Now thrilling over the NBA Finals, the city never gave up on the Knicks. By Seth Faison
After decades of disappointment, grinding mediocrity and wasted spending on stars who flamed out, the New York Knicks are treating their long-suffering fans to the thrill of a team that’s really clicking, “playing the right way” in the inimitable phrasing of coaching legend Larry Brown. It’s a pass-first, no-superstars collection of guys who embody the gritty determination of their host town.
And Wednesday night they play their first NBA Finals game since 1999, hoping to win their first trophy since 1973, their opponent the same team that snatched it from them in the title-deciding best-of-seven series 27 years ago.
Led by Jalen Brunson, the irrepressible point guard, this team is so in sync, with elegant ball movement and smothering defense, that they have won 11 playoff games in a row, and counting. Winning the Eastern Conference Finals four games to zero? For a Knicks fan like me, it’s pure bliss. For New York as a whole, it’s bringing a mythic team back to life.
In a city of asphalt and chain-link fences, basketball thrives in the urban schoolyard and is the ultimate city sport. It’s no accident that the Knicks’ homecourt, Madison Square Garden, is known throughout the NBA world as “the Mecca” of basketball. It stands smack in the middle of Manhattan, essentially the city’s living room.
Every fan may think his or her sport exceeds the others. As a native New Yorker, I’m accustomed to seeing Yankees caps on every other head I see in the subway. But come on. The Yankees and Mets play in outer boroughs. The Giants and Jets? They actually compete in New Jersey. Celebrities show up at the Garden not only because they’re Knicks fans, but because it’s the hottest ticket in a city of hot tickets.
Just how hot? If you measure by dollar amount: A pair of courtside tickets for one game in the Knicks-Spurs contest sold this week for $279,000. “Nosebleed” seats in the upper level already cost $5,000, and may be more next week. That’s out of range for many of us fans. But watching the Knicks in the Finals, whether in the arena, or on a Jumbotron outside, or at a neighborhood block party, is like a collective act of worship.
We Knicks fans have endured indignities that burn in collective memory. Game Five of the 1993 Conference Finals, when Knicks forward Charles Smith missed three chances at a lay-up as time expired. Game Seven of the 1994 Finals, when guard John Starks shot 2-for-18, and coach Pat Riley kept him in the game, only to lose to the Houston Rockets. The Stephon Marbury years were dreadful. The Carmelo Anthony years were worse.
The Knicks have not won a championship since 1973, which almost seems mathematically impossible. Their last trip to the Finals, in 1999, came amid a strike-shortened season. Lucky to be there, the Knicks got shellacked by San Antonio.
Yes, that San Antonio. A team that won it all in 1999 and again in 2003 and again in 2005 and again in 2007 and again in 2014. Winner again of the Western Conference this season, the Spurs hope to repeat again. (Did San Antonio’s success stem from consistency, relying on one coach for 20 years, while the Knicks cycled through fifteen?)
To love that team requires stamina, selective memory, irrational optimism and a taste for grievance—all characteristics of the quintessential New Yorker.
The Spurs, now built around young phenom Victor Wembanyama, give San Antonio their only major league sports team. No baseball team, no football team, no hockey team. They had a WNBA team, the Stars, who left for Las Vegas. You want to compare San Antonio’s verve for the Spurs with New York’s love of the Knicks? Fuhgeddaboudit.
During a half century of failure, the Knicks made 28 disappointing trips to the postseason. To love that team requires stamina, selective memory, irrational optimism and a taste for grievance—all characteristics of the quintessential New Yorker. Most franchises disappear when they lose for long enough. The Knicks somehow became more mythic. The 1990s Knicks never won a title but still loom larger in New York memory than many actual champions elsewhere because they reflected the city’s self-image at the time: physical, proud, defensive, confrontational, unglamorous but dramatic.
Side note: If quintessence were determined by championships, Chicago would be a Bulls town. But everybody knows Chicago belongs to da Bears. It doesn’t seem to matter that the Bulls have won six championships since the Bears last won one. Michael Jordan may have ruined my youth, singularly eliminating the Knicks from postseason play over and over again. But it’s telling that Bears running back Walter Payton is more honored in Chicago.
Betting markets favor San Antonio to win, at this writing. But if the Knicks can play the right way, and channel the pent-up demand flowing through this city, they may cap this extraordinary run with a fitting end.
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