Worst moment in each NBA franchise’s history
By Brad Rowland
New York Knicks – The Charles Smith disaster in the 1993 Playoffs
New York is the biggest city in the United States, and because of that, it seems insane that the NBA has gone more than 40 years without anointing a champion from the Big Apple. However, that is exactly the predicament that the league and the Knicks are in at this stage, and perhaps the greatest “what if?” of that time period of emptiness came in the 1993 NBA Playoffs.
The Knicks claimed a 2-0 advantage over Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in the Eastern Conference Finals, but after back-to-back wins by the Bulls to even the series, New York faced a must-win environment in Game 5. Enter Charles Smith, who famously missed four consecutive layups (not a misprint, for the youth among us) in the final moments of the pivotal game, allowing Chicago to claim a three-point victory on the way to an eventual six-game series win.
Smith finished the game with 12 points and 6 rebounds in 29 minutes, but his entire NBA career has come to be defined by a single sequence in which he just couldn’t convert a bucket in the paint. It is entirely unfair to pin New York’s full chances to this infamous possession, but Smith’s failure lives on for folks in New York as a huge and pivotal moment in the franchise’s history.
To let Smith off the hook a bit, the Knicks did advance to the NBA Finals in 1999, but as you can glean from the rest of this post, that bid for the title came up empty against the San Antonio Spurs.
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