Commentary : Getting Bernard King Was Best Move Bullets Made This Season

Four years ago, as Bernard King was blossoming into the premier scorer in the NBA, the New York Knicks played the Detroit Pistons in a five-game playoff series. King, then a Knick, was awesome, setting a National Basketball Assn. record for a five-game series with 213 points, an average of 42.6. Game 5 was played in Detroit, with the Pistons favored, a situation parallel to what the Bullets now encounter. King scored 44 to hoist the Knicks to victory in overtime.

That was the last year King played in the playoffs. In 1985, he was leading the league with a 32.9 average, when, on March 23 in Kansas City, the cruciate ligament in his right knee exploded. Not a mere flat tire, a blowout. King’s basketball obituary was set in type in time for the 11 o’clock news.

King did not play again in 1985, or in 1986. In 1987, following more than two years of rehabilitation, overcoming odds so long you could climb them, King showcased himself in six games with New York, and months later signed a contract with the Bullets.

He isn’t the dominating player he was. King had a special gift, a sudden, stunning lift-off. He’d get the ball and burst powerfully into the air before you could double-team him. Big and strong, he relished contact, he’d bump off a defender’s body as if to gain thrust for his launch. That ka-boom is gone from his game. But he can play. As far as he fell, from the height he started, King still leveled off above the ground.

Acquiring King was the best player move Washington made this season. Kevin Loughery coached him in New Jersey, knew how great a player King had been, and felt if King had anything left he was worth the gamble. King cost the Bullets nothing but money--no bodies, no draft picks. He averaged 17.2 points, and played hard every game. “He gives you everything he’s got, whatever it is,” assistant coach Bill Blair said appreciatively. “He wants the ball in the clutch, and he’ll try to score. He’s scared of nobody.” And he’s won Game 5s.

Should the Bullets win Game 5, the pivotal move of the series may have been starting King instead of Charles Jones in Game 2. The Bullets hoped that King’s offense would overcompensate for Jones’ defense. Playing 12 minutes in Game 1, King scored one point. Jones didn’t score at all in 27 minutes, and the Bullets lost by nine. Game 2, King scored 12, and the Bullets lost by one. The Bullets won Games 3 and 4 with King scoring 19 in each.

Guarding Bill Laimbeer hasn’t been a hardship so far for King, as Laimbeer seems bent on convincing the world of the need for an immobile 6-foot-11, 265 pound shooting guard. On offense, King is asserting himself the way the Bullets hoped he would. “He’s calling for the ball,” said Frank Johnson. “A couple of times I heard him say, ‘Jeff! Jeff!’ Usually when Jeff gets it, the rest of us let him go, but B was ready.” Point guard Darrell Walker, himself an assertive player, was delighted to feed his old friend and former Knick teammate. “I just stood back and gave him the ball on the wing like I used to. I’ve been passing the ball to B my whole career. He always wants it in the clutch, and I love to see him take it.”

Someone mentioned that Knicks-Detroit series four years ago, Walker’s rookie season, and half-closing his eyes, Walker could see King the way he used to be. “Tell you what,” Walker said dreamily. “He was so great. You can’t believe just how great he was.”

King remembers that series, remembers winning Game 5 on the road, but he’s reluctant to dwell on it.

“It’s part of history,” he says, conceding, “I think about it from time to time.” Smiling his stiletto smile, King decides it’s time to alter the course of the conversation. “It was something special, but not so much for my performance as the team’s,” he says, deftly shifting the focus away from discussing the player he once was. Ask him how he feels about returning to the playoffs after the prolonged absence, and King says, “I was ecstatic at the outset, but the significance wasn’t the mere fact that I hadn’t been in the playoffs for four years, but that our team rebounded from such a poor start.”

Bernard King might be the most articulate player in the NBA. He’s as smooth as velvet. He could sell winter coats in Hawaii. And he did not get that way by revealing more about himself than intended.

It’s an interesting angle, comparing the King of 1984 to the King of 1988. But King won’t help with the research.

What’s the difference in your game now and then?

(Smiling) “I don’t think about it at all.”

Does it feel like old times out there?

“In what respect? (Smiling) I don’t regress. I’m in the present. I don’t associate the feelings. My life isn’t what it was four years ago.”

He’s overcome so much in his life: urban poverty, infamous allegations of the theft of a TV set in college at Tennessee, alcoholism in his early years in the NBA, this terrible knee injury. It seems that in every period of his life there was some great pain to endure. That he got through them all and maintained such personal dignity and enthusiasm for life is remarkable and, in its way, heroic. “Have you any idea how big B’s heart must be to make this comeback?” said one Bullet. “He knows what he’s lost as a player, but he’s worked so hard to get back. So publicly he says: The hell with what I was, I’m a player now.”