IN so many ways, this is the perfect pairing, the ideal deal. On the one hand, you have a basketball team struggling to find an identity, desperate to tap its fans on the shoulder and scream: “Don’t forget about us!” And on the other, you have a star who has never quite been super, the basketball prodigy who has never quite been able to fulfill all the promise he’s pledged, almost from the cradle.
Now, they will prosper together – or they will perish together.
The Knicks have committed to Stephon Marbury, made his face the face of the franchise, for today and long into tomorrow. And Marbury, who has never been shy about admitting his wish to be the prince of Madison Square Garden, now has that rarest of opportunities: the chance to verify all the adjectives exhausted in the description of his game since he was a freshman in high school.
“We judged Stephon pretty harshly when he was 21 years old,” said Isiah Thomas, the man who made all of this happen. “I think he’s a different man at 26, not only as a basketball player but as a person. Maturity is a wonderful thing.”
Marbury is an excellent player who has only occasionally been great. The Knicks, they need great right now. They need the Marbury that has shown fleeting glimpses of what we have always known he could be: the textbook point guard sprung to life, electrifying and enterprising, tough and steady, able to elevate the players around him – many of whom, in this case, need serious elevation.
He gets to do this in his hometown, at the Garden, the place he always viewed as the ultimate basketball basilica on all of those anonymous afternoons at the other “Garden,” the patch of Coney Island concrete on 31st Street between Surf and Mermaid, the place where Marbury learned the sacred craft of the New York City point guard. It is a long and noble lineage that starts with Bob Cousy and extends right through Marbury’s own family tree, into the bloodlines of his cousin, Sebastian Telfair, currently running Steph’s old show at Lincoln High.
“It’s always meant the world to me to be thought of as a New York City kind of player,” Marbury said once, during his brief and thoroughly unhappy 21/2-year stay with the Nets. “To me, that’s the highest compliment you can pay a player, because it says you’re tough, competitive, and all you care about is winning. I want people to think that way about me.”
If it doesn’t happen here, it won’t happen anywhere. If he doesn’t reach the full measure of his talent under the watchful eye of Thomas, perched in front of the Garden tunnel – to say nothing of the ever-helpful notice of Clyde Frazier at the TV press table – it’s hard to imagine he ever will. Marbury cares about history. He wants a place in it, a valued place. In so many ways, the challenge he faces is the same one he used to encounter on the playground.
Only now, instead of playing to keep the court, he’ll be playing to keep the Knicks afloat in the public consciousness. Instead of battling against the best of Brooklyn, he’ll have a direct target against whom to compare himself, and his progress: Jason Kidd. Kidd may play in New Jersey, but as he proved two nights ago, he has a game big enough and brassy enough for the Garden to fall in love with. Marbury can be that player, too. He has it in him. Now he gets to prove it.
Marbury thought he was coming home once, before learning the old lesson that East Rutherford is never to be confused with the Upper East Side. He didn’t honor himself at the Meadowlands. Isiah Thomas wants us to believe he’s a different man. All of basketball New York wants to believe that, too.
For the sake of the Knicks. And for the sake of a native son’s legacy.
SCOUTING REPORT ON THE NEW KNICKS
STEPHON MARBURY: Significant leap last season into a legit star point guard can be traced to ankles feeling better and Penny Hardaway taking a backseat. He’ll push tempo up just like Don Chaney likes and, in a perfect world, will be less shot-happy.
PENNY HARDAWAY: Isiah Thomas likes his players long but the 6-7 Hardaway no longer is close to the athlete he once was and has started just 10 games this season. The Knicks will leave him unprotected in June’s expansion draft.
CEZARY TRYBANSKI: Probably better than Slavko Vranes but not much, according to one European scout. At 7-2, the 24-year-old Polish project moves well up and down the floor but has no lateral movement.
– MARC BERMAN
