Truth Crushed to the Earth Is Truth Still

FD's Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History will be officially released on October 26, but the celebration is beginning early. Inspired, and curated, by Brian Phillips of Run of Play, DREAM WEEK features some of your fastest and most favorite writers trying to crack the mystery of Hakeem Olajuwon and his Rockets.

Dan Devine is a contributing writer for Ball Don't Lie, Yahoo! Sports' NBA blog. He Tweets, he Tumbls and he stows away neatly under your seat.

I was 11 years old when Hakeem Olajuwon changed the way I understood basketball. And God, do I hate him for it.

It was the summer of 1994 and my synapses were on overload. The Rangers were slaying the Canucks and Jordan was shagging flies in Birmingham. As I sat in my parents' basement in Staten Island mastering "Shinobi III," it felt like the New York Knicks were really going to do it.

The Knicks stomped the Atlantic that year, rolling up 57 wins with that bruising Pat Riley steez that still invokes screw faces. In the Eastern Conference Semifinals, they finally slid past the hated (and yes, Jordan-less) Chicago Bulls, thanks to a Hue Hollins whistle that will echo forever and ever, amen. Then they beat the somehow-even-more-hated Indiana Pacers, satisfyingly clipping the string on that miserable Chatty Cathy they had playing the 2, and graduated out of the East into the NBA Finals for the first time since 1973.

"Graduated" works pretty well here; with all due respect to the Dunking Dutchman, going from Rik Smits to Hakeem Olajuwon represents a pretty steep elevation. For Patrick Ewing, Master's-level work lay ahead.

In the memories seared into my gray matter, the 1994 NBA Finals consisted of Ewing having a seven-game nightmare against a bully he couldn't drop, throwing punch after feckless punch that landed flush on Hakeem's jaw but had no effect. In my memory, watching Ewing play Hakeem feels like watching my father try to get around on crutches after breaking his kneecap, seeing a giant laid low by a force beyond his control.

In my memory, this happened over and over and over:



Of course, as is often the case, memory doesn't quite nail the facts. Ewing wasn't exactly a scared little kid in that series -- he was a 31-year-old eight-time All-Star, the best player on a team that contested a Game 7 for the O'Brien, a linchpin who played 44 minutes and averaged 18.9 points per game in the Finals.

That said, Ewing did get destroyed in that series, bested in just about every facet of the sport. Hakeem was faster, sharper and more athletic. His hands slipped more smoothly into the passing lanes and his feet moved more quickly on the help-side rotation. He had a better handle, a defter touch and a more rapid reaction after receiving the rock. He had moves, and moves, and moves. Ewing set a then-Finals record for rejections with 4.3 blocks per game (Hakeem posted 3.7) and got the better of the boards, snaring 12.4 rebounds per game to Hakeem's 9.1. But just about everywhere else? Anything he could do, Hakeem could do better.

Olajuwon outscored Ewing all seven nights, averaging 26.9 points on 50 percent shooting from the floor. At the other end of the court, he forced Ewing, himself a 49.6 percent shooter during the '93-'94 regular season, into a dismal 36.3 percent mark. The Dream also more than doubled Ewing's dimes (4.1 assists per game to 1.7) and topped him in thefts (1.6 steals per game to 1.3).

Everywhere my 11-year-old self looked, there was proof. Seven games' worth of indisputable evidence, collected on the purest proving ground possible. Hakeem's team won, and they won because he flat-out beat Ewing. I hated it, I raged against it, but he was better. He just was.

And because he was, Ewing couldn't be what I'd come to believe he was: The best player in the game who wasn't Michael Jordan. (I know, I know. I was 11 and grew up in New York. Cut me some slack.)

Ewing losing to Jordan was one thing; Michael was another animal entirely, and everybody knew it. But losing to -- and being considerably less than -- Hakeem? Someone who played the same position as Patrick, who came from the West, who we never saw? (Again, kid memory falls short here -- they'd actually squared off in the regular season 15 times prior to the '93-'94 Finals, with the Rockets going 9-6 against the Knicks, including two white-washes that season in which Olajuwon outscored Ewing by a combined total of 66 to 24.)

