Gotham's true heroes, its sanitation brigades, are still sweeping up the dazed, delirious, and confused bodies from the streets of the city, and the clean-up will take them well into this evening. Then they'll have to do it all over again Thursday after the obligatory semi-violent boozer disguised as a parade. These New York Knicks are finally done with being the Knicks of yore, and the city that has come to rely on them as a work in perpetual progress, regress, and occasional undress, has one less thing to rely upon as enduring truth.
That loss of identity begins after the parade, after approximately 50 gazumpty-skillion people clog and foul the streets of Manhattan to salute the logical inheritors of the crowns last worn by Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, Bill Bradley, Harthorne Wingo, and Red Holzman. The half-century and change of often performative suffering has finally ended, and Knicks fans finally have a team worthy of their occasionally obnoxious hubris. Now they have to figure out what to do with it, and they are not reliable right now when it comes to figuring that out because they are still on the post-coital cigarette portion of their new journey.
They beat the San Antonio Spurs for the final time Saturday night, 94-90, to win the 80th NBA championship, and they did so in the most New York kind of way: by taking early body shots from the younger and springier Spurs and then clinically exposing San Antonio's collective naivete time and again. Through know-how, defensive pressure and new statue-in-training Jalen Brunson, they made the Spurs and allegedly indomitable centerpiece Victor Wembanyama grapple with and eventually submit to their own too-new-for-school demons. The Knicks had done the same things the same ways in Games 1 through 4, and the only reason they needed five games instead of the bare minimum is because Donald Trump attended the third.
Hey, you have your analytics and we have ours.
Of the team itself and its winning methodologies, well, you already know the rudiments. They finally combined talent, experience, and the two most elusive character traits a team can display in tandem—toughmindedness and openmindedness—exposing the Spurs for lacking rudiments 2, 3 and 4, and making this a close yet oddly one-sided series. They won the five fourth quarters by a combined score of 131-105, and the endgames all felt like the difference between the two teams was far greater than the math would allow.
But the town, which long ago came to find comfort in its odd combination of smugness and disappointment, is what we look at now rather than the basketballishness of it all. Citizens of all demographic cubbyholes filled the streets in independent but quickly merged mosh pits of joy, taking drunken and disorderly credit mostly for not moving out of town for the last half-century. They spent 53 years hoping without holding real belief, and the years in which they actually did believe, they took a middle finger to the eye. They came to know that finger as their due, and kept queueing for more of the same year after silly year. So you bet your metaphorical asses they were going to make the streets impassible with their glee. And they should, because this is as good as it's going to get for them, at least until 2079. Not because four days of joy is all they deserve but because four days is all they get. Next week, after all, is just today with a rent hike.
Unrequited love is funny that way. It's highly addictive, and its seductive power does not want with time. Whatever else you want to say about the Knicks as a concept, those 53 years without a title didn't build up scar tissue as much as it made everything hotter to the touch. The few good times (the last few years, the early 2010s, and most of the '90s) hurt more than the fallow times (most of the 2000s and the late 2010s, the mid-’70s to late '80s) because they ended in varying heaps of dashed hope mixed with uncollected trash, which is why last night's payoff was so cathartic city-wide.
The Knicks cannot play at being championship-due any more. A town that has largely talked well beyond its level of sporting accomplishment is now making American's ears bleed with self-congratulation, and as the rest of the nation arises tomorrow, it will be done with the Knicks thing even if the network morning shows and ESPN want to beat the story into a cold, tasteless gruel. They saw what everyone saw Saturday, they nodded admiringly at the team and its successes, and they moved on, hoping that New York's psychoses will eventually diminish. Good luck with that.
The psychoses will just be different ones now. They shall live with a champion's expectations, which are harsher, less romantic, and in the current NBA, significantly crueler. New York is good at playing the long-suffering card, and while it will do its best to be an annoying frontrunner as one of the perks of victory, it still has the Giants (15 mostly desultory seasons without a championship) Yankees (17), Rangers (32), Mets (40), Islanders (43), and Jets (58) as their mutual burdens. Here as in most things, the women—of Gotham FC and the Liberty—are carrying the load.
But as we were told ad nauseam amidst all the stock shots of Lee and Stiller and Chalamet and Hargitay and the rest of Celebristan, the Knicks were different because they engendered a love for New Yorkers that the other teams didn't. Part of it was competition in the market—they don’t have any because New Yorkers still prefer to deny that the Nets exist—but most of it was those 53 years. And now those are gone, to the town's great relief and its pending consternation. They will be chasing the high of this moment forever.
Next year's Knicks will be among the favorites to repeat as champions, which has done Oklahoma City, Boston, Denver, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and Toronto a heap of nothing. Eight years without a repeat champion is the most egalitarian the NBA has ever been, and there is no indication that it is going to change any time soon. Between the nature of the new game, the salary cap and concomitant roster churn, the higher rate of injury and just general karma, repeating has never been less likely. This runs smack into New Yorkers' bone-deep belief that victory is their birthright due to there being more of them.
Expectations are harder to navigate than a first-half deficit. From here on, even if the roster doesn't change at all, the Knicks will be chasing their own ghosts because that's how winning works. But fans set the real expectations—it is their prime shortcoming as well as their invulnerability—and having them exceeded should be savored right up to the point where you feel yourself wanting to punch that police horse. But New York and its favorite team are going to get regular reminders of how much those expectations weigh. No moment is quite like this one, and that is because it required each and every one of those 53 years.
