Link'd Up, 10/18/09: Overstaying his welcome

The Knicks can't even have a preseason game without something going wrong.

To be fair, this one wasn't the hapless franchise's fault. This was more like a combination of customs, an insane coach, and replacement referees.

New York played an exhibition game against Maccabi Tel Aviv in front of a packed house at Madison Square Garden, rare for a preseason contest. The 14,602 fans were treated to a spectacle they most likely have never seen before and will never see again -- at any level.

After being ejected in the third quarter, Maccabi coach Pini Gershon refused to leave the court, leading to a bizarre sequence of events that included a rabbi coming out of the stand to moderate and an impromptu half-court shooting contest from the players while they waited.

The replacement referees -- installed for all NBA games going forward after the league locked out its referees -- were completely befuddled as Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman, clad in a black hat and coat and sporting a long white beard, pleaded with the refs to let Gershon stay. Knicks' guard Nate Robinson even wandered over to figure out what was going on, but he was stymied by all the Hebrew being spoken and retreated.

Eventually, Gershon left and the game continued. But for a while, it looked like security would literally have to drag him off the court.

Bizarre. Even for the Knicks.