NBA Accessories Week: Patrick Ewing’s iconic knee pads

Patrick Ewing wasn’t the only NBA player wearing knee pads, but for whatever reason, his were iconic and emblematic of his career as a whole.

Are knee pads absolutely necessary for playing the game of basketball? They most definitely are not, and while wearing them can be a preventative measure against injury, wearing them most often suggests the body’s joints — the cartilage and the ligaments — are already starting to fray.

Thus, seeing the knee pad on the limbs of a great basketball player is to witness an admission to stress. The player is already aware that something wicked this way comes, and there is not much else to be done than don the equipment from some other sport. Knee pads belong on the Tony Hawks of the world. They can also resemble links in a hockey goalie’s armor or shin guards on a soccer player, but they tend to make basketball players look old and beaten by gravity and repetition.

Patrick Ewing is not the only player to have worn knee pads. Bill Walton donned them, as did Hakeem Olajuwon. Walton even to this day is a poster child of the fragility that comes with being a big man in a game of grace and style. Olajuwon, on the other hand, is everyone’s go to when rummaging through the underrated champions. He is a killer of Robinsons and Shaqs. And, as if his career were penned by George R.R. Martin, he never did get his epic showdown with Michael Jordan. Still, he did the next best thing: He vanquished Patrick Ewing’s New York Knicks in the 1994 NBA Finals. Both wore knee pads, but only Ewing is noted for having done so.

Who knows exactly why this is?

Perhaps Ewing’s knee pads were more noticeable. They were larger in size and always blinding in their stark whiteness. Olajuwon wore red knee pads that were almost invisible on television, especially when the team played at home in Houston where the lane was painted a matching shade of Rocket rouge. But maybe the knee pads are synonymous with Ewing because so much of his NBA career appeared to be a struggle against the promise of his younger self.

He wore the knee pads even while playing at Georgetown. His college career was one of the best imaginable. Those Hoya teams made the NCAA championship game in three out of his four years. They won the title in his junior year. He positioned himself as a bigger player than Ralph Sampson. The sky was the limit, and the knee pads seemed to be designed for buoyancy. Then, after joining the New York Knicks as the No. 1 pick in the 1985 NBA Draft, those knee pads started to resemble sandbags.

Ewing averaged 20.0 points and 9.0 rebounds per game. He won Rookie of the Year, but he also missed 32 games with knee injuries, and the team finished 23-59. He missed 13 fewer games the next season, but New York’s win total only increased by one. And head coach Hubie Brown would be fired only 16 games into Ewing’s second season.

In November of that second season, the following paragraphs ran in a national newspaper about Ewing’s developing knee problems:

"“He doesn’t believe his knee problems are career-threatening, but he has played on at least one bad one for almost a year and is clearly frustrated about it. His right knee first became sore about midseason last year, and he discovered the problem himself one morning on an airplane, when he found a piece of floating tissue while massaging the knee.“He had surgery March 14 to have the tissue removed, and, even after a brutal summer of weightlifting and rehabilitation at Georgetown, he showed up at training camp with the knee ‘feeling pretty good, but not 100%.’“Since then, the right knee hasn’t gotten much better, and now the left one is sore. The result is that he hurts all the time, and appears to be gingerly running on egg shells a good part of every game.“‘The left knee, which had been fine, got sore because I was trying to compensate for the right one,’ he said. ‘I imagine it’ll take a full year to get it all well.'”"

So much for those knee pads being preventative.

Patrick Ewing was a great NBA player, and yet he had the misfortune of playing most of his career in an era where not one but several teams were simply better than his. When his Knicks made the playoffs for the first time, they encountered Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics in the first round, and as the sun set in Boston, it rose in Detroit and Chicago. Ewing was great, but he needed to be more. He also sweated a lot, and the visual combination of his sweat and his kneepads always gave the impression of a man swamped in futility.

If one were to wring out those knee pads after all those years of strain, the salty liquid held in that glistening white fabric might be enough to raise sea levels.