Seeing as someone already posted this (7 Hours ago!!! Doh) I will post this instead. It does have the word Houston in it, so it is in the right Forum p.s. Keep those Hounds on a leash Waste Of Money (Wallace Mathews) July 18, 2001 -- TIME was when teams gave the kind of money the Knicks are about to give Allan Houston only to the most special of players. The kind who can take control of games. Carry sagging teams. Win championships, or at least die trying. One hundred million dollars is the kind of scratch you give to franchise players, to leaders, to guys you just cannot win without. Now, the Knicks choose to give that kind of money to a player they can't win with. Allan Houston has the talent of a leader but the mind of a follower. That is why he foolishly went along with Charlie Ward's anti-Semitic rantings last year. It is also why he almost never takes a game into his own hands. Why he never demands the basketball for the last shot of a crucial game. Why he never seizes the kind of responsibility routinely shouldered by the true greats like Michael Jordan and the near-greats like his teammate, Latrell Sprewell. Allan Houston doesn't want that kind of burden. Maybe he fears it. For whatever reason, there are just too many nights when you don't even notice Allan Houston is out on the floor. No amount of money can change a man's character. One hundred million dollars is not going to turn Allan Houston into Allan Iverson. It won't even turn him into another Sprewell. All it will do is insure that the Knicks remain trapped in the corner Dave Checketts maneuvered them into - a roster overcrowded with shooting guards, a payroll that is hopelessly capped out and a team once again destined to disappoint its fans. Turns out that was Checketts' parting gift to the Knicks and to New York: a future held hostage by Allan Houston. There is simply too much air between Houston's big games - his last impact performance in a truly big game came on June 11, 1999, the night the Knicks beat the Pacers to go to the NBA Finals - and not enough between his disappearing acts. On the night the Knicks were eliminated by the Raptors in the first-round of the 2001 playoffs, Houston managed just 16 quiet points. When Sprewell, who played his heart out, said some guys didn't give it all up in that final game, you can bet one of the guys he was talking about was Allan Houston. Sometime this afternoon, the Knicks are expected to make the Houston contract - six years at $99.25 million their Major Announcement of the Offseason. But what they are really telling you is this: Next year will be a lot like last year. So will the year after that and the year after that and the year after that. It will be the same unbalanced, ill-conceived lineup playing the same erratic, unsatisfying and often ugly game. It will be the same cruel tease of a regular season followed by the all-too-familiar postseason exposure, followed shortly thereafter by collapse. The only thing different will be the ticket prices, which of course have gone up. Everything else is going down. After they went out in the first round of last year's playoffs to the Raptors, it was generally agreed that the Knicks could not seriously challenge for an NBA championship as currently constructed, that a lineup featuring Sprewell, Houston and Glen Rice simply does not work. Of the three, the one to move was Houston. With the $21 million they owed him coming off the cap, that would have been addition by subtraction. Instead, the Knicks opted for subtraction by the addition of four more years to Houston's existing contract. And for what? For a player whose physical skills far outstrip his mental strength. A shooting guard with a great touch for the hoop, but no grasp for the jugular. A guy who will hit the first shot of any game for you but wants no part of the last shot, especially in a tough spot. Today, the Knicks give you six more years of Allan Houston. But what they're really giving you is six more years of business as usual. The business of failure. http://www.nypost.com/sports/knicks/29591.htm ------------------ "For there is nothing either good or bad, thinking makes it so." - William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet [This message has been edited by BobFinn* (edited July 18, 2001).]
Oh sure, anytime something bad happens, it's the lawyers' fault. This whole thing seems like it should have been hammered out awhile back. Did they just do the math? ------------------ I'm so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip that I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis.
