February 4, 2012: Jeremy Spoke

NEW YORK - It was a game destined to be long forgotten, in what was already looking like a lost season. Playing their third game in as many days, the Knicks were wounded and in need of a spark. With 3:31 left in the first quarter and his team already trailing, New York coach Mike D'Antoni pointed to the bench and sent Jeremy Lin into the game.

At this point in his career, even getting into the game was an accomplishment for Lin. He had been buried in the depth chart for first his hometown Warriors and now the Knicks, spending almost as much time in the Developmental League as in the NBA. He was running out of time on February 4, 2012. His 10-day contract was almost up, and the Knicks were going to be faced with decision to release him or guarantee his contract for the rest of the year. Considering he had spent most of his stint with the Knicks sleeping on his brother's couch - and had spent the night of February 3 sleeping on teammate Landry Fields' couch - Lin probably knew which way the wind was blowing.

But things can change in an instant. After Lin entered the February 4 game against the Nets, he scored six points in the first half. Not bad, but nothing earth-shaking. He was going to need a gigantic second half to convince the Knicks to keep him around. Fortunately, the Knicks had a lot of injuries, so D'Antoni had to keep Lin in the game.

And Lin took advantage. He continually got to the rim for easy shots or pulling up for short jumpers. He moved the ball around the court, single-handedly jump-starting New York's stagnant offense. Lin scored 19 points in the second half, willing the Knicks to a victory. But it was much more than just a single victory in a long season. When Jeremy Lin entered the game in the first quarter, only the most passionate of Knick fans even knew who he was. By the end of the game, Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" was playing in the Madison Square Garden speakers and Lin was being hailed as a hero in New York.

This was only the beginning.

After his 25-point outing on February 4 - when he had scored just 32 points all season leading up to it - Lin kept scoring. He scored 28 points two days later, got 23 points with 10 assists the game after that, then 38 points against the Lakers after that. From there, the phenomenon was in full force. The Knicks had an unexpected star, and Lin had a fully guaranteed contract.

Of course, it wasn't just about the basketball. It never was. The underdog story was nice, but it was a far bigger deal that Lin was the first American of Chinese or Taiwanese descent to play in the NBA. He was also intelligent and well-spoken and humble, so he quickly became a media darling. Sports networks fell all over themselves coming up with new ways to use Lin's name as a pun, with "Linsanity" becoming the most common use. Sports writers burned up keyboards trying to write the latest piece that best explained exactly what he meant to the NBA and the Asian American community.

It didn't take much to see what he meant to the NBA. The Knicks had been going nowhere before February 4, but their games quickly became events. The stands at Knicks games - both in Madison Square Garden and on the road - started becoming filled with Asian Americans, a demographic that hadn't traditionally been NBA fans. Lin was the most popular Knick in years.

The coverage of Lin was so focused and so all-encompassing that it's easy to forget that his tenure as a Knicks starter - or, at least, a player who played starter-type minutes - lasted only 26 games. By the end of March, Lin was out for the season with a knee injury, and by the time the 2012-13 season started, he was a Houston Rocket, having signed a three-year deal in Houston after the Knicks gave little effort in resigning him. Now, Lin is a perfectly average NBA player, and the huge crowds and media attention he saw as a Knick seem to have happened ages ago. But for two months, he was all anybody talked about, the man who  went from being almost out of a job on February 3 to being a nationwide phenomenon on February 4.

March 2, 1962: 100

HERSHEY, Pa. - There was an overwhelming smell of chocolate hanging in the air that night, which sounds nice until you realize it was a never-ending, inescapable smell. After all, the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, had been built around the chocolate factory. So everywhere smelled like chocolate pretty much all the time. It got old.

Nobody wanted to be there. Not the New York Knicks, not the Philadelphia Warriors, nobody. Wilt Chamberlain definitely didn't want to be there; he was hung over from the night before and almost missed the train to the game, and probably wouldn't have been too upset if he had missed it altogether.

The Warriors were technically the home team in this game, but it didn't feel like home to them. The court was small and run-down, basically a high school gym. If they had their say, they wouldn't have played any games anywhere near Hershey, but they had an agreement with the gym owner; they were allowed to practice at the gym for free as long as they played three home games a year there. This was number three. So off to Hershey they trudged.

