In case you haven’t seen it, Charles Barkley and Greg Anthony are starring in a Capital One television ad together. While there are few things that I detest more than television commercials, in this instance I feel sharing the ad as being extremely pertinent. Have a look.
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Now you might be asking yourself, “What is it about this commercial that is so interesting that it warrants any attention at all? It’s Charles Barkley and Greg Anthony together in an advertisement, what’s the big deal?” To answer questions such as those one has to go back in time.
In 1991 the New York Knicks created a big splash when they hired former Lakers coach and the current-at-the-time NBC commentator Pat Riley as their new head coach.
By late-winter of ’93, under Riley’s genius, the Knick franchise had been revitalized and grown a reputation as the most intimidating team ever to hit the hardwood at the NBA level. Rather than focusing on constructing a “Showtime” offense like he had previously done in L.A., Riley realized that to turn the Patrick Ewing Knicks into a contender he was going to have to take an entirely different approach. His focus would be on defense. But it wasn’t just your typical run-of-the-mill defensive schemes, blocking of shots, rebounding and the forcing of turnovers Riley was looking to stress; sure all of that would be necessary, but Coach wanted that added edge on the defensive side of the ball. What would be his secret ingredient? Intimidation. Riley brought in or expanded the roles of a number of players during his first two years who would come to be known for their defensive prowess, fearless blue-collar-like work ethic and an innate ability to intimidate their oppenets.
Along with Ewing, Charles Oakley was already an established star on the team. John Starks on the other hand was a seldom used CBA-reject coming off the bench. Riley would go on to sign another ex-CBA player in Anthony Mason and expand Starks’s role on the team.
Riley would also be instrumental in making the trade for Xavier McDaniel in ’91, and the feisty Glen “Doc” Rivers the following season. And of course his first draft pick with the Knicks would be none other than the UNLV NCAA championship-winning Runnin’ Rebel point guard; Greg Anthony.
The four seasons Riley spent as coach of the Knicks would be marked by a brand of basketball that revolutionized how the NBA would play defense forever. It stressed slowing the game down, contesting every single shot and allowing zero to no lay-ups. Lay-ups were deemed unnacceptable. This often meant a lot of physical fouls needing to be levied against their opponents to make that last point clear. Riley’s Knicks made the “Bad Boy” Pistons of a few years prior, whom he modeled the Knicks after, seem meek by comparison.
Brandishing that style of basketball philosophy, it was in 1992 that the upstart Knicks took on the defending champion Chicago Bulls to the brink in a classic, though vicious, seven-game series. Naturally the Bulls won, they did have Jordan after all, but just barely. It wasn’t supposed to be that close of a series.
Though they had Ewing, the Riley-led Knicks did have one glaring weakness: a lack of talent equivocal to the amount of wins they’d chalk up. Everyone knew the McDaniel could play, but Anthony Mason and John Starks weren’t exactly Dave DeBusschere and Earl Monroe. Greg Anthony showed a lot of promise as a potential point guard of the future with his hard-nosed style of play off the bench, but nobody was confusing him with Micheal Ray Richardson. They simply weren’t supposed to be that good that soon. But they were. A big reason as to why the Knicks were successful had to do with the fact that they bullied every team they came across – even the vaunted Bulls. That 1992 playoff series is famous for the punishment the Bulls players were subject to. Scottie Pippen’s abuse at the hands of McDaniel in particular.
It was clear that Horace Grant and Bill Cartwright wanted no part in dealing with McDaniel, Oakley and Mason. It is likely that Pippen still has nightmarish visions of the eyebrowless menace, Xavier McDaniel, in his sleep. Jordan, on the other hand, wasn’t one to back down.
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Out of all six of Michael Jordan’s championship runs, that 1992 series against the Knicks was in all reality the one serious threat Chicago had to being eliminated. The series was so hard on Chicago that many feel Jordan (who just so happened to share the same agent as Xavier) and the league had McDaniel sign any other team other than the Knicks after just that one season.
Nevertheless, the Knicks had now established themselves as a team to be reckoned with.