Seeing Ewing so obviously outgunned by this tight-mustached cat who, as our esteemed curator notes, had "never seemed inhumanly perfect," who had "something approachable about him even when he was bringing the roof down on somebody's head," forced me to reevaluate him. And I wasn't the only one, either.

Hakeem's brilliance in the '94 Finals -- his victory in the first post-Jordan run for the roses, his seizing of the wide-open opportunity for anyone else in the game to stake their claim -- changed the popular understanding of Ewing and indelible-inked his story. No one could argue Ewing's heart or desire, but going into the 1994-95 season at 32 years old, with nearly 28,000 minutes of NBA ball on those knees, having just been summarily vanquished by Olajuwon, himself 32 -- and it wasn't just that he was better than Ewing, it's that he didn't seem worn down in the same way -- it was becoming harder to believe that Patrick could be a serious factor at the championship level.

Admittedly, the Knicks' subsequent clashes (and stumbles) against an ascendant '95 Pacers team, the MJ-revitalized Bulls and the late-decade Riley/Mourning/Hardaway Heat show that Olajuwon didn't completely cut Ewing off at the knees or end his tenure as a competitive player. But the team's best, brightest shot at the brass ring has passed and Ewing, try as he might to stay in the conversation, had settled into a lower tier (The Knicks did make one more trip to the Finals during Ewing's tenure, but their improbable title-round run in the strike-shortened 1999 season was fueled by the guard play of Allan Houston and Latrell Sprewell. While Ewing showed some of the fire of old in series-clinching games against Miami and Atlanta, he bowed out two games into the Eastern Conference Finals against the Pacers with a torn Achilles.)

Everyone was happy to call Ewing a "warrior." He would be revered as a tireless fighter, but never be viewed as an ultimate victor. Any Knick fan would gladly claim him as our proudest standard-bearer, but we all had to realize he'd never be the gold standard. Everything about Patrick Ewing's essence as a basketball player was thick with the sweat of labor, literally and metaphorically, and monarchs never perspire.

In a way that Jordan's off-guard ominpotence never could, Hakeem's brilliance laid bare the flaws in Ewing's game and determined his fate: When the game got immortal, he'd forever be second-class.

At least Patrick wasn't the only one.



The other best pivot of the era came out of the Naval Academy with the first pick in the 1987 NBA Draft. David Robinson was a rippling marvel who ran the floor like a 5-foot-9 scatback. He could use outmaneuver plodding defenders on the block to get to the basket, elevate above traffic down low to clear the glass, erase teammates' defensive mistakes at the rim, and do it all with matter-of-fact ease. On top of that, he cut a warm, compelling figure, forever flashing a smile that swelled like a symphony. He was intelligent, accountable and phenomenal. Superman in high tops. Your grandma's favorite basketball player.

And after leading his San Antonio Spurs to an NBA-best 62 wins and the top seed in the Western Conference during the 1994-95 season, he was named the NBA's Most Valuable Player, a well-deserved reward for a race well run.

Except, y'know, not really.



To his credit, Robinson fared better in the 1995 Western Conference Finals than Ewing had one year earlier, averaging 23.8 points per game on 44.9 percent shooting to go with 11.3 rebounds, 2.7 assists, 2.2 blocks and 1.5 steals in 41.7 minutes of nightly work. Thing is, Olajuwon was an utterly insolvable equation, a different animal than even the one the Knicks saw -- the legend attributes this to Olajuwon seeing red after watching Robinson receive his MVP award before the start of the series -- and he made Robinson look flat-out stumped. In 43.5 minutes per game, Olajuwon torched the Admiral for 35.3 points (shooting 56 percent from the floor and 80.6 percent from the line), 12.5 rebounds, 5 assists, 4.2 blocks and 1.3 steals.

More than that, Hakeem showcased the kind of iron will that could independently decide outcomes. With the series knotted at two games apiece and a slot in the Finals hanging in the balance, the Dream took the onus on himself and straight-up beasted, posting 81 total points, 26 rebounds, 11 assists and 10 blocks in Games 5 and 6. It was complete, borderline ridiculous domination, the kind of thing that just doesn't happen to players of Robinson's stature -- at least, until they meet their mismatch.

