Flashback, May 1973: Knicks Reach Peak of Greatness—and Start a Half-Century of Frustration

Fifty years ago this week, the New York Knicks defeated the Los Angeles Lakers 102-93, taking their NBA championship series four games to one—their second title in four years.

I wrote about the squad in a prior post from a decade ago. But I find that with the passage of time, additional poignancy accrues to this achievement, and more can be written about the larger meaning of it.

The victory secured the Hall of Fame credentials of coach Red Holzman, as well as several starters from that squad: Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, Earl Monroe, Dave DeBusschere, Willis Reed, and Jerry Lucas.

Ecstatic fans like me couldn’t imagine at the time that this was a summit the team would not reach again for 50 years and counting, as I write this.

We were reminded of it, brutally, this week, as the Knicks were beaten in the second round of the playoffs by the Miami Heat. (One consolation: thank God it didn’t happen at Madison Square Garden, on Wednesday, the 50^th anniversary of that earlier victory, with Frazier himself in the stands, doing his best to cast whatever residual magic he had left on Jalen Brunson, Julius Randle and Co.)

Particularly over the last two decades, the teams have been so woebegone that longtime fans were just grateful for the team to be competitive, let alone that it would have a championship run.

It was all so different back in the early Seventies.

For the Knicks players, their success in ’73 meant that their title in 1970 was no fluke; that they had avenged their loss to the Lakers in the 1972 Championship Series; and that they deserved to be considered not just among the best of their time, but eminently worthy of emulation through their team-oriented style.

For Holzman, it meant the vindication of his trade the prior year for Earl Monroe, who, many observers wondered would be able to blend his style with backcourt partner Frazier, as well as sweet revenge in the Conference Finals against nemesis Red Auerbach, the Boston Celtics president and GM given to off-court gamesmanship to rattle foes (like changing the Knicks locker room when they were visiting for games in the Boston Garden). Holzman savored the fact that the Knicks became the first team to win an elimination game in the Celtics’ home court.

For New York fans, the Knicks’ triumph was something far greater, analogous to what Pittsburgh Steelers championships were about to accomplish: boosting the spirits of a Rust Belt metropolis badly in need of it.

In the early Seventies, New York City often seemed nothing like the “Fun City” that Mayor John Lindsay proclaimed it, with crime, population lost to the suburbs, graffiti-strewn subways, and strained finances that would plunge the city toward financial crisis in the middle of the decade. And that was on top of other strains that New Yorkers experienced like other Americans in those years: the Vietnam War and Watergate.

In contrast, the Knicks gave New Yorkers something that not only distracted them from the outside world, but that even united them in pride for a team that sacrificed individual goals for the good of the whole. Fans paid attention not just to the more celebrated ones, like the Rhodes scholar Bradley, the indomitable Reed, and the too-cool-for-school Frazier, but even role players.

(Several weeks ago, I astounded a close relative when I mentioned one of these from the 1973 squad, Harthorne Wingo. My relative insisted that I must be making the name up. Nope!)

Back then, it really was like the title of a book and documentary about the team from several years ago: “When the Garden Was Eden.”

They’d never won a championship before hiring Holzman as head coach. They haven’t won one since he left the sidelines, either.

In reading about the aftermath of the Knicks’ second title, I couldn’t help but wonder if I were seeing something similar this week in the case of the squad that, perhaps more than any other over the last decade, reminds me of them on their emphasis on defense and hitting the open man: the Golden State Warriors.

With the Warriors’ loss to the Los Angeles Lakers only a few hours after the Miami Heat ushered this year’s Knicks squad out of the playoffs, the resemblance to Holzman’s team suddenly hitting its twilight years seems hard to miss.

Just as Holzman had to deal with the sudden departures of injured and aging veterans Reed, DeBusschere, and Lucas after the ’73-’74 season, Warriors coach Steve Kerr must now contend with 38-year-old Draymond Green, 35-year-old Steph Curry, and 33-year-old and injury-plagued Klay Thompson in the last stretch of their career.

And, just as Holzman found in the late ‘70s that highly touted young players like Ray Williams and Micheal Ray Richardson couldn’t really take the place of his former Knick core, Kerr must be wondering after his team’s second-round exit when Jordan Poole, Moses Moody, and Jonathan Kuminga are ready to take the baton from Curry, Thompson, and Green.

I could not conclude this post without words of praise for Red Holzman. The numbers of six of his players, now retired, hang from the rafters of MSG. So does a number associated with their coach: 613, the number of wins he notched in leading the team.

The Knicks coach was glad to see the success of one of his former players, Phil Jackson, as head coach of the Chicago Bulls. But Jackson’s self-created “Zen Master” image was nothing like the modest style of Holzman.

Holzman started by effecting an attitudinal shift when he took over the Knicks. As Frazier put it four decades later: “He cut out all the shenanigans.”

A typical quote of his, in Mort Zachter’s 2019 biography, Red Holzman: The Life and Legacy of a Hall of Fame Basketball Coach, is, “A good team doesn't have any superstars. They fit together, make sacrifices and do things necessary to win."

According to Holzman, there were five essential factors for winning: emotional maturity, the will to win, good fellowship, leadership and alertness.

Ultimately, he focused the team’s attention on fundamentals: Ball movement, teamwork, and spontaneity, culminating in the two “D’s”: Discipline and defense.

