How I learned to love the New York Knicks

Everyone loves an underdog story. Even in the city that has everything.

The view from my seats in the 200 level — admittedly, some of the better seats in the 200 level — during the national anthem on Friday night.

One quality you wouldn’t ordinarily associate with New Yorkers is patience. Commuters scamper to catch the subway when they hear the rumble of a train approaching, even though the next one is usually only a few minutes away. Service at restaurants in New York isn’t necessarily polite, but it’s punctual: it’s not a coincidence that the city’s favorite food, pizza, is typically served up in a New York minute. And although we might spend a lot of time stuck in traffic — albeit less now with congestion pricing — the rampant honking suggests we aren’t happy about it.

Except when it comes to basketball. There, the city just waits and waits and waits, with no light at the other end of the Holland Tunnel. Until now.

On Friday, the Knicks advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals by demolishing the Boston Celtics 119-81. The win was uncharacteristically easy: the Knicks had trailed either at halftime or at the start of the fourth quarter in six of their seven previous playoff wins.

Obviously, it helped that the Celtics were not at full strength: Jayson Tatum ruptured his Achilles tendon in Game 4, and Kristaps Porzingis, the former Knick whom the MSG crowd lustily booed at every opportunity, is a shell of himself. And the path forward isn’t necessarily easy. Although the Knicks are now the top seed remaining in the Eastern Conference, they’re only barely favored against the Indiana Pacers, who defeated them in the playoffs last year. Conditional probabilities at major sportsbooks suggest they’d be underdogs in the Finals against any of the Timberwolves, the Nuggets or (especially) the Thunder.

But none of that matters: it’s already a Bing Bong moment, with Timothée Chalamet exchanging high-fives with random strangers like we’re the 1996 Chicago Bulls. It’s the franchise’s first trip to the conference Finals appearance in 25 years, a span during which their best player by Basketball Reference win shares at various times included Kurt Thomas, Jamal Crawford, David Lee and Enes Kanter — and top 10 draft picks were wasted on Michael Sweetney, Jordan Hill, Kevin Knox II and Frank Ntilikina. After all the false starts, all the terrible trades and even worse free agent signings, we deserved this. We earned it.

What are the rules for adopting sports franchises as adult?

You’ll notice that I stuck a few we’s in there. Although I could make a dubious claim of Knicks family lineage — my mom was born in New York and grew up in Westchester County and I think the first NBA game I ever attended was a Knicks game¹ — we were of course a Detroit Pistons household. (With exactly one team in each of the big four sports, Michiganders didn’t have too many tough choices — well, other than between MSU and U of M.) The Knicks, at least, mostly stayed out of the Bad Boy Pistons’ way, knocking them out in the first round in 1992 but only after we felt pretty satisfied with our two championships. Instead, our main rivals were the Bulls, Celtics and Lakers, so rooting for any of those teams as an adult would be a cardinal sin.

Adopting the Knicks isn’t quite so unkosher. Still, I wouldn’t have expected to ever become a Knicks fan. Then I moved to New York in 2009. I’m not sure why exactly, but I felt bad for the team after LeBron James spurned them the next summer, soon unexpectedly finding myself lurking in the comments sections of obscure Knicks blogs. Then came Linsanity in 2012, back when people were still using their BlackBerrys to check out the score, and I saw Knicks love coming out of the pores of the city in a way that few other causes unite New Yorkers. The next year, I moved from Brooklyn to what is technically part of Chelsea but was really more of an ambiguous non-neighborhood primarily defined by its relationship with Madison Square Garden and Penn Station.² By that point, I was hooked.

I don’t know what the honor code is for adopting sports teams later in life. But I’m pretty sure that you get special dispensation if the team in question is almost literally across the block from you; the MSG marquee dominated my view from my apartment window. There weren’t a lot of points of civic pride in this weird patch of the city, but the Knicks were one of them. Also, I’m pretty sure that you’re not allowed to frontrun, jumping on the bandwagon of an already successful franchise. That would rule out me ever becoming a huge Yankees guy, for instance. But this is not an issue in the case of the MSG teams, the Knicks and the Rangers, who have combined for just one title in my lifetime.

Why New York loves the Knicks

By the books, or at least by the revenue data, the Yankees are still the biggest ticket in town. But it doesn’t feel that way on the ground in Manhattan. Instead, the Yankees are more of a regional juggernaut, the team for people who grew up in Northern New Jersey or on Long Island. The Knicks are the city’s favorite team. And since the city is full of people who migrate here from all around the country and indeed all around the world, they’re a focal point for old and new New Yorkers alike.

New Yorkers have contradictory narratives about the city. One is that of hegemonic dominance. We expect the best and we usually get it: the best food, the best performing arts. We’re both the undisputed financial capital of the world and a contender for the fashion capital, too. The Yankees play into this image: they’re the Bronx Bombers, the Evil Empire. With a brand like that, it would simply be unacceptable not to put a winning product on the field, whatever the price — and the Yankees haven’t had a losing season since 1992.

The Knicks, conversely, have mostly lost, often embrrassingly. But New Yorkers also like to see themselves as scrappy, resilient underdogs, from the Battle of Brooklyn to recovering from “Ford to City: Drop Dead”, the September 11 attacks, and one of the deadliest COVID outbreaks anywhere in the world.

There’s something to this: the city hustles, and it's always been home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who come here with virtually nothing. Still, this is mostly a self-flattering way to see ourselves. When I asked ChatGPT for examples of how New York City is really a scrappy underdog town, it agreed this was a common trope but rudely called it a “myth”. The best exceptions it could find of New York actually being a down-on-its-luck underdog town were from three of our famously cursed sports franchises: the Jets, Mets — and, of course, the Knicks.

New York Basketball is a thing, and Jalen Brunson is its finest example

It’s not that the Knicks have been underdogs by choice, exactly. They had the highest payroll in the NBA for four consecutive seasons from 2004 through 2007 — i.e. the Isiah Thomas Era — during which they averaged just a 32-50 record.

The Knicks, however, have at least had a common thematic approach that has spanned both their many years in the wilderness and their few moments of success. Unlike the Bronx Bombers, who seek to overwhelm you with firepower, the Knicks like to slow the game down, winning with grit, tenacity, rebounding, and defense. In the 61 seasons since 1964-65, the Knicks have played at a slower pace than the league average all but 10 times, the most significant exceptions coming during Mike D’Antoni’s coaching tenure. Wearing the other team down — as the Knicks have repeatedly done in the playoffs this year — has always been a big part of the brand.

This year’s iteration of the franchise can take this to ridiculous lengths. In theory, the Knicks might function okay as an uptempo, ball-movement and spacing-dependent offense, the style that has dominated the league since D’Antoni’s 7-seconds-or-less teams in Phoenix. They often field lineups with four or five players who are at least competent 3-point shooters, and they have quick-twitch athletes like Mikal Bridges and OG Anunoby on the roster.

But that’s just not the way Jalen Brunson rolls. Instead, Brunson lurks around the perimeter, often dribbling with his back to the basket, sometimes bypassing open looks from one of the more middling shooters³ as he presses for tactical advantages that are rarely obvious to anyone but Brunson himself. With 10 seconds left on the shot clock — then 9, 8, 7 — the possession often looks like a bust.

Then Brunson not so much drives as burrows toward the basket, and often pulls a rabbit out of his hat: a fadeaway jumper, a running finger roll layup, a kickout to one of the shooters. During the regular season, the Knicks averaged 0.9 points per shot attempt on field goals taken with four seconds or less on the shot clock, the third-best rating in the league. While that’s not great by the standards of a modern NBA possession — the league averaged 1.09 points scored on shot attempts overall this year — it’s often better than settling for some bailout, especially since these longer possessions often produce a lot of fouls and offensive rebounds, which aren’t accounted for the data I’m citing here.

I deliberately left a lot of white space in that scatterplot because now I’m going to compare it to the playoffs. This year especially, the NBA has basically become a whole different sport in the postseason: more physical, a slower tempo, with max defensive effort on every play.⁴ As you can see, the number of late-shot-clock possessions has considerably risen in the playoffs. But efficiency is notably down on account of facing better, more engaged defenses.⁵ The Knicks have thrived under these conditions, however, averaging 1.02 points per field goal attempt so far in the playoffs with four or fewer seconds on the clock. No other team has even reached 0.9:

Is this sustainable? Probably not to this level of consistent execution. Still, the Knicks put up those numbers against the Celtics and Pistons, who had two of the best rim defenses in the league this season.

Brunson may not be as lights-out as he was in Game 4 against the Celtics or Game 6 against Detroit, and it will depend on how the game is officiated. (I love you, Jalen, but you’re guilty as charged on the flopping stuff — and it’s usually a sign you’re on your B-game). Still, this could potentially frustrate the Pacers, who true to their moniker prefer to play a faster pace and are one of the most efficient transition teams in the league.

If we’re getting a lot of 117-111 scores, I’d probably take Indiana in the series. But if we’re back to the 90s — say, Knicks 93, Pacers 89 — that will indicate the Knicks are winning the tactical battle, and continuing to win over the city.

1. My grandpa was an attorney who worked in the city and had good MSG hookups, so I have vague memories of the Garden as a toddler when we’d visit for Thanksgiving, but he died when I was 6.

2. I recently relocated to the East Village.

3. Particularly Josh Hart.

4. I think I’ve become a convert to the idea that the NBA should shorten its regular season; this high-effort form of basketball is much better.

5. There’s also a wider spread because of the smaller sample sizes.