New York is the Town and the Team is the Knicks

A tribute to basketball, this squad and the spirit of the city

Tragedy, it had come to seem, was the only thing that could bring us together: One recalls, say, New Yorkers lining up to donate blood and food and clothing after 9/11, or banging pots each evening to honor our front-line medical workers during the pandemic. New York, apparently, was simply too large, too various, too set against itself in a thousand different ways to allow for the possibility of collective euphoria.

That truism was decisively disproved late in the evening of June 13, 2026, when the New York Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs to win their first National Basketball Association championship since 1973, and New York City burst into paroxysms of unfettered joy not seen since perhaps the celebrations of V-J Day. The Knicks’ hold on New York is unique among the major sports, in that the city’s love for the team is both intense and nearly universal. For every Yankees fan who attends a victory parade, after all, a Mets fan stays home, muttering darkly about the Evil Empire; much the same is true in football, where the Jersey-based Giants and Jets grudgingly share a home in the manner of rivalrous siblings. In pro basketball, though, the Knicks’ only immediate competitors are the arriviste Nets, born not in the city but on Long Island, who decamped to New Jersey in 1977 only to return three decades later, like so many other regretful suburbanites, to a newly gentrified downtown Brooklyn, where they maintain an uneasy relationship with even their own modest fan base. 

While that other city game, stickball, has gone the way of skelly and chocolate malteds, basketball courts are still everywhere in New York, pick-up games played daily in gyms and playgrounds and schoolyards, on asphalt and concrete and polished parquet, with backboards made of glass or wood or sheet metal and the rims often missing their nets. The open-air courts on West 4th Street (“The Cage”) have now become something of a tourist attraction, and the Harlem-based summer tournament founded in 1950 by a city parks employee named Holcombe Rucker is a national phenomenon, the games attended by celebrities and NBA players alike. No court, however, is as celebrated as that of Madison Square Garden, the arena that has been known as “the Mecca of basketball” ever since the 1930s, when college basketball teams from around the country aspired to receive an invitation to one of the Garden’s prestigious weekend triple-headers, much as actors working on a new play in a community theater somewhere might dream of taking it to Broadway. 

Ever since the glorious championship years of 1970 and 1973, a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden has had the captivating, slightly louche glamour of a Sinatra concert or heavyweight prize fight. George Lois, the legendary ad man on whom Don Draper is said to have been based, owned four season tickets on the baseline. Nearer to center court was Woody Allen — the pre-scandal Woody Allen, that is, in the years when a new film of his premiering at the Beekman or the Ziegfeld was a big deal. Elliott Gould was a Garden regular, as was Zero Mostel, and William Goldman, the writer of many great films including “Marathon Man”; often on game nights the star of that film, Dustin Hoffman, could also be found sitting behind the Knicks bench. 

These days, celebrity row has diversified and now features Spike Lee (of course), as well as actors such as John Leguizamo, Tracy Morgan and Chris Rock, alongside hip-hop stars including Busta Rhymes, Fat Joe and Jay-Z. So it’s not at all surprising that it is the Knicks, rather than one of the city’s other sports teams, who are name-checked again and again in rap lyrics. This was true from the very beginning of the genre, in 1979’s “Rapper’s Delight,” when Big Bank Hank of the Sugarhill Gang rapped, So after school I take a dip in the pool, which is really on the wall / I got a color TV so I can see the Knicks play basketball. Later came Knicks shout-outs from, among others, Kurtis Blow, Doug E. Fresh, Beastie Boys, Lauryn Hill, Notorious B.I.G. and A Tribe Called Quest, who summed things up in their song “One Two Sh*t”: Money on my mind so never mind a trick / New York is the town and the team is the Knicks. 

