By Craig Kwasniewski
After a 95 day road trip, the Lakers return to Staples tonight to face the Knicks.
BTW - Screw the damn Grammy's! Why can't they hold the Grammys in the summer and interrupt the LA Sparks home schedule? Instead the Lakers, Clippers and Kings (They play a game called "hockey," it's really big in Canada, I heard it's like soccer on ice... whatever.) get sent on a brutal two week road trip that ends up killing any momentum. Does anyone besides bitter housewives even watch the Grammys?
Anyway, I always roll out when the Knicks come to town. The NY transplants show up in their Starbury or Ewing jerseys bringing that east coast attitude. The game somehow feels a little more important despite the Knicks sucking since Van Gundy left. Maybe it's nostalgia for the Ewing-led Knicks or the stories my dad told me of Clyde Frazier, but I've always made sure I catch the Knicks when they face the Lakers. In fact tonight will be my 12th Knicks @ Lakers game in a row.
So looking back I ask myself, what was the best game in the last 11 years? Was it Alan Houston dropping 53-points on the three-time defending champs? What about the Kobe-Chris Childs fight? Or maybe it was the 1997 game, where the Lakers rallied to tie the game causing my friend and me to run back to the Forum from the parking lot to catch the OT.
Actually my favorite game of all time was the 1999 encounter. Let's set the stage: It was the strike-shortened season. Every team was to shoehorn a 50-game schedule in three months. The players were out of shape and bitter.
The Lakers had fired head coach Del Harris and replaced him with Kurt Rambis; they traded fan favorite Eddie Jones for Glen Rice; the players started turning on Kobe with Shaq rumored to have punched him in practice. Oh by the way, a guy named Dennis Rodman came to town, got married to Carmen Electra, divorced Carmen Electra, sat out a few games for mysterious reasons (which was code for Vegas) and was then dismissed after playing in 23 games. It was a circus and very fun to watch (in fact one of my all-time favorite Laker seasons).
The Knicks came to town with their own internal problems. The team with Ewing, Camby, Sprewell, Houston and Larry Johnson were woefully underachieving at 16-14. Their fans were expecting a championship run, but instead they were treading along as an eight seed.
The game matched the typical NY-LA hype... very entertaining. Dennis Rodman got under the skin of several Knicks players and turned the game into a slugfest. Here's a video of Rodman getting into it with Knicks bruser, Kurt Thomas:
He got Kurt Thomas ejected for the throw-down. Soon the GW Forum faithful starting chanting, "Rod-man... Rod-man... Rod-man..."
The rest of the Lakers followed Rodman's lead, making the game very physical. Shaq later threw down a thunderous jam right on Chris Dudley, landed on him and shoved him on the ground. Check it out (as they say, Dudley went down like a Tijuana whore):
Chris Dudley got up, grabbed the ball and fired it at Shaq who was walking away at half-court. The ball hiliariously tapped Shaq on the ass, no force at all. The refs immediately ejected Dudley from the game.
It's hard to remember the rest of the details from the game (THC, alcohol, age... who knows), all I know is that the Lakers ended up beating the Knicks 99-91.
To me the game best represented the Rodman era, a circus atmosphere with the feeling that you never knew what to expect next. I didn't know it then, but the crowd chanting Rodman's name was the peak of Rodman's Laker days. In less than three weeks, the Lakers waived him. The Lakers season started to unravel, culminating with the implosion against the Spurs in the playoffs. Phil Jackson and three championships were right around the corner.
I hated Rodman, but not because of all the tattoos, missed practices, hairstyles, transvestite showcases, etc. It was because he was, for some unknown reason, allowed to out-and-out wrestle his opponents to the ground. Take the 1988 Eastern Conference Finals, for example. The Pistons finally beat the Celtics in a very tight series (the Celtics lost Game 3 by four points, Game 5 by six points in overtime, and Game 6 by five points). Much was made afterward of the fact that Larry Bird shot 35 percent in that series. Well, if you go back and watch the games, Rodman was mugging Bird for 40 minutes a game...but thanks largely to the Pistons' "Bad Boy" reputation and the historical allowance of overly physical play in th Eastern Conference, he was allowed to get away with it. And the Pistons went on to face the Lakers in the Finals.
(Ironically, the Pistons didn't get the same allowances against the Lakers. Case in point: with the Pistons up by a single point in Game 6, Bill Laimbeer is whistled for a ticky-tack foul against Jabbar as time expires. Kareem sinks both free throws, game over. Lousy call, and it cost the Pistons the title. And for the record, the C's weren't getting those calls in the ECFs).
Years later, Rodman did the same kind of stuff for the Bulls, first against Shaq (when he was with Orlando) and then later against Karl Malone. Everybody likes to point out how Karl Malone "choked" in the 97 and 98 Finals, but again, go back and watch how much the refs let Rodman get away with. In Game 6 of the 98 Finals, Rodman twice dragged Malone down to the floor without getting called. Do you think any player would *ever* have been allowed to pull Jordan down without getting called? It was a travesty.
Posted by: basketbawful | February 13, 2007 at 07:01 AM