Before his trade to the Knicks a couple of weeks ago, Bill Walker had played a total of 37 games in the NBA, scoring 96 points and grabbing 34 rebounds. (In last year’s playoffs for the Celtics, he did score two points in four games.) He was most famous for urinating in a towel courtside while at Kansas State. Once you get to New York, though, the stage shifts. Now he’s a big, bright shining star.
Walker received the first start of his career last night — the Knicks, coincidentally, hammered the Pistons 128–104, driving another stake in the heart of that once-proud franchise — and scored a career high 22 points. In his last two games, Walker has scored 43 points and notched career highs in points, rebounds, assists, field goals, free throws, and, obviously, minutes. One suspects he likes it here.
Wilson Chandler will be back soon and thus cut into Walker’s minutes, but that’s beside the point: Bill Walker was a twelfth-man scrub in Boston, but came here and turned into a star (or “star”). That’s what we do here. We take your tattered and your poor, and we give them minutes and sustenance. The Knicks might not have much, but for the rest of the season, you can rest assured, they have plenty of minutes to give.