EVERY time he comes to town, Charles Oakley gargles a mouthful of metaphors and lets them spill out to the delight of those surrounding his locker. Somewhere, hidden amidst the verbiage, rests a wise pearl from an NBA philosopher who is something of a mixed bag himself. Oak is part hippie and part blue-collar, a relentless practitioner of a trade he plies unselfishly.
Let’s see if we can find the pearl.
“You get what you got,” Oakley said of the current Knicks mix. “You smoke what you get. Let it burn.”
No, that wasn’t it. Besides, Oakley, now with the Bulls, didn’t finish the thought. Had he finished it, he might have said something such as, “Fire up some tunes and eventually get around to pressing the speed dial button to Domino’s.”
The search continues.
“That’s who they wanted,” Oakley said of injured Marcus Camby. “I have nothing bad to say about Marcus. As long as when I play him I know how to guard him, that’s all I’m worried about. He’s not a franchise player, but he brings them some things as far as energy.”
Nah, he can do much better than expressing thinly veiled, lingering jealousy over a younger, more explosive player for whom he was traded.
“New York’s not gonna deal with being knocked out in the first round again,” said Oakley, who helped the Raptors bounce the Knicks a year ago. “I don’t care if they don’t have a center. You can’t be under .500. They’ve got some athletes. They’ve got talent.”
Now he’s warming up.
“Guys aren’t into it like they used to be,” he said. “They were always real tough, hard-nosed in practice. It’s all selfishness now.”
Another nice predecessor to his pearl of the day: “They have to listen to Jeff and what he’s trying to tell them.”
Bingo. Knicks coach Jeff Van Gundy always has been worth listening to because he never has had any motive other than winning every possession on the way to winning every game. He isn’t Phil Jackson, picking a fight with a different superstar every year so that he can be praised for patching up the relationship, a tactic that has more to do with getting credit for winning than with winning.
These are tough times for Van Gundy because he is coaching without his center, Marcus Camby. These are tough times for the players because they have to listen to the man who is coaching without his center and blaming everything but that for the poor play.
Listening to him beats the alternative: Tune him out, get him fired, and play for the next guy. The problem is the next guy won’t be as good, won’t have as high of a ceiling. Anybody as good as Van Gundy already would have a desirable job and his current team would consider him worth keeping.
At least until Camby returns, the Knicks are as tough to watch as their coach’s expressions. Sure, they avoided the embarrassment, yesterday, of losing twice in one season to the Bulls. The Knicks won 78-71, but did so in such a way as to make Janet Reno look pretty by comparison.
Now the Knicks need to win their next two games to get to .500. It’s not what anybody envisioned in the post-Patrick Ewing era.
“It’s like a recipe and they changed up and wanted to make it another way and it didn’t come out,” Oakley said. “If somebody has a recipe for 20, 30 years and you went to see a psychic lady and she tells you should do it like this, now you’re going to try this, it ain’t going to work in this game.”
Somebody should find that psychic lady who thought it was a good idea to pay third-string point guard Charlie Ward $5.3 million, and expose her as a fraud, tear up her tarot cards, smash her crystal ball, and keep her away from the checkbook.
The Knicks have some serious work to do in upgrading a roster that already gets a great deal better once Camby returns. If Van Gundy is still standing in front of the scorer’s table, sweating every possession, the chances of that upgraded roster going places will be greater than if a change is made.
