THE most tantalizing part about Allan Houston’s absence isn’t what it means for Houston, for his career, for his personal legacy with the Knicks.
It’s what he could mean for the other members of what has the possibility of being the Knicks’ most fascinating three-headed backcourt since Clyde, Pearl and Dick Barnett all shared space on the roster 30 years ago.
Stephon Marbury has been terrific through the first 13 games heading into last night’s home game with Memphis. He has been every bit the special player everyone ever hoped he would be, embracing the position of point guard with a fervor many wondered he would ever embrace. He has been the Knicks’ runway MVP over the season’s first month. If he keeps it up, he may well make a case for himself for the really big trophy by season’s end.
But he isn’t the biggest key to this backcourt.
Jamal Crawford has been a joy to watch on many nights, a puzzle on others, and a little of both every once in a while.
Tuesday night in Atlanta, every molecule of Crawford’s personality was on display: he played hard, he shot too much, and he never once lost faith that if he absolutely needed to, he would make the biggest shot of the game. Which he did.
The Knicks have won two games because Crawford stepped up and hit game-winning shots.
But Crawford isn’t the key ingredient to all of this, either.
No, it’s Houston who will determine how much faith Knicks fans will put in this team before season’s end, how much energy they want to invest in the Knicks’ chances of winning the Atlantic Division, earning that No. 3 seed, trying to make New York’s springtime ring a little louder, in a way it hasn’t rung since the end of the last millennium.
Whenever Houston returns, he will provide the kind of flexibility Lenny Wilkens simply doesn’t have right now.
Crawford’s missing everything? Houston can spell him. Marbury’s playing too many minutes (which he is, by the way; Wilt’s 48.5-minute average might not be in jeopardy, but not because Wilkens isn’t trying)? Houston can come in and let Crawford play point for a while and not make it seem like the Knicks are on a state of constant red alert.
Houston is a max-out player whose body may already have maxed out, a max-out salary whose max-out skills may already belong to yesterday. But that really isn’t the issue. The Knicks are just now re-learning how to win again, how to be competitive again. They are just now beginning to understand the ways of legitimacy again.
It isn’t easy. Part of the reason it isn’t easy is because this team, so reliant on its backcourt to provide so much of its success, has two prominent backcourt players right now who have no history in achieving that level of success.
Crawford lost ballgames in bunches in his previous incarnation, in Chicago. Marbury had one brilliant series (in a losing cause) as a Sun, against the Spurs, but he left Minnesota just as the Timberwolves were discovering how to win, and he got caught in the Meadowlands Morass as badly as anyone ever has.
What they are doing together, right now, is reaching for territory neither of them is terribly familiar with. As well as they’re playing, they’re still working a room in which the furniture is constantly being rearranged. Houston has been there. He’s played in the NBA Finals. He’s hit big last-second shots, including one that one a playoff series in Miami all those years ago.
He needs to get better. He needs to be here. The Knicks don’t need him to be his former All-Star self, just his present veteran-presence self. In many ways, he has never been so necessary. Which means in many ways, his absence has never felt so empty.