Barbara Barker: These Knicks aren't the same as the 1999 team that made the NBA Finals . . . and neither am I
Newsday's Barbara Barker hard at work during Game 1 of the NBA Finals between the Knicks and Spurs on Wednesday in San Antonio. Credit: Steve Popper
SAN ANTONIO — On the surface, the symmetry of it all is startling.
The Knicks opened the NBA Finals Wednesday night here with a 105-95 win over the San Antonio Spurs, the same team they met the last time they went to the Finals in 1999. Yet that’s where the similarities end between this trip and the one the Knicks made 27 years ago.
Same teams. Different players. Different expectations. Different world.
I ought to know.
Twenty-seven years ago, I took a yellow cab to LaGuardia Airport, stopped by a newsstand to buy four newspapers, used a paper ticket to board a plane and more than likely flew past the World Trade Center on my way to San Antonio. I was six months pregnant, exhausted, but thrilled to be covering a team in the Finals that I had reported on as a beat writer for the past four years.
On Monday, after waiting in the kind of massive security line at LaGuardia that didn’t exist three decades ago and then using my phone to both board a plane to San Antonio and read Knicks coverage on various apps, I couldn’t help but think how different this Knicks team was from the one I covered then.
This Knicks team is both better and more beloved than the last Knicks team that went to the Finals, though both of their journeys through the Eastern Conference playoffs were remarkable in their own way.
The team I covered as a younger, OK much younger, reporter really wasn’t all that well-liked by fans until upsetting No. 1 seed Miami in the first round of the playoffs. The biggest reason for this were two controversial trades the Knicks had made to help get them to the NBA Finals at the end of a shortened lockout season
In June of 1998, the Knicks traded Charles Oakley, their popular and punishing power forward, for Marcus Camby, a versatile and athletic shot blocker. Then, a day after the lockout ended, the Knicks dealt John Starks, their fierce and emotional shooting guard, to Golden State for Latrell Sprewell, a player who had been suspended for seven months for assaulting his coach.
Oakley, Starks and Patrick Ewing were the nucleus of the Knicks team that captured the heart of the city in the early 1990s, leading the Knicks to the 1994 NBA Finals. Now, just Ewing was left and the years of leading the team were beginning to take a toll on his body.
Sprewell, in particular, won over the fan base with his breakaway tomahawk dunks and a personal style that appealed to younger fans. After Ewing tore his Achilles during Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals against archrival Indiana, Sprewell tried to pick up the slack, averaging 26 points in the Finals.
As exciting as that run was, with Ewing out, only the most ardent fans expected that the Knicks would be able to beat a San Antonio team that had both David Robinson and Tim Duncan, and would go on to win four more titles in the 2000s. Their accomplishment was beating the Pacers in the Eastern Conference Finals.
That is the biggest difference between that team and the one that opened the Finals on Wednesday night. This Knicks team is capable of winning it all against a Spurs team that is going to be great but is still young and inexperienced.
With their run through the Eastern Conference — the Knicks are on an 11-game winning streak, which includes sweeping their last two series — this team has captured the heart of this city and the metropolitan area. Unlike the 1999 Knicks, the core of this team has been together since the start of this season. They increased the size of their fan base and their expectations with a win over the defending champion Celtics last season in the Eastern Conference semifinals and entered this season as a legitimate title contender.
When my plane landed in San Antonio 27 years ago, I never could have imagined that it would be almost three decades before the Knicks were back in the Finals again. Nor could I have imagined just how much the world would change in the interim.
The daughter I gave birth to three months after the Knicks lost to the Spurs in five games is a 26-year-old social worker in New York City and has a younger brother who is a crazed Knicks fan. I am no longer one of a handful of women covering the NBA and one of even fewer to do so while having children. Far from it.
A year after that 1999 run, Doris Burke broke a major glass ceiling when she became a commentator for the Knicks. Today, there are a number of women with high-profile jobs covering the NBA and one of them, ESPN’s Cassidy Hubbarth, has recently launched a podcast ANDMOM, along with WNBA guard Skylar Diggins, on how to navigate the challenges of career and motherhood.
If the world can change this much in 27 years, so can the Knicks.
Knicks in 7.
Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.
