Free Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson, Hugh Delehanty

bond among the players and the selfless way we worked together as a team. That bond was particularly strong during our advance to the first championship in 1970. After the arrival of Earl Monroe, Jerry Lucas, and Dean Meminger in 1971, the team chemistry shifted, but a new bond formed that was more strictly professional in nature yet no less effective. We didn’t spend a lot of time with one another off the court, but we meshed brilliantly on the floor. Now the team was going through another sea change, but this time the effect would be more disruptive.
    We struggled to hold things together during the 1973–74 season with Reed, Lucas, and DeBusschere hobbled by injuries, and we limped into the Eastern Conference finals against the Celtics after barely surviving a tough seven-game series with the Bullets. The pivotal moment came in game 4 in Madison Square Garden, with the Celtics up 2–1 in the series and young backup center John Gianelli and me trying to make up for our diminished big men. But this time there would be no magical Willis Reed epiphany. Boston’s Dave Cowens and John Havlicek knew how to take advantage of our lack of strong front-court leadership and outmaneuvered us at every critical turn in the second half. Boston won 98–91.
    The Celtics finished us off three days later in Boston en route to another successful championship run against the Milwaukee Bucks. I remember sitting in Logan Airport with my teammates after that loss and feeling as if our once-glorious dynasty had come to an end. Lucas and DeBusschere had already announced that they were planning to retire. By the time the next season got under way, Reed and Barnett had also moved on and Meminger had been picked up by New Orleans in the expansion draft and traded to Atlanta.
    Nothing was the same after that. I stepped in as a starter the next year to replace DeBusschere and played pretty well, but only three other members of the core team remained—Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, and Earl Monroe—and it was difficult to forge the kind of unity we’d had before. Times were changing, and the new players flooding into the NBA were more interested in showing off their flashy skills and living the NBA high life than in doing the hard work of creating a unified team.
    Over the next two years, we added some talented players to the roster, including All-NBA star Spencer Haywood and three-time NBA scoring champion Bob McAdoo, but neither of them seemed to be that interested in mastering the Knicks’ traditional combination of intense defense and selfless teamwork.
    Every day the gap between generations became more apparent. The new players, who were accustomed to being pampered in college, started complaining that nobody was taking care of their laundry or that the trainer wasn’t doing good enough tape jobs. The old Knicks were used to taking responsibility for our own laundry because there was no equipment manager then, and strange as it may sound, washing our own uniforms had a unifying effect on the team. If the newcomers weren’t willing to wash their own gear, we wondered whether they would take responsibility for what they had to do on court.
    It didn’t take long to find out. Within a remarkably short time, the Knicks transitioned into a dual-personality team that could run up 15-point leads, then collapse at the end because we couldn’t marshal a coordinated attack. We held several team meetings to discuss the problem, but we couldn’t agree on how to bridge the gap. Nothing Red did to stimulate team play worked.
    In 1976 the Knicks failed to make the playoffs for the first time in nine years. A year later Bradley retired and Frazier was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Then Red stepped down and was replaced by Willis Reed.
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    I thought the 1977–78 season would be my last, but in the off-season the Knicks made a deal to send me to the New Jersey Nets. I was reluctant at first, but I agreed to come on board when coach Kevin Loughery