It’s been 50 years since Willis Reed, Clyde Frazier and the 1970 Knicks won the NBA title. The iconic team leaders took some time to reminisce with Post columnist Steve Serby.

Q: The mindset of the team in training camp after losing to the Celtics in the 1969 Eastern Division finals?

Clyde: Championship.

Willis: We thought we had all the pieces. We knew that (the Celtics’ Bill) Russell and Sam Jones were supposed to be retiring. And we knew that there’s no way they could replace Russell and Sam Jones both, and we thought we were gonna be the best team in the East.

Q: The 18-game winning streak?

Clyde: By the third quarter, the starting team was on the bench.

Q: The Bullets first-round, seven-game playoff series?

Willis: We had some great matchups. We had Dave DeBusschere and Gus (Johnson), and myself and Wes (Unseld), and then Jack Marin and Cazzie (Russell) and Bill (Bradley). And we had Earl (Monroe) and Clyde, and Freddie Carter and (Dick) Barnett.

Clyde: It’s always hell with the Bullets. When you win, you lose (laugh). It’s gonna be so physical … every matchup was like an All-Star matchup. They liked to run, and we knew that if we could hang close, we could pull it out in the end because of our teamwork and our defense.

Q: The Bucks and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were next.

Willis: I thought the advantage we had against him was he was just a young player. I knew that if I didn’t play close to the basket, if I went away from the basket a ways, that he wasn’t gonna go.

Q: Clyde thought that you intimidated Kareem.

Willis: No. He was just a young player.

Clyde: Willis roughed him up, forcing him further out than he wanted to be with the sky hook. We kinda imposed our will on them because we knew they were kind of a young team.

Q: You thought that Willis intimidated Kareem?

Clyde: Oh yeah, yeah. He was appalled by how Willis was throwing him around.

Q: Then the mighty Lakers. The reaction when Jerry West hit that 60-foot buzzer-beater to force overtime in Game 3?

Clyde: Well, DeBusschere did it best, he fell down (laugh). DeBusschere crumpled to the floor, man. When we go back to the huddle (Red) Holzman is always cool and calm: “All right guys, come on, we gotta play five more minutes, we’ll pull it out.” And I’m saying to myself, “Wait man, if God wanted us to win that game, He wouldn’t have let that shot go in.”

Willis: (Prolonged laugh). If I remember correctly, DeBusschere had ran back, was standing under the basket, when the ball went through the basket, he fell flat on his back (laugh).

Q: Do you remember the huddle before OT began?

Willis: Everybody was going through their own emotion and stuff and disorganized, and Barnett said, “Hey, man, what’s wrong with you guys? This game’s not over — it just started.” That was the kind of thing that I liked about that team; you always had somebody else ready to go get it done.

Q: What were your immediate thoughts when Willis went down (torn thigh muscle) driving to the basket in the first quarter of Game 5?

Clyde: There goes the series! When The Captain was lying on the floor in pain, I wasn’t sure if he could return or not.

Willis: It was just one of those things. You’re saying, “How bad could our luck be?”

Q: That incredible second-half Game 5 comeback, when undersized Dave Stallworth somehow helped contain Wilt Chamberlain.

Clyde: At halftime we changed our offense, we went to a more college 1-3-1 opening up the court so that Chamberlain had to come on the perimeter, and Stallworth was a good guy off the dribble, so he was able to create a lot of havoc.

Willis: On any one night, any one player could be the leading scorer. Most of our players had been great offensive college players. We were hard to beat at Madison Square Garden with our fans.

Q: What was it like for you on the bench watching Wilt (45 points, 27 rebounds) lead the Game 6 rout?

Wills: We knew we were gonna fight another day.

Q: But you didn’t know if you were gonna fight another day.

Willis: Listen, I believe if I didn’t play, I believe we would have won at home. But I didn’t want them to play in that big dance without me, though.

Q: You were The Captain.

