The trade jolted the Knicks. They won ten games in a row, lost to the Bulls in Chicago, then won a half dozen more. By the turn of the year they were challenging Philadelphia and Baltimore (led by Earl Monroe and a burly rookie center named Wes Unseld) for Eastern Division supremacy. The Celtics, in Bill Russell’s final season, struggled to keep up.
ON THE NIGHT OF JANUARY 21, the Knicks won their 13th straight home game and 17th of 19 overall, defeating Seattle 113–106. But the real news broke with Cazzie Russell’s right ankle, just before the third quarter came to an end. Hustling for a loose ball, Russell sprawled on the floor, only to have the Sonics’ Joe Kennedy stumble and fall across his lower legs. Russell suffered a fracture that would all but finish him for the season.
Bill Bradley became a starter, by default—or, as he said, “by total dumb luck.” In replacing Russell at forward, he was not the same shaky novice of the previous season, perhaps in part because he didn’t have to guard opposing players on the perimeter. “I didn’t have my back to the basket constantly on defense,” he said, meaning he was no longer having to stop quicker guards. The positional change explained his increased comfort level but not his growing confidence.
For those who had already written off the Bradley phenomenon as media hype, he returned from his rookie season determined to change their minds. The man dubbed Dollar Bill by Leonard Lewin of the New York Post (because of his contract) had done his summer homework in Philadelphia and earned extra credit. The old-timers in the City of Brotherly Love still talk about the night Bradley showed up in the basement of the Bright Hope Baptist Church at Twelfth and Oxford in North Philly and had the audacity to lock himself into an old-fashioned duel with none other than Black Jesus himself, Earl Monroe.
“You’d walk into the building and go down these steps to a gym where there were no windows and they didn’t have enough money to complete the floor, so we wound up playing on concrete,” said Sonny Hill, who founded the Charles Baker Memorial Basketball League in 1960. “We had so many NBA players in those days, the cream of the cream. They’d play in unbelievable heat, so bad that they’d have to go up the stairs and outside at the half and wring out their shirts. The gym had stands on one side for 400 or 500 people, maybe. That night we had them standing all around the court, packed together, maybe 1,000. Here in Philly, it’s like Wilt’s 100-point game: 10,000 folks will tell you ‘I was there.’
“Earl played for Gaddie’s Realtors. Bradley played for my team, Jimmie Bates B Bar. I took him under my wing, helped him reconstruct his game, but mainly his confidence. He was down on himself after his first year. You have to understand the pressure Bill was under. Because he was the great white college basketball player, people expected him to come into the NBA and dominate. But Bill was not a selfish player. Once he was on a team with players as talented as him, his instincts were to sacrifice. I had him mostly at guard to help with his quickness, to force him to create. I wanted him to let loose, just play like he did in college.”
Across his career, there was only one man Bradley had ever called Coach, and that was Arvel Popp, who mentored him when he was the reigning superstar for the Crystal City Fighting Hornets on the western bank of the Mississippi River, about 30 miles south of St. Louis. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have heartfelt respect and admiration for Holzman and the others who put in the hours, who cared about players and playing the game right. He had fond memories of his Baker League experience and especially of Hill, who encouraged him to shake loose of his proclivities to fit in and unleash his school-yard id.
Separately, Bradley and Monroe smiled sheepishly when I asked about their stranger-than-fiction showdown. It was if I had stumbled upon an old family secret they didn’t mind me knowing. Bradley remembered Monroe’s team winning in overtime, and that he scored “fifty-odd points and Earl had sixty-something.” Monroe said it had been “back and forth all game long,” but played down the notion of any racial subplot.
“What you have to realize is that the Baker League wasn’t like the Rucker, because Philly basketball was different from New York,” he said. “We prided ourselves a little more on the team aspect of the game, even though you had some unbelievable talent out there every summer. And there were a fair amount of white guys playing with us back then, too.”