Only 4,124 fans went to the game, and many of them were only there to see the exhibition basketball game between the NFL's Eagles and Colts. The main event that followed, the regular-season NBA game between the Warriors and the Knicks, felt like an afterthought.

But then Wilt started scoring.

His shooting from the field was down a bit in the first half, but Chamberlain made up for it with surprising - for him - accuracy from the free-throw line, going 13-for-14 from the line in the first half. He had 41 points in the first two quarters, putting him on track to break his own single-game scoring record of 78, which he set earlier in the season. The Knicks were keeping it relatively close, too, so there was a chance Chamberlain would have to keep trying and could get that record.

Then he scored 28 in the third quarter. From then, it became a matter of not if, but by how many. With 7:51 left in the game, Wilt scored his 79th point of the game, setting the new single-game record. The sparse crowd went nuts, feeling honored to have been a part of something historic when it seemed like the game would be anything but memorable.

Then the fans, the Knicks, and the Warriors all seemed to come to the same realization at the same time: there was still time for him to reach a previously unthinkable number. See, earlier in the year, when Wilt's 78 points had broken Elgin Baylor's single-game record of 71, somebody asked Baylor if he was upset his record was broken. He said no, because it was just a matter of time before Wilt got to 100 in a game. He wasn't the only one who said something to that effect, either, with everybody always mentioning that magic number of 100 in their statements of how high Wilt could hypothetically fly. Suddenly, that didn't seem so hypothetical.

So the fans started yelling at the Warriors to get the ball to Wilt. And the Warriors started passing the ball to Wilt every time down the floor, even if they were passing up open layups to do so. And the Knicks were, bizarrely, fouling anybody on the Warriors who wasn't Wilt, trying to do whatever they could to stop him from getting the ball. And the Warriors were in turn fouling the Knicks every time down just so that they could get the ball back so they could get the ball to Wilt.

In short, the game became a farce. It stopped being about winning or losing and became about one guy getting an individual achievement, and the other team trying to prevent that. But the Knicks, already missing their starting center due to injury, were helpless to stop the onslaught.

With less than a minute to play, Wilt scored on a layup to get to 98 points. When the Warriors got the ball back and drove up court, all five Knicks ignored the ball carrier and surrounded Wilt. He got the pass anyway, but missed the shot. With all the Knicks around Wilt, it was easy for teammate Ted Lukenbill to get the rebound; he passed it right back to Wilt, who missed again. Lukenbill again got the rebound, but this time passed to Joe Ruklick, who had a wide open layup. Not wanting to miss his chance at history, Ruklick saw Wilt break free from his defenders for a moment and threw him a lob pass. Wilt converted the alley-oop - whether he dunked the ball or merely laid it in is still debated - and the fans stormed the court in celebration of the unthinkable milestone.

The farce wasn't over, though. With 46 seconds left on the clock, everybody who had gone to the game was on the floor; it took nine minutes to clear everybody off. In the chaos, Ruklick went to the scorer's table to make sure the scorer saw that he had the assist that led to point number 100. When the game finally restarted, Wilt merely stood at midcourt, his hands on his hips, not wanting to touch the ball. As he said, "100 sounded better than 102."

When the game was over, the joyous Warriors retreated to the locker room. An AP photographer was at the game, but as a fan, not on assignment. He got into the locker room anyway. Seeing the photographer, Warriors PR director Harvey Pollack quickly scribbled the number "100" on a piece of paper and handed it to Chamberlain. The photographer snapped the shot, and the resulting photo has become the iconic photo of Chamberlain.

The 100-point game has come to define Chamberlain as well, for better or for worse. On the plus side, it shows just how dominant he was, the highlight of what was his peak season. On the other hand, it also showed his obsession with numbers, and how that obsession often seemed to take precedence over his team's ambitions.

Today, the 100-point game is rightly viewed as one of the most untouchable record in sports. It's hard to imagine anybody being able to approach it. It's also hard to imagine anybody wanting to.

May 8, 1970: "And here comes Willis!"

NEW YORK - There was a buzz in Madison Square Garden. There's always a buzz for a Game 7, but this one was different. The Knicks had never won a championship, and they were one home win away from doing just that. Anybody in the arena who didn't feel the magnitude of the moment didn't have a pulse.

