The New York Power of the New York Knicks
How they've taken over the largest city in America
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The small city, I’ve always believed, is most conducive to feeling the intensity of a championship run. Take a city with less than one million people, hand them a sizzling team, and watch the resurgence of a monoculture that, these days, can only exist for sports. The charitable view is that a smaller city is more communal, more intimate, neighbors more likely to know neighbors; the sneering New Yorker, like me, might shoot back that the small city just has less going on. I’ve long thought that, for New York, this was always a bit of a problem when it came to professional sports. I’ve been an inveterate Yankee fan from early childhood and I’ve followed basketball and football with varying intensity over the years—less in recent times, if I’m honest—and this has allowed me to make a study of big city fandom. And my observation, from watching the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Rangers, and Islanders go on long playoff runs, is that all of these teams will only matter so much in a city of eight million people, especially since loyalties are divided.
New York, I’d argue, is a baseball town, but neither the Yankees nor Mets can unite the mass of New York baseball fans behind them. Met fans will never cheer on a Yankee playoff run. If the Yankees reach a World Series, as they finally did in 2024, Met fans will hope, desperately, they don’t win. Yankee fans, generally, have been more indifferent to the fate of the Mets, but the Juan Soto signing changed that dynamic, perhaps for good. Yankee fans now delight in the suffering of the Mets. While I’ve personally enjoyed Mets playoff runs—I was supportive, in particular, of the 2015 drive to the World Series, and hoped for a Subway Series in 2024—I can’t imagine ever seriously cheering them on. The dark part of me now hopes they lose in embarrassing fashion. All of this is ultimately ancestral: New York has been a city of baseball divisions dating back to the dawn of the American League, when the Highlanders, the predecessor to the Yankees, were formed in 1903. The National League had two New York baseball teams, the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, and when both moved to the West Coast in 1958, the Mets were created to give Yankee-hating National League fans their own replacement franchise. The Yankees could not be the sole baseball team of New York City for very long.
The Knicks are unique because they effectively share the city with no one. I write this as a casual Brooklyn Nets fan; the Nets are, at this point, one of the least popular and most irrelevant franchises in all of professional sports. I am a Nets fan because I grew up in Brooklyn and found out, in the early 2000s, the Nets would be moving from New Jersey to my home borough. I was a baseball history obsessive who lamented being born decades after the Dodgers left Brooklyn and saw the Nets as a chance to somehow recapture that spirit. They didn’t. In 2012, they arrived at the charmless Barclays Center, the crown jewel of a massive real estate project that never delivered on the affordable housing that was promised. I rooted for them, hoping two attempts at forming super-teams would deliver a title. The Kevin Garnett-Paul Pierce Nets didn’t come close, and neither did the Kevin Durant-Kyrie Irving-James Harden edition, though the 2020-2021 season might have delivered that elusive championship if Durant’s foot wasn’t on the three-point line for a game-winning shot against the Milwaukee Bucks. The Nets were always doomed to be a runner-up to the Knicks, but had they managed to beat the Bucks and storm to a title that year, they could have inculcated a new generation of fans and been a respectable number two, mattering to a slice of Brooklyn residents and youth who wanted a shot at playoff glory. The ceiling for the Nets was probably becoming the New York version of the Chicago White Sox, scrapping in the shadows of New York’s Cubs, the Knicks.
That, obviously, did not happen. Now the Knicks might win their first NBA title since 1973. New York belongs wholly to them.
