Even those who’d never doubted Riley were second-guessing his choice to keep Starks on the floor. “I wonder if maybe this would be the time for us to take a shot with [backup Rolando] Blackman,” ex–Knicks coach Red Holzman said as he watched the action from the crowd. (“It’s the closest I ever heard Red come to even mildly construing a disagreement with Pat,” says Ed Tapscott, then a member of New York’s front office, who was sitting next to Holzman during Game 7.)
Meanwhile, the Rockets were counting their blessings. “[Starks is] our best player right now,” Houston guard Scott Brooks recalls thinking from the bench that day. “After a while, his shot looked more like a medicine ball, with how much he was struggling to shoot it. All of us on the bench—players, coaches—kept waiting, thinking Pat was going to use Blackman. Because for years [with the Mavericks], he’d just killed us, and we couldn’t stop him, no matter how hard we tried.”
You have to go back two and a half weeks earlier, to what took place right after the Knicks’ Game 7 victory over Indiana in the Eastern Conference finals, to understand how the Rolando Blackman dilemma might have come into play against the Rockets.
The Knicks players, who collectively had zero rings, were in a great mood, having just won the biggest game of their careers. Riley had just congratulated them in the locker room. The next step was to head down to Houston.
But before dispersing, Blackman asked Riley a question: Could the players bring their wives along for the trip? Riley’s answer, in front of the entire team, was a swift no.
The four-time All-Star failed to understand the logic and pushed back—something that rarely happened with Riley, the league’s highest-paid coach and one with four rings to his credit. Blackman asked for an explanation.
But Riley simply repeated his answer from before: Wives wouldn’t be making the trip to Houston.
The tone of the exchange stunned the players, not only because they hadn’t seen Riley challenged that way in front of the group before, but also because of Riley’s terse response to such a respected veteran.
To an almost comical degree, Riley was a staunch believer in being either in or out as far as his teams were concerned. During his first training camp with New York, he overheard a phone conversation between team president Dave Checketts and Checketts’s wife, Deborah, who was purchasing an SUV. When she floated the idea of getting a green Chevy Suburban, Checketts said that was fine. But it wasn’t fine with Riley.
“She can’t buy a green car, Dave. Green is the Celtics,” Riley said.
Checketts began laughing, thinking Riley was making a joke. But Riley was completely serious.
When Checketts relayed that green wouldn’t work, his wife suggested red as an alternative. Again, Checketts was fine with that. And again, Riley wasn’t. “What? Red is the Bulls,” Riley said.
Checketts finally relented, telling his wife not to bring home anything other than a blue Suburban. But that was how Riley was wired. You were either in or you were out, down to the color of your car.
So when Blackman never got subbed into Game 7—despite the fact that he enjoyed a career-best scoring average against the Rockets, and despite Starks’s arctic spell—his teammates wondered whether the exchange with Riley had something to do with it. Blackman wondered, too.
“I don’t know if that caused some interior backlash or played a role in [Riley’s] choice,” says Blackman, who hadn’t played in the series prior to Game 7.
You’re ABSOLUTELY right about that Blackmon signing. He was supposed to get them over the hump.
And as you age, ‘those who can’t, teach’. So there is ALWAYS something at the heart of the game that still hasn’t changed that is appealing. Ie watching pros run the same offensive and defense sets and following the same principles you were taught in MIDDLE school.
That’s who’s driving the cynical, disengenous discourse of NBA fandom
one this board.
but I still feel a way hearing white dudes in media who never played, criticize majority Black sports like Basketball and Football. Something just never seemed right to me listening to these non-players/coaches who didn’t grow up around Blacks having the audacity to critique how they walk, talk, and play. These are the dweebs that you speak of.
