With the Knicks one win from their first NBA Finals trip since 1999, Madison Square Garden was loud again and Jalen Brunson was making a real case to climb the list of the franchise’s greatest players. BET put that debate front and center with a new ranking, “Clyde, Captain Clutch and the Mecca: The 15 Greatest Knicks of All Time,” timed to a run that has New York up 3-0 on the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals.
The Knicks earned that position the hard way. They rallied from 22 points down in the fourth quarter of Game 1 to win in overtime, then took Games 2 and 3 by double digits. The result was a 10-game playoff winning streak and a chance to close out Game 4 on Monday night at 8 p.m. ET in Cleveland on. In that setting, it is no surprise that Clyde Frazier, the Hall of Fame guard whose style and success helped define the team’s identity, is back at the center of a familiar New York argument: who belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Knicks history, and where do the current stars fit?
The list reflects the full arc of the franchise. Carl Braun spent 12 of his 13 NBA seasons with the Knicks and made five straight All-Star teams from 1953 to 1957, helping lead New York to its first three NBA Finals appearances. Bob McAdoo arrived in 1976 after winning MVP in Buffalo and led the Knicks in scoring in each of his three seasons in New York, finishing with the highest scoring average in franchise history at 26.7 points per game. Allan Houston’s nine seasons produced 18.5 points per game and one of the defining shots in team lore, the runner over Alonzo Mourning that knocked off the top-seeded Heat in 1999, when the eighth-seeded Knicks reached the Finals.
Charles Oakley’s decade in New York still matters because his value was never flashy: he ranks 13th on the team’s all-time rebounding list and gave the Knicks an edge that traveled from night to night. Richie Guerin, who played seven full seasons in New York, was a six-time All-Star, led the club in scoring three times and in assists for five straight years, and once set franchise marks with 57 points and 21 assists in a game. A Hall of Fame profile said the Knicks languished in those years, but Guerin was the toast of the town, and he was honored with induction in 2013. Bill Bradley rounds out the group of eras and styles, a two-time NBA champion from the 1970 and 1973 title teams who also fits the franchise’s long memory.
The ranking lands at a moment when the Knicks are chasing something bigger than a single series. A win Monday would send them back to the NBA Finals for the first time in 26 years, and it would also force one more update to an old debate that never really leaves New York. Brunson is climbing. Frazier still anchors the story. And the fact that a current playoff run can revive discussion of players from Braun to Bradley says as much about this season as it does about the team’s history.