For the record, Sonny Hill said he was certain that Monroe had 63 points to Bradley’s 54. But it was the way Bradley played, getting his shot whenever and however he chose. “People always said, ‘Oh, Bradley is a great team player but he can’t do this, can’t do that,’ ” Hill said. “Well, let me tell you something: people in the NBA never saw the true Bill Bradley. They saw the player who reconfigured his game to be part of the Knicks. That night he played against Earl? That wasn’t a game; that was an event. And I’m telling you, that was the real Bill Bradley.”
BACK IN THE NBA, where summer league defense could get you benched—or fired—and where not even Dick Cheney could quiet the New York press, Bradley was suddenly tasked with even more. With Russell still recovering and with Bellamy and Komives gone, Holzman’s team was thin. It needed Bradley to show something, and soon.
As a front line, Bradley (6'5"), DeBusschere (6'6"), and Reed (listed as 6'10") looked perilously small. Modern guards are as tall or taller (not to mention more athletic) than the Old Knicks’ forwards. But even before conventional positioning by size was revolutionized by the likes of Bob McAdoo, Magic Johnson, and Dirk Nowitzki—all of them 6'9" or taller—it was clear that the Knicks were on the small side. People looked at Wilt Chamberlain and other behemoths of the day and wondered how this team could possibly contend. “If you saw them line up, it was easy to raise questions about how they would defend and rebound,” said Jack Ramsay, who in 1969 was coaching a strong 76ers team in Philadelphia. “But after they threw the ball up, you would see how and might remember, Oh right, Russell and the Celtics aren’t the biggest guys, either.”
His point was this: somewhere along the way, the Old Knicks developed a cohesion that was impossible to plan for on paper, and some believed that Bradley was the key. “Not because he was a great scorer or a great defender,” said Ramsay, who would coach Bill Walton and Portland to an NBA title in 1977 and later be known on radio and TV as Dr. Jack (for earning a doctorate in education from the University of Pennsylvania). “He was tough—you didn’t get away with anything with Bill. But his ability to run the floor, run the baseline, move without the ball, keep the ball moving, knock down the open shot—I always thought it opened up everybody’s game.”
Others thought matching Bradley with DeBusschere at the forward positions was most responsible for the team’s offensive cohesion, the improvisational genius that Holzman never claimed. Guards are presumed to be the players who see the floor, recognize the game’s geometric spacing, but suddenly the Knicks’ starting forwards were a Rhodes scholar and a player who had been made coach of a professional team two years removed from a college campus.
“The great Jack McMahon, who worked for me in Philadelphia, who was one of the great lifers and evaluators of talent in our game, had a passion for passing forwards and used to say that if you had them, you’ll be good,” said Pat Williams, who was the GM in Chicago as the Old Knicks coalesced in the late sixties. “And Jack always said the reason why the Knicks were so good was because DeBusschere and Bradley were such good passers and it made their team so difficult to defend everywhere on the floor.”
Less interested in crediting any individual or tandem, Bradley suggested that the team’s lack of depth created an accelerated bonding period among the starters and laid the foundation for what the unit would become.
“Rather than say, ‘Gee, my movement was the key,’ I’d say that the team jelled when five of us had to average about 40 minutes a game after Cazzie’s injury,” Bradley said. “For me, personally, I was freed, having moved to forward. It felt like I was back with van Breda Kolff at Princeton. I could almost hear him yell, ‘Clear the goddamn floor, don’t clog it
up.’ Everybody had a job. I felt that I created space for things to happen. You know, cut along the baseline, go back three steps. I’d play with my man, try to keep him guessing, get him a little exasperated. Sometimes you would get an oomph, a ‘Slow down, man,’ and then you ran even more. See, the movement was conscious, but a lot of the time I was just clearing out space, say, to give Frazier room to operate. He could work on his own or work with Willis, so it would become a two-on-two, rather than three-on-three. Offense for us really had to be a collaborative effort, because we did not have the best player in the league or the biggest scorer or the biggest team. So through this period, we were on the floor night after night, all these minutes, and began playing off each other.”
