Dude brought the Knicks to 2 Finals trips. You can argue that he wasn’t putting up the same numbers in 1999 but he was old; superstars centers from his era like The Dream and The Admiral were also pretty much busted by 1999.
In the 1994 run, the Knicks could had won the title if not for that Hakeem block and John Starks playing horribly overall. Yes, Ewing shot the ball horribly at .363 (raw), but he was never acclaimed as an offensive superstar anyway. He was always known to be a defensive beast. Hakeem averaged 9.1 rebounds and 3.9 blocks while Ewing 12.4 and 4.3. I’m not saying that Ewing played better than Hakeem; just that defensively, Ewing was still pulling his weight.
The Bulls acknowledged that the Knicks were their nemesis and the toughest nuts to crack in their title runs. Not anyone else, but the Knicks that were led by Ewing. Obviously there is no pity trophy for runner-ups, but there can only be one winning team and basketball is also a team sport; no matter how good Ewing was, he still need his teammates to be good enough.
He’s definitely one of the top 50 or so players or all time and one of the best big men to ever play.
Consistently a great player and great defensive anchor for some really tough knicks teams that really didn’t have much talent outside of him.
Those Knicks teams were tough, played good defense, and were definitely deep, but there wasn’t much top end talent ever on the knicks in the 90s outside of him.
His second fiddles were Kiki VDW, starks, Charles Smith, Mark Jackson, and a bunch of other average-ish players.
He was a walking 26/10/2 blocks type guy.
But he was just overshadowed by MJ and Hakeem who were better players.
It’s true he doesn’t get talked about that much in public discourse, but very few players do.
Like, who does the media really talk about from that era? MJ, Hakeem, Shaq in the later 90s. Chuck of course but that’s also because he’s on TV. There just isn’t much public discourse at all outside of the upper echelon of players in the past besides these “why does nobody talk about x top 50 player?” threads.
I mean, the guy was 29/10/2 blocks on a knicks team in 1990 that was seriously void of talent on the offensive end.
I’m not sure which big of his era was definitively better than him other than Hakeem.