Sometimes, late at night, I Google Latrell Sprewell. I don’t really know why. Some vague longing. It’s been going on since he slipped out of the N.B.A., and the public eye, in 2005. At first, I was looking for news of his return. After a while, I was looking for any news at all. One would have thought that the recent first-round matchup between the Heat and the Knicks would have been the occasion for an update, but this was not the case.

Sprewell’s playing days ended abruptly. The cause was a self-inflicted wound. He broke his hand under mysterious circumstances while he was a Knick, but this was more symbolic and therefore more damaging: he blithely turned down a three-year contract of twenty-one million from the Minnesota Timberwolves, saying—brace yourself—that he had “a family to feed.” The quote has been the gift that keeps on giving to every moralizing sports writer in America. It was like sending them a dartboard with his face on it. They still have it on the wall, years later.

The “family to feed” debacle served to return to prominence the story of Sprewell choking P. J. Carlisimo, his coach on the Golden State Warriors. In 1997, he was suspended for the rest of the season and then traded to New York.

Sprewell experienced a renaissance with the New York Knicks, and the Knicks experienced a renaissance with Latrell Sprewell. There are many New Yorkers who love Spree, but it’s a silent majority, a strangely private love, perhaps because of its irrationality, that I now want to express.

Latrell’s great moment with the Knicks was back in the news a few weeks ago, when the Knicks and Miami Heat were going head to head. The teams met in 1999 under similar circumstances: the Heat were heavily favored, the season was shortened by a strike, and a new star was taking control of a Knicks team (Sprewell then, Carmelo now). Then and now, there was an opaque power struggle in the Knicks organization that resulted in somebody getting fired. This happens practically every year with the Knicks, but it still bears mentioning. In 1999, it was G.M. Ernie Grunfeld; this year, it was coach Mike D’Antoni.

Because of these echoes, video clips from that earlier series have been wafting through Sports Center and around the Internet. The images were a little jarring, partly because many of the stars are still with us. Pat Riley, whose shrewd face has now taken on a patina of grandfatherly sagacity, pops onto the screen in all his sleek, cuckolding glory, the betrayer who notified the Knicks of his departure by fax—and left them for Miami.

Patrick Ewing, the key figure of the modern Knicks era, is seen gamely soldiering through the season only to be sidelined with an injury when the playoffs began. As if his mythic aura of thwarted promise wasn’t strong enough, he went down with a ruptured Achilles.

And Jeff Van Gundy! Now he’s a humorous, blunt-talking television commentator comfortable enough with his baldness to make self-mocking commercials about toupees. Back then, he was a prodigy and a protégé of Riley, for whom Jeff’s brother Stan worked in Miami. I was happy to see, on national television, the old clip of Van Gundy clinging to Alonzo Mourning’s leg like an attacking Chihuahua while Mourning exchanged blows with Charles Oakley at center court, in the Garden. There was a brief shot of him just afterward, uncharacteristically aflame, his hair mussed. Hair? Van Gundy had J.F.K. hair. By this, I don’t mean his hair was like J.F.K.’s hair, but rather that the press treated Van Gundy’s painfully and ghastly looking hair implants with the same discretion that they once treated J.F.K.’s affairs.

But the most significant player from this era has also been the most conspicuously absent from the retrospective: Latrell. It’s almost as though he is an unmentionable, unassimilatable figure.

Even in basketball terms, he’s hard to discuss. The Knicks had never really had a player like Latrell. John Starks, his closest antecedent, had some of that reckless abandon—hence “The Dunk”—but one rooted for him in part out of a sense of his sweetness. Latrell was in some unclassified category. Though obviously not nearly as offensively skilled as the all-time great wingmen of his generation, Jordan and Kobe, he had comparable athleticism, played defense at Jordan’s level, and, most importantly, had a wildly conspicuous will to power that was an inspiration to anyone who watched him play.

I still remember when I first saw his game—a fast break in an All Star game in the mid-nineties. He had a Afro, was wire thin, and didn’t so much dunk the ball as attack the rim like some kind of velociraptor who wanted to tear it off and take it elsewhere to eat. I imagined him cackling as he ran back on defense. It was a bit frightening.

But to understand the importance of Latrell, and the feelings he evokes, one must go not just to the videotape but to the mood of the franchise, and the city, in 1999.

I remember meeting with a friend a few weeks into the new millennium, a few months before the bottom fell out of the dot-com boom. The Knicks’ season was underway. Ewing was back. Sprewell, already canonized, was leading. To say that he had rehabilitated his image from the choking incident is to miss the point. A lot of people liked him for it. It was a breathtaking act of defiance, and it fit the mood of the city at the time.

My friend worked at a Silicon Alley start-up. I had gone to see him for advice about a Web site. He listened to me politely. When I was finished talking he leaned forward with a gleam in his eye, as though he was going to impart some deep bit of wisdom. “Choke the coach,” he said matter-of-factly. He repeated it about ten times, pounding his fist, getting to his feet, getting louder each time. It reminded me of the song “Alice’s Restaurant,” when everyone starts jumping around yelling, “I want to kill!”

He wasn’t even a basketball fan.

The Knicks had ascended to unexpected heights in the spring of 1999, the first eighth seed to advance all the way to the finals. They lost in five games to the San Antonio Spurs, whose imposing front line of David Robinson and Tim Duncan was nicknamed the Twin Towers.

Larry Johnson, Marcus Camby, Allan Houston, and the rest of the team were all integral to the run. When Allan Houston’s shot bounced on the front of the rim and dropped in to win the Miami series, he ran the length of the court before allowing himself to exhale and throw a roundhouse punch, as though knocking out once and for all his reputation for being soft. But the glorious march to the finals was driven by Latrell. He set the tone.

Using a word as nebulous as “tone” when assessing a basketball player is almost heretical these days. It’s the era of analytics, moneyball, and basketball conferences at M.I.T. I’m confident that the numbers would bear out my claim about Latrell’s significance, at least to a point. But what makes me love him goes beyond basketball.