Sunday Pages: Knicks in Five
21 thoughts on sports, glory, teamwork, basketball, New York, joy, and my favorite team's first championship in 53 years
1.
I had most of a conventional “Sunday Pages” all ready to roll, but how could I not write about the Knicks?
They did it. They really did it.
Pinch me.
2.
There are 15 players on the Knicks’ playoff roster. Combined, they earned $205 million this year, an average of $13.6 million per player. The highest-paid Knick, Karl-Anthony Towns, made $53,142,264—more than a million bucks a week. These men are all professional athletes, the best of the best, and with a few notable exceptions, they are all staggeringly tall. Of the 15, one player is white, and he didn’t play a single minute in the Finals. Oh, and they represent New York City.
Nothing about this team should be relatable to a nation notorious for its institutional racism—a nation that’s 56 percent white, where half the men are shorter than 5’ 9”, where three quarters of the population is considered overweight, where the median income is less than what Towns makes in a single day, and where the rightwing media has conditioned most of the country to fear NYC. And yet these Knicks are the most relatable and likable squad the franchise has assembled since I started watching basketball 32 years ago.
Sports has the power to unite us.
3.
Trump knows that sports has the power to unite us. That’s why there’s such a spectacle on the lawn, or what used to be the lawn, of the White House. He wants UFC cage matches to bring the people together. For his birthday. Not gonna happen—and certainly not now.
4.
My son’s boyfriend, who knows nothing about sports, watched the fourth quarter with us. “Is it okay if I root for another game so this can continue?” he asked innocently, and the rest of us snapped, in unison, “NO!”
He was taken aback. He said, quietly, “But it’s just a game.”
And he’s right. It is just a game. A game in which the teams are owned by horrible people, some of them in the Epstein Files. A game in which the owner of the Knicks, James Dolan, very unpopular with the fan base, has tussled with the (very popular in the city) Mayor of New York and hosted the (very unpopular in the city) President of the United States. It is ridiculous that something so inconsequential has had such a profound emotional impact on me.
But basketball is a metaphor for life. The lessons we learn from watching the game are applicable to all of us. Plus, sports-watching is a safe way to channel, and release, our emotions: rage at the crappy officiating, regret at the opportunities lost, disappointment at shots not falling, stress during the endgame moments, agony at being defeated—and, best of all, joy at winning.
There was a lot of joy last night, and there’s a lot of joy this morning. And here’s the thing: Joy derived from a game is still joy. Your body doesn’t know the difference.
5.
In recent years, great basketball teams are typically led by an alpha star, a pair of secondary stars, and role players. The Knicks certainly fit that model, with Jalen Brunson, Towns, and Game Four hero OG Anunoby leading the pack. Even so, this was a team effort, and a team victory. Everyone on the roster made significant contributions to what was an historic playoff run.
The Knicks showed us how successful teams function. They work together, they pick each other up, they have each others’ backs, and they are genuinely happy when a teammate does well. They are humble, and they are not interested in individual glory. There’s a reason the Pope likes the Knicks, and it’s not just because that he and three of the Knicks starting five all went to Villanova.
6.
Styles, they say, make fights. This series was a study in contrasts. The best player on the Knicks, Jalen Brunson, is listed at 6’ 2” but is shorter than that. (“LOL he is shaped like you,” my friend Chris, who hasn’t watched hoops all year, texted me). The best player on the Spurs, Victor Wembanyama, is listed at 7’ 4” but is taller than that. My wife called him a giraffe. So there was a David and Goliath element to the match-up.
But the Knicks are older, more experienced. They are all around 30. The Spurs are young. Wemby is 22. Stephon Castle is 21. Dylan Harper, a rookie who is already the second-best player on the team, turned 20 on March 2.
Young teams almost never win in their first deep playoff run, because they tend to blunder in the fourth quarter, when the game gets tight and the pressure ramps up. That happened in all five of these games. The Spurs led in all of them. They lost four of five.
7.
The only game San Antonio won was the one Donald Trump attended.
8.
I get that a lot of folks aren’t interested in sports. I respect that. Hey, I don’t particularly care about the World Cup, something hundreds of millions of people around the world get super excited about.
PSA: if you don’t care about sports, you don’t need to assert that opinion today. If you have the urge to tweet something with the word “sportsball,” please resist the temptation. It only makes you look like an asshole.
The world is on fire, Elon Musk is a trillionaire, and the South Lawn of the White House looks like the Ulster County Fair. Don’t shit on our joy.
9.
