“EIGHT YEARS COMING” and “AMBUSH AT THE ARMORY”
#952/#951
952. NEW YORK KNICKS VS ATLANTA HAWKS
EASTERN CONFERENCE QUARTERFINALS
GAME TWO
MAY 26, 2021
MADISON SQUARE GARDEN
QUALITY OF PLAY—6.33
DRAMA—6.55
STAR POWER—7.55
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—7.35
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—5.88
LOCAL IMPACT—8.57
TOTAL: 42.23
“EIGHT YEARS COMING”
It was the day New York Knicks basketball fans had been waiting for—waiting a painfully long time, in fact. Game Two of the 2021 Eastern Conference quarterfinals—the first round of the playoffs—represented much more than just another postseason game. It was ten days shy of exactly eight years since the Knicks had last won a playoff game, Game Five of the 2013 Eastern Conference semifinals, to be exact (they lost the next one to Indiana to end their season). It was time to end that drought.
The Knicks had a surprisingly strong season, led by the emergence of forward Julius Randle, and as the four-seed hosted the series. Game One was expected to be the dawn of a new era, and a rowdy, jubilant sellout crowd turned out for an expected pummeling of the fifth-seeded Atlanta Hawks. However, the Hawks, while largely unknown to the navel-gazing Garden crowd, had far more talent than New York, particularly in point guard Trae Young. In 48 dazzling minutes, the mercurial, magical Young scored 32 points, had ten assists, and hit the game-winning floater with less than a second left to steal the game and stun the throng. Young turned and shushed the crowd after hitting the shot.
Instantly, NYC had a new enemy. Young wasn’t particularly hateable, and his breathtaking range and magical ball handling were worthy of envy, not ire. But he had beaten the locals and talked trash about it, and that was enough. Plus, his hairline was receding prematurely, and thus became an easy target.
“TRAE IS BALD-ING” was the deafening chant during Game Two of the series (among other less amusing, expletive-filled ones), which took place on a Wednesday night, May 26, 2021, in a City still only just emerging from the dread of the pandemic. Prior to the playoffs Knicks crowds were limited to just 2,000 fans. But that cap was lifted for the postseason. It was beautiful that day, encouraging people to be outside and safe, but more than 16,000 fans packed into MSG despite the covid worries to see if the Knicks could get revenge.
Many—not all—wore masks, but there was no doubt who was the “masked man” to the crowd. Trae was quite comfortable in the villain role, and he thoroughly controlled the game with his trademark mixture of fearless forays to the hoop, lobs to Hawks big men, and deeeeeep three-pointers. Atlanta cruised out to a 13-point halftime lead, and Garden Gloom set in.
Enter Derrick Rose. Once upon a time, Rose was like Young, a star point guard new to the league and wowing everyone with his breathtaking athleticism and game. But injuries destroyed the one-time MVP’s career in Chicago. In 2021 he was part of Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau’s comfort crew, former Bulls who had played under Thibs in Chi-town and followed the coach east. Taj Gibson was another piece, and together the two former Bulls injected some much needed energy and poise into the game.
“A switch was flicked, and a 13-point halftime deficit wiped out,” noted Steve Popper in Newsday. Randle was very quiet through the first six quarters of the series. Now, at last, he put on his team leader cloak and made some shots, including the go-ahead fadeaway J that gave New York a lead going into the fourth quarter.
Rose kept it going, scoring a team-high 26 points in a throwback performance as the lead built to ten, helped mightily by Hawks coach Nate McMillan leaving Young on the bench for far too long to begin the fourth quarter. At last reinserted, Trae led a rally. With a series of jumpers and assists he got the game tied with 5:05 to play. Rose put the Knicks back in front with a short runner, and a Reggie Bullock triple made it a five-point game. Young at last was stopped, Atlanta missed its final eight shots, and when Gibson slipped out for a breakaway dunk, the Knicks could celebrate their first playoff win in eight long years.
For a flicker of time, Knicks basketball was indeed back.
AFTERMATH
Alas, that flicker was snuffed out immediately. The Hawks rebounded to win the next three games, and take the series in five. After putting the clincher on ice with a deep three, Trae bowed to the Garden crowd. “I know where we are,” he explained. “I know it's a bunch of shows around this city. And I know what they do when the show is over.” Young led Atlanta on a surprising run to the Eastern Conference finals, where they lost a tough battle with eventual champs Milwaukee, hampered by a flukey ankle injury Young suffered when he landed on the foot of an official.
As of this writing, the Knicks have returned to their usual spot, nearer the Eastern Conference cellar than its penthouse. Hopefully they win another playoff game before 2029.
WHAT THEY SAID
“The league got so soft. That’s basketball. The crowd is supposed to do that. It’s supposed to be that way. I’ve been in series where drinks were thrown at a parent, people’s moms. You’re on the court and you see a beer splashed on your mom—that’s the environment I’m used to.”
—Derrick Rose
FURTHER READING:
I’ll Show You by Derrick Rose with Sam Smith
VIDEO:
951. NEW YORK KNICKS VS MINNEAPOLIS LAKERS
NBA FINALS
GAME THREE
APRIL 16, 1952
69TH REGIMENT ARMORY
QUALITY OF PLAY—7.72
DRAMA—7.15
STAR POWER—7.05
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—6.55
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—8.02
LOCAL IMPACT—5.75
TOTAL: 42.24
“AMBUSH AT THE ARMORY”
The Knicks have had several brief but striking periods of excellent basketball in their mostly futile history. The first came in the early 1950s, during the Pleistocene Era of NBA hoops. Led by stars like Dick McGuire, Ernie Vandeweghe, Connie Simmons and Max Zaslofsky, New York was an annual title contender. But unfortunately, as would be the case when Michael Jordan thwarted their dreams in later years, the NBA’s first superstar, George Mikan did so when the league was still in its infancy.
