MIAMI — So much consequential New York basketball history has happened within this half-mile corner of this city. Kaseya Center (formerly American Airlines Arena, formerly FTX Arena, formerly Miami-Dade Arena) stands regally now on Biscayne Boulevard. If you head due west on NE Sixth Street then turn right onto NW First Avenue, you’ll end up at the site of the old Miami Arena.
That old barn was where much of the New York’s entertaining and occasionally infuriating basketball history took place, beginning on the night of May 14, 1997, Game 5 of the Eastern Conference semifinals. The Knicks had entered that night up three games to one, but the Heat had staved off elimination and were finishing off a 96-81 win.
But the Knicks were on a serious roll. They’d won 57 games in the regular season thanks to the import of Larry Johnson, Allan Houston and Chris Childs, the best supporting cast the Knicks had ever put around Patrick Ewing, and overwhelmed Charlotte in the first round. They’d already won the game in Miami they needed in the series opener.
It was going to be a sweet scene at the Garden two nights later, the Knicks ousting the Heat, allowing 19,763 folks to ride Pat Riley like Secretariat for three hours less than two years after he’d walked out on the Knicks. It was perfect.
And then it wasn’t.
Because late in the game lined up on the free-throw box, Miami’s P.J. Brown became entangled with the Knicks’ Charlie Ward. Brown started it, and it cost him the final two games of the series. But the Knicks, to their eternal regret, finished it, and they wound up with five suspensions, most for merely wandering from the bench. Three — Ewing, Ward and Houston — would sit out Game 6. Two — Johnson and John Starks — sat Game 7. The Knicks would lose both games and never get one last crack at the Bulls, against whom they’d gone 2-2 that year.
“In my heart, in my bones, I know we would have won the championship that year,” Ewing would say 18 years later, inside his office at Georgetown where he’d just taken over as head coach of the Hoyas. “I will go to my grave thinking — knowing — that we were the best team in the league that year. And we never got a chance to prove it.”
Follow The Post’s coverage of the Knicks vs. Heat NBA playoff series
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- Knicks battle but fall in season-ending Game 6 loss to Heat
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- Brunson’s heroic night spoiled by late turnover
The Knicks got a modicum of revenge a year later at Miami Arena when this time it was the Heat who lost a key player, Alonzo Mourning, for decisive Game 5 after Mourning had gotten into his famous fight with Johnson at the end of Game 4, with Jeff Van Gundy clinging to his leg. The Knicks were without Ewing, who’d broken his wrist in December, but they raced to a 20-point lead, held off a furious Miami rally and won going away, 98-81.
“It wasn’t exactly payback,” Van Gundy whispered after the game. “But it was sweet.”
It was the next year when the arena played host to a couple of remarkable moments for both area hoops teams. The Nets tripped out of the gate once the lockout to start the 1998-99 season ended, and they were swarmed by the Heat on Sunday afternoon, March 14, 102-76, in Stephon Marbury’s first game as a Net.
It was also John Calipari’s last game as Nets coach, and when it was over there was a surreal scene when Cal was led on a public perp walk out of the arena and into a waiting limousine by Nets owner Lewis Katz. By the time the Nets landed in Toronto, Don Casey was the coach.
“Not a good memory,” Calipari said exactly a year later, by which point he was an assistant to Larry Brown in Philadelphia.
For the Knicks, though, their final memory at the old arena was a grand one: Houston’s forever shot with 1 second left at the end of Game 5 of the first round a month later, pushing the eighth-seeded Knicks past the top-seeded Heat.
And a year later, in the last of the classic Knicks-Heat wars that was also the first (and, so far, only) heart-stopping chapter in the new building, the Knicks outlasted the Heat in Game 7 of the East semifinals when Clarence Weatherspoon’s 17-footer at the buzzer rimmed out.
That one, finally, reduced Riley to tears.
“In 32 years,” he said, “I have never been around a group that wanted to win a game so desperately. But New York did, too.”
Twenty-three years later they are back for a fresh chapter. Bout time.
Vac’s Whacks
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If there’s one group that should know the early speed of the Rays is probably unsustainable it’s Yankees fans who watched last year’s odd roller coaster of a regular season.
Man. It was 40 years ago Saturday that Darryl Strawberry made his debut with the Mets. These days the ordained minister travels the country speaking about the evils of drugs. Then … well, it’s hard to explain just what a big deal it was to see him that first year in right field at Shea Stadium.
So far it would seem that “Succession” plans on sprinting right through the tape.
Whack Back at Vac
Bruce Welsch: Got trouble sleeping? Just turn on a Mets game.
Vac: One hundred percent. Guaranteed to not be rousted by the annoying cracking sound of a baseball solidly colliding with a bat.
Howie Siegel: If body language means anything, Mitchell Robinson looks defeated at the free throw line even before attempts one.
Vac: I bet Rick Barry would love a half hour with Robinson. And he lives in South Florida!
@216stitches: When is someone going to get after Buck Showalter? Refuses to change the batting order. Francisco Lindor is not a 3 hitter, Pete Alonso leads off every time he is up, Jeff McNeil is all over the place, Brett Baty and Francisco Alvarez batting down. They are too predictable and Buck is to blame.
@MikeVacc: Looks like someone just did.
Joe Nicoletti: Mets pundits pushing Max Sherzer’s issues are from excessive rosin use. I can relate. I’ve been telling my wife for years my extra 30 pounds has nothing to do with ribeyes and Oreo cookies but from excessive steamed vegetable use.
Vac: We work from the same playbook, Joe.