Rory Sparrow, Marvin Webster, Eddy Curry, Cleanthony Early, Kevin Knox, Maciej Lampe, Antonio McDyess, Iman Shumpert, Elfrid Payton, Immanuel Quickley: On and on the names toll in the minds of Knicks fans, like the casualty rolls of ill-fated battles. In each of these players (and innumerable others), we once invested our hopes, however briefly or foolishly, telling ourselves that perhaps, somehow, this year would be different. Much of the time, though, the Knicks were simply not very good; In the 23 seasons preceding the 2026 championship, they failed to qualify for the playoffs 16 times. For a while in the 1990s, a title seemed within reach; yet each time, deep into a playoff run, they were thwarted by the likes of a Michael Jordan, a Reggie Miller, a Hakeem Olajuwon or a Tim Duncan, but more than anything by their own mistakes. In 1993, in the Eastern Conference championship against the Chicago Bulls, Charles Smith — all 6-foot-10 of him — failed to sink a game-winning put-in under the basket not once or even twice, but four times; the next year, in Game 7 of the NBA Finals against the Houston Rockets, the Knicks’ long-range bomber, John Starks, shot 2 for 18, missing all 11 of his three-point attempts; the year after that, in Game 7 against the Indiana Pacers, the outstanding center Patrick Ewing missed a last-second finger roll that normally he would make in his sleep. 

Those were excellent Knicks teams, admirable in many ways, but they were not precisely lovable. There was something a bit blundering about them; they were too reliant on sheer physicality, too focused on toughness at the expense of intelligence, too primed for a fight. Just the opposite was true of the 2025-2026 edition of the Knicks, who, if anything, were criticized for being too soft, too passive, lacking the killer instinct necessary to win at the highest levels. Yet after an up-and-down season in which they finished third in their conference, these Knicks seemed all at once to find themselves in the playoffs. Suddenly the ball movement was crisp, the spacing impeccable, the team defense smothering. It was basketball of a kind we had not seen before. (Watching the Knicks dismantle the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference finals, one television commentator said that he felt he was watching an instructional video.) Across the entire postseason — during which they lost only three games, by a combined margin of six points — the Knicks accumulated a total point differential of +283 — not just the highest in the history of the franchise, but the highest in all of NBA postseason history, shattering the previous record set in 2017 by the Golden State Warriors’ so-called “super-team,” by 53 points. During one especially remarkable stretch, the Knicks won 13 straight playoff games, against the toughest competition the NBA had to offer. 

Even years from now, in recalling this championship team, we will still thrill to the silky grace of Mikal Bridges’ jumper, with its unusual, slightly off-center release; the astonishingly deft three-point shooting of the seven-footer Karl-Anthony Towns; Josh Hart’s lunch-pail rebounding, and his careening coast-to-coast rambles, and his half-playful, half-aggrieved sneer when contesting a referee’s whistle (much like Kevin McHale before him, Hart seems to believe that he has never committed a foul in his NBA career); the playground bravado of Brooklyn-born Jose Alvarado, whose quick hands on defense earned him the moniker “Grand Theft” Alvarado, much as Walt Frazier was called “Clyde” after the celebrated bank robber Clyde Barrow; and the unassuming all-around brilliance of OG Anunoby, whose midseason arrival in December 2023 seemed to unlock the excellence of this team, as the midseason trade for Dave DeBusschere in December 1968 had for the earlier champions. 

New York City has fallen in love with each of these players, and several others to boot, but of course it has fallen most deeply, irreversibly in love with the captain, Jalen Brunson, who is a spellbinding point guard and clutch player of a sort we have not seen since the days of the great Frazier. We watch awestruck as Brunson sacrifices his body again and again, hurling himself toward the rim against much larger defenders; or as he delivers an advanced geometry lesson in the branch of sphere and backboard; or, perhaps most mesmerizingly, as he simply holds the ball at the top of the key, surveying the court with the silent cool of Alain Delon’s hitman in “Le Samouraï.” 

