Walton Blinks, Misses Game

NBC’s Bill Walton must be acquainted with a second John Starks, a consistent John Starks, a reliable John Starks, a court-savvy John Starks.

Why else - after Starks blew two free crucial throws Sunday to keep the Knicks tied at 105 with the Pacers - would Walton label him a “normally sure-fire shooter” and “one of the great clutch players in basketball”? John Starks?

Sometimes Walton waxes wacky to get attention, maybe to shake out the cobwebs at 6 foot 11 inches above sea level. But he knows what clutch is. He was. Jerry West was. Michael Jordan is. But Starks is too reckless to be clutch, to be dependable. He’s won games with key flings, but how many more has he lost by being out of control?

Walton is NBC’s best basketball analyst. For his quantity of seeing more than what’s apparent, he towers over Steve Jones’s banal reiterations of what viewers just saw, and surpasses the coach-talk of an improving Matt Guokas.

But Sunday was not one of Walton’s better days. At one point, he said the Knicks’ Greg Anthony had played good backup point guard during the regular season without noting that he had sat for long stretches of the year.

Later, he said Anthony had learned a lot by sitting down and shutting up.

He also said that forward Charles Smith’s 76-game season was injury-free without saying that while Smith played, he was regularly slowed by knee woes.

Walton was not harsh enough on the Knicks’ Derek Harper for surrendering his self-control and getting a second technical foul (which came after an interview with Harper talking about the need to take responsibility for winning).

Nor did he castigate the Knicks’ Anthony Mason quickly for the dumb inbounds pass that led to Reggie Miller’s game-tying 3-pointer.

Tom Hammond, Walton’s partner, had a so-so game. He displayed his skill in feeding Walton the right questions and showed a sly sense of humor. Describing his fellow University of Kentucky alumnus Pat Riley, Hammond, who studied equine genetics, said: “He was the guy least likely to be the focused, introspective, dedicated coach he is now. He was, to put it delicately, happy-go-lucky.”

But he misspoke the record for most fouls by two teams in a playoff game, citing the 59 by the Knicks and Pacers as breaking the mark of 55. The 55 he referred to represented the one-game record for one team, by Syracuse, against Boston, in 1953. Those clubs combined for the two-team record of 106 in that four-overtime affair.

In the second quarter on Sunday, Hammond said the Pacers had outscored the Knicks, 11-5, with Knicks center Patrick Ewing out. But Ewing was right there, on the court, unseen by Hammond, for about a minute during that run.

And at game’s end, he twice said that Miller had scored eight points in the final 32 seconds of the game, when the time span was a mere 8.9 seconds.

Airwaves

NBC’s three NBA games scored an average 10.2 overnight Nielsen rating, up 26 percent from a year ago, highlighted by a 13.3 for the Chicago-Orlando game. TNT’s and TBS’s playoff ratings were up 21 percent through Thursday … ABC’s Kentucky Derby telecast with a 6.4 rating, down 15 percent from a year ago - was hurt by an awkward overhead angle on host Jim McKay that kept him from looking into the camera; a breakdown in the cable-mounted camera that follows horses closely in the backstretch, and the loss of time to air any in-depth features in order to accommodate the running of a turf race.