I started watching basketball in 1994, the summer between my junior and senior year of college. I didn’t go home that summer. I stayed in D.C. The Knicks were in the playoffs, and some of my housemates were into it. So I watched with them.
Led by Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, and John Starks, the Knicks made the Finals, where they squared off against Hakeem Olajuwon’s Houston Rockets. They almost won Game Six. They lost Game Seven. It was an exciting series, and it made me a Knicks fan for life.
When the ‘94 playoffs started, I didn’t know anything about basketball. By Game Seven, I was shouting at the TV, “Olajuwon has five fouls! Feed Ewing in the post!”
I’m sure there are newly minted Knicks fans who didn’t know the rules a month ago, but who can now opine expertly on what does and does not constitute a flagrant foul.
10.
There’s been a lot of grousing on Knicks Twitter about real fans versus bandwagon jumpers. To wit: My friend Mike told me about a viral clip, where some pranksters interviewed Knicks fans in the street, and asked where Aubrey Graham ranked on the list of all-time Knicks. There was a lot of, “Oh, top 20 for sure.” What did you like about his game? “Toughness.”
Aubrey Graham is not a basketball player. Aubrey Graham is a musical artist. We know him as Drake.
Me, I welcome the new fans with open arms. Because I was a new fan myself, and I know how exciting it is. And the new fans will, one day, become old fans. That’s how fandom works.
11.
Also: this is New York City. We don’t have bandwagons. There’s way too many people for a wagon. We have subway lines. Take the A train to 34th Street. Everyone’s invited.
12.
Jalen Brunson is a closer. He is Mariano Rivera in a Knicks jersey.
We’ve had good players, we’ve had great players, but we’ve never had a closer—a guy who can take the ball with the clock winding down and say, “Relax, I got this.”
13.
My friend Chris, who I used to watch the Knicks with in the 90s, texted me during the first quarter: “So, I tune in after all this hype and this looks like the Knicks I used to watch, lol.”
I respond: “This happens every game. The Spurs get off to a hot start and fade down the stretch. Wemby gets tired and Brunson heats up.”
Two hours later: “Yup. Not the old Knicks.”
14.
In 1996-97, I was in a bad way. I was 24 years old, I was single, I was lonely, I was broke, and I wasn’t having any success with my writing. That season, I watched the Knicks obsessively. I mean, it was unhealthy.
How unhealthy? At the time, the Knicks color analyst was an older, white-haired chap named John Andariese, whom I adored. He skipped a few regular-season games to attend his daughter’s wedding. And I dreamt I was at the wedding.
Like I said, unhealthy.
That year, the Knicks rolled into the playoffs, taking a commanding 3-1 lead against the rival Miami Heat. But all hell broke loose in Game Five. An altercation at the end of the fourth quarter led to a bench-clearing brawl. Half the Knicks team was suspended for leaving the bench during the melee—a stupid rule then and now.
The Heat won Games Five, Six, and Seven. I was so depressed after the Knicks lost, I stayed in bed for two days. I was despondent. I felt like I’d lost a close relative.
15.
The Knicks played the Spurs in the 1999 Finals. That was a fun team, invigorated by the acquisition of Latrell Sprewell, who we got on the cheap from Golden State because he’d choked his coach. Spree looked a bit like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. I liked to think he was Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. But we had no chance against San Antonio that year.
When he came to New York, the sportswriters were salivating to hate on him. But they were used to years of surly interviews from Ewing and Oakley. Sprewell showed up in bookish glasses, spoke eloquently, answered all the questions patiently—and won over the press corps in about five minutes. An amazing performance.
16.
James Dolan—the guy with the veneers and the orange sport coat next to the slumbering Trump in the owners box—inherited the Knicks franchise from his daddy in 1999. Jeff Van Gundy, our beloved coach, quit in 1999.
In a related story, the Knicks sucked from 1999 until 2021. Not just sucked—were unwatchably bad. Terrible hires, whiffed draft picks, idiotic trades, even more idiotic free agent signings—a two-decade clusterfuck.
Larry Brown, who’d coached Allen Iverson in Philadelphia and had won the title with the Pistons in 2004, came to New York in 2005. I loathed this man. He singlehandedly drove away all the joy I got out of basketball. My hatred for him is irrational; to this day, I’d still rank him somewhere between Elon Musk and Todd Blanche on my all-time Most Despised list.
The point is, I didn’t think the Knicks would ever be good again, much less win the chip.
17 .