The Knicks were the third-best team in the Eastern Division in 1952, but they knocked off Bob Cousy and the Celtics at Boston Garden in a decisive, thrilling double-OT affair to advance out of the first round. They cruised past Syracuse in four games to make the NBA Finals for the second straight year (they were beaten by the Rochester Royals in 1951 in seven games for the crown). This time they would take on the Minneapolis Lakers, fronted by Mikan, their immortal center.
At 6’10”, “Mr. Basketball” was the player who took the game above the rim for the first time, using his height and superb athleticism to be unstoppable inside. Mikan teamed with forwards Vern Mikkelson and Jim “The Kangaroo Kid” Pollard to form an dominant front line that no other team in the nascent league could match. The Lakers played home games on a small and unusual court at the St. Paul Auditorium. The dimensions of the gym forced the court to be several feet more narrow than the standard width, allowing the Lakers bigs to seem even more gigantic.
“They used to say that when Mikan, Mikkelsen and Pollard stretched their arms across that narrow court, nobody could get through,” said Al Cervi of the Syracuse Nationals. Cervi’s teammate Paul Seymour added, “Those three big guys made every court look narrow.” Minneapolis was a formidable away team as well, proven in the 1952 Western Division playoffs when they swept away the Indianapolis Olympians and won a tough series with Rochester to reach the Finals.
The Knicks hung tough with the favored Lakers in the first two games in the Twin Cities. Game One went to overtime, where Pollard scored several of his game-high 34 points to lead the Lakers to a four-point win. Mikan had 18 points and 21 rebounds in Game Two, but Knicks big man Harry “The Horse” Gallatin, despite giving away four inches to Mikan, battled him to a draw, and the Knicks won 80-72. New York came home even at 1-1.
The circus was in town, and as was often the case in the early days of the NBA, Madison Square Garden preferred the big top to the big men. The Knicks were shunted off to the 69th Regiment Armory, downtown on Lexington Avenue between East 25th and 26th. The 69th Regiment had been known as the “Fighting Irish” since the Civil War, and with Sons of Erin Dick and Al McGuire on the squad, the Knicks felt right at home in the cozy confines of the Armory. The team had won 23 straight on Lex, including all 11 games they played there in 1951-52.
Despite the downtown dominance the game wasn’t a sellout—4,500 fans turned out on a lovely spring Manhattan Wednesday evening, April 16, 1952, somewhat shy of the Armory’s 5,000-seat capacity. “The drilll shed was not filled to capacity, as had been anticipated, probably because the [baseball] Giants were opening at home, the harness racing was going on at Yonkers and the [Sugar Ray] Robinson-[Rocky] Graziano fight was being televised simultaneously,” thought the New York Times.
Those hardball and harness and Sweet Science fans missed out on a back and forth battle in the Armory. The Lakers controlled play early, but a “determined spurt” by the runnin’ Knicks wiped out a 7-point deficit with an 11-0 run and took a 46-41 halftime lead. The game was nip and tuck thereafter, with fifteen ties and eleven lead changes. With six minutes to go, it was 71-71, and the game—and a big step toward the championship—was up for grabs.
Dick McGuire and Vandeweghe, New York’s best ballhandlers, had been running and gunning the Lakers, with “fast-passing breaks worthy of the Garden’s slickest jugglers,” according to Hy Turkin of the Daily News. But in the decisive moments, their defensive shortcomings let them down. Lakers guard Pep Saul, a former star at Seton Hall, shook McGuire repeatedly for set shots and drive n’ dimes. His frequent passing target was Mikan, who had been good but not great through two and a half games. Now he took over, controlling the paint on both ends. Big George didn’t just score and rebound—he thoroughly discouraged New York’s drive and slash game, while also setting up his outside shooters by drawing double teams. He would finish with 26 points and 17 rebounds, easily the most in the game in both categories. Mikkleson also was key in winning time, scoring nine of his fifteen points in the fourth quarter, “when it really hurt,” Turkin wrote.
He might have had more, but, employing the pre-shot clock stratagem of the day, “Minneapolis staged a modified freeze the rest of the way,” as the Turkin put it. New York couldn’t make a shot down the stretch, missing six in a row at one point, and the Lakers took the crucial Game Three, 82-77.
“The locals went fatally sour,” wrote Turkin, and New York now trailed in the best-of-seven series 2-1.
AFTERMATH
New York won a pair of thrillers at the Armory in Games Four and Six (both to be covered later in the list) sandwiched around a Game Five whipping, in which both Mikan and Mikkelsson scored 32 points. In Game Seven, held in St. Paul, the Lakers won their first of three straight titles thanks to 22 points and 19 rebounds from Mikan, and a defense that strangled Knicks shooting in a 17-point blowout.
The Korean War-era would prove a shining spasm of excellence by the Knicks, though they couldn’t get over the hump. The team would lose at the last hurdle to the Minneapolis Mikans again the following season, and wouldn’t darken the door of the Finals again until the Vietnam War was in full swing.
WHAT THEY SAID
"When the Knickerbockers stopped driving, they stopped winning.”
—Lou Effrat, New York Times
FURTHER READING:
Unstoppable: The Story of George Mikan by George Mikan and Joseph Oberle
VIDEO: