Amid the possibility of the first championship win for the Knicks in 53 years, some New Yorkers are experiencing a sense of déjà vu (albeit, a belated one). Though there is an abundance of nostalgia reels on social media reliving the close call of 1999, part of the local population experienced the Knicks’s last championship win, in 1973. (And before then, in 1970.)
“It’s been a bit of a drought. We’re ready for this,” said Carol Becker, a native New Yorker and the owner of William Greenberg Desserts in Manhattan, where the black-and-white cookies have been iced in blue and orange in honor of the Knicks.
Becker was at Madison Square Garden for the championship game in 1970, the year that “Willis Reed hobbled out onto the court, and the place went wild,” Becker said, referring to an iconic moment involving the injured center. “He made one shot and that was the end of it.”
Jasmine Chang, 66, a former fashion editor in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, grew up in the Bronx. Her teenage crush was Dave DeBusschere, a beloved player who helped bring the Knicks to victory in 1970 and 1973.
She treasured his book, “The Open Man: The Championship Diary of the N.Y. Knicks.” “I wrapped it up in Saran Wrap and I put it under my pillow at night,” Chang said. Why Saran Wrap? “Because I wanted to just keep it forever,” she said. (She still has it.)
She also has a bag with autographs from players she pursued “around town,” plus clippings of them from papers like The New York Daily News: “Bill Bradley, Willis Reed, Phil Jackson, just holding up their fingers: No. 1.”
Her interest continued into adulthood. “Of course I voted for Bill Bradley because I was just obsessed with all of those team members,” Chang said, referring to the two-time champion who became a U.S. senator in 1979, and ran for president in 2000.
The way New Yorkers tuned into the game back then was, from a modern perspective, prehistoric. Bob Byer, 64, a junior high athletics coach from Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn, recalls listening to the 1969-70 season on his father’s car radio as an 8-year-old. “In ’73, I had a little transistor radio that I would fall asleep to games on,” Byer said.
By 1973, he also viewed them on TV, but on “tape delay,” not live. “The games were played in the afternoon, and we’d have to wait until sometime after 8 o’clock to watch them,” Byer said. But back then, you were hard-pressed to encounter spoilers. Late editions of newspapers like The New York Post and The Daily News came out in the afternoon, so “there was really no way to find out unless you listened to, like, news radio,” he said.
The best times for the Knicks were some of the most desperate for the city, which was in a state of financial crisis. Fred Weinberg, 84, a retired restaurateur born in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan, has been following the team since he was in college in the ’60s, “before it was a big deal,” he said. He recalls the New York of the early ’70s as “a dangerous and a gritty, grimy city.”
But basketball had the power to uplift. “When the Knicks won, it was like a different New York City,” Weinberg said. “They united everybody just the way they do now, even more so. And everybody was just happy as hell.”
Though he watched games on TV at home because he couldn’t afford tickets, prices were still within reach then. “They had regular people in the stands, not just celebrities and people who had big bucks,” Weinberg said. “And you could afford to go to a game and that was a real gift.”
Tom Allon, a newspaper publisher, former mayoral candidate and lifelong Knicks fan, said that while the city had changed over the years, the team remained “singular in people’s imagination.”
“Even though you’ve got Celebrity Row there, and you’ve got a lot of wealthy people going to the games, it’s still a blue-collar audience,” Allon said, adding that many fans had probably played the game at one point or another.
“Basketball is a sport of New York,” he said. Like many Knicks followers, Allon fondly remembered the 1973 championship team, as well as the near champions of the 1990s.
Like those squads, whose members became well known on the city’s streets (and sometimes its nightlife scene), Allon says that the 2026 Knicks seem approachable and friendly.
“You can imagine hanging out with them,” he said.
And while the team is still one win away from the championship, Allon, 64, said he was enjoying the moment as much as he did as a kid. “I’ve suffered through the last, you know, 53 years, and I watch them even when they’re bad,” said Allon, calling the playoff run magical. “I haven’t felt this good in a long time.”
Phil Hartman, a downtown filmmaker and co-founder of Two Boots Pizza, said that “everybody loved those Knicks teams from the ’70s,” in part because they lived in the city and were seen out and about by reporters and gossip columnists.
“You’d hear where Earl ‘the Pearl’ had been the night before,” Hartman recalled of the famed Knicks guard Earl Monroe.
“There is definitely a different kind of ownership of the Knicks than there is of the other teams, which sometimes feel like they’re owned by the suburbs,” Hartman said. Both of the city’s football teams, after all, play their home games in New Jersey.
As a Mets/Jets/Knicks fan, Hartman, 70, said his teenage years were full of champions, and he once thought the trend would continue indefinitely.
That wasn’t so. “My son’s 41. He’s never experienced a championship,” he said. “And I’m so excited for him because he’s just so into the Knicks right now.”
But while the team is close to its goal, Hartman says he’s loath to predict another title for a reason very familiar to almost anyone who has ever rooted for the Knicks — a fear of cursing it.
“I’ll believe it,” he said, “when I see it.”
The post It Was 1973, and the Knicks Were Heading to Game 5 … appeared first on New York Times.
