As a lifelong Knicks fan, I’ve observed that having a ticket to a Knicks game has traditionally been a license to kvetch. In my experience, the better the seats, the more insistent the moaning and lamentation. But the team’s championship last season showed the other side of this coin: how easy it is to spark a frenzied joy among the Knicks faithful.
All summer, people in Knicks gear on the streets of New York greeted one another with nods of recognition and giddy shouts of “Knicks in 5!” The parade in June embodied the incredible democracy of our post-championship jubilation. Everyone in attendance — an estimated two million, according to the police — was willing to be quite uncomfortable to be part of the moment, because that moment belonged to everyone.
A new season is underway and in some ways it feels like the honeymoon is over. We knew the joyous mood that lingered after last season couldn’t last forever, but the Knicks, befitting of the city, I guess, don’t go in for half measures: They started this season by losing their first three games before finally getting a victory.
Then there’s the team’s owner, James Dolan. The volcano of bad vibes that is Mr. Dolan, who was mostly dormant for last season’s championship run, has begun to ominously rumble. He is no stranger to bad press — but there’s bad publicity, and then there’s the kind of “you can’t make this up” horror story of management sending an email to Madison Square Garden and some team employees saying they, too, will be receiving their own keepsake championship ring, only to be told that no, it was just a test by management to see if they would open a phishing email and click. (Management later characterized the email in a statement as “an unfortunate mistake.”)
This season Mr. Dolan has also returned to Scrooge-ing out as an owner, starting with not re-signing the role player Mitchell Robinson and letting him go to Boston, of all teams. The new season has been needlessly shadowed by unresolved contract negotiations with the star players Josh Hart and Karl-Anthony Towns. The Jalen Brunson era has been so joyous overall that it’s allowed me to overlook the fact that, in the middle of the free speech capital of the world — which is how I like to think of our contentious, kvetching city — Mr. Dolan has turned the Garden, “the Mecca,” into a kind of East German theme park from the Stasi era, with facial recognition systems to ban people deemed to be adversaries. Such is the reputation of the place — along with Mr. Dolan’s ongoing feuds with, among others, franchise legends like Charles Oakley — that during the one playoff game I attended last spring, I walked up to a guy wearing an Oakley jersey and congratulated him for his bravery.
The Knicks acclaimed team leader, Mr. Brunson, a spectacularly clutch player on the court and a man who seems impressively devoid of neurosis off it, stated at the start of this season that, while the Knicks as a team are ready to turn the page, “the joy that this city had this summer, we would love to replicate that again.”
I think the team’s faithful must have a similar goal: to keep the levitational feeling of last season’s championship going for as long as possible, even as the normal laws of NBA gravity, in the form of Mr. Dolan and the way the league is structured to make repeating more difficult than ever, set in. We can’t let the communal ecstasy that resulted from a title that was 53 years in the making — that exuberance that had fans across the city greeting each other with joy in the streets — fade just yet.
On the morning of the Knicks parade, I shepherded my own group of teenagers through the epic crowd, spelunking through the increasingly narrow streets of old Wall Street in a quest to get to a friend’s apartment with a terrace overlooking City Hall. At one point, the density of the throng — marked until then by an incredibly warm atmosphere of politeness and consideration, including toward the police keeping order, who themselves were remarkably cordial and nice — threatened to tip the atmosphere toward a riot.
For a moment in the street, I wondered if it was all worth it. By which I meant, was it worth it to come down to see, or try and see, the parade, but I could have extended that question to life in New York City and, by extension, being a Knicks fan all my life. On that day, and forever after in the realm of the Knicks, it was so nice to have the answer to that question be such a resounding and simple “yes.”
We did make it to my friend’s apartment, and from that perch heard Mayor Zohran Mamdani evoke Game 4, fourth quarter, when the Knicks were down by 20. The betting sites, he said, “give the Spurs a 99.6 percent chance of winning the game.” Then he turned it around. “But there is one thing that the pundits just don’t get about this team, that they just don’t get about this city. It is in that .4 percent that we go to work.”
It was an inspiring line, and got a big cheer in response, but I have thought about that statistic a lot. Is it only when all is lost and hope has vanished that we finally go to work? Really? Is that what it takes? For a person, or a basketball team, or a city, it’s magnificently neurotic. If the Knicks had a psychoanalyst, he or she might say to the team, “Why do you think you had to make it so difficult? Maybe next time can be easier?”
Next time is here. And, with the new season, we have our answer: It will be difficult. To which one can only say, what did you expect? Much has been made of the 53 years that passed since the last Knicks title, but it’s also been 51 years since the famous 1975 New York Daily News headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” which punctuated the city’s slide into urban blight.
I went to my first Knicks game at the Garden a few years after that headline, but my first childhood visits to the Mecca were to attend the circus. The impressions from those visits are imprinted in my memory in the way that only the earliest memories of childhood can be: A man standing on the back of two white horses galloping in a tight circle, one foot on each; men and women flying through the air in between the trapezes. The way the Knicks won games during last season’s playoffs reminded me of those feelings — you think there is no way the daring young men on the flying trapeze will survive, yet they did.
As Knicks fans, the daring young men and women of New York are back on the flying trapeze. Let’s hope we all land in one piece. Knicks in five!
Thomas Beller is the director of Tulane University’s creative writing program and the author of “Lost In The Game: A Book About Basketball.”
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