Indeed, it’s not so much an image from those years that comes to mind but a sound, a mighty roar from the Garden faithful that came through loud and clear as I listened to games on the radio: “DEEE-fense, DEEE-fense!”

This Day in NBA History (DeBusschere Landed in Knick of Time)

Dec. 19, 1968—With Christmas only days away, New York Knick General Manager Eddie Donovan gave Coach Red Holzman an early present for the holidays: the player who would form the missing piece of the puzzle he needed to secure two league championships. 

The team, even with several fine players, had inexplicably started to sputter when Donovan traded center Walt Bellamy and point guard Howard Komives in exchange for a player much-coveted by much of the rest of the league: rugged forward Dave DeBusschere. 

Standing 6 feet, 6 inches and weighing 225 pounds, DeBusschere had already made his mark in his early twenties by playing two professional sports (the second was baseball, in his time as a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox) and serving as player-coach for the Pistons. 

His years with the Knicks would, surprisingly enough, only constitute half of his dozen years in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Yet New York was where he secured the reputation that would lead to his uniform being retired by the Knicks and with DeBusschere himself enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

No other trade in Knick history would have such a long-lasting, positive influence on the team. Since 1963, Donovan had acquired a raft of talented young players in Willis Reed, Bill Bradley, Walt Frazier, Cazzie Russell and Phil Jackson. But until DeBusschere came along, a team that should have contended was consistently out of sync. 

Holzman's offensive credo was simple to state but harder to apply without the right players: "See the ball, hit the open man." Komives had not only proven inadequate to that task, but had annoyed Russell by often overlooking him on court, even when he was wide open, according to Bill Gutman's Tales from the 1969-1970 New York Knicks.

As for Bellamy, there was no doubting the skill of this former Rookie of the Year, but he was three years older than another natural center then playing out of position—Reed—and without the latter’s passing ability or leadership skills. 

While these factors made Bellamy and Komives expendable, DeBusschere brought a number of assets—some immediately visible, others only observable over the long term. He was already demonstrating that he could be an essential cog in the pressing defensive alignment that Holzman hoped to put into action. 

Invariably, he would be designated the player who would shadow and stop the opposing team’s offensive star. DeBusschere, Phoenix Suns dazzler Connie Hawkins once observed, "took away my first, second, third, and fourth offensive move." 

But he could also pass well—a prerequisite for “hitting the open man”—sneak behind picks for shots, and inspire teammates with his durability and fearless, all-stops-out physical style.

Had it simply involved acquiring a talented player, the swap’s impact would have been limited. After all, obtaining Bob McAdoo and Carmelo Anthony—among the most prolific scorers of their eras—did nothing to improve the Knicks’ standing.

Instead, the trade—while bringing aboard a tenacious rebounder and defender who could, when the occasion warranted, sink a well-timed jumper from the corner—was so important for the way it allowed other players to assume other, more natural roles, as detailed by sports journalist Pete Axthelm in The City Game:

*Willis Reed, a bit slow at power forward to stop fast smaller players, could use his bulk at his natural position—center—while using his feathery outside shot to lure the opposing center away from the basket.

*Bill Bradley, who had been shuttling unsuccessfully between guard and forward, settled at small forward, where Madison Square Garden fans could see the deft shooting touch and court awareness that made him a star at Princeton.

*Walt Frazier, knowing that Reed and DeBusschere could cover for his mistakes, took more frequent gambles in stealing the ball, becoming one of the leading defensive stars of the National Basketball Association (NBA).

*Cazzie Russell learned how to make an instant impact as an offensive sparkplug.

*Dick Barnett, at shooting guard, found new life in his post-30 legs.

In short, DeBusschere changed the alchemy of the team. He would also exemplify its consistency and cohesiveness, as he himself put it after his retirement: "The key to our team was the willingness to sacrifice without expecting anything in return. Period.”

The forward’s impact was immediate: Not only did the team halt their losing streak, but it would go on to to the Eastern Division finals, which they lost to the Boston Celtics in six games. 

The following year, when I began to avidly follow them over the radio, was their season of glory, when they won their first NBA championship. DeBusschere would be essential to that success, averaging 16.1 points per game in the team’s 19 total playoff contests. He would prove equally essential in the team’s 1973 championship run.

Following his retirement in 1974, DeBusschere would become one of only two men to serve as general manager of two New York professional teams (George Weiss, with the Yankees and Mets, was the other executive); engineer the merger of the NBA with the American Basketball Association (in which he acted as the last commissioner of the league); and, in his four seasons as Knicks GM in the 1980s, lay the cornerstone for contention in the 1990s by drafting Georgetown All-American center Patrick Ewing as the overall #1 pick in the league.

DeBusschere’s indomitability on the court made his 2003 death by heart attack at age 62 all the more shocking and sad to fans like me. Few of us could identify with Frazier’s off-court flash, Bradley’s mixture of court smarts and intellectual brilliance, or Jackson’s counter-cultural instincts. 

But DeBusschere was the lunch-bucket hero, the guy who would shrug off a sharp elbow, a blow to the face, or an aching knee to get his work done, night after night, only to smile afterward with a beer in hand over a job well done.

(Accompanying photo of Dave DeBusschere taken from 1974 New York Knicks program.)