The NBA sidekick Hall of Fame
By Bryan Harvey
Charles Oakley and Anthony Mason
Much is made of how Michael Jordan warped the league’s thinking about what makes either a great player or a championship roster, and while he blurred the vision with dazzling speed and soaring heights, Charles Oakley (along with the Bad Boy Pistons) deserves some credit for hammering at the telescope’s cylinder. All the Old World propaganda about toughness and brutality and it being a man’s game can be found in Oak.
Charles Oakley never averaged 15 points per game, and he only averaged double-digit rebounds in six of his 19 seasons. Still, in the season where he and Patrick Ewing finally outlasted everyone else in the Eastern Conference, he finished second on the team in VORP.
The Knicks were always a gang of Frost Giants, running an endless group of recognizable players at the Eastern Conference’s upper echelon. John Starks, Anthony Mason, Charles Smith, Doc Rivers, Greg Anthony, Rolando Blackman, Hubert Davis, Herb Williams and Derek Harper all played significant minutes in the early and mid-90s at what could then still be propped up as the Mecca of basketball.
No matter how any of these players played before or after arriving in New York, they all seemed to be infected by Charles Oakley’s brooding toughness, as if upon joining the team and shaking his hand a splinter had pierced their skin, entered their bloodstream, and twisted their DNA into part of his world tree. You know this is true, if you were around for it, because when he was no longer of any use to the Knicks, other teams still believed he could prick their teams into being.
The Toronto Raptors hired him and Antonio Davis to act as human shields around their young star Vince Carter, and a few short seasons later, he would reunite with his Airness in Washington to close out an era.
One of the saddest tales in all of basketball is how all those rings rained down in Chicago without Oakley’s branches to catch a one.
In 1994, the New York Knicks of the 1990s came closer than they ever would to winning the NBA championship. Jordan was out of the league, but the vaunted Knicks ran into a magical Houston Rockets team in the Finals and lost in seven games. They lost to a team full of blessed role players. Their own sixth man was Anthony Mason.
Mason’s most dominant feature was his own name scrawled in cursive on the sides of his head, and this was before Dennis Rodman reinvented the rainbow. Mason was a bruising forward, as all the Knicks’ forwards were, but he could also flash a surprising amount of finesse. Or maybe the flash was an illusion; the result of standing next to the always old Charles Oakley.
But Mason wasn’t endless energy either. He could look beleaguered. The playoffs could render him under siege, and why not? After all, this was the player rumored to be the victim in Biggie’s “I Got a Story to Tell.” No wonder he had dark circles under his eyes. The flash in his game was like gunpowder unleashed in an alley.
Mason would win Sixth Man of the Year at the end of the 1994-95 season, but his Knicks would fall to the Indiana Pacers, who would then fall to the Magic, who would then fall to the Rockets. The next season, all windows in the Eastern Conference would be closed for all intents and purposes.
Mason’s last year in New York would be his first as a starter. He would lead the league in minutes played that year, as he would in his first season with the Charlotte Hornets. His best scoring years would be in Charlotte and Miami, but he was also no longer coming off the bench in those cities.
Still, he never seemed so beloved as he did in the Big Apple — even when he refused to defer to anyone, from Pat Riley to Patrick Ewing or Derek Harper, and simply dribbled to where the sidewalk ends and back again, with no exact purpose in his movements, just no reason to go home either.
Drafted by Portland in the third round of the 1988 NBA Draft, Mason didn’t premiere in the league until 1990. No wonder those early years in New York for Pat Riley always bubbled over with the energy of a cat being let out of a bag.
If these slides are really about the underrated role player, maybe this slide should’ve been dedicated to Charles Smith, the Pittsburgh graduate sandwiched in between Oakley and Mason on a subway to and from the Mecca.