Longtime Knicks fan Katie Baker explains Knicks fandom well over at The Ringer:
The glory days of the 1990s Knicks that folks my age never shut up about, meanwhile, are covered in very little actual glory.
Knicks fans have long bonded by invoking the most dismal formative memories they can conjure—Charles Smith missing layup after layup in 1993; John Starks going 0-for-11 from the 3-point line in Game 7 of the 1994 NBA Finals; the bench-clearing brawl against the Miami Heat in 1997 that left multiple Knicks starters suspended, not to be confused with the bench-clearing brawl against the Miami Heat in 1998 that left Jeff Van Gundy clinging to Alonzo Mourning’s leg like a child who doesn’t want to be dropped off at day care; various gut punches and/or faxes from the likes of Reggie Miller and Pat Riley—and then shaking their heads in communion. And all that’s, like, only the half of it! The other half, which we at The Ringer merely scratched the surface of here, is far darker.
In other words, as a Knicks fan, I’m extremely accustomed to all manner of meltdowns and fuckups, to all forms of seeing some other team’s game-winners go in with a swish (or, worse somehow, game-tiers go in with a 10-foot bounce).
But this year, as she said, she expected them to win. As did I.
I can’t express how weird that feels, as a fan of this team.
18.
The Knicks were supposed to contend in the Eastern Conference this year, and maybe make the Finals. Even after they went on the most ass-kicking playoff win streak ever—after falling behind 1-2 to the Atlanta Hawks in the first round, they won 13 straight, many of the victories lopsided blowouts—no one really expected them to win.
And yet they managed to put together the single greatest playoff run of all time. They lost two games by one point and one game by four points. They won 16 games by a combined 289 points, for a playoff point differential of +283, by far the best ever. They came back from down 20 in the fourth quarter—twice! Including the biggest comeback in Finals history!
I mean…
19.
There is an adage in basketball—Lawler’s Law—that the first team to 100 points wins the game. In Game Five, neither squad crossed that threshold. It was a low-scoring game, 94-90—a score out of the 90s.
Jalen Brunson scored 45 of the 94 points.
Note: I’ve been a subscriber to Knicks Centric, Tommy Beer’s Substack, for a few years now. He does a great job breaking down all the action. I can’t wait to see what he writes about last night. If you want to re-live what just happened, go read:
20.
My favorite thing about sports is watching grown men cry tears of joy. I love watching people being happy. I like to see how the players react. Some of them weep. Some of them scream for joy. It’s meaningful to all of them.
Unlike in real life, success in sports is quantifiable. It is zero sum. You win or you lose. And my god does it feel good to win—even vicariously. Look at how happy Taylor Swift and Ben Stiller and Spike Lee looked. Even Larry David was gleeful!
After the Celtics won the title in 2008, someone asked Kevin Garnett, who came to Boston after years of playing for shitty teams in Minnesota, about the significance of winning the title. “It is like knowledge,” he said. “Once it is achieved, it is achieved.”
Nothing—not even the malevolent Donald Trump—can take away what the Knicks just did.
21.
Since losing the Trump Game on Monday, “Knicks in Five” has been a mantra, in and around the city, and on social media. Chants break out on the subway—even at a World Cup match, reportedly.
And lo, the Knicks won in five. We collectively spoke it into existence.
And I know things are bleak right now. But Donald Trump is 80 years old and was examined by 22 doctors at his last check-up, thunderstorms are in the forecast for UFC Freedom, and as the OG Anunoby tip-in showed us, anything is possible.
“You are allowed to think about the worst possible scenario,” Jalen Brunson said. “Now do something about it.”
There’s wisdom in that.
Brunson also said, when asked what the most important thing is in having the right mindset to be cool under pressure: “Don’t be afraid to fail.”
Knicks in Five, for real. The 53-year championship drought, which spanned almost my entire lifetime, is over. If we can do that, we can do anything. Or, as the song about New York says: if we can make it there, we can make it anywhere.
I know we shall prevail, because you know what?
We just did.
ICYMI
Excellent show on Friday. Jeremy Lent came on to talk about his new book, ECOCIVILIZATION, and his ideas for how we can affect positive change.
Plus, my wife Stephanie St. John did the singing on my Suzanne Vega parody…
On Tuesday, I promise, we’ll bring our focus back to the bad guys.
Thanks, everyone!
Photo credit: Closeup of Larry O’Brien Trophy.
Greg, I just read that the last time the Knicks won, the humiliated President resigned the next year. Hope that was true. Hope that WILL be true this time as well. I’m so happy for New York!!!
I'm happy because you're happy.