Willis: A captain is a responsibility. You don’t tell guys what to do, you show guys what to do.

Q: What made Willis The Captain?

Clyde: His leadership qualities; he’s a man’s man. Nobody gives more effort than Willis. With the players, he was the most generous person that you’ll ever meet.

Q: What percent chance did you think you had to play?

Willis: I always believed I was gonna play.

Q: The team left Los Angeles the next morning.

Willis: I left that night after the game so I could start getting treatments the next day.

Q: On your walk from the New Yorker Hotel to the Garden on May 8, was it painful?

Willis: Well, walking didn’t hurt. When you extended the leg where you had to use all of the muscles, that’s when it hurt.

Q: You got there around noon.

Willis: Basically I was getting whirlpool, heat packs, cold packs, all that kind of stuff on the muscle in my leg.

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Q: Who was going to defend Wilt?

Clyde: I was living at the New Yorker Hotel on 34th and 8th, so when I went to the game I made a few calls during the day, no one knew anything whether Willis would play or not. Only when we got to the arena did we realize that he was still hurting, he had been there all day getting treatment, and still was questionable for the game.

Q: Did you wear a special game-day outfit?

Clyde: That day I wasn’t concerned with my outfit. … I can’t even remember what I wore for that game because I was so concerned with Willis, ‘Was he gonna play, man?’ Knowing that without him, we didn’t really have a chance to win that game.

Q: Every Knick was concerned?

Clyde: We were all in the training room and Holzman ran us out: “Hey guys, whether Willis plays or not, we have to. Go get ready mentally to play the game.” He was looking apprehensive, he was sitting up in the corner leaning on the wall like maybe 50-50, “I don’t know, I might give it a try.” He wasn’t that sure what he would do. So then when we left, Willis was still in there with the door closed, so we had no idea whether he was coming out or not.

Q: Willis told me there was no way he wasn’t gonna play.

Clyde: Yeah, but he didn’t tell us that.

Q: How close to game time did Dr. James Parkes administer the cortisone shot?

Willis: I probably should have had it a little earlier. The players were warming up when I went out on the floor. We were within 15 minutes of game time, for sure.

Q: What was going through your mind as you were limping through the tunnel?

Willis: I said to myself, “As a kid you dream of being in the championship games.” And I’m saying, “Boy, this is a helluva predicament you’re in. You gotta go out there and play the best big man offensively that ever played the game, and you gotta try to play him on one leg (laugh).”

Q: When the crowd first saw you, how loud was it?

Willis: On a Friday night in Madison Square Garden, the crowd is gonna be ready, they’re gonna be rocking, and they were.

Q: Did you see him immediately?

Clyde: Well first you hear this roar of the crowd. Then you turn around and see what’s going on, and that was Willis limping out of the tunnel. And I’ll never forget, I saw Chamberlain, I saw (Elgin) Baylor, I saw West — they just stopped what they were doing and they were staring at Willis. And that gave me so much confidence when I saw them doing that, I go, “Hey, we got these guys.”

Q: When you started playing, how much pain was there?

Willis: The only way I could prevent there from being pain was I had to kinda drag the leg as opposed to picking it up. When I picked it up, I would have to use all the muscles. If I kinda slid it along, it didn’t hurt as much.

Clyde: He was trying not to limp, but you could tell that he was in pain.

Q: You passed him the ball for that first shot.

Clyde: I didn’t think he would shoot it (laugh). Then after he made the second shot, I went, “There ain’t nothing wrong with this guy!”

Q: You were a man possessed (36 points, 19 assists) after Willis hit those two shots.

Clyde: When we left the locker room, Holzman pulled me to the side: “Hey Clyde, hit the open man, get everybody involved.” But as the game progressed, I was the open man. But the dye was cast after Willis made his first two shots. The Lakers were psyched out, I was psyched up (laugh), so was the rest of the team, the crowd was in a frenzy, and it just rolled from there, man. We believed we could do it.

