With five minutes left in the final quarter, Patrick Ewing scored on Radja on consecutive post-ups, dragging the Knicks back to within two points. The game entered a back-and-forth struggle that drained the most stamina and put the players' willingness to battle to the greatest test.
Just then, Sam Cassell drove from the high post, feinted a shot, and passed. Rookie Eddie Jones caught the ball as he cut beneath the basket and was about to rise in stride. Anthony Mason lunged sideways toward him. Unable to block him head-on, Mason threw his entire body into Jones, who had yet to find his footing, knocking him hard to the floor near the baseline.
This was the defensive language the old-era Knicks knew best: intimidating young core players with punishing physical contact to establish a psychological advantage.
For a moment, however, Mason had forgotten that in the summer of 1994, David Stern had already issued a directive classifying this kind of rough, non-basketball contact against airborne players as a flagrant foul.
A piercing whistle sounded instantly. The referee barely hesitated before crossing both hands above his head. A flagrant two, and an immediate ejection.
A tidal wave of cheers erupted from the stands of the Old Boston Garden. Mason spread his hands in disbelief and tried to rush toward the referee to argue, but it was no use. There was no room to negotiate how the new rules were enforced.
On the Celtics' side, Cassell was the first to rush over and demand answers. Several young players quickly gathered around, and the situation was on the verge of spiraling out of control. Just then, a towering figure pushed through the crowd and walked out at an unhurried pace.
Robert Parish.
From the first day of training camp until now, the 41-year-old veteran had barely said a word in public. He had watched Cassell and Dominique Wilkins fight over possession with a cold eye, and had seen enough of the youngsters' fire and restlessness. Now, he walked past everyone and planted himself firmly in front of Mason, who was being held by coaches as they escorted him out.
Parish shielded Jones, who lay on the floor still shaken, securely behind his broad back. He neither threw a punch nor unleashed any heated trash talk. He simply stood there like an immovable mountain of black rock. His poker face, unchanged for more than a decade, remained expressionless, his gaze icy. He stared at the Knicks' defensive line and spoke one word at a time.
"You want to touch him, you go through me first."
The twenty thousand spectators at the Old Boston Garden and the cameras broadcasting nationwide clearly witnessed the scene.
On the sideline, Lin Qi finally felt the tension in his chest ease.
The moment was right. The Old Chief had said only a few words, but from that moment on, those five players on the court and the nine on the bench-headstrong troublemakers with different personalities who refused to bow to one another-found, for the first time, a sense of unity beyond tactics, a sense of belonging to the same team. They were no longer a hastily assembled ragtag outfit. They were the Celtics, the Boston Celtics.
Cassell bent down and pulled Jones off the floor, then gave the rookie a firm pat on the chest. Jones gritted his teeth without a word, stood at the free-throw line, and calmly swished both technical free throws with crisp releases.
With two minutes remaining, the teams were tied. Celtics possession.
Cassell dribbled unhurriedly in the frontcourt, directing the offense, while Wesley Person and Dana Barros stretched the floor wide from opposite corners. The newly shortened three-point line posed such a threat that the Knicks' defense dared not commit too firmly even when collapsing for a double-team.
Based on his habits in training camp, everyone expected Cassell to go it alone on such a crucial possession. This time, however, his peripheral vision stayed fixed on the top of the arc.
Dominique Wilkins stood there.
In an intrasquad scrimmage six weeks earlier, Cassell had preferred an extremely difficult pull-up jumper to passing to this decorated veteran. But after a long period of adjustment, Mason's brutal foul moments earlier, and Parish's stand, the team's chemistry had completely changed.
Cassell suddenly sold a sweeping change of direction and feinted a drive, successfully drawing Ewing's full defensive attention onto himself. The instant the double-team formed, he flicked his wrist, sending the basketball like lightning toward the opening at the top of the arc.
Wilkins caught it.
At 34, abandoned by the Hawks and considered by the entire league to be on borrowed time after his Achilles rupture, "The Human Highlight Film" rose with striking grace against the closing defender, before all those eyes that questioned whether he was too old to deliver.
At that moment, his once grievously injured Achilles tendon seemed to bear the pride of fourteen years of battle.
Swish.
The basketball pierced the net cleanly.
The Old Boston Garden erupted. Twenty thousand Boston fans rose as one, shouting Wilkins's name until their voices were hoarse. Just as Lin Qi had promised him in that office over the summer, Boston would give him the respect he deserved.
Wilkins raised his arms toward the stands and roared. As he retreated on defense, he did something that would have been impossible in training camp: he turned and nodded to Cassell, who had delivered the assist.
Cassell broke into his trademark grin.
When the final buzzer sounded, the Celtics had defeated last season's Eastern Conference overlords, the New York Knicks, on their home floor.