I'd never deign to fall back on the basketball/jazz canard, especially not here, but there was an elemental stylistic difference between Olajuwon and Robinson revealed in that series that evokes at least the spirit of that too-easy comparison. Watch the way Hakeem attacks Robinson in that video -- the fluidity of his movement, the way his offensive approach straddles the line between fundamental and freestyle. He initiates, Robinson works to make the proper prescribed play to take away the Dream's best option, Olajuwon calmly responds with an evil array of counters and pivots, and by the time Robinson can calculate the altered trajectory, the ball's already in the net.

Robinson always appeared to be the perfect specimen, the test-tube All-Star, programmed for greatness. But in the heat of the moment, he had no answers to combat the relentlessness, improvisation and immediacy of Hakeem's offensive attack. Call it instinct vs. education, nature vs. nurture, art vs. math, whatever -- while Robinson's greatness felt bound by a very precise machine logic, Hakeem could color outside the lines. That made the difference. Rockets in six.

Robinson's performance in the series' final two games? Forty-one total points, 22 rebounds, seven blocks and five assists. Respectable numbers -- real good against anybody else, and good enough to win against most of the league's other centers. But not good enough here, and not good enough to lift his team by himself, especially when his counterpart was finding daylight every time the Rockets fed the post.

Fairly or unfairly, that's how we remember Robinson in the context of all-timers. Very nice player, very nice skills, very nice career -- especially that late part, after the Spurs drafted Tim Duncan, the best power forward of all time, when they won two titles (lest we forget, the only two that Robinson won). I mean, sure, he didn't get the job done as the top dog in the year he got the MVP and had the best team with the best record and home court advantage. And sure, faced with a coin-flip opportunity to take control of a 2-2 series with Game 5 at home after clawing back to even-par on the road, put his squad on his back and push the Spurs into the Finals, he got destroyed in back-to-back games. But yeah. What a nice player.



Two seasons, two legendary rivals, two decisive victories, three legacies set in stone: Ewing as wounded warrior, Robinson as secondary specimen, Olajuwon as conquering crucible. Olajuwon's performances against his era's two greatest counterparts defined the way a generation viewed the basketball hierarchy. They also made a convincing argument that for a time, however fleeting, he was the most dominant basketball power on the planet, Birmingham included.

Why Is It Gnawing on Arkansas?

Not so long ago, I was out at a party, and I met a Dallas Mavericks fan from Eudora, AR who closely follows NBA basketball. We shall call him Frank. Frank professes no extraordinary fondness for any other team, though he does hate Kobe Bryant. Frank is twenty-three, and he has spent his whole life in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Missouri. Frank turns twenty-four this fall, meaning that he wasn't yet nine years old when the New York Knicks lost to the Houston Rockets in the NBA Finals, wasn't yet twelve when the Knicks and Heat first fought, and hadn't yet reached high school when the San Antonio Spurs' dynasty dawned at the Knicks' expense in 1999. By the time Frank had finished high school, the Knicks had begun their steady recession into functional obsolescence. As things currently stand, the New York Knickerbockers haven't been basketball relevant for almost a decade, or about as long as Frank has known enough to really know anything.

So, then, why is it that Frank and I could speak at length during our first conversation about seemingly every transaction, farce, dip, and rise that the Knicks have experienced this century? How could someone who has spent his entire life wholly beyond the East Coast media bubble, consistently amidst a television landscape from which the Knicks have been quickly exterminated, and generally insulated from a miserable foreign-market team know so much about a franchise so insignificant? The only memories of worthwhile Knick moments, to the extent which they exist at all, should come from a time of preadolescence that is often hazy and imprecise. More recently, through tests, high-school social drama, prom, and all of college, the decrepit Knicks were important enough to distract from the immediacy of that life? Even the most devoted Knicks fan, one who is blissfully absorbed in a New Yorker's unique geocentrism, would find this difficult to believe. Trust me. Not least of all because actual Knicks fans have hardly been able to keep up with all of it.

