New York Knicks are tantalizingly close to landing LeBron James and reviving Madison Square Garden « pidgisiila

There has never been an event quite like this, certainly not here. Sonny Werblin, who would later run the Garden, signed Joe Namath for all that money in the '60s, but no one knew that Namath would change everything for the Jets, by winning Super Bowl III.

No one knew that Tom Seaver would change everything for the Mets, and that the Mets would give us the baseball miracle of 1969. Reggie Jackson was the free agent who put the Yankees back on top, in 1977 and then 1978, but the Yankees were in the Series the year before Reggie got to town.

"I didn't need New York to be a star," Reggie used to say. "I brought my star with me."

LeBron James is all that, at 25, even though he has been to the NBA Finals just once. Amar'e Stoudemire, whom the Knicks paid $100 million just to get a better shot at LeBron, said this last week when his signing was announced:

"The Knicks are back."

Stoudemire is a good, exciting player. He's not good enough to bring the Knicks back by himself. LeBron James is good enough, if he brings his own star with him, to do that by himself.

New York doesn't deserve him more than the other cities in the great free agent chase of July 2010. The owner of the Garden, James Dolan, doesn't deserve to win the player known as King James. But Knick fans do. The ones who were there through all the losing, the ones who kept coming because they remembered what the Garden was like when it was run by better people and had better teams and mattered - they deserve a chance to have LeBron come play for their team.

They find out a little after 9 the way everybody else does. This close to LeBron James. After the darkest period in the history of the Knicks, in the history of basketball New York, maybe the lights finally come back on Thursday night.

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New York Knicks are tantalizingly close to landing LeBron James and reviving Madison Square Garden

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