Q: Willis limping out was an inspiration to you?

Clyde: Oh yeah. If he didn’t do what he did, I would not have had that game. I would had not have the confidence.

Willis: Walt was a helluva player.

Q: Was that the loudest you’ve heard the Garden?

Clyde: Yeah, yeah. It’s been close with (John) Starks, with (Jeremy) Lin, with LJ (Larry Johnson). But I don’t think it’s reached that peak.

Q: Describe that feeling of winning the NBA championship.

Willis: Bill Russell won 11 out of 13 championships. There weren’t a lot of guys winning championships in that stretch (laugh). It’s a personal satisfaction that you and all the other guys have that … only so many people can have that.

Q: What made that team a championship team?

Willis: You had guys who had played places and they had leadership ability, and they were willing to be the man, take big shots. I think it was the quality of the men. And I think the thing that amazes me was that the guy who basically scouted all of us, and picked us to become players on the Knicks was Holzman, with no idea that he would one day be coaching us. I’m sure that there were a little idiosyncrasies about different players on our team that Red picked up scouting when we were in college that really helped him when he coached us. Some guys are fair-weather players. We didn’t have any quitters.

Q: Hit the open man was his philosophy.

Willis: He picked guys that were willing to play together. It didn’t make no difference to him who was the leading scorer. All he wanted to just to do is to win the game. And give the ball to the open guy.

Clyde: We personified team.

Q: What was the celebration like that night?

Clyde: I had so much champagne that night, man, people just buying us a drink, I couldn’t spend any money for months. We just went all over town, we started out down on the East Side, we ended up at Chamberlain’s place up in Harlem, they stayed open til like 4 o’clock.

Q: Your emotions 50 years later.

Willis: As a Knick player, the only team I played for, I’m a Knick forever, I was disappointed that when DeBusschere was GM with Patrick (Ewing), that they had a shot at it and they didn’t get it done. I thought they had enough talent to do it.

I’m a lucky enough guy that won a championship in high school, college and then pro.

Q: That team is still revered 50 years later.

Clyde: I’ll never forget, once I was talking with Bradley, it was in Cincinnati. He told me he was going into a high school, so he thought it would be a good idea to take Oscar Robertson with him. So he said he was so embarrassed, man, that none of the kids knew who Oscar Robertson was. I’m saying today, you could still go in a school here, and some kid would know who Frazier, or Bradley, DeBusschere … some kid would have heard of us. Because of the parents, the parents have perpetuated the legacy of that team, and these guys, like you said, were still revered, man, after 50 years. But in other cities it’s not like that.

Q: Fifty years later, how are you doing?

Willis: I’m down here (Ruston, La.) with the green grass, I’m looking out the window see if I see that coronavirus coming in here, but I can’t see it. It’s like a ghost. But I’m good. I got two ponds in the back of my house, one pond in the front … I’m home.

Q: Sum up what it’s like being Clyde Frazier today.

Clyde: Well I never dreamt of my celebrity. I never dreamt of anything like this. I would have just been happy to play in the NBA, never reaching stardom or anything, the type of career that I had, the legacy that I have around New York, greatest city in the world. It’s made me very humble.

I pray all the time because I see how fortunate I am. Having not played in 30, 40 years, to be able to have a restaurant (Clyde Frazier’s Wine & Dine), kids that are 10 or 11 years old coming in looking for Clyde, wanting my autograph, wanting to take a picture with me.

Q: How proud are you of that team and that day?

Clyde: I still get the goose bumps just talking about it.

Q: Is it hard for you to believe that it’s 50 years later?

Clyde: It’s starting to sound old now, 50 years (laugh). . .

I can remember it like yesterday, though.

MSG Networks will air a special “MSG 150 at Home” edition at 5 and 7:30 p.m. Friday, followed by a replay of Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals at 5:30 and 8.