Meanwhile, in the backcourt, Barnett ceded control of the ball to the younger Frazier, whose leadership had become clear. Fall-back flamboyance and all, Tricky Dick was just as adept at flooding passing lanes and wreaking havoc with his lightning-fast hands. All of them orbited the sturdy captain, Reed, who was just entering his prime and had developed into the rarest of NBA centers: smaller than most opponents, he was agile and strong enough to score at the rim. Benefiting from his otherwise frustrating time with Bellamy, trying to fit two natural centers into one lineup, he was also more comfortable than ever facing up for his excellent southpaw jumper.
“How many teams have there been where everyone could hurt you from almost anywhere on the floor?” Pat Williams asked rhetorically.
As the 1968–69 season progressed, the pain was administered league-wide. Between January 25 and February 15, the Knicks went on yet another streak, reeling off 11 straight wins. They finished the regular season with a 54–28 record, third-best in the East behind Baltimore and Philadelphia, and steamed into the playoffs to face Earl Monroe and the Bullets in the first round. After finishing ten games under .500 the previous season, Baltimore had added Unseld’s bruising defense and rebounding and climbed to 57 wins. Out of nowhere, the Bullets were the first seed in the East. Under coach Gene Shue, they wanted to believe they had eclipsed the Knicks.
“We actually wanted to play them instead of Philly in the first round, because we thought they would be an easier matchup for us,” Monroe said. “But you know what happens when you’re young and dumb; it was our first time in the playoffs, our first taste of success. We weren’t ready, and they were a much better team than when the season started.”
It was a humiliating sweep, four straight and the start of a miserable pro sports run for the city of Baltimore against New York. But before the Jets and Mets could chime in, the Big Apple was, rather suddenly, a pro basketball town. The Knicks were in the Eastern Division finals, one step away from another shot at their first NBA crown. Now all they had to do was find a way past the greatest winner in the history of the sport—a man who, just their luck, happened to be making his last championship stand.
NO ONE EVER ACCUSED BILL RUSSELL of suffering from excessive modesty. There was a reason he and Red Auerbach got along so famously. Ego was always an important and arguably essential component of Boston’s winning equation, even after it officially ended in 1970. As Russell said to Willis Reed sometime after the Knicks’ first championship run, defining the ethos of Celtic Nation, “I guess you guys are glad I left.”
Sipping coffee in a quiet hotel lounge in Midtown Manhattan, Russell recounted the quip and followed up with his familiar hearty laugh. He was there to talk about his new book, Red and Me, while I attempted to steer the conversation toward Russell’s coaching showdown with the other Red in the 1969 division final.
That series turned out to be the biggest disappointment of Holzman’s career. “That was supposed to be our year, not theirs,” he confided to Pearlstein. In his final go-round as player-coach, Russell, not surprisingly, saw things differently. Holzman, he said, let six more regular-season victories delude him into thinking that the Knicks were the favorite. The Celtics, he argued, had merely been pacing themselves, not worried about playoff seeding; they were lying in wait among the divisional weeds.
“I think, in my mind, I outcoached the Knicks in that series,” he said, before setting out, in surprising detail, to explain how.
“First off, I had a lot of respect for those guys, but I also knew what we had done,” Russell said. “That was in the books, too. I had a team that knew how to play, okay? When people talk about the better team, they usually mean personnel, not team. I had one that knew how to play half-court, uptempo. Now, in making my plan for that series, I decided the best player they had was Walt Frazier, and I wanted to attack him. He was the only guy I thought who could guard Sam [Jones] without help. So in the first game, I looked at the stats—they had beaten us six out of seven times, and I had averaged like six points, about four or five shots. So Willis was able to help out, back up everybody. First game, I came out looking to score, not because I cared about scoring but to make Willis pay attention. I always felt that Wilt was the only guy who could guard me when I wanted to score. So Willis was over here with me, there was no trap over there. The flow of that defense was disrupted. We won the first game with relative ease, and the beauty of that today is that they still don’t know what happened.”