Despite losing McDaniel, the Knicks were even better than they had been the previous year in ’92-93. In all of their meetings with New York that season it was still evident that Chicago still remembered the beating they took at the hands of the Knicks the previous spring. As March of ’93 was coming to a close the Knicks were looking like they were every bit the “Beast of the East,” as they were now being billed – as well as being the best team in the league top to bottom. Towards the end of that month the Knicks had on their schedule a west coast trip that included their only visit to Phoenix. The Knicks would be up against Charles Barkley and his new team, the Suns.
If there was one other club that could lay claim to being the best team in the league at that particular point in time, it would have been Phoenix. At tip-off on that March 23rd night in the America West Arena, that particular game in the NBA was significant due to the fact that it was the league’s top two teams meeting in a game – which Phoenix would eventually win, by the way – that might have offered everyone a sneak peak into what that year’s Finals match-up would be. Both sides were amped up and ready to make statements. When the horn blew ending the game, however, it would be remembered for something else – because on that night this happened:
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It was ugly. It was an incident that the league never forgave Riley and the Knicks for. Brawls are never deemed good for business in the NBA, but a player who isn’t even suited up for the game to attack another player while swearing street clothes? Damn, son. It was a surreal scene to say the least.
As for Barkley, who already had no love for the Knicks going into this game, this incident – Anthony’s actions against Kevin Johnson in particular – was an outrage. He already harbored a deep resentment for the Knicks after they had brought out brooms on Philadelphia’s home floor after sweeping his 76ers out of the playoffs in three games during the 1989 Playoffs. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, in so far as his disdain for New York went anyway.
If you ever watch the NBA on TNT and listen to Sir Charles elucidate Knicks basketball in pre, halftime and post-game shows, it’d be hard not to come away thinking that the Round Mound doesn’t have a personal gripe with the basketball team hailing from New York. This is not to say his analysis isn’t accurate. It’s pretty much spot on. The Knicks have been awful for fifteen years now, so it’s not as if he has to make anything up. But if you know the history than you get why there always seems to be a little zest in Barkley’s criticisms of the New York Knicks over the years. It’s as irritating to listen to as it is amusing.
That ’92-93 season the Knicks finished with a franchise-best 60 wins. A rematch with the Bulls was inevitable on their way to what most were predicting as a championship season for the Knicks. Their defense was just too good. It was simply a matter of getting past Jordan and the Bulls, something that the Knicks were favored to do as the re-match of that series began. Only thing was, despite winning the first two games of that series – capped by John Starks’s famous dunk (the most overrated dunk in franchise history), the Bulls still had Jordan.
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Jordan being Jordan was sick of losing to the Knicks already. Enough was enough. In epic Jordanian fashion MJ led the Bulls to an improbable four straight victories, once again eliminating the Knicks. Phoenix was there waiting for New York in the Finals, but they got a determined Michael Jordan-led Chicago team instead, and he smoked them too.
1993 was the year either Ewing or Barkley was supposed to win his championship. A Knicks-Suns rematch would have been compelling, but Michael Jordan had other ideas. Much to the elatation of David Stern we can be assured. The last thing Stern and the NBA would have wanted was to have their golden goose displaced from the Finals by the “thuggish” Knicks – a franchise viewed as responsible, due to Greg Anthony’s actions most particularly, for the ugliest scene in the NBA since Kermit Washington caught Rudy Tomjanovich with a punch so square it nearly knocked his head off (#6 in the video below).
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The previous year’s playoff series with Chicago was ugly enough, but that brawl in Phoenix took the cake. If the Knicks being in the Finals instead of the Bulls wasn’t an odious enough concept for the league to contemplate, it was only made all the more horrifying of a scenario that their opponents would very likely be the Suns. What kind of scene might have unfolded had the Knicks and Suns met again in 1993? We’ll never know.
It’s now 2014. Charles Barkley’s routine as the nonsensical no-nonsense commentator since his retirement is a staple of the NBA-on-TV experience. Everyone knew Barkley had a future in the media. This comes as no surpise. But going back fifteen to twenty years ago, nobody saw what Greg Anthony would be coming.
Greg is now the well-respected corporate and conservative face of basketball as both a studio analyst and game time color commentator at both the college and professional level. He’s as good at what he does as the industry has today. Greg Anthony is so well-respected and in the good graces of corporate America that he’s now the straight pitch man for Capital One in a TV ad. What’s more, Charles Barkley is his comic relief in said ad.
Irony is a motherfucker.
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