So there was a buzz, but it was a different kind of buzz. It was a nervous energy, where many of the fans had to be thinking, "What if we don't win?" It was a valid question; nobody knew if the Knicks' starting center, Willis Reed, was going to play. He had torn a thigh muscle earlier in the series, an injury that had caused him to miss all of Game 6. Lakers center Wilt Chamberlain, taking advantage of Reed's absence, had unleased holy hell in Game 6, scoring 45 points to lead the Lakers to a 23-point victory. If Reed didn't play Game 7, how could the Knicks prevent a repeat of that performance?

So there was nervousness, but there was also excitement. It was Game 7, after all, and, Reed or no Reed, the Knicks were still a good team, still had three future hall-of-famers in their starting lineup. Plus, it was one game, at home. Anything can happen in one game, right?

The teams came out for the pregame warmup. The fans got louder. But there was no Reed. He had to have been far too hurt to play. Nervousness. A buzz. Excitement.

The fans started cheering, louder and louder. The announcers doing the pregame stopped mid-sentence, looking toward the tunnel leading to the locker rooms. The fans got even louder. Knicks announcer Marv Albert: "And here comes Willis!"

Bedlam.

.........

Imagine tearing a muscle in your right thigh, right at the top, near the hip. The last thing you'd want to do is move it, right? Most people would be laying in bed, not moving the leg at all - partially because of the pain, partially because it just physically couldn't move with a torn muscle. Now imagine having a torn thigh muscle, but being 6-foot-9 and weighing 250 pounds, then getting up from your chair in the locker room and walking down the tunnel to the court, dragging that useless leg behind you to join your team for warmups. Sound like a herculean task? Think that would inspire your teammates - and your team's fans - before the biggest game in franchise history?

Madison Square Garden didn't earn the nickname "The World's Most Famous Arena" lightly. It earned it. So when a poll came out asking people to name the most memorable moment in the arena's history, it carried some weight. The winner? The moment Willis Reed walked down that runway before Game 7. Not the game itself, mind you, but him simply joining his team for warmups.

...........

Reed scored the Knicks' first two baskets that game, almost literally dragging his leg down the floor to shoot a pair of jump shots. Then he came out of the game, too injured to go on. It didn't matter. Walt "Clyde" Frazier scored 36 points, Dave DeBusschere added 18, and the Knicks held Wilt to 21 on their way to a 113-99 victory. Willis Reed was named the Finals MVP. It didn't matter that he didn't play in Game 6 and only scored 4 in Game 7. He was the unquestioned MVP of that team. The moment Reed jogged onto that floor in pregame warmups, the Knicks had already won.

April 27, 1984: King of New York

DETROIT - Something was missing from the storybook ending. Instead of celebrating with his teammates, being carried off the court in jubilation, and getting ready for the next round, Isiah Thomas laid on his stomach on the Joe Louis Arena floor, head resting in his hands, a look of shock on his face. It wasn't supposed to end that way. Not after what he did.

It seemed nothing could go wrong for Thomas in the final moments of Game 5. Continually getting into the lane to shoot short jumpers and high-floating layups, Thomas willed his team back into the game. When the lane closed up, he shot from the outside, including a game-tying 3-pointer from the top of the key with just seconds remaining. When the smoke had cleared, Thomas had scored 16 points in the final 94 seconds, all despite the fact that the Knicks knew exactly who would be getting the ball and what he would be doing with it.

Everything was going right for Thomas. So why did the ending go so badly?

Becuase for how brilliant Detroit's point guard was, New York's small forward was even better.

There were few offensive forces who could compare to Bernard King in the early 80s. A devestating combination of speed and power, King would fly in for dunks and floaters, daring anybody to stop him. He was dangerous even without the ball, willing to fly over taller defenders to grab rebounds and dunk them home in one motion.

King might never have been better than he was in the 1983-84 season, culmunating in the jaw-dropping first-round series against the Pistons. After a low-scoring Game 1 victory, King eclipsed the 40-point mark in each of the next four games of the series, including a 44-point effort to trump Thomas' heroics in the Knicks' 127-123 Game 5 victory.

King led the Knicks to a Game 7 loss to the future NBA champion Celtics that spring, and his future potential seemed limitless. But his 12 playoff games in 1984 would be his last for four years, as a severe knee injury took away a year and a half from his career, leading to a trade to Washington. While he was still effective for the Bullets, he was nowhere near what he had been pre-injury.

The spring of 1984 may have been the peak of Bernard King's career. Isiah Thomas probably wishes that peak had come a bit earlier.