After so many games, so many years, and, yes, so much success, Russell could be excused if memory wasn’t serving correctly. The record shows he scored only 10 points in Game 1, though his typically suffocating interior defense did spearhead the 108–100 Celtics victory at Madison Square Garden—a victory that erased the Knicks’ hard-earned home-court advantage. But there was a strategic move by Russell that indeed made a documentable difference: inserting Emmette Bryant, the former Knick, into his starting backcourt.
The Knicks had lost Bryant to the expansion Phoenix team the previous spring, but he’d wound up in Boston after refusing to play for the Suns. Nowadays, it’s rare that a player would reject an opportunity to play in sun-splashed Arizona. Bryant expressed his displeasure in no uncertain terms. “I said, ‘The desert? Oh God, no, I’m an asphalt guy, from Chicago,’ ” he told me from his home in—where else?—Chicago. “I told them, ‘I’ll quit before I go there.’ Then that summer, Auerbach approached me at Kutsher’s [Country Club in the Catskills]. K. C. Jones had just retired. He told me, ‘We’ll try to work something out and bring you in, but you have to promise to shave off that beard.’ I told him, ‘No problem.’ Those days, everyone wanted to go to Boston because of the playoff money.”
As Bryant remembered it, Russell put him into the lineup just before the playoffs, replacing Larry Siegfried. This was a typically iconoclastic statement by Russell. Bryant, a black player, was bumping a popular white player in a city that was not exactly the stronghold of racial harmony and honor. Russell’s reward was a near triple double by Bryant in Game 1 against the Knicks: 13 points, 11 rebounds, and 8 assists. In Game 4, with the Knicks making a strong bid to reclaim the home-court edge, Bryant iced a 97–96 Celtics victory with two free throws after Reed missed a jumper with eight seconds left.
“Then we got to the sixth game in Boston,” Russell said, picking the narrative up with the Celtics leading 3–2.
Now, I watched the fifth game, and Frazier had figured it out, okay? So I watched the way he was playing Sam, the way he was moving his feet. The whole series, I had been low post. The sixth game, I went high post. All the adjustments they had made were useless to them. Every play that was for Sam, Frazier ran into three picks, and because I was a good passer, we had good prospects for a layup with Sam or John [Havlicek] or Satch [Sanders]. So Frazier says, “I’ll go behind the pick and get him as he’s coming by.” Now Sam’s catching and shooting that little bank shot. Now Frazier’s thinking, “I’ll flash and make Sam go wider.” Now I’ve got the ball, and if you remember that cover photo in Sports Illustrated, I’d turn and take one dribble and have a layup. Now we’re back where we started. And Sam killed them.
Jones piled up 29 points as the Celtics closed out the series with a 106–105 victory, and Boston went on to a stunnin
g win on the Lakers’ home floor in Game 7 of the Finals. It was Russell’s 11th title in 13 years—and his last. Again, contrary to Russell’s version of events, the point must be made that Frazier was suffering from a groin pull and by Game 6 was limited to 29 minutes. “I couldn’t run, man,” he said, dismissing Russell’s claim that Holzman and the Knicks had been outfoxed.
But the tense and hard-fought series only convinced the Knicks that they really did have an opportunity to be the next big thing, Russell or no Russell. In its postgame report on the last game the following morning, the New York Times noted how Frazier and the Knicks had sat around the cramped Boston Garden locker room downing cans of beer. Rather than drowning their sorrows, it seemed as if they were toasting their future.
While Auerbach and Russell puffed away on victory cigars, there was at least one Celtic who wasn’t about to bluster or blow smoke in the Knicks’ faces. That was Bryant, who had more right to gloat than anyone after coming up big again in Game 6, scoring 19 points. Looking back, he said that no matter how ecstatic he was to be going to the NBA Finals, closing in on a title, he was too fond of his ex-teammates, Reed especially, not to keep his emotions in check as he made his way around their cramped, foul-smelling locker room, shaking hands, lingering finally by the dressing stall of his first pro roomie and friend.
“You guys played a beautiful series,” he said.
Reed shook his head, in mock disgust.
“Can’t believe you’re getting a championship before me,” he said.
Bryant gave the big man a hug.
“Be patient,” he said. “You guys are next.”
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