At Least Knicks Should Score More With Camby

BThe basketball court at Madison Square Garden reverts to normal dimensions now. It is no longer than anybody else’s, no wider. The row of photographers on either side of the basket is no longer in play, and neither are the first two rows of seats. Neither is the press table. It works out this way because Charles Oakley gets traded for Marcus Camby. Oak always thought the whole place was in bounds.

This is a trade the Knicks have to make. It does not change who Oakley was at the Garden, what he meant here over 10 honorable years. The next time we see his white home jersey with No. 34 on it, it goes into the rafters where it belongs.

The Knicks get more moves with Camby, create more problems for the other team. They get quicker and more dangerous on offense. They get a 6-11 power forward with a small forward’s game, one who can lead the whole league in blocked shots. Ernie Grunfeld, president of the Knicks, kept talking about “upside” the other day when he talked about Camby. There is upside all over the place.

He is also a kid who seems to have been spoiled by his own talent and success, all the way back to UMass. The guy with so much upside is one you want to hit upside the head occasionally. And that is why he is no sure thing.

The Knicks get bigger now, faster, younger. They also get smaller in the locker room without Oakley, the way the court gets smaller. The trade is Oakley for Camby. But this is the deal:

A gifted basketball kid is brought to New York and asked to do a man’s job. “(Oakley) has a physical presence and a mental toughness unsurpassed in our league,” Toronto general manager Glen Grunwald said.

Oak still gives you that, even though he is 34 now, going on 65. From the moment he got to New York, from the Bulls traded that time for Bill Cartwright, he has played a brand of lunchpail basketball that is supposed to be out of fashion, out of style with all the rich young Marcus Cambys of the basketball world. No. 34 goes way up there to the top of the Garden some day because of all the things Charles Oakley did on the floor:

Ride shotgun for Patrick Ewing. Take the other team’s power forward on defense. Sometimes take on the center. Box out. Jump out. Spend so much time sliding around on his belly you wondered if he had mistaken one of the most famous basketball floors in the world for a water slide. In an age when the game was being played in mid-air, Oakley became an All-Star, a $10 million-a-season ballplayer, in the trenches.

He didn’t score very much, hardly ever dunked the ball, kept getting overlooked for the league’s All-Defensive team. Oakley became one of the great Knicks of all time anyway.

It doesn’t mean he was a boy scout. Sometimes it seemed that he set the Knicks’ tough-guy code as much as Pat Riley ever did. And he had a terrible habit of playing small in the biggest games. Game 7 against the Rockets in the NBA Finals. Game 7 against the Heat the season before last. These things are easy to look up.

We still won’t see another player quite like him at the Garden. He was a Knick with some Thurman Munson in him.

“Doesn’t matter how banged up you are, how tired you are,” he said to me one night before the playoffs this year. “Just gotta keep playin’.” Said it in that wonderful low jazzman growl of his.

Now he goes to the Raptors, and maybe he moves on from there to some contender looking for heart, and rebounds, and loose balls. In return the Knicks get Marcus Camby, once the Player of the Year in college, once the No. 2 player in the draft. If he plays up to his talent, this is a steal, because the Knicks needed someone exactly like the 24-year-old Camby, someone to make them “younger and more athletic in the front court,” as team president Ernie Grunfeld said Thursday.

But Camby has plenty to prove in the last year of his first fat NBA contract. First he has to prove he can stay healthy.

His body too often has been weak in the pros the way his character looked weak in college, when he seemed to go around with his hand out, looking for money, girls, jewelry, all the usual goodies from oily, on-the-make agents. Everybody says he has grown up since then. We will see about that in New York.

At his best, Camby can move up and down the front line as easy and sleekly as he can move up and down the court. He changes the way the Knicks look, the way Allan Houston did. He makes them more exciting. With this trade, the Knicks make the most exciting move around a draft they were supposed to sit out. The guys running this organization never sit back.

The Knicks make a good trade. It costs them a good man. The Knicks get better. They still need to get a point guard.