Knicks avoid repeating colossal 1994 mistake with the Alec Burks Renaissance

We’ve been overdosing on 1994 vibes for a month now. Mostly that’s because the Knicks and the Rangers have alternated thriller nights, both leading up and on through the playoffs. They’re a combined 9-2 at home in the postseason, and you could argue it should be an even 11-0, and they’ve got the place daily juiced in a way it hasn’t been in 30 years.

Then there’s the other … well, ancillary stuff. An eclipse. O.J. Simpson was back in the news again. Ahmad Rashad has been spotted back at the Garden again. The Yankees are winning every day again, in the shadow of hoops and hockey. We have discovered that the Vancouver Canucks are still alive and well and playing in the NHL playoffs.

Tuesday night, something else happened.

The Alec Burks Renaissance hit the Garden.

And when he took up where he’d left off in Games 3 and 4 in Indianapolis, scoring double digits for a third straight game (18 points) while knocking down five 3-pointers in front of a delirious MSG crowd …

Well, if you were around in ’94, it had to make you at least a little bit wistful to watch a forgotten sharpshooter afforded an unexpected chance, even as it made you hopeful that Burks’ unlikely emergence strengthens the Knicks core going forward, as long as they last in these playoffs.

For it was only six short days ago that Burks wasn’t just benched, but banished. Burks had vanished from the rotation late in the season, and while he was on the active playoff roster it was hard to tell. Before Game 3 last Friday, Burks had played all of 44 seconds in the Knicks’ first eight playoff games.

But it was actually even more than that. You half expected if the Knicks ever encountered some serious foul trouble, and a Scott Foster or a Tony Brothers approached Tom Thibodeau about sending in a fifth man, Thibodeau would’ve thrown a Norman Dale at them — “My team is on the floor” — and taken his chances four on five.

Late Tuesday night, Thibodeau said, “I thought Alec … was really, really good off the bench,” and it’s hard to imagine he won’t be an integral part of the rotation from here.

And it hearkens to that fabled spring of ’94, back to Game 7 of the Finals, specifically, when Pat Riley sat by and watched John Starks throw up brick after brick against the Rockets, a box score so laced with infamy that every Knicks fan who was alive that spring can recite it without looking it up: 2-for-18 from the floor. Zero-for-11 from 3. He played 42 minutes. He kept shooting.

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And all the while, Rolando Blackman sat idly by on the bench. Riley had acquired Blackman the previous year because he did one thing about as well as anyone in the league: for his career he shot 49.3 percent. Starks’ emergence had cut down on Blackman’s minutes, and then a locker-room argument with Riley following the Knicks’ bare-knuckle escape of the Pacers in the East finals — Blackman asked for wives to join the players on the team charter, Riley adamantly and flatly said no — seemed to seal his fate.

He never played a second against the Rockets in the Finals. And as Starks melted down, Riley kept Blackman on ice. The player immediately retired from the NBA. The coach? Well, 12 years later, at the 2006 NBA Finals, where his Heat would soon win Riley’s fifth title as a head coach, he made a startling admission.

“I got caught up in the short rotation,” Riley said. “That’s why we brought Rolando there. Immediately afterward, I knew. If we had played [him], we would have won the championship.”

And then: “That’s the biggest mistake I ever made.”

Blackman and Riley never got a mulligan. Burks and — to a degree — Thibodeau have. There have been other folks in other sports around here who have emerged from the darkness and delivered in the most important ways.

Brian Doyle replaced an injured Willie Randolph in the ’78 playoffs, hit .438 (or 237 points higher than his lifetime average) in the World Series and by rights should’ve been MVP. Jeff Hostetler and Ottis Anderson were both left for dead by the Giants by 1990, and then they both conspired to deliver an unforgettable ride to glory. Dean Meminger earned lifetime cred with Knicks fans when he came off the bench to spell his banged-up roommate, Earl Monroe, in the ’73 title run, Dean the Dream picking up Earl the Pearl magnificently.

What Burks has done is not unprecedented. Just unexpected.

“Just stay ready,” he said late Tuesday night. “You never know. That’s what Thibs tells me all the time, what everybody tells me. Just stay ready. My guys have been playing with me, playing a lot of pickup and just working out.”

And now they are one step away from the East finals, thanks to Burks taking a few essential steps out of the basketball crypt, getting the shot and hitting the shots that, 30 years ago, Ro Blackman never did.