Plaxico Burress and Stephon Marbury cloud New York sports optimism

Monday December 8, 2008 8:17 AM By Max J. Dickstein

Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress is suspended for the rest of the season. (Getty Images)

By Budd Mishkin

Remember the good times in New York sports, when all seemed optimistic and the outlook for the upcoming winter was bright? Remember those halcyon days three weeks ago?

The Giants and Jets were playing beautifully, the Rangers had the best record in the NHL and the Knicks had started to emerge from the abyss of the last seven years.

And then? Plaxico Burress and the Giants. Stephon Marbury and the Knicks. Two completely different situations, but together they've managed to make this a not so jolly time to be a sports fan in New York, with the front and back pages awash in negativity. Some happy holidays.

If you're looking for another dissection of the Plaxico Burress shooting case and all of its implications, look somewhere else. I actually have this ridiculous notion that we should let the justice system play out and render a verdict before columnists do.

That may not be the sexiest opinion to have, especially in this 24-hour sports talk/news world when immediate opinions are required and due process is a legal term best left to others. The Burress case may seem pretty open-and-shut, with even the Mayor chiming in.But we've seen previous cases when we thought we knew all of the details, and the result turned out differently than the public's initial verdict. Do the words Duke lacrosse ring a bell? Entirely different types of cases, but you get the picture. The football field is a place for quick reads and reactions. The legal system isn't.

We can judge right now that the Giants are a lesser team without Plaxico Burress. But our legal judgment of him should wait.

And then there's Steph and the Knicks. So many people in the city have relationship problems. Why should our basketball team be any different?

The divorce was proceeding quietly until the trades to free up cap space to sign You Know Who required more bodies in Knick uniforms. It also precipitated the most parsing of words in recent New York sports history. Did coach Mike D’Antoni "demand" or "request" that Steph play? It's easy to get on Steph, even if his $15 sneakers idea is one of the coolest moves by any modern athlete. The team hasn't won since he's been here, he's never helped himself with his public comments and he makes a boatload of money (his $21 million this season is more than Walt Frazier made in his entire career. Think about that for a second).

But on the first night when Steph refused/politely requested not to play, I found myself siding with him. "We don't want you, we don't want you, we don't need you ... Hey, we need you, can you help us out?" True, the Knicks were still paying him, but Marbury knew they had little use for him in the future. Imagine if Marbury said yes and then went out that night and tore an ACL. Then he's done with the Knicks and any other team that might be interested.

And it does no good to say, "Hey, I can't beg out and still get paid at my job."

In a perfect world, the rules for all employees in all

industries would be the same. Suffice it to say, this ain't that perfect world.

And yet I still can't bring myself to side with Marbury, even if his argument makes sense on some levels. If he'd agreed to play and had played well, it would have been a win-win for Marbury, improving his marketability to other interested NBA teams. But in the end, my feelings aren't really about who said what and the relationship between

Marbury and the Knicks. It's simply a case of too much losing and negativity through the years. We wanted change, we're getting it, even if some toes are getting stepped on in the process. To paraphrase the old story about then-Pirates general manager Branch Rickey when he considered trading slugger Ralph Kiner, "We finished in last place with you Steph, and we can finish in last place without you."

The Burress and Marbury stories haven't exactly had Happy Holidays written all over them. Not to worry. The game's the thing, and if the locals win, the good times will be back. It will be like three weeks ago all over again.