All-Access with the Roadrunners from CollegeInsider.com on Vimeo.

Man, Brooks Thompson is a name from the past. He finished with the Knicks in 1998..

Thanks Tad Hathaway for the flashback.

Thanks SI Vault.

Remember Brad Lohaus and Willie Anderson?

Remember J.R. Reid knocking out A.C. Green’s teeth?

Anyway, that summer the Knicks needed to retool on the fly. Gone was Derek Harper and the aforementioned scraps. Gone would be Anthony Mason in a shrewd deal for Larry Johnson. The Knicks would toy with the idea of bringing in Reggie Miller with their new found cap space and would wind up bringing in the new back court of Chris Childs and Allan Houston. I remember the press conference at Ardsley Country Club, a venue where I qualified for a national championship in Puerto Rico as an amateur golfer the same summer.

Oh, and they had 3 new rookies who wouldn’t have much of an impact although John Wallace brought serious cache after leading Syracuse on a miracle run to the NCAA Finals. Sure, Walter McCarty and Donte Jones wouldn’t bring much to the team because of Van Gundy’s general lack of trust and allergic nature towards rookies an their development, but we wouldn’t know that at the time. Like Iman Shumpert, as well as all rookies really, all you see is hope and potential and that’s what I saw at the time.

I said this the other day when I saw the Chandler press conference in person. I still get very excited to see new Knicks in uniform. I’m absolutely ecstatic and can’t wait until Saturday. And that is mostly because of the off season the Knicks have had. Dare I say it’s been the tops since that summer of 96. You could argue the summer of 2010 because of Amar’e. You could say the summer of 98 and winter of 99 with Camby and eventually Sprewell, yet another on the fly rebuilding job. But I’m going with 1996 if the team can finish the job and bring back Shawne Williams and sign Baron Davis.

Here’s what I love about Davis, back issue or not. He’s fearless. Motivation is relative in my opinion especially when he’s still in his early 30s. If you watched him shred the Knicks last year you know you have to keep an eye on him. Can he morph into a 25 minute guy who can occasionally win a game by himself for you? I think so. He’s a fit here.

To me, Shawne Williams needs to be here. That’s been documented here numerous times. He’s tough and is a player who established his career, back from the NBA catacombs, in a Knicks jersey. He’s been anointed a Knick and brings an edge that the team needs desperately. 

To me he’s the very definition of a Knick. Skilled, tough, and always has a teammate’s back. He’s willing to do anything for a win if that means guarding Lebron James or Dwight Howard.

So with the team about to start the push Glen Grunwald needs to finish a bang up job. And by adding Davis and keeping Williams, he will have accomplished just that, which is, to me, the best off season since 1996.

At the time, it was harder to tell which was weirder: the fact that many NFL experts didn’t have a statistically dominant Heisman winner projected gone until the third round at the earliest; or the fact that, despite modest production, most NBA scouts had Ward gone no later than the late first round, with many billing him as the third best point guard in the draft behind sophomore stud Jason Kidd and Arizona’s Khalid Reeves. But while both Kidd and Reeves offered something in the way of flash and flare – two qualities Ward himself had made his calling card on the gridiron – neither were the raison d’être of Ward’s NBA suitors. Instead, it was the 23-year-old senior’s steady, heady poise, combined with superior decision making, that would attract surprising buzz amongst NBA GMs.

He’d wind up going 26^th to the Knicks, mere weeks after the Bockers had succumbed in seven grueling games to Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets. He would play just 16 total minutes that first year, learning the ropes from veterans Derek Harper and Greg Anthony. But with Pat Riley’s departure, and the subsequent ascendance of Jeff Van Gundy to the helm (a year of Don Nelson found Ward with only slightly less bench glue about his shorts) Ward played in 62 games in 1995. By 1996, he’d asserted himself as a regular part of the rotation, and one of the most consistent defensive stalwart on a team which lived and died by a manifest, almost savant-like adherence to the craft. Gradually, like the patience and pace with which he steered the offense, appreciation and admiration from the New York faithful buoyed  Ward to the level of bona fide fan favorite.

“Good or bad, I was always going to do what I needed to do as far as little things were concerned to make the team run properly,” Ward reflects. “I played my role. I understood my role. And I think the fans appreciated that.”

As far as Ward and the NFL, the shotgun formation was just becoming a trend in the early 1990s in college. The Houston Cougars took it to the extreme with the “run and shoot” but the Noles used a combination of shotgun hand offs and vertical throws down the field. That idea was rarely seen in the NFL other than in Houston and in Buffalo, but both quarterbacks, Warren Moon and Jim Kelly were physically bigger than Ward with stronger arms, albeit much less fleet of foot. Scouts believed Ward would have to rely on his feet more than his arm, and that would result in a short career as a quarterback.

I found Ward to be tremendously underrated as a Knick, seeing that fans always yearned for a more flashy big-named poing guard. All Ward did was hold it down, make big shots, play defense and move the ball when it needed to be moved.

“I hope that one day I get to come back home because I do live in this area, I still consider this my area, I still consider myself a Knick. Hopefully one day I’ll be brought back here,” Ewing, the Knicks’ career scoring leader, said in response to a question from Lupica.

When asked about the lack of big men as head coaches in the NBA, Ewing said: “If you look at most of the guys who have gotten the jobs, most of them have been guards. Very few big guys have gotten the opportunity.”

Now I have to be fair here. No one is a bigger fan or defends the big fella as much as yours truly. That said, I talked to several people familiar with Ewing’s situation in Orlando and there are questions about his preparation during practices and a lot of that talk is the reasoning behind him not getting head coaching interviews from what I understand.

For him to come home casts a huge shadow on the team. This is Amar’e's franchise. It’s Melo’s franchise.

Nostalgia is great and it allows you to remember the past, but sometimes things are better left there.

On the other hand, Ewing has played on a million great defensive teams and coached many as well. Negatives aside, if he were any other coach he’d be a prime candidate for D’Antoni’s bench. Should he be either way?

Imagine if King hung around to play with Patrick? Talk about bad decisions. After King’s horrid knee injury King and the Knicks couldn’t come to terms and guess what the Knicks got in return?

Nothing.

Via UpNorthtrips

Finger point to Pavvy.

This was one of my all-time favorite Knicks teams that was primed and ready to beat Jordan’s Bulls. This team had everything. They were 25th in all around offense during the season, but LJ brought it against the Hornets and Allan Houston finally began to break through in the playoffs. We know what happened in the next series and yes it still very much hurts today.

I am a major fan of this concept. I may play this video every day until they sign him…