Mets Walk-Offs And Minutiae

So the Knicks did it again on Wednesday night, winning at the buzzer on David Lee's tip-in of Jamal Crawford's inbounds pass in a rather improbable double-overtime ending. It's that time of year in which the Knicks have historically had a lot of success winning games in this fashion. For most, it brought back memories of one particular game, though for our purposes, we'll reference three such contests. The first is the obvious one, the Knicks victory over the Bulls on January 15, 1990, when Trent Tucker took an inbounds pass with 0.1 seconds remaining and flipped in a 3-pointer at the buzzer for the win. The laws of mathematics, as well as common sense dictate this kind of play to be an impossibility, but the NBA was not prepared for this kind of dispute in it's first season using tenths-of-a-second to measure the final minute. The basket led to the creation of what's known as the "Tucker Rule" which states that the only way that you can score in such ...

It feels the slightest bit appropos, on a night in which there is Knickerbocker jubilation (James Dolan is said to be dancing in the streets) thanks to a walk-off buzzer beating finger roll by Stephon Marbury over Jazz center Mehmut Okur (translation of which is "My Ogre"), that we find some sort of Mets tie in. Wouldn'tcha know, I found one? I suppose it would make sense to use this space to find a Metsian equivalent to this Knicks victory, but I choose not to write about the 26 instances in which the Flushing 9 went from a 1-run deficit to a 1-run win on one swing of the bat, or the subset of 16 occurrences in which they accomplished that down to the final out (closest thing to a clock winding down we've got). One of the reasons for that is because I've already penned essays on nearly all of them already. It would also seem logical for me to use this space at some point for one of my rant-and-rave sessions about the Knicks president/general manager/coach/waterbo...

Well, Saturday was an eventful day at Madison Square Garden as both the Knicks and Rangers pulled out improbable walk-off wins. For those who missed it, the floundering Knicks had their nicest moment of the year, as 5-foot-7 munchinesque rookie Nate Robinson hit a rainbow 3-pointer from the corner at the overtime buzzer, giving the hometown team a victory over the Philadelphia 76ers. They changed over the Madison Square Garden floor to ice and at 8pm the Rangers and Washington Capitals faced off at Madison Square Garden. The Rangers failed to hold a 2-0 lead and were lucky just to get the game to a shootout after Jaromir Jagr got called for an illegal stick in overtime. The goaltenders put on a show big-time in this edition of bonus pucks and it appeared that the Capitals were going to win after scoring in the 14th round. But defenseman Jason Strudwick tied it for the Rangers, and then after rookie goalie Henrik Lundqvist stopped Washington's 15th shooter, 6-foot-6 Rangers defensem...

The NBA season opened Tuesday, so you had to figure at some point this week that I was going to chime in with a basketball walk-off story. The problem I had in trying to come up with one is that my team, the Knicks, hasn't had a lot of significant walk-off wins in the time that I've been following them. Yes, there was a Trent Tucker 3-pointer off an inbounds pass with 0.1 seconds remaining that never should have counted in the first place, and I recall Patrick Ewing hitting a buzzer-beater to beat the Bulls sometime about two decades ago. But unless you count some shots of recent vintage by those imposters presently wearing the Knicks jerseys (the Jamal Crawford's of the world), I can't think of too many others. So I'm going to expand the definition of a "walk-off shot" slightly to relate the story of one of my favorite Knicks games, and it's particularly timely given the recent retirement of a well-known Knick. One of the knocks on the NBA is that peo...

I'm going to interrupt my Mets-related chatter to tell a brief story and perhaps it explains my interest in all things walk-off and buzzer beater. Basketball is a hot topic in New York City with the Knicks hiring Larry Brown as their head coach earlier this week, so we'll tell a hoops-related tale for this weekends entry. The date was January 30, 1975 and the Knicks were on the road, taking on the Atlanta Hawks. My mom and dad were big basketball fans during the glory days of New York's basketball franchise. My dad was at Madison Square Garden when Willis Reed limped on to the court for Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals and not long after that he met my mom. They got married on November 8, 1970, better known as the day that a New Orleans Saints kicker named Tom Dempsey set an NFL record by kicking a 63-yard field goal to beat the Detroit Lions. My dad's job on Wall Street enabled him easy access to Knicks tickets and I've been told the story on more than one occasion of...