Heat Black Eight all the way to the Finals, do you know which other team has ever done it? He was the Knicks of '98-99, when the league played only 50 regular season games due to labor disputes. That year, before the start of the Knicks' season, the team's meritorious guard had blocked Jordan's Starks to switch to the gold shaft. The team's core center Ehu is plagued by injuries at the age of 36, and as the president of the players' union, he is also exhausted by the Rouse dispute.
The main pioneer Aunt Johnson is old, Camby who has just been traded from the Raptors is still a rookie, guards Childs and Ward are difficult to be big blades, and newly signed madman Sprewell has just been released from a suspension that almost strangled the former coach, and he has not appeared on the NBA court for 15 months, that is, Allan Houston, the shooting king. In the year of the fight, it seems that such a Knick can hardly be expected.
Sure enough, the team finished just 27-23 in the regular season, finishing eighth with a narrow margin of one win and entering the playoffs. The first place in the East that year was the Knicks' old wrongdoer Heat, a team led by Ironman Mourning.
In the previous season's confrontation with the Knicks, the famous large-scale brawl in NBA history broke out, and the scene of Knicks coach Van Gundy holding Mourning's thigh and being dragged a few meters away has become a classic. This season, Mourning is averaging 20.1 points, 11 rebounds and 3.9 blocks per game, and is in prime form. The Heat also made a comeback to top the Eastern Conference.
The two archrivals met in the first round, and the two sides did not give each other, and the Knicks beat the Heat by 20 points in the first game, and the Heat won back 10 points in the second game. In Game 3, the Knicks came back and won by 24 points. In the fourth game, the Heat fought back to win by 15 points, and the score came to 2-2. In the case of a best-of-five system, the two teams will play a best-of-five battle. In the fifth game, the two teams were inextricably killed, and finally with a shot from Alan Houston, the Knicks completed the black eight.
After climbing over the mountain of the Heat, the Knicks swept the Hawks directly in the second round, and they reached the Finals with Reggie Miller's Pacers in 6 games, and their opponent was the Spurs with two towers, but the series of hard battles plunged the Knicks into a wave of injuries. Ewing and Larry Johnson were injured 4-4, and they eventually missed the championship. The temperament displayed by this Knicks team amazes opponents: 24 years later, the same is true for the Heat, can they make history this time?
