the record about his feelings on players’ rights. “In three or four years, every player will become a free agent, and if they change teams, it will hurt the game,” Werblin told the Times. “Players will be moving from one team to another and there will be no loyalty and no players the fans can relate to the way there used to be.”⁹⁸

By the spring of 1983, after playing for almost a year without a collective bargaining agreement, player reps established an April 2 deadline to get a deal in place. As he had done before, Fleisher decided to use the annual All-Star Game to meet with players. Abdul-Jabbar explained the player’s position to the press: “We’re not making any demands. We’re just trying to maintain what we have.” Sonics owner Sam Schulman wanted none of it. “I dare them to strike,” he told reporters. “The players are overpaid. A strike would enable us to return to normalcy and start all over again.”⁹⁹

As the deadline for the strike approached, the Knicks decided to vote after practice one day whether to support the movement. Their vote was unanimous, 12–0, in favor of the strike. “The vote took five minutes,” player rep Marvin Webster explained. “We don’t have any other choice. There was very little discussion. The guys felt they knew the issue and if they had to strike they would.”¹⁰⁰

On April 1, 1983, at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan, after twenty-six negotiating sessions spread over ten months, O’Brien announced a new collective bargaining agreement, just hours before the players’ deadline. Players gained a share of league revenues—initially set to 53 percent—while the owners gained what they had long sought: a salary cap. “Both sides basically got what they wanted,” O’Brien told reporters. “League parity is now possible because teams in large cities won’t be able to spend more on players than those in smaller areas. Yet players who already have big salaries will not only keep them, but still have the right to move—the right of free agency.”¹⁰¹

Beginning in 1984, the salary cap went into effect. For that season, the cap was $3.6 million per team, but each year the figure would be readjusted based on gate receipts, television revenue, and other forms of income, projecting a rise to $4 million within two seasons. The five teams with the largest payrolls (the Lakers, Nets, Knicks, SuperSonics, and Suns) could re-sign their own free agents but could not bid on players who would increase their team’s salary. Additionally, the league continued its outmoded practice of restricted free agency; not until Tom Chambers signed with the Suns in 1988 could NBA players relocate without compensation owed their original team.

As the new bargaining agreement took effect, there were no earth-shattering changes for the Knicks. Abdul-Jabbar remained in L.A., Sikma stayed in Seattle, McHale was still a Celtic, Webster and Sparrow were back in the fold, and Darrell Walker was penciled in to replace Westphal, who finished out his career in Phoenix. With few off-season moves, the Knicks had no reason to suspect that 1984 would bring the team the highest of highs and lowest of lows.

• 1982–83 Knicks
• Record: 44–38
• Playoffs: Won Eastern Conference first round versus New Jersey Nets; lost Eastern Conference semifinals versus Philadelphia 76ers
• Coach: Hubie Brown
• Average Home Attendance: 10,703
• Points per Game: (100.0—20th of 23)
• Points Allowed per Game: (97.5–1st of 23)
• Team Leaders:
  • Points: Bernard King (21.9 per game)
  • Rebounds: Truck Robinson (8.1 per game)
  • Assists: Paul Westphal (5.5 per game)
  • Steals: Ed Sherod (1.5 per game)
  • Blocked Shots: Marvin Webster (1.6 per game)
• All-Stars: None
• Notable Transactions: Drafted Trent Tucker in the first round of the 1982 NBA Draft; traded Maurice Lucas to the Phoenix Suns for Truck Robinson; traded Micheal Ray Richardson to the Golden State Warriors for Bernard King