Knick Guards Beat Pistons at Own Game

It had its roots in the time before big men played in the air over the basket, when the game was determined by the little guys who damned the elbows and played full speed ahead. This one was won at the guards--Mark Jackson and Greg Anthony beating Isiah Thomas and Joe Dumars, three out of five falls.

Often it looked as if there would be no winners, only survivors. See Mark Jackson unwrap the ice pack on his left knee and the bigger pack on his right hip and thigh. See him wince as he reaches for his trousers and lies that nothing hurts when he wins.

From the early moment Charles Oakley threw a flagrant hip into Dennis Rodman to the waning moment when Bluto Bill Laimbeer threw a forearm and a trip into John Starks, it was the primeval ooze. It went back to the time of Al Cervi and Freddie Scolari, when the game had emerged from the cage but there still were teams in Syracuse and Fort Wayne.

“You don’t want to leave anything on the court, go home for the summer and say you should have done this or that,” Jackson said in the dressing room, which showed as much relief as triumph.

“It was a war of attrition,” Anthony said.

“A five-game war,” Jackson said.

Basketball isn’t war, but it was as close to combat as professional games get. They had to play tough, because that’s the game these Pistons demand, and they had to play smart, because these Pistons had the experience of five successive trips to the Eastern Conference finals. They had those two guards who are going to the Hall of Fame.

“No question they live and die by Isiah and Joe,” said Jackson, who likes to say “no question” to a question he likes. “We wanted to contain them; we didn’t want it to be The Isiah and Joe Series. If it was, we’d be on vacation.”

So they go on to play the Bulls. Only a mean person would dwell on that; let the Knicks have what they earned. They won the decisive game of the first round of the playoffs, which gives credibility to the 51-victory season and minimizes the embarrassment of letting the division championship slip away.

They didn’t let it be any Isiah and Joe Series; it certainly wasn’t Thomas and Dumars who turned the game that turned the series. Jackson and Anthony outplayed Thomas and Dumars, 16 points to 43 and 7 assists to 10.

“Isiah is probably the best small guard ever to play the game,” Anthony said. Thomas scored the Pistons’ last 19 points and wound up with 31, and that ought to be seen as yardage against a prevent defense.

“You want to contain them enough to let your team win,” Anthony said. “He didn’t get them when they needed it.” At the point the Knicks opened a 68-60 lead in a game that was more offensive for its clutching and grabbing than its shooting, Thomas had made 2 of 13 shots and Dumars 3 of 10.

Jackson wasn’t about to let pain keep him from starting the biggest game of the season, in which he was born again as a point guard. “I wanted to be a leader” was how he thought of himself. He had experience in the situation. However, Pat Riley had to carefully spreadtime between Jackson and the rookie.

There is stuff Jackson learned in the deep trough between the peaks of his rookie season and this one. He noted Gerald Wilkins’ response when the crowd thought he was stinking up the game in the third period and booed him accordingly. Wilkins waved the two-handed single finger a driver in traffic might flash to a brazen cab driver.

Jackson had the right words for the moment. “I just let him know, ‘You never get booed by one of us,’ ” Jackson said. He remembered how he listened for somebody to pick him up.

In those times of depression, who gave him the lift? Jackson smiled eloquently. The mark of this team is that Riley has created a team with linked emotions. It may be a one-season self-deception, but it enabled these players to play harder than they thought they could, better than the sum of their parts.