In the beginning of the book, you write about the Knicks of the 1970s and '80s first. I'd love for you to read from page 10, about the '70s Knicks.

Well, let's start here: The New York Knickerbockers of the early 1970s were the hoop aficionados' team of choice. They won with their brains. Aside from having a couple of players who'd become NBA head coaches, including Phil Jackson, an eventual Hall of Famer, New York's roster possessed a future PhD, a Rhodes scholar who'd become a US Senator and presidential candidate, and a man who could memorize vast portions of the New York City phone book in one sitting. Those clubs possessed skill, they packed the court with players capable of hitting open jump shots, they had an abundance of talent... Defined by synchronization, savvy, and on-court selflessness, their players relied on making the extra pass so frequently that years later Jackson revealed the Knicks made a point to slightly deflate basketballs just before games would start. This disadvantaged opponents when they tried to dribble and get didn't get the same bounce they were accustomed to, but it helped the Knicks who were far more interested in passing the ball than dribbling it to begin with. To many this share the wealth mentality represented basketball and its purest. A tribute to how the sport was meant to be played. And with it, the Knicks won two world championships in 1970 and 1973.

So what happened in the eighties then?

The Knicks were pretty horrible in the 1980s. You know, there were a lot of things that impacted a lot of teams in the 1980s. The league was growing during the eighties because of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, but the drugs were just kind of hounding so many players and, you know, their minds weren't really in the right place.

And the Knicks were in the middle of New York City, which was a place that was obviously hit by a lot of that stuff too. So it got so bad that the players wouldn't come to practice sometimes and stopped coming to practices during Red Holzman's last year, the legendary coach that they had. It got so bad to the point where there were questions about whether the drugs were impacting the players' decisions to get in bed with sports betters, who we're trying to convince them to shave points. And there never really was a definitive answer on that. The Knicks were investigated by the FBI, some of their players were investigated by the FBI for maybe shaving points to try to throw games purposely to do favors for drug dealers, basically, who were thought to be maybe providing drugs for some of the players.

And then the management was just terrible. There were so many injuries that they had, they were practicing on a court that was, you know, someone described it to me as a court that was worse than the one that he played on in seventh and eighth grade, that tore up players, knees. And they just could not make good trades. The players hated their coaches during those years. It was just kind of a miserable experience for most of the players, most of the coaches during that time. And so you had the Knicks go from being one of the most hallowed teams in the seventies to just kind of being a team in the 1980s, that not only was not selling out their game, people kind of felt like they were shaming the Garden, you know, this historic place to play and that they were not really worthy of the court that they were playing on during the 1980s.

For most of that time, even after they got Patrick Ewing.

[On] St Patrick's Day they had a promotional night where they had posters of Patrick Ewing, you know, a life-size poster of him, a seven-foot-long poster. And people had gotten it that night for the game, but they were losing to a horrible Nuggets team by something like 27 points and fans started throwing the posters onto the court and they had to stop the game and the PA person came over the announcement system and basically begged them to stop. But that was how bad things were during the 1980s. Even once they got this legendary player, fans were just really fed up with how bad the Knicks were during a lot of those years.

What was one of the first things that happened in the nineties that started to change things for the Knicks?

The very first thing I think, to give him credit, is they hired a guy named Dave Checketts to be the general manager, the president of the team and his first move was probably the smartest one they made during all those years was to hire Pat Riley. Who'd been, you know, the Lakers coach and won four championships. Wore the Armani suits, had the slicked back hair, they hired him away from a job that he had with NBC as a TV analyst and, you know, getting him completely changed the mindset of the team. And it changed the way they played, which was the way they would play for the better part of a decade. The title of the book is Blood In The Garden, and Pat Riley was more or less telling them to extract blood from opponents however it needed to happen. I have a chapter in the book called "Knock Michael Jordan to the floor," and that was because Pat Riley literally gave them those instructions.