“This team that we’re looking at now, it didn’t remind me of the ‘90s Knicks,” said Chuck D of Public Enemy, who has been a fan since 1967. “That was a different squad. This squad reminds me of the Knicks I grew up with. It was like we had stars and superstars, but they all played as one.” Unselfishness, intelligence, nerve, discipline, resilience: these are the qualities that we recognize in this team, and which enabled it to overcome double-digit deficits in all four of the victories against San Antonio, including the most remarkable one of all, Game 4, when OG Anunoby’s flying tip-in after a Brunson miss capped a comeback of 29 points — the largest comeback in NBA Finals history, and one that seemed to leave even the Knicks themselves stunned, grasping for words in post-game interviews. After Anunoby’s heroics that night a friend texted me, without hyperbole: “There will be a lot of babies born in New York named Ogugua.”

Before the San Antonio series began, a 23-year-old Bengali immigrant from Jamaica, Queens, named MD Ahnaf Hossain composed an ingenious quatrain that instantly went viral:

My mayor is Muslim,

My bagels are Jewish,

My Christian Dior,

The Knicks in four!

“I grew up with Jews, Muslims, Haitians, Pakistanis, Bengalis,” Hossain explained to the Washington Post. “I just had to bring everyone together.” 

All through the playoffs, New Yorkers did watch the games together, in bars and backyards and bowling alleys, in Radio City Music Hall and Wollman Rink and outside the Garden itself. And then at the end of the last game, nearing midnight, when the final buzzer sounded and the championship was ours, the celebrations went on in every neighborhood of the city, a mad exhilarating crush of strangers bouncing up and down in the streets, crowding onto fire escapes and clinging to light posts and scaffolds, jubilantly belting out “Go NY Go” and “Empire State of Mind” beneath impromptu fireworks displays. On social media, New Yorkers posted and re-posted the clip of the amazing final seconds, when television announcer Mike Breen exclaimed, “It’s over! It’s over! Knick fans, this is not a dream! Your long, long wait has ended! Go ahead and cry — after 53 years, the Knicks are NBA champions once again!”

Fifty-three years ago, of course, was a dismal moment in the city’s history; in 1973 the coming fiscal crisis could already be sensed on the horizon, foretold in thickly graffitied subway cars and triple-locked doors. Those championship Knicks teams seemed to offer an escape from daily realities, their brilliance and glamour hearkening back to a better time, when New Yorkers could proclaim their city, without fear of contradiction, the greatest in the world. Today’s city, for all its problems, feels entirely different. Our new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who is riding a wave of popularity, is not a Democratic hack but a democratic socialist; he is also, like so many others in the city, an immigrant, and a Knicks fan to boot. As deft a political communicator as there is anywhere today, Mamdani has attached himself to this team. He appeared at numerous events this spring wearing a Knicks jersey over his own politician’s suit, and cut a TV ad in which he draped his favored congressional candidates in Knicks blue and orange and declared, “This is our team. This is our year.” 

Unlike 1973, today the central issues facing New York involve not a lack of resources but an unfair allocation of them; ours is not a city abandoned by the well-to-do, but rather one that has been too freely given over to billionaires. Fortunately, in addressing these issues we will not have to depend on the clubhouse politicians and money managers and demagogues who dominated New York politics in the 70s. 

“So often,” Mayor Mamdani declared during the team’s City Hall victory celebration, “when this city comes together it is because we are forced to, by a moment of tragedy or adversity. What a gift it is to be brought together by pure, unfiltered joy. For as long as we live, we will remember this feeling of a city together, a city alive, a city overcome by happiness.”

A city overcome by happiness: Fifty-three years ago, the idea was virtually unthinkable. Today’s Knicks champions seem to represent not a turning away from present-day realities, as in 1973, but rather a turning toward: toward the possibility of a better future, of a freer, more just city — an improbable outcome, to be certain, but surely not as improbable as the 0.4% chance that oddsmakers gave the Knicks of winning Game 4 when they were down by 29 points. Yet the Knicks did win that game, of course, through the most improbable combination of skill, fortitude and teamwork, as well as a fair dose of luck, in so defying the oddsmakers and inscribing their names in the history books. Jalen Brunson, on whom our hopes have so often depended, misses the three-point jumper, but now comes OG Anunoby hurtling in unchecked from the sideline, rising free to the hoop, and this time, after so very long, the shot goes in.