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If you’re a New York native, you’re swimming with pride today even if you can’t tell a basketball from a handball. For the first time since it was possible to type these words into a personal computer, the New York Knickerbockers are the champions of the National Basketball Association, which to about three-quarters of those currently living within the Tri-State area makes this the first time in their lives they can wake up with that reality smacking them in the face.
Even the somewhat detached AP writer Tim Reynolds managed to invoke a level of excitement and outright shock that accompanied last night’s climactic achievement:
Jalen Brunson and the Comeback Knicks did it again. And now they’re the Champion Knicks.
For the first time in 53 years, New York rules the NBA. Brunson scored 45 points, including 13 straight for New York in the fourth quarter, and the Knicks beat the San Antonio Spurs 94-90 in Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Saturday night. The Knicks won the series 4-1, rallying from double-digit deficits in all four of those victories. The deficit was 16 on Saturday night. Brunson and the Knicks were never fazed.
“I have no words,” Brunson said during the on-court celebration. “It’s everything I ever dreamed of.”
Brunson, fittingly, closed with a flourish. He set a Knicks record for points in a finals game; it had been 38 by Willis Reed against the Los Angeles Lakers in Game 3 of the 1970 series. It now belongs to the left-handed point guard who changed the franchise’s fortunes when he arrived four years ago. Mikal Bridges and Josh Hart – the other two parts of the “Nova Knicks” trio that also includes Brunson, three players who were NCAA champions at Villanova and teamed up in New York to try to do the same – combined to score 27 points. Bridges had 14, Hart 13. “I don’t know what I’m feeling,” Brunson said. “I’m in awe. Whenever someone counted us out, we found a way to come back and do something about it.”
But if one really wants a sense of how significant an event this is for a city and a fanbase that has gone multiple generations with nothing but disappointment and, more often than not, outright putrid efforts one needs to look at the kind of recap that only a NEW YORK DAILY NEWS beat writer like Kristian Winfield could capture:
The unmistakable smell of cigar smoke is wafting about the corridor leading directly to the visitor’s locker room at Frost Bank Center. Beneath the smoke scent are the citrus and mineral notes of champagne. The locker room itself resembles a crime scene: Here lie the Spurs, laid to rest by the New York Knicks. Plastic drapes cover the locker stalls. Empty bottles — Ace of Spades, Moet & Chandon and Michelob Ultra — are scattered across the table in the center of a room far too small for such a life-sized occasion.
Champagne drips from the ceiling. It has splattered all over the visitor’s locker room. Ultimately, it pools beneath the feet of those assessing the crime scene in the aftermath of New York City’s greatest sporting accomplishment in 53 years.
Meanwhile, back home The City That Never Sleeps more than lived up to that monicker, as no less than FOUR of Winfield’s compatriots- Kerry Burke, Roni Jacobson, Julian Roberts-Grmela and John Annese –compiled this morning:
Hundreds of frenzied Knicks fans skirmished with cops in a running pitched battle along 42nd St. early Sunday morning — hurling bottles at police and even trying to tip over a school bus after the Knicks captured the NBA championship Saturday night.
Cops arrested 63 people during the mayhem. The NYPD reported four people shot or stabbed and 10 police officers attacked, with one punched in the face and another hit with a glass bottle. Scores of fans clambered on top of and inside eight yellow school buses in the middle of the street at 42nd St. and Ninth Ave. Police repeatedly drove the wild fans off of the buses, but without enough manpower to make arrests, would then back off, retreating to the nearby intersection, each time after which the fans again swarmed the vehicles.
If you’re a New Yorker, you shouldn’t be surprised. In many ways this was been a typical warm weather evening, and at least no stores got looted. And imagine what could have happened if they had lost.
No, this is how children, parents and even grandparents who have been embarrassed and thrown their loyalties at some truly underserving regimes–and still may have some reluctance to do so–react when in spite of that legacy the brilliance of Leon Rose’s multiple maneuvers that took an undersized two guard (Brunson)off the Dallas Mavericks’ hands by using his father as chum in the free agent water, finding a Minnesota Timberwolves management (including, ironically, former Yankee World Series champion Alex Rodriguez) at a tipping point where they brought a disappointing Karl-Anthony Towns back to his hometown area to serve as Brunson’s brute force, finagled another underperformer with the spellcheck-necessary name OG Anunoby out of Toronto and eventually turned him into the Mookie Wilson of this generation with his “hand of god” tip-in that secured the greatest comeback in NBA playoff history and then rounded out the team with crafty fringe pieces like the rebounding expert Mitchell Robinson, whose offensive snatch of a missed Dylan Harper free throw all but secured the title-clinching comeback win last night.
And extra credit goes to Rose and, dammit, to Trump-loving owner James Dolan for having the huevos to toss the seasoned and respected yet championship-less coach Tom Thibodeau into the East River after last year’s conference final elimination and replace him with the ring-adorned Mike Brown, who ironically was a Spurs assistant 12 years ago when San Antone won their fifth title in 15 years–the first coming against the Knicks’ surprising 1999 Eastern Conference champions that rose from an eight seed in a shortened season to a five-game elimination that those younger than Baby Boomers have been forced to cling to as their most recent memory of an NBA Finals until now.
So do allow us some leeway at least until Thursday, when as the oh so busy Annese just announced the Knicks will turn New York into a unifying sea of joy to a level not seen certainly since Wilson and the ’86 Mets captured their collective hearts:
The streets of New York will be bathed in blue and orange as the city hosts a ticker-tape parade Thursday — the first in Knicks history —to celebrate the team’s NBA Championship win.
The logistics of the parade are still in the works, but it will include a City Hall ceremony where the heroic hoops stars will get the keys to the city, Mayor Mamdani announced.
“For more than 50 years, New Yorkers have waited for this moment. Through near misses, heartbreak and a hope that every year could be our year, this city never stopped believing in the Knicks. And this team fulfilled that hope with grit, resilience and heart — just like the five boroughs itself,” Mamdani said in a statement.
How fitting that keys will be awarded to those who used them so deftly. And I suspect they won’t be the only ones present if anyone with a shred of marketing savvy makes sure that the lady who provided the anthem that accompanied just about every watch party and conflagration is on hand to belt it out in the flesh.
And even though I’m generationally more inclined to warble Billy Joel’s state of mind tribute you bet I’m gonna be doing my best to groove to the Empire version. The one that reminds us that we’re from a concrete jungle where dreams are made of and there’s nothing you can’t do.
Let’s hear it for New York.
Until next time…