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Bulked up but still bothered by injuries, Marcus Camby remains the center of attention on a thin front line

By Ian Thomsen

The pressure is squarely on Houston, who signed a nine-figure contract this summer after a subpar season.  Manny Millan Enemy Lines An opposing team's scout sizes up the Knicks " Clarence Weatherspoon and Kurt Thomas are going to be animals inside. New York was the worst offensive-rebounding team in the league last season, but Weatherspoon is good in that area. He and Marcus Camby are going to get so Larry Johnson after they see how Weatherspoon plays. ... The Knicks are living on the edge with their lack of depth around Camby. They're one injury away from being not too good.... The new rules are going to make them even tougher defensively. I bet there are going to be some games in the 60s now that Camby -- who was already a great off-the-ball defender -- will be able to take an additional step or two away from his man. ... They're going to miss Glen Rice because scoring is their weakness. I know they're thinking that Shandon Anderson is an upgrade defensively, but they were already the best defensive team in the league.... Charlie Ward is their best point guard, but he's dragging his knee. So the question becomes, How many minutes can Mark Jackson give them at his age? ... Allan Houston has become a little inconsistent. He's one of those guys you wish could play with Sam Cassell's emotions, or Michael Jordan's, and at his age I don't see that changing. ... It's amazing how Latrell Sprewell has become a cornerstone of the Knicks. The incident with P.J. Carlesimo four years ago made him tougher and gave him something to prove, and Jeff Van Gundy has given him the opportunity to prove it."

The Knicks realized Marcus Camby's importance last April in a most horrible way. The night after he controlled the boards with 18 rebounds in a playoff-opening win over Toronto, Camby was called to the South Windsor, Conn., home of his 21-year-old sister, Monica, where she was being held hostage by a former boyfriend. Camby made a personal appeal that helped persuade the attacker to release his sister. But the distraught center was of no help to the Knicks for the remainder of the series, sitting out Game 3 and scoring just 11 points before fouling out with 6:15 left in the decisive Game 5 at home as New York failed to reach the second round for the first time in 10 years.

The attack on his sister remains too painful for the 27-year-old Camby to discuss, but it marked the beginning of an off-season devoted to helping all kinds of people -- including the Knicks. The injury-prone Camby put on 15 pounds of muscle over the summer in hopes of playing more than 63 games for the first time in his six-year career. The Knicks will go as far as he can lead them. Hence the concern when a flare-up of the plantar fasciitis in his left foot limited Camby to a total of six minutes in New York's first six preseason games.

"You could make the point that he is our MVP because his effort and energy are so hard to duplicate," says coach Jeff Van Gundy, who was not a Camby fan when New York acquired him for Charles Oakley before the 1998-99 lockout season. "Marcus has a huge impact on the game when he doesn't have the ball."

Yet it's Camby's desire for the ball -- to rebound it, block it or otherwise disrupt the opposition's possession of it -- that has prevented the Knicks from crumbling since the departure of Patrick Ewing. With their payroll of better than $83 million, second highest in the league, New York has little flexibility to bolster its thin front line. The best it could do was sign 6'7" Clarence Weatherspoon as a second-string power forward behind 6'9" Kurt Thomas, who takes over for the retired Larry Johnson.

The Knicks maintain hope that the energy of Camby and Latrell Sprewell will inspire their less gifted teammates. Sprewell openly admits that the Knicks' talent doesn't even rank among the top five teams in the East. Yet New York ranked No. 1 in defensive field goal percentage (41.7%) and No. 2 in defensive rebounding -- both high-effort categories -- during the regular season. "Everybody wants [us] to concede that we're not good enough or we're not big enough anymore," Van Gundy says. "I don't want to concede anything. This is a team that can overachieve, that can play harder than a lot of teams. We are good enough."

When Sprewell accused his teammates of not playing hard during the postseason, it was thought that he was referring not only to Glen Rice (now departed) but also to Allan Houston -- an implication that Sprewell denies. The Knicks made the 30-year-old Houston their highest-paid player by giving him a six-year, $100.4 million contract this summer, which means he will be held more accountable than ever for the team's results. "I want to really set myself apart from where I've been," says Houston, whose shooting percentage fell 34 points to .449 last season. Newly acquired Shandon Anderson will have to fight for the minutes that Rice had to settle for last season.

Though Camby faces no such internal competition, he still plays like a guy desperately trying to make the team. As a year-round resident of New York, he has deep-rooted feelings for the city. He sponsors P.S. 194, a Harlem elementary school, and in September he continued his tradition of walking with the children to their first day of class. This year the NBA turned Camby's idea into a leaguewide program and made him its spokesman. Now the Knicks need him to play as prominent a role for them.

Issue date: October 29, 2001

Click here to look back at CNNSI.com's preseason Knicks preview.