This was far more than an ordinary season-opening victory. As Pat Riley walked toward the players' tunnel with a grim expression, the renowned coach knew perfectly well that he had lost more than a game tonight. He had lost to the direction of tactical change across the entire league. As for just what offensive benefits David Stern's three new rules would unleash, tonight's Celtics had given the entire league a perfect demonstration.
And Boston's young general manager had already pushed all his chips onto the rising tide of the new era months earlier.
In the locker room, the young players splashed champagne over Cassell and Barros. Wilkins sat in a corner wiping away sweat with a towel and let out a long breath. Meanwhile, the team's true anchor, Robert Parish, silently unfastened the heavy braces around his knees. At last, the faintest hint of a smile appeared on his stern face.
Lin Qi did not go inside to interrupt the players' celebration. He stood at the entrance to the dim players' tunnel and looked up toward the VIP box on the highest level.
Owner Paul Gaston held up a champagne glass, meeting his eyes across most of the arena. Gaston saluted him from afar, the wild joy on his face unmistakable.
But there was little ease in Lin Qi's expression. He was more clearheaded than anyone: beating the Knicks was only a beginning. The sight of Ewing wreaking havoc inside tonight had already exposed this new Celtics team's most lethal weakness under the spotlight. The new rules offered enormous protection to perimeter drives and shooting, but they could not conjure the bulk needed for the Celtics' lightweight interior players to withstand contact.
What made Lin Qi even warier was that, in this new era that seemingly weakened muscle-bound basketball and liberated perimeter offense, a terrifying anomaly lay ahead in the Eastern Conference, reaping every tactical benefit the new rules offered.
The Orlando Magic, Shaquille O'Neal.
This was a logical blind spot the entire league was seriously underestimating at present. Every general manager thought Stern's new rules targeted traditional interior players, but Lin Qi knew perfectly well that while the rules appeared to liberate perimeter stars, in reality, they directly removed the shackles on "passing the ball to O'Neal."
Under the old rules, a team's first line of defense against O'Neal was often not its interior players but its perimeter guards. Defenders could use relentless hand-checking and forearm impediments to frantically disrupt the Magic's passing lanes on the perimeter, making a comfortable entry pass into the low post extremely difficult.
Now, however, a gifted point guard like Anfernee Hardaway had an easier time than before dribbling across half court to the top of the arc, changing direction, and advancing. When the ball could sail over defenders' heads unhindered and with greater accuracy, delivered straight into O'Neal's hands in the low post, any defensive system would be plunged into despair in the paint.
More deadly still, the new rules cracked down on "rough, non-basketball contact" in the paint. In the past, when O'Neal leaped from the low post, traditional bruisers would use near-wrestling moves to haul him bodily out of the air, ball and all, wearing down his body and his sense of psychological security. Now, with the blade of flagrant twos and additional suspensions hanging overhead, interior brawlers began to hold back when defending his jumps.
This directly removed the final restraint on O'Neal's rampages through the paint.
Moreover, the Shaquille O'Neal of 1994 was by no means the 330-pound behemoth who would slowly grind opponents down in half-court sets during the Lakers' later three-peat. Right now, he was in his "Baby Shark" phase, maintaining a weight of around 290 pounds while his physical capabilities were at their most terrifying... His body was all muscle. Not only was his strength unmatched, he even possessed a small forward's running speed, leaping ability, and agility.
Stern had shortened the three-point line and cracked down on perimeter defense with the intention of making games more entertaining. Instead, teams discovered to their horror that when the pace quickened, this nearly three-hundred-pound monster, O'Neal, could sprint alongside perimeter guards on the fast break and finish with thunderous trailing dunks.
He was a heavily armored tank perfectly adapted to the new-rules era, one that could even advance on the fast break.
The lightweight interior rotation under Lin Qi-Radja, P.J. Brown, and Bo Outlaw-emphasized speed and spacing, and certainly worked for pulling around a center like Ewing who was rooted in traditional half-court play. But if they ran into that terrifying mountain of flesh in the playoffs, with his monstrous bulk, his complete adaptation to the new era's fast pace, and his ability to receive perimeter entry passes without any pressure...
Lin Qi pushed open the video room door, sat down in the office chair, and reached over to switch on the television.
With a faint crackle of static, the television screen lit up. Lin Qi slid a black VHS tape labeled "Orlando" into the VCR beneath it, and the machine gave a dull mechanical clunk as it engaged. Clips from the Orlando Magic Team's latest game began playing on the screen.
He had indeed caught the rising wind of the era, but above that wind already lurked a colossal beast with its bloody maw wide open. If his team truly wanted to overthrow the ruling order in the Eastern Conference, it would still need to endure harsher trials in the regular season ahead.