Retro recap: Knicks 101, Jazz 92, March 9, 1991 — The ice storm game
Nothing warms the heart or the skin like seeing the Knicks win at Madison Square Garden live
Were you as taken aback as I after the Knicks added Landry Shamet, Malcolm Brogdon, Garrison Matthews, Matt Ryan and Alex Len to their roster candidates pool?
The season doesn’t start for another month; there’s no pressure on teams to finalize their cohort anytime soon. Golden State’s got a literal third of a roster still waiting for Jonathan Kuminga’s status to be settled before they sign. And if any of the Knicks mentioned above are major players for them in 2025-26, something went horribly wrong. Leon Rose’s regime works 24/7/365, and when they decide on a certain course of action they act on it. STAT.
A year ago they brought in Karl-Anthony Towns literally on the verge of training camp starting. Tom Thibodeau barely had time to bench-press away the hurt of losing to Indiana before he was fired. Now roster spots 10-12 are open for auditions with training camp just opening. At no point this offseason did I expect to be thinking about Matthews or Len. But what is life, if not upheaval?
By the time I reached seventh grade, recognizing upheavals as a constant was one of two life lessons I’d never forget. The other was when a posture coach came to my sixth grade class and drilled us on making sure our arms moved when we walked. This went on for hours; to this day I wonder whether my arms swing enough when I move, and whether I’m swinging them too much and looking like someone strangers cross the street to avoid.
Up to that point, the team I’d followed the most was the Mets. But when my family moved from Long Island to Rochester in 1991, I learned WOR and Sportschannel somehow, improbably, were not available to every American. This was a blessing in disguise, given that to that point in my life the Mets had been hot Elvis and were about to enter their sad Elvis phase. I didn’t know that then. I was devastated. Ralph Kiner and Rusty Staub were lost to me, forever.
Nearly as gruesome, the NHL’s masochistic blackout rules meant even though we got the MSG channel, Rochester was considered Buffalo territory, televisionally, so Rangers games were all blacked out. For three hours a night MSG was just a screen with print telling you the game was blacked out. No Mets. No Rangers. No Jets, really, because in western New York the Buffalo Bills are the church, the state and their favorite sexual position all in one. Where would my father and I get our sports fix during the long, dark, endless upstate winters?
At the 58-second mark in the clip above, Patrick Ewing grabs a defensive rebound, dribbles the length of the floor against Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan, then soars and scores with a left-handed fingerroll. That clip shocks and awes me even today, all these years later. Moments like that – glimpses of the exceptional from a mostly meh team – was what first led me to love the New York Knicks.
By then the only Knicks I’d heard of were Ewing and Mark Jackson, who’d starred at St. John’s before being drafted by New York. Ewing’s Skybox basketball card would’ve shown that the year before he averaged 28.6 points, 10.9 rebounds and four blocks a game. He is to this day the only player in league history to hit all those heights in the same season. Not Wilt. Not Kareem. Not Shaq. Ewing.
I’d grown up on Doc Gooden and Darryl Strawberry. Thanks to a family connection I was briefly pen pals with Bobby Bonilla when he’d been a White Sox rookie; he once sent me a birthday card. My dad bumped into Mark Gastineau at our Pathmark (Dad’s take: an absolute mountain of a man, and couldn’t have been nicer). All my teams revolved around leading men, and Ewing was the biggest, the baddest and the best on the Knicks by a mile.
Jamal Crawford may be the only Knick I’ve seen whose game was more joyful than Jackson’s, though by ‘91, Action had lost his joie de vivre and his starting job to Mo Cheeks. Charles Oakley was not yet the beloved franchise icon he’d become; young Oak already had the rebounding and defensive chops down cold, but on the other end he still mostly (in)famous for passes that made Hail Marys seem sensible and owning the only sub-zero vertical leap in NBA history. Obviously that last bit’s made up, but when the league is selling high-flying dunks and your power forward jumps like a Dorito, you tend to notice.
As I followed the Knicks more closely, I dove into the analytics. This being 1991, when phones were the size of board games and there were but two types of Cheerios, “analytics” meant the Sunday edition of the Democrat & Chronicle, Rochester’s morning newspaper (shout-out to those of you too young not to know there were once morning and afternoon weekday editions.). Monday through Saturday the only numbers you could find were boxscores, but all they listed were each player’s field goals made and attempted and points scored.
Ahhh, but on Sundays the sports section listed the league’s leading scorers, all the way from Jordan down to like the 100th-leading scorer. Once you passed Ewing in fifth, there wasn’t another Knick until you got allllllll the way to 51st. I didn’t know Kiki Vandeweghe had been a two-time All-Star many moons ago with Denver, nor that averaged nearly 30 points a game one year there. All I knew was he scored 16 a game for John MacLeod’s Knicks and that made him their second-leading scorer, and therefore their second-best player. Gerald Wilkins was very athletic and a cool dunker.
Rochester is a city whose Triple-A baseball team has Opening Days snowed out. The first year we lived there, it snowed in May. If there was two to three feet of snow overnight, you knew school would open the next day; that’s how on top of things the snow plows and salt trucks were. You dig?
Late one afternoon in March of 1991, a freezing rain began to fall. It’d fall for 17 hours. Afterward a dozen counties were declared disaster areas and hundreds of thousands of people and businesses were without power. We were without for weeks.
If you know where to look, trauma often juxtaposes oases of achingly beautiful truths we wouldn’t normally perceive. Before the reality of weeks without power in sub-freezing temperatures had sullied and sapped our spirits, all the world was a winter wonderland: every tree and powerline for miles and miles, coated in thick ice. All that light hitting all that ice created so much sparkly. That same principle drew me to the ‘91 Knicks – the gleams amidst such gloom.
Still, after a week eating a lotta cold hot dogs with zero sense of when the power would be restored, we drove to Long Island to spend some quality time with our loved ones: family, working hot water and electricity. While there, my father and I went to my first Knicks game: two seats in the nosebleeds to watch New York take on Utah.
