On a fresh episode of his show Scoop B Selects (via YouTube Selects), Brandon “Scoop B” Robinson chatted with longtime New York Knicks point guard Charlie Ward about his tenure with the team, with special attention paid to New York's run to the 1999 NBA Finals as an eighth seed without its best player, eventual Hall of Fame center Patrick Ewing.
Ward, the No. 26 pick out of Florida State in 1994, played for 10 seasons with the Knicks before wrapping up his career with short stints in the Lone Star State with the Spurs and Houston Rockets.
He started every contest for that 1998-99 lockout-shortened season with New York, averaging 7.6 points, 5.4 assists, 3.4 rebounds, and 2.1 steals a night. His passing and perimeter defense were critical for an upstart club led by Latrell Sprewell in the 1999 playoffs. New York did come up against a buzzsaw of a young Spurs club, piloted by Hall of Famer big men David Robinson and Tim Duncan, which made quick work of the Knicks, sweeping them in the NBA Finals.
Detractors tend to say that the 1999 Spurs and your 2020 Los Angeles Lakers' titles are somehow invalid because of the circumstances surrounding their championships. 1999 teams didn't have training camp or a preseason, which yielded a lot of injuries to older clubs, while the 2020 teams had to fight for a title in an Orlando "bubble" campus away from their homecourt fans. No one seems to care about now-Laker LeBron James' 2012 Miami Heat, who also played in a lockout-condensed season (66 games as oppose to the 1999 teams' 50) and also had no training camp or preseason.
Ward, for one, thinks both the Spurs' and Lakers' titles were pretty darn valid.
"Well the people on the outside saying that it doesn't count, they have a trophy and rings to say otherwise and so, that’s all that counts because when it’s all said and done at the end of the day they’re going to have in the record books those two teams as the champions," Ward opined. "I like the outside opinions which is great but when it’s reality, they’re BOTH champions and they will go down in the history books as champions."
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