(Ep036) Chris Herring and Dan Shaughnessy: Pat Riley’s Punishing Practices, the Basketball Symphony of Bill Walton and Larry Bird, and the Toughness of the 80s Celtics and 90s Knicks
What would happen if a current NBA coach ran players until they threw up or fell over in pre-season training camp? How would today’s All-Stars react to a “no layups” policy that left them on the ground during drills? There’d be big trouble now, but back in the 90s, Pat Riley made New York Knicks practices look like Navy SEAL Hell Week, and opponents feared playing in Madison Square Garden.
This toughness is not only traced back to Riley’s upbringing in gritty Schenectady, but also to his own playing days for Kentucky and in the NBA. Then there was the roughing up that the Boston Celtics gave Riley’s Lakers in their seesaw battle for mid-80s supremacy. All three came to bear when Riley left the Showtime Lakers and molded the Knicks into the toughest team in pro basketball history. Not merely tough guys, the Knicks made it to the Finals twice, pushed Jordan’s Bulls to seven games, and had legendary rivalries with Reggie Miller’s Indiana Pacers and Miami Heat.
A decade before, it was the Celtics who ruled the East, with a combination of front-line toughness and the unparalleled skill of Larry Bird. When Bill Walton joined the team and was finally able to put in a full injury-free season, Bird, McHale, and co made it to the top of the NBA mountain one last time. Chris Herring and Dan Shaughnessy chronicled these eras in their fascinating books Blood in the Garden and Wish It Lasted Forever.
In this episode, they share:
How Kevin McHale clotheslining Kurt Rambis in the 1984 Finals galvanized Pat Riley’s approach
How Larry Bird called MJ the greatest player he’d ever seen before he turned into the GOAT
The time Larry Bird made a bet that he could bank a 3-point shot in during a game
The conduit that connected the 80’s Celtics with the 90’s Knicks
How Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason, Patrick Ewing and the 90s Knicks pushed Michael Jordan’s Bulls to the brink and almost won an NBA championship
Why the Knicks’ failure to win a title in the 90s obscures how great they really were
The theory that Doc Rivers provided to explain how Pat Riley contributed to John Starks going 2/18 in the 1994 NBA Finals game 7
What direct player access did to enhance NBA reporting, and why it might be gone forever
Read the full stories of the 90s Knicks in Chris’s book Blood in the Gardenand follow him on Twitter. Relive the Celtics’ 80s glory days in Dan’s book Wish It Lasted Foreverand check out his Twitter feed.
