With the New England Patriots #DeflateGate investigation still ongoing and being talked about, one reporter decided to look up similar stories and came across an article on Phil Jackson and the championship Knicks which won titles in 1970 and 1973. In the article Jackson admitted the Knicks deflated balls. As the story began to circulate, Jackson now the Knicks president, took to his Twitter account and cleared up what really happened.
via Sam Smith of the Chicago Tribune in 1986:
“What we used to do was deflate the ball,” recalls Phil Jackson, the cerebral reserve forward who was every bit as metaphysical as he was physical.
“We were a short term with our big guys like Willis, our center, only about 6-8 and Jerry Lucas also 6-8. DeBusschere, 6-6. So what we had to rely on was boxing out and hoping the rebound didn’t go long.
“To help ensure that, we’d try to take some air out of the ball. You see, on the ball it says something like ‘inflate to 7 to 9 pounds.’ We’d all carry pins and take the air out to deaden the ball.
“It also helped our offense because we were a team that liked to pass the ball without dribbling it, so it didn’t matter how much air was in the ball. It also kept other teams from running on us because when they’d dribble the ball, it wouldn’t come up so fast.
So the team that expressed the soul of the game, produced a U.S. senator, a former top executive of an NBA team, several coaches and successful businessmen and set standards that many still try to emulate also had the heart of burglar.
Jackson took to his Twitter account and explained:
joy of tweet is correcting errors. Knicks used under inflated balls. wrong! ball has 7-9lbs psi. we wanted 7 psi softer but not illegal.
While he didn’t deny actually using the tactic, he did deny that they went below the legal amount. Only problem there is, it’s a little difficult to envision pressure gauges being available to make sure that the 7-psi threshold was being met at all times.
