The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [24]
In the five seasons beginning in 1969-1970, the Knicks averaged more than 19,000 fans per game and sold out every seat in 133 of their 205 regular season home games at Madison Square Garden.
Following the 1974 season, though, Dave DeBusschere, Jerry Lucas, and Willis Reed all retired, and the Knicks became a less competitive team. The 1975 Knicks still featured stars like Earl Monroe, Walt Frazier and Bill Bradley, but the team’s victories fell from forty-nine in the previous year to forty. Attendance fell from 19,133 per game and twenty-five sellouts to 18,556 per game and only nineteen sellouts. After 1975, the team’s fan attendance slipped much further.
The NBA fell into a league-wide abyss regarding attendance and television ratings, and the drop off from the team in New York was a big contributing factor to that decline. The team that played the most like the Knicks of the early seventies were the Portland Trailblazers, who won the NBA Championship in 1977. The Seattle Supersonics won the Championship two years later. Without trying to sound too east coast biased, teams from Portland and Seattle just didn’t move the needle much in the northeast, and attendance and television ratings continued to plummet.
After their impressive run ended, the Knicks simply became a bad team to watch. They not only stopped winning championships, they even stopped winning playoff series. Following the 1974 season, they didn’t win a seven-game playoff series again for nineteen years.
It seemed that the franchises in Boston and Los Angeles were able to keep their teams competitive through their superstars’ retirements far better than New York could. When legendary Celtics coach Red Auerbach stepped down from the bench and into the front office, respected center Bill Russell became head coach and led Boston to two more championships. When the Knicks coach Red Holzman stepped down following the 1977 season, however, respected center Willis Reed became head coach, but he steered the club through thirty-one victories and fifty-one defeats before having to be replaced by Holzman.
The Celtics always seemed to be able to make a shrewd deal that kept the dynasty intact, while the Knicks couldn’t seem to make a good draft pick or trade for a decade. With the fourth overall pick in the 1978 draft, the Knicks chose the talented yet mercurial guard, Michael Ray Richardson, from the University of Montana. Two picks later, the Celtics chose Larry Bird, who still had one year of college eligibility remaining. Although Bird decided to play his final season at Indiana State, the Celtics retained his rights until the next draft. It took almost the full twelve months, but eventually Boston managed to sign the player who would go on to become known as “Larry Legend.” Richardson, on the other hand, would create news of his own. He played four seasons with New York, and when asked once about the direction the Knicks were taking, Richardson replied, “The ship be sinking.”
Bird was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame after leading the Celtics to three championships. Richardson failed several cocaine tests, and, despite his four all-star appearances, was banned from the NBA for life by Commissioner David Stern. He played in Europe for close to fifteen years, and made news again in March of 2007 when, as coach of the CBA′s Albany Patroons, he told reporters that he had “big-time Jew lawyers” to help him negotiate a new contract as coach. This from a man who once played for Red Holzman!
The Knicks had other talented players in that fallow era, such as Spencer Haywood. Haywood played with the Knicks for four seasons, beginning in 1976. Haywood was later traded to the Jazz and then to the Lakers, where he was kicked off the team during the 1980 NBA Finals for freebasing cocaine. In later years, he would tell Sports Illustrated that “I did drugs, like 80% of