The beauty is that smart Knicks fans, the ones who have stayed loyal despite all compelling evidence to abdicate, know who’s responsible for making possible what’s coming to Madison Square Garden.
They are the ones who will pull you aside and talk about not only all the great Knicks games that have been played here but all the memorable Holiday Festivals and NITs, too, all the high school city championships that have electrified the Gardens, new and old, going back to the infancy of the sport.
They are the ones who helped coin the term “The City Game.”
And they know that despite all the hysteria growing around the team again, hysteria allowed inside Penn Plaza because James Dolan refuses to shed his schoolboy crush on Isiah Thomas, there is reason why the Knicks even have this opportunity to be relevant again. That’s because of a son of New York City, because of team president Donnie Walsh, who cleaned out Isiah’s graveyard and re-affirmed the value of Dolan’s crown jewel.
It was Walsh — born in Manhattan; raised in Riverdale, Astoria and Brooklyn; schooled at Fordham Prep, as New York a basketball upbringing as nature allows — who razed the crumbling tenement Thomas had reduced the Knicks to. He was the one who patiently dumped salary, who put the Knicks in position where they could be players for Amar’e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony and for whoever else chooses to hop on the Garden’s Iron Horse express back to contender-dom.
“He’s always known players, always known who could play, because he was a hell of a player himself once, don’t forget that,” Lou Carnesecca said a couple of weeks ago at the Garden, where he’s enjoyed the dueling revivals of the Knicks and St. John’s across these past few months. “The day he got the job I stopped worrying about the Knicks because I knew they’d be fine. He’s a tough old son of a gun, Donnie is. I think the city’s seen that.”
What the city has seen lately is a shadow government in South Florida trying to elbow its way back into the picture, desperately trying to scream above the din, and that’s both shameless and shameful. This should be a triumphant day for the Knicks. Tonight, for the first time since Earl Monroe and Clyde Frazier still shared the same backcourt in 1975, they will have two of the league’s 10 top talents sharing the same bench, the same locker room, and if all the i’s are dotted and t’s crossed, the same floor.
This should be a day of equanimity and unanimity among Knicks fans and yet there is a rift, and that schism can be best described thusly: Knicks fans wouldn’t trust Isiah if he told them the sky was blue. And if he had anything at all to do with closing this deal, then the transmission is surely about to drop out of the car.
Walsh, for his part, tried to dismiss the notion he was a silent observer in all of this, saying he couldn’t “care less” if Thomas was cooing in Dolan’s ear, taking a less-than-subtle jab at the man he once handed $20 million to coach his Indiana Pacers.
“I’m assuming Isiah is getting ready for the NCAA Tournament,” Walsh said, a zinger with flames attached to it since, at 9-17, in last place in the Sun Belt Conference’s East Division, Thomas’ Florida International Panthers only will be going to the Tournament if it is suddenly expanded to 325 teams; mark it down as one more abject Isiah failure on a stack that scrapes the sky by now.
Maybe that’s simply Walsh adhering to the laughable statement released by the Garden the other day, or maybe he was hotter for the deal than we were led to believe. Either way, the pressing truth is this: After so many years in the basketball wilderness, passed by Los Angeles and Boston and even Indianapolis as the visceral capital of the game, a New Yorker has New York humming with basketball again.
Starting tonight, we aren’t merely a fawning Yankees town or a giggly Jets town any more. We’re a basketball town again. Just as we were always supposed to be.
Just as a New York kid named Donnie Walsh promised we would be.
