New York Rangers, Knicks Prove Every Dog Team Has Its Day

It has been 54 years since the New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup.

It has been 21 years since the New York Knickerbockers won the NBA championship.

Good years, all in all.

The only thing New York City needs more than a dose of strong air freshener is a dose of humility, and the ringless streaks of the Rangers and the Knicks have happily provided that.

Remember when the Giants won their first Super Bowl, back in 1987? They beat the Denver Broncos. Big accomplishment. Four different teams, four different cities have beaten the Denver Broncos in Super Bowls. That’s only because the Broncos have appeared in four Super Bowls. Put the Rams or the Falcons or the Saints in those games and they’d have beaten the Broncos, too. The Giants just happened to be there, and they did what was expected of them.

The rest of country took it that way, too. Nice little team Parcells has there, we said before nodding off into a Bud Lite-induced stupor, but they’re sure no ’85 Bears, are they?

Back in Manhattan, however, it was V-J Day II. Civilization had been saved. The solar system could resume spinning around the sun. The Greatest Football Team Ever Assembled Had Just Won The Greatest Game Ever Played. Books were written about Phil McConkey. Books were written about Jim Burt.

Not that anyone living west of the Hudson gave a rat’s eye about the philosophical leanings of the Giants’ field-goal unit, but from the New York perspective, none of that mattered.

If it happens in New York, because it happens in New York, it is intrinsically bigger, better, more notable, more important and more irresistibly fascinating than anything that happens anywhere else.

That is Rule 1 for the New York sports fan, writer, broadcaster and commentator.

There is no Rule 2.

The Knicks, and especially the Rangers, have been useful, then, in uncluttering the mind of the average American sporting spectator--to say nothing of uncluttering the sports section of the average American book store.

Two whole generations now have been reared with the knowledge that the center of the hockey universe is not Madison Square Garden. They know hockey as a sport that has been mastered in steel towns (Pittsburgh) and oil towns (Edmonton) and cow towns (Calgary), but something of a problem in sleek, sophisticated Gotham.

The Stanley Cup scoreboard, post-1940, tells all:

Edmonton 5, New York City 0.

Detroit 5, New York City 0.

Pittsburgh 2, New York City 0.

Long Island 4, New York City 0.

Similarly, the last 20 years atop of the NBA have been Knickless and painless. Between appearances by New York in the championship round, Portland and Washington have reached the finals three times apiece, with Phoenix, Seattle, and Houston each breaking through twice.

It has been one long, cool drink of water, until now, these sobering days of late May, 1994, which has seen the re-emergence of the two-headed hydra from the five-borough sewer system.

The Rangers are in the Cup finals again.

The Knicks are two victories away from the NBA finals, again.

The world, as we know it, is about to be swept off its axis.

As the country braces itself for tabloid apocalypse, the Rangers and the Knicks represent two entirely different case scenarios.

A Ranger Stanley Cup would be seen as a triumph of rightful order. The Rangers led the league in points, they own the most talent, they have the best goaltending--they are the team that deserves to win.

A Ranger Stanley Cup might even be tolerable, too. Finally, we’d be rid of all this tiresome moaning about 1940 and so much overwrought, angst-ridden prose about curses and ghosts and demons that supposedly vex the Garden pipes.

As if Gordie Howe, Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky and the Montreal Canadiens had nothing to do with it.

But nothing positive can come from a Knick championship. There will be no joy in any headline declaring “KNIX HAX WAX ‘EM IN SIX!” What’s good for the Knicks is bad for basketball, pure and simple, and if Larry Brown can’t stop them in this round, we had best pray for the mighty hand of Hakeem to smote them in the next.

Do we really want a basketball champion that wins solely on its ability to impersonate British soccer fans?

That scored 68 points in a semifinal-round loss to the Indiana Pacers?

That received a total of one point--one more than a dead man, as Al McGuire used to say--from its best player and media-created “fearless warrior,” Patrick Ewing?

In New York, Ewing has already been anointed as an automatic Hall of Famer, one of the top 10 centers of all time, yet I have trouble remembering Wilt Chamberlain or Bill Russell or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Willis Reed or Bill Walton or Hakeem Olajuwon or Moses Malone or Bob Lanier or Nate Thurmond or Robert Parish or Dave Cowens or Wes Unseld ever going 0-for-10 from the field in an important NBA playoff game.

See, this is the problem with New York and its sports teams. There, decent players are exalted as all-stars and good players are transformed into living deities. Meanwhile, the real thing--John Stockton, say, or Reggie Miller--is relegated to the obscurity bin, simply because his mailing address is Salt Lake City or Indianapolis and not upper Manhattan.

Thuggery is popular in the Big Apple as well, which explains the fanaticism over the Knicks. New Yorkers identify with a good elbow in the Adam’s apple, a swift kick to the groin. Hey, Looie, that Starks plays just like me tryin’ to get on the subway.

Well, keep it out of our kitchen. If we ever do need a fix of TV nastiness and violence, we’d rather not find it watching the NBA finals.

That’s what baseball’s for.