Linkin’ Center: 1970 Championship Team Scrapbook, Timofey Balls, & How John Starks Became A Knick

We’ll take a little break from putting Donnie Walsh under cross-fire and instead check out some Knick notes from around the interweb.  First off, earlier this morning Team USA pulled off the win against Russia, yet one of the two Ruskies who played really well was none other than incoming Knickerbocker, Timofey Mozgov.  Over on Posting & Toasting, Seth noted the following things (amongst others):

– Timofey backed up Sasha Kaun and definitely outplayed him. He probably could’ve snatched more of Kaun’s minutes had he not been in foul trouble throughout the game. Be it on loose balls, moving screens, or shot contests, Mozgov is a physical player, and his timing and positioning will have to be a little sharper if he ever wants to get major NBA minutes. That said, Mozgov won’t be getting major minutes this season, so he’s welcome to foul away. The Knicks could use that physicality…well, maybe not the moving screens.

– One of Mozgov’s fouls came when Derrick Rose drove to the rim and Timo pasted his shot against the backboard. The refs whistled a phantom foul, but not a single Knicks fan saw the call because we were all changing our underpants.

There’s more good stuff in the post, so check it out.

—————————–

Want a blast from the Knicks’ championship past?  NBA.com reports on this treasure the organization recently received from a fan:

Forty years ago, Allan Kaufman was among the millions of young New Yorkers who were captivated by a legendary Knicks team blazing toward its first NBA Championship.

Now it turns out that he was one in a million.

Today, Kaufman, 59, lives in East Brunswick, NJ. The father of three grown daughters, he’s been involved in the pharmaceutical industry for more than 30 years. But the most striking evidence of his long-ago Knicks fandom now lives here online: the voluminous scrapbook he kept of the day-by-day highlights of that magical season.

From Opening Night against Seattle to that final, fabled Game Seven against the Lakers, it’s all here… yellowed clippings and fading photos documenting virtually every game on the road to the title. More than 300 pages in length, now preserved and captured electronically by Chicago Albumen Works based out of Housatonic, MA, the scrapbook provides a sentimental journey for its author, who was a freshman at Fairleigh Dickinson University when he started the massive project in October of ’69.

To view the actual scrapbook, click here.

——————————

On the more depressing side, reports emerged today that Knicks fans’ dream target, Carmelo Anthony, is being discussed in trades… with the Bulls.  Since the early news of Melo likely being on the trade market with New York as a possible destination, it seems like every new rumor adds another team to the mix.  Clearly the Denver Nuggets haven’t been too excited by the offers we’ve thrown their way.  Our one hope is that some of the teams mentioned, like Sacramento, make little sense.  No team will trade for him without assurance that he’ll re-sign with them (if not outright insisting on an extend-and-trade, a rarely done variation on the more well-known sign-and-trade).  Unlike LeBron and Wade, word is that Melo is intrigued with going to a large market.  So even mediocre teams like the Nets and Clippers are feasible due to their locations in/near New York and Los Angeles, respectively.  And it of course means that Chicago is most likely a location he’d welcome with open arms, making this rumor potentially have legs.  Scary unshaven legs.

—————————

Finally, here’s the latest of Brian Cronin’s excellent series on Knickerblogger.net about the Knicks Unsung History. Here’s the opening to whet yer whistle about a story that, as Walt Clyde Frazier might say, will “tantalize and surprise.”

John Starks was one of the most popular Knicks of the 1990s and he perhaps was also the Knick with the most interesting mythology surrounding his life and career. For instance, we all know by heart the story of how Starks, playing on a non-guaranteed contract and feeling (most likely correctly) that he was about to be cut, tried to wow everyone by dunking on Patrick Ewing during the last game of the Knicks’ 1990 training camp. Ewing, of course, easily swatted him to the ground, injuring Starks’ knee. The injured Starks was not allowed to be cut until healthy, and by the time his knee was healthy, Trent Tucker had gotten hurt so the Knicks now did need a back-up guard, and the rest was history. That is just one small piece of the Starks mythology, which also includes the story of how he was working as a bagger at a grocery store at one point before going back to college. This story, however, is about Starks’ trademark fiery nature, which he never was quite able to control. Sometimes it would hurt the Knicks (like when he got ejected for head-butting Reggie Miller in the 1993 playoffs), but today we look at a incident Starks was involved in that, in a roundabout way, ended up helping the Knicks.