It was sweaty and a little disgusting. It was basically rude. When Knicks fans cheered a 2021 win over the Celtics, it was New York bravado in an “I’m-walking-here” kind of way.
“BING BONG,” one fan screamed into the microphone. Another pressed his finger to his forehead forming the L shape for loser. Fans cursed out Boston, Tom Brady and Kevin Durant. One fan, jumping up and down, bleated breathlessly: “Tell me a little something K.D., don’t you regret not coming to the Kniiiiiiiicks? Don’t you regret not coming to the Kniiiiiiiicks?”
Those 56 seconds, captured in a Knicks fan video from the street show Sidetalk, were partly the inspiration for Zohran Mamdani’s video strategy as he ran for mayor.
“We want your campaign to feel like this,” a video producer, Anthony DiMieri, recalled telling Mr. Mamdani when they met in fall 2024 to begin crafting his social media approach.
From the start of his successful campaign, Mr. Mamdani was adamant about the version of New York City he was selling. This wasn’t the New York of private social clubs (sorry Zero Bond) or hard-to-get restaurant reservations. It was the version of New York City that draws in broke 20-somethings heady on a combination of overconfidence and resolve.
So Mr. Mamdani campaigned by singing Jay-Z at a club in Bushwick in Brooklyn, jumping into the frigid waters at Rockaway Beach in Queens, walking under the steel and limestone colossus of the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn and digging into Halal cart food with a plastic fork. His campaign superimposed “Zohran” over a Knicks logo in an ad — a miscue that resulted in a cease-and-desist letter from the Knicks.
Six months into his mayoralty, the stars aligned not just for the Knicks but for their mayor. The N.B.A. championship briefly made real Mr. Mamdani’s throbbing, enchanting vision of New York, all in one good-old-days-are-now moment.
Tens of thousands of people poured onto the streets in mass blobs of blue and orange, lights flashing and voices belting and grown men sobbing, together forming a scene that looked like a Frank Sinatra-scored television ad for New York.
There’s a New York City that so many locals know. It’s lugging an air-conditioning unit up the steps of a walk-up in sticky heat. It’s locking eyes with a rat going to town on the crust of an abandoned slice of pizza. It’s passing a window twinkling with the lights of someone else’s party, learning intimate details about the life of a couple next door that fights at full volume.
Then there’s the New York of last Saturday night: people swinging from traffic lights, strangers giving bear hugs, masses forming a party that stretched across boroughs and didn’t cost a dime to attend.
For an instant — preserved on tens of thousands of cameras, plastered on social media and now being edited into future footage for the mayor by his video team — New York City looked like the version of itself that Mr. Mamdani’s campaign sold. Sometimes sports heroes can do what politicians and pastors cannot — give people evidence that belief can be rewarded.
Some of Mr. Mamdani’s supporters were quick to lay claim to the celebrations, as if the mayor himself was on the court. “This is your city on socialism,” the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America wrote on X, reposting the N.B.A.’s championship announcement.
“Welcome to Mamdanistan,” wrote City Councilwoman Shahana Hanif.
“This never would have happened if Cuomo was mayor,” wrote Zara Rahim, the mayor’s campaign adviser.
Of course, both the mayor’s campaign and the Knicks victory leave in their wake not just sleep deficits and hangovers but real questions. What comes after the feel-good moments? The heart of Mr. Mamdani’s campaign had nothing to do with camera-ready festivities and everything to do with the real difficulties of building a life in the city. Governing takes time: The rent isn’t frozen yet, the child care plans are still being drawn up and the grocery stores are months or years away from opening.
Even the Saturday night celebrations, at times, pointed to one of Mr. Mamdani’s looming challenges: the friction between keeping the city safe and making real his campaign promises on policing.
During his campaign, Mr. Mamdani pledged to disband the special unit of the Police Department, called the Strategic Response Group, which polices protests and has been criticized for deploying heavy-handed tactics. On Saturday night, as postgame chaos spread, the unit was brought out to control the reveling crowds across the city. This came one day after the D.S.A.’s New York City chapter, in a surprising break from the mayor, criticized his handling of policing — specifically his support for a plan to increase police head count and what they saw as his languid progress on moving social welfare functions out of the Police Department.
“Some of us anticipated that this would be a trouble spot for him,” said Aminata Hughes, 32, a member of the New York City D.S.A. chapter, who was standing on the sidelines of a chapter soccer game on Sunday, where D.S.A. members were basking in the weekend celebrations. “So far it has been.”
The tensions surrounding public safety concerns also surfaced earlier during the N.B.A. finals, when the mayor and the Knicks owner, James L. Dolan, sparred over the cancellation of watch parties outside Madison Square Garden.
Mr. Mamdani was asked about the police’s response to unruly fans at a news conference in Maspeth, Queens, on Monday morning, where he stood beaming next to an orange and blue sign that read “Champion’s Way.”
“The vast majority of New Yorkers celebrated responsibly, celebrated appropriately, given that the city has been waiting for this for 53 years,” Mr. Mamdani said. “I’m deeply appreciative of the work of the men and women of the N.Y.P.D. for keeping our city safe, not only Saturday evening, but throughout this finals run.”
The mayor watched Game 5 at Le Dive in the West Village, sitting with his wife, Rama Duwaji, his best friends and, later in the evening, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When the Knicks won, he was swallowed up by the West Village streets, doling out fist bumps and high fives in his Josh Hart jersey. He belted the words to “My Way” in a circle of enthusiastically off-key crooners. He stayed out until 3:45 a.m., looking a little bleary-eyed as he joined the Puerto Rican Day Parade on Sunday.
It was the weekend that the mayor dreamed of. Like most city dreams, it hadn’t come without compromise.
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