New York Is Back in Knick of Time

Are you a pro basketball lover? Are you a Boston Celtics hater? Are these two things mutually exclusive?

Aren’t you sort of happy, in a morbid sort of way, that Larry Bird has been grounded? Aren’t you going to scream if you have to hear one more word about green uniforms, banners hanging from the ceiling, parquet floors, victory cigars or how Chief is Robert Parish’s nickname?

Weren’t you just as bored with the Philadelphia 76ers winning their division any year the Boston Celtics didn’t? Wasn’t it nice to see the Lakers play somebody else from the Eastern Conference in the finals last year?

Most of all:

Isn’t it swell to see the New York Knicks doing so well?

Hey, it’s about time. We’ve missed the Knickerbockers. We began to wonder if they were still in the league. We seem to remember that they had Willis Reed, Walt Frazier and Earl Monroe, but that’s the last we heard of them.

You could have made 10 bucks easily at any cocktail party in the 1980s, wagering that nobody in the room could name five Knicks. All we seem to recall is that Bernard King and Bill Cartwright suffered injuries that forced them to miss, oh, about a thousand games. Maybe a couple thousand. The team became a laughingstock. They were the Snickerbockers.

The weird thing about the great Knick revival is that King and Cartwright are finally playing again. Only thing is, they’re playing for somebody else. New York finally got around to putting together a new team. And, you know what? It’s not inconceivable that the New New York Knicks could succeed the Lakers as champions of the league.

OK, maybe not this year. Maybe next year. Then again, maybe Tuesday night’s scrap at the Forum was a preview of coming attractions. The Knicks were making their only appearance of the season in Inglewood . . . or were they?

Credit is being passed around generously to those responsible for rebuilding these Knicks. Rick Pitino, the young coach, deserves pats on the back, for one. No doubt he got a few from the fans at the Forum, some from the former New Yorkers in attendance, and some from Californians who mistook him for TV sports anchor Fred Roggin.

Patrick Ewing’s constant improvement is another factor, as is the arrival of an exciting playmaker in Mark Jackson. The Knicks have several good guards, so many, in fact, that top draft pick Rod Strickland is unhappy about not getting into the lineup more. This is not entirely surprising, since anybody who encountered Strickland at DePaul usually found him to be unhappy about something.

If you want to know what this particular pro basketball lover believes to be the secret behind the “new, improved” Knicks, here it is, in two words:

Charles Oakley.

Someday when they list the great holdups of the world, they will begin with the Great Train Robbery, the Brink’s job and taking Manhattan from the Indians, and in fifth place, right behind Lou Brock for Ernie Broglio, will come the deal that sent Charles Oakley from Chicago to New York for Bill Cartwright. New York should have had to throw in something on that deal--like maybe Manhattan.

All Oakley has done is give the Knicks brute force on the boards and spectacular outlet passes for fast breaks and a soft outside shooting touch at times when it is needed. If he is no Charles Barkley or Karl Malone, he is the next closest thing. Out of Oakley you get a dozen points a game instead of 20 or 25, but you still get a good night’s work.

Before the Knicks got to Portland the other night, Oakley put together double-doubles in 12 straight games. He continues to be among the league leaders in rebounds, after having lost the National Basketball Assn. championship in that department to Michael Cage of the Clippers last season on the last day.

What Oakley does is work, work, work.

“In an era of triple doubles and spectacular athleticism, workmanlike efforts like Charles Oakley’s often go unnoticed,” Knick assistant coach Al Bianchi says. “Charles’ numbers offer only a glimpse of what he means to our team.”

Guard Trent Tucker says: “He does a lot of hustle things that don’t always show up in the stats.”

The Knicks freely acknowledge that when they pried the Oak Man from the Bulls, all they were expecting was a man who would give them some power rebounding. They knew that Oakley was itching to get out of Michael Jordan’s shadow so that he could shoot the ball a little more often, but the Knicks were not counting on him to score more. Just rebound.

Well, where the 6-foot 9-inch forward from Virginia Union caught them by surprise was with his passing ability, in the way he zips the ball to the fast-breaking Jackson and Tucker and Strickland and Gerald Wilkins, better known as the Quickerbockers. So explosive is the New York offense that the team now averages 116 points a game. These guys have become the Eastern branch of the Denver Nuggets.

All we can say is, it’s great to see New York putting an exciting team on the floor again. Basketball fans in New York, and from New York, have been waiting a long, long time for somebody to make them forget Willis and Clyde and the Pearl. Some of them are even more tired of the Boston Celtics than some of us are.

Come to think of it, there must a lot of people in the Los Angeles area who are tired of Los Angeles winning the NBA championship.

Could this be New York’s year? Is this where it gets revenge for the Mets? Would we be happy to see the Knicks in the NBA finals? Should the NBA finals end up being between the Knicks and Lakers, will there be a game at halftime between Budweiser bottles? We wonder about such things.