Maybe it's Frank. He is smart, and he has demonstrated impressive recall of sports-related information. He used to work as a radio broadcaster calling baseball games while in college. A self-proclaimed NBA fanatic, perhaps his lifelong passion naturally led to a special interest in the Knicks, even if not wholly conscious. This is somewhat reasonable: I recently made a reflexive reference to Beno Udrih based upon an obscure SportsCenter highlight from several years ago which I only recalled processing after I had invoked Beno's name. To the contrary, though, Frank is quick to admit that he remembers far more about baseball than basketball, and that he isn't always so good with the NBA minutiae of teams not from Dallas. On the surface, nothing about Frank suggests he should have a special affinity for the Brickers.



A more plausible explanation is that in an age of league-wide cable highlights, League Pass (which Frank has never owned, however), and internets, staying up on any team has become dramatically easier. Someone like Frank can follow the Knicks almost inadvertently, merely by seeking out basketball content provided by the leading sources which are now functionally ubiquitous. Further, despite its on-court decline, New York enjoyed special notoriety during the Isiah Thomas years due to the ignominy of paying so much money for so little production, and due to Isiah's almost inconceivable incompetence as a coach and personnel merchant. Ardent NBA man Frank may have been forced to keep tabs on the Knicks, even if he weren't already titillated by the spectacle of an ongoing disaster.

Sex-scandal aside, why the Knicks, though? Other teams have been serially, comically mismanaged. Teams such as the Clippers, the Grizzlies, and, until recently, the Hawks. These are franchises which have served as league-wide jokes, their names mocked and transformed into code words among sports fans at times. Yet, Frank's recall of the macabre details surrounding those teams lags far behind what he knows about Knickerbocker basketball. And he is not alone. The number of sports fans, in general, and basketball fans, in particular, who have no discernable connection to New York but nonetheless speak at length about the team's fortunes and history always surprises me. Something about the Knicks appears to matter more.



New York City is among the older places in the United States. Like many American things, with age comes advantage. Harvard is Harvard, in part, because it was Harvard before other places were anything. Previously, higher education hadn't existed here. Same goes for today's rich people whose families have just always been rich--they got a much earlier start watching investment opportunities come along and interest compound, so they had some distance ahead of would-be equals. New York is no different. That's not meant to minimize Harvard's academic rigor, the hard work which served as the kernel for a family fortune, or, in New York's case, desirable factors including an inviting harbor. But being old has helped to amplify certain intrinsic benefits and conferred upon New York lasting relevance and a presumed meaningfulness.

As the financial industry is realigned and the general American economy is overhauled, New York may lose this rarified profile. For now, though, the presumption is strong: most people don't seem to question that New York is a special place. I was not a history major, but the United States can feel as though it grew up with this understanding, as though appreciating New York's importance were an inherited value.

Regardless of its beginnings, enough people seem to embrace this curious ethereal sense that New York is supposed to be special. And New Yorkers love feeling this way. The architecture, the culture, the shops, the restaurants, the fashion--everything must be the best because it is of New York, and, naturally, it is of New York because it is the best. Tourists have bought into this idea as though it were a marketing slogan; millions of people visit New York under the assumption that they will spend time among something different and largely better. Beyond lofty markers like marble columns and outrageous dresses (some of which connote elitism), pride in exceptionalism permeates even quotidian aspects of New York life, like riding in a subway car loaded with people of every ethnicity imaginable. For the most part, New Yorkers relish these sorts of things about themselves.



I grew up in New York, I lived there as an adult, and I always felt that a majority of the local sports culture was informed by fomented entitlement. The Yankees had always been good, and New Yorkers deserved for them to remain good was the rough reasoning which seemed to fuel the regular fits of Yankee hysteria. Any free agent in any sport was grist for the rumor mill because no person wouldn’t want to live in New York City. Escalating ticket prices to everything were collective validation that New York sports really were just that special. And so forth. The City’s preeminence as a media and commercial capital was wedded to self-satisfaction, and this consummation yielded the perverse climate of impatience and impulsiveness that is manically self-reinforcing. Everything has been infected by the corrosive notion that New York’s teams must be the best because New Yorkers won’t stand for anything less.

