40. Reed goes down, but the Knicks come back to win in Game 5, May 4, 1970, Madison Square Garden

Willis Reed was the Most Valuable Player of the 1969–70 NBA season.

            Willis Reed was the player around whom the Knicks were built, their offensive core and their defensive anchor.

            Playing on battered knees, Willis Reed led the Knicks through the first four games of the 1970 Finals against Los Angeles, averaging 32 points and 15 rebounds while guarding larger-than-life legend Wilt Chamberlain.

            So when Reed slipped while driving to the hoop, then crumpled to the Madison Square Garden floor in Game 5 on May 4, grabbing his hip and covering his face to hide the pain, the Knicks’ championship aspirations seemed to deflate instantly. With Reed gone, Chamberlain would likely erupt, scoring at will; with Reed gone, the Knicks offense would lose its go-to guy; with Reed gone.º.º.º. It was impossible to imagine winning with Reed gone. But the Knicks, already trailing by 10, stunned everyone with a win for the ages, a perfect representation of the team’s intelligence, fortitude, discipline, and teamwork.

            The day before Game 5, New York Times writer Leonard Koppett wrote that despite the possibility of three games in five nights, “there is no question Reed will play, and probably play well, until and unless he actually collapses.”

            Now, with under four minutes left in the first, he had done just that. Down 25–15, Knick coach Red Holzman tried backup center Nate Bowman, but in seven minutes Chamberlain scored seven points and the Lakers’ lead grew to 37–24. Holzman next turned to little-used Bill Hosket, but the Knicks failed to gain traction—eventually the Laker lead would reach 16—so after another four minutes Holzman made an unusual but shrewd move. He shifted Dave DeBusschere in the low post. At 6K6J, DeBusschere gave away at least seven inches against Chamberlain, but he was perhaps the game’s best defensive forward, and in the half’s final four and a half minutes the Laker superstar did not score.

            At halftime, when it was obvious that Reed, on the trainer’s table and unable to move, would not return, Holzman gave what he called “my best Gipper treatment” and asked the players to win for their fallen leader.

            In the second half, Holzman stuck with DeBusschere—and when he picked up his fifth foul early in the fourth quarter, 6K7J Dave Stallworth—in the pivot. Both men did their best to front Chamberlain and deny him the ball. They had help, of course: Holzman’s Knicks always played a well-rounded team defense, and this game represented the pinnacle of those efforts. Walt Frazier and Dick Barnett, who seemed to have read the Laker playbook at intermission, anticipated every move. The Knicks allowed Los Angeles just 22 shots in the second half and had 10 steals or interceptions in the last 16 minutes. They wreaked havoc by double-teaming Jerry West, Mr. Outside to Chamberlain’s Mr. Inside, which prevented West from getting off good shots or dumping the ball in to Chamberlain. The frustrated Lakers committed 19 turnovers in the second half (compared to New York’s 2), while Chamberlain and West managed just 5 of their team’s 26 shots, scoring a grand total of 8 points.

            Some observers, like Koppett, felt the Lakers were “robbed, pure and simple,” as officials let the undersized home team mug the big, bad visitors. Still, there’s little doubt that Chamberlain let up and that the Knicks’ aggressive, rotating defense and screaming fans unnerved the Lakers, who lost their poise when their most obvious game plan faltered. Elgin Baylor, their sole hot hand in the second half (scoring 15 of his 21 then), hit only three field goals in the fourth quarter, passing up open looks in desperate but failed attempts to get the ball to Chamberlain. Unlike the Knicks, the Lakers lacked the temperament for improvisation; by alternately playing too passively and too frantically, they let their tremendous advantage evaporate.

            Under normal circumstances, Chamberlain’s mere presence in the middle on the other end of the court might have been enough to stave off a Knick comeback. But at halftime, Bill Bradley, the thoughtful Rhodes Scholar from Princeton, presented Holzman with a solution to the quandary of what the Daily News called a “donut” offense (a reference to the missing center). At Bradley’s suggestion, the Knicks went to a 1–3–1 offense, in which Frazier played up high, Bradley hovered around the top of the key, Barnett and Cazzie Russell spread to the wings near the free throw line, and DeBusschere roved down deep. Because all the Knicks could handle the ball and hit from outside, they were able to stretch the court, either drawing Chamberlain out (enabling them to use their speed to drive around him) or minimizing his impact in the lane.

            “It was like having five guards on the court at the same time,” Frazier said afterwards. (Zone offenses, like zone defenses, were technically illegal, but L.A.’s complaints were ignored, perhaps because Chamberlain was hovering in the middle, in an illegal defensive zone.)

            The Knicks chipped away in the third, outscoring Los Angeles 35–29, but they still trailed 82–75 as the fourth began. Early in the last quarter, however, the Knicks went on a 12–5 spurt, which featured Stallworth hitting from outside as Chamberlain scrambled out after him and culminated with 7:43 left on a long shot by Bradley to tie the game at 87. At 91–91 with 5:19 to go, Bradley again drained one from downtown to give New York its first lead. The Lakers were so rattled that they couldn’t even get the ball in-bounds, and Stallworth hit a running one-hander for a 95–91 edge. The Lakers would not get another shot at tying it up as Russell caught fire, scoring six points to give the Knicks a 101–94 cushion. Stallworth drove the final nail in the coffin when he exploited his earlier success from outside and blew past Chamberlain with a head fake, went under the basket, and laid in a short reverse hook for a 103–96 lead with under two minutes remaining.

            That clinched it, and the Knicks finished L.A. off 107–100; Frazier had 21 points (and 12 assists), but there was not one star—the team finished with six players in double figures and five with at least six rebounds.

            The win was overshadowed by the news of the day (May 4 was the day of the Kent State shootings) and by the unforgettable Game 7 that followed. But had the Knicks failed to pull together in Game 5, they would have headed to L.A. facing elimination, and without Reed for Game 6, there probably would not have been a Game 7. Reed—who listened in the locker room to public address announcer John Condon’s calls via a special hookup—believed this game “was really the most significant game of that series.”