What’s the deal with New York sports teams and curses? The most famous – The Curse of the Bambino helped the Yankees stay on top of their archrivals the Red Sox for too many decades. Currently, Knicks’ fans are suffering from a Sports gods’ curse and they probably don’t even know it or at least refuse to admit it. The fabled franchise’s woeful misfortunes can be traced back 8 years ago to around this time in the season – marquee player for 14 years Patrick Ewing broke his hand/wrist in a terrible fall against the Bucks. He sat out the rest of the season, and outrageously the Knicks – thru Jeff van Gundy’s exhaustive coaching – took the team to the Finals; they unfortunately lost to the rising Spurs (their first of many championships).
However, the Knicks jettisoned Patrick during the off-season to Seattle after he gave the franchise his entire career, left everything he had on the Madison Square Garden hardwood. Sure loyalty in the age of the free agent is something that has become a near joke, but the way the Knicks and the Dolans handled this multi-year All-Star who lit up the Garden during a fantastic play-off run throughout the late 80s and 90s bordered on contempt.
Ever since then the Knicks have been suffering under a dark, cantankerous, stinking cloud – I don’t think there’s been one season worth vaguely remembering since the end of the Ewing era. To kic you when you’re down and bleeding, the Knicks strangely haven’t even been able to bring any type of quality players to the team – even with their willingness to over-spend on mediocre talent, can you say Joe Johnson’s Hawks deal? You’d think Zeke was jockeying for position on the call sheets of all the sports agents with a bevy of 2nd tier players.
Sports gods usually dish out punitive damages in denominations of ten, so I figure the Knicks won’t be able to crawl from the wreckage until 2010 – the year we make contact.
Keywords: curse, dolans, knicks, madison square garden, msg, new york knicks, zeke