(One note: The NFL may have created a safe haven amid this storm, because the league’s ruthless insistence on parity has forced liberation from this lunacy upon the Jets and Giants. The culture of those teams, surely not without insane people, feels more universal, organically connected to the larger national football pastime that has supplanted seemingly everything else. Maybe that is the ultimate triumph of the Shield--it made New York relent.)

The Knicks have a special form of this disease. Unlike the Yankees and Mets, the Knickerbockers are impeded by a salary cap that magnifies mistakes. Unlike the Jets and Giants, the Knickerbockers do not benefit from a countervailing, nearly religious belief system that excuses failure, however disappointing, as part of the natural order imposed by its governing body. Unlike the Rangers, the Knickerbockers are important to more than just a dwindling niche audience. They’ve enjoyed none of these protections. Instead, they are left exposed to the ills of mismanagement; to the ill-advised insistence on mortgaging the future for a passable present; to the ill-tempered response from an expectant fan base. Knicks history in recent decades has been one full of questionable personnel, awful contracts, a strategy which eschews cultivating a sturdy foundation, and a group of fans left to seethe in anger. The Knicks have devolved into the worst of New York.

Underneath these many problems lies one other debilitating symptom: shame. And it’s a shame which stems from something else unique about New York that might help to explain why the Knicks resonate well beyond the area to which they might be--here’s that word again--entitled. Basketball’s home is New York, and the Knicks have desecrated the City’s game.



The Knicks haven’t won an NBA championship since 1973, the most unstoppable player on the planet grew up in Akron, and college basketball’s leading orbits lie elsewhere. It would be easy, upon cursory glance, to survey this landscape and disregard as hubris the claim that basketball belongs to New York. Only, that would be wrong. Almost every basketball institution--UCLA, the Celtics, Marv Albert--owes a debt to New York. Yearly, New York City’s high schools replenish the talent in towns like Storrs, Lawrence, and Chapel Hill. Madison Square Garden remains the most sacrosanct stage for the game’s great performers, all but demanding timeless efforts that can often feel supernatural. To sit among the crowd at a Knicks game is to be immersed in a level of basketball erudition uncommon to any other arena around the league. And then, of course, there’s the street.

Celebrating schoolyard basketball for its soulfulness has become almost trite. One could build a mountain out of the magazines, movies, books, paraphernalia, and web writings dedicated to definitively capturing streetball. The entire And1 brand may have forever destroyed this romance, and some point in our recent past surely stands as a moment of demarcation when the supposed innocence of grassroots hoops was lost. There really doesn’t remain much room for reverie. However weary we may be of this commodification, though, it is no less true that schoolyard games retain the quintessence of the sport. Without the hip-hop montages and corporate sponsorships, pickup games are still exercises in egalitarianism, athleticism, hard work, and determination, set on top of asphalt. The same is true of New York: look past the oligarchs who keep the tallest buildings smooth and shining to see the many other everyday folks who know the rough edges and confer upon the city its creativity and vitality by working jobs, raising families, and hoping to carve out some success.

In this way, New York is the true capital of basketball. Beyond the dizzying array of connections to the NYC that unite almost all of the game’s denizens, New York’s primacy as a streetball center keeps the sport anchored in the five boroughs. Basketball embodies New York’s spirit, and New York embodies basketball’s. Appreciating this dynamic explains why places like West 4th Street are hallowed proving grounds; why the history of the game was likely altered the day that Black Jesus came forth from Philadelphia, held court in Harlem, and dazzled Lew Alcindor; why a palpable chill descends on the building when Kobe shows up to drop 60.



Now, about that shame.

The Knickerbockers are New York’s most visible link to the sport with which it shares a soul; the Knicks are a proxy for the City. And the Knicks, of course, play in the National Basketball Association. NBA basketball is the best-known, best-played form of the sport. A sustained championship drought, therefore, has bedeviled New Yorkers because it has challenged a shared sense of identity. Even if this discomfort is not always articulated as such, the Knicks’ failures have struck at what New Yorkers are about. The place of basketball should field a team which can play it as well as just about any other.

