The last time a New York team lost a veteran star in the playoffs was early in the 1999 NBA Eastern Conference Finals. The Knicks did without Patrick Ewing what the Yankees hope to do without Derek Jeter.
Ewing was going to turn 37 years old that summer, and he was far from the player he used to be but, still one of the Knicks’ best. The Knicks were in the Eastern Conference Finals against the Pacers, and Ewing’s final game of the postseason would be Game 2 when a partially torn Achilles’ tendon ended his season.
With the series tied 1-1 at that point, though, the Knicks still were able to take down favored Indiana. They played the final four games against the Pacers without Ewing, winning three, to capture the series in six and go to the NBA Finals. The Yankees’ chances of matching that feat took a hit yesterday with a 3-0 loss that put them down 2-0 to the Tigers in the ALCS.
Then Knicks coach Jeff Van Gundy, now an ESPN analyst, said he didn’t have to do much to keep his team focused once Ewing went down.
“We had a team that had great belief in itself, individually and collectively,” Van Gundy said yesterday in a phone interview. “It’s not like a coach instilling belief. The belief was already here.”
Van Gundy said one thing that helped the Knicks deal with Ewing’s injury was that the franchise center had been hurt throughout the season.
“For Patrick, it’d been a yearlong thing, obviously. He was banged up,” he said. “I think the good thing for us was it wasn’t new.”
Van Gundy also considered it fortunate that, like the Yankees with Jeter, the Knicks did have Ewing for part of the series. Ewing scored 16 points during a game-high 40 minutes in the Knicks’ Game 1 win, then added 10 points in 25 minutes in a Game 2 loss. He was done after that, with the Knicks using a combination of Chris Dudley and Marcus Camby, who had a terrific series.
“We still believed we could win,” Van Gundy said.
The Knicks played the Finals without Ewing and with Larry Johnson hurting with a knee injury, losing in five games to the Spurs.
Would things have been different if the Knicks had a healthy Ewing and Johnson against Tim Duncan, David Robinson and Co.? Maybe. But Van Gundy admitted yesterday, “I think they were a better team.”