As Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns ride in the Knicks victory parade, there will also be a place in the Canyon of Heroes for John Starks. The hard-nosed, undrafted guard who embodied the Knicks playoff teams of the 1990s is expected to join his former teammates.
Starks, who supported All-Star center Patrick Ewing by going toe-to-toe with stars like Michael Jordan and Reggie Miller, was haunted by the team’s loss to the Houston Rockets in the 1994 NBA Finals. The Knicks flew to Houston after Game 5 with a 3-2 series lead, needing only one more win for a championship.
Starks said he still remembers the “eerily quiet” plane ride home after the Rockets won the title. The trip was extra painful for him because of his shooting in the deciding Game 7: a nightmarish 2-for-18 performance, including missing all 11 of his 3-point attempts. The next season, the Knicks played Houston again; despite a much better game from Starks, he was still reeling from the loss.
“It still left the emptiness inside of me because we didn’t have the ‘chip, and they did,” Starks said. “And so I just kind of went into a funk.”
Starks was in the doldrums for about a month until he sat in a dark room and rewatched every minute of the Game 7 film.
“I went through that whole game, and after that, after I exorcised those demons, I was fine moving forward that year,” Starks said. “You tend to try to run away from your problems and not face them head on, and that never been the case with me. I always face my problems head on, but I was running from that moment, and I had to go back in and look at that moment and really get it out my system.”
Starks now works for the Knicks as an alumnus. He has been a fixture at Madison Square Garden during games, particularly during the playoffs and this championship run. Watching this current squad has done even more to help him get over the loss.
“To this day, you still live with that emptiness, because you didn’t do it as a player, but this takes care of all of that,” Starks said. “I’m a part of the organization — myself, Patrick (Ewing) is part of the organization — and to be able to watch these guys go out and perform the way they perform, not just during the playoffs, but throughout the year, and come together all at once to get the job done. It’s almost as gratifying as if I was playing.”