The angst that has accompanied New York’s decades-long run of futility has built ever stronger as years have accumulated. Do not forget that more than any other area team, the Brickers are infected by the warped New York insanity. Patrick Ewing’s arrival in the 1980s was supposed to cure this disease, restoring order and elevating the franchise to its deserved place. That didn’t happen. Instead, he and his charges spent the 1990s annually gearing up for another assault on the title, always falling short, usually in spectacular fashion. A wounded host, Ewing’s teams attracted the illness and provided it with nourishment to grow. A tragic legacy of the Ewing Knicks is that they inadvertently perpetuated a sports culture they were intended to eradicate--or at least satiate--and unwittingly initiated the ugliness that followed.

As Frank can recount with disarming specificity, here’s what came next: foolish hirings, crippling sums paid to worn-out players, desperate attempts to cure the present by hurting the future, largely fruitless drafts, widespread mockery, and steady losing. Steady, outrageous losing--by forty; by accident; without offense; forever without defense; through suspensions; through fistfights on the team plane; through truck parties. All of it brought on by the warped New York reality that was closing in faster than ever and making demands even louder than before. And so, the shame. New York, a place of exceptionalism and basketball capital, was represented by a team which directly defied both.



One of the first questions Frank asked me when I shared that I rooted for the Knicks was, “Are you excited about Donnie Walsh and Mike D’Antoni?” I nodded and said that I was, however it was far from a ringing endorsement. I was being honest; I wasn’t entirely sure.

The new Bricker leadership has restored professionalism to the franchise, one of the many ironic deficiencies previously afflicting a team which has such an active corporate following. And D’Antoni offers the promise of a system which requires discipline and practice, but not at the expense of creative freedom or entertainment. It’s a daring concept that is exciting and engrossing, though not yet proven to be a championship schematic. That, honestly, is the cause for concern. NBA championships are won with defense, and D’Antoni has not yet demonstrated that he can teach it or, more importantly, get his teams to play it well. Further, Walsh and D’Antoni’s first trip to the draft lottery yielded an unproven European who may be too slow for great defense and too frail for great anything. Not exactly the dawning of a new day.

Walsh and D’Antoni’s next opportunity to prove themselves comes in nine days, when they’re back in the lottery at the Draft. Rather than the team’s current players or most recent season, discussion of the Knicks will likely be framed by LeBron James, who, of course, is a Cavalier. But there are few NBA topics as popular as the insinuation that LeBron will sign with the Knicks in 2010. Whomever is traded, or signed, or figuratively told to start looking for a new house, the media will speculate about LeBron. The Knicks took Stephen Curry because he is friendly with James. The Knicks want to trade up for Ricky Rubio because they like his potential alongside James and think that will appeal to LeBron. They took a big man to pair with James. All of this will be said even though there is hardly a preponderance of evidence to suggest that James-to-New York is an actual possibility. So, then, why does everyone keep saying it?

For the same reasons that Frank remembers the Trevor Ariza trade and that people pay so much money on Fifth Avenue for things they can buy at home: the Knicks matter more. The Lakers and the Celtics and the Bulls matter. So do the Pistons and the Spurs. But the Knicks matter more. They carry with them New York’s prestige and the soul of the game, two wholly unique qualities. National media, whose satellite and internets arms reach into the corners of Arkansas, recognize this, and so the Knicks remain a story even when they aren't. This may bother people, but it's the truth; if people didn’t care a little more about New York, the Today Show would spend far less time out in Rockefeller Center. LeBron is viewed as the man who can stand up to the New York insanity, if not cure it. He is viewed as the man who can restore the Knicks to the position which their city demands. And he is viewed as the man who will reward Frank for his continued attention and encourage it through the next drought. That's why everyone keeps saying it; in some ways it feels right.

Think about all of this and prepare accordingly, because the LeBron gossip is going to stop just as soon as New York stops being old, basketball leaves the City, and he signs anywhere else. Frank will surely keep track of that.