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ONCE THE FINAL 1.2 seconds ebbed off the clock inside Madison Square Garden, allowing the New York Knicks to escape Wednesday’s Game 4 of the NBA Finals with one of the most improbable victories in basketball history, the celebratory roar rocketed through the arena.
Through the throngs of fans assembled outside the Garden. Through watch parties scattered across Manhattan’s West Village, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. An entire city and surrounding tri-state area reveling in the largest comeback in Finals history.
And while OG Anunoby’s game-winning tip-in didn’t get the Knicks all the way there — it took another three days and roughly 1,500 miles to officially crown the champs in Game 5 — generations of heartbreak, disappointment and grief seemingly evaporated with every moment of New York’s 29-point comeback.
For 53 years, this wasn’t New York’s place in the basketball universe. It might be The City Game, but it hasn’t been this city’s game in a long while. Until now.
NEW YORK CITY has delivered a who’s who list of memorable champions throughout the past half-century.
The Giants have claimed four Super Bowls during that time, three in dramatic fashion: upsetting the Jim Kelly-led Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXV on Scott Norwood’s missed field goal at the buzzer; David Tyree and his helmet helping to dethroning the unbeaten New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII; and then four years later, taking down Tom Brady, Bill Belichick and the Patriots again with less than a minute remaining.
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The Mets won the 1986 World Series in a championship round that featured some similarities to the 2026 NBA Finals. The series’ defining moment, the ball bouncing through Boston Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner’s legs to allow the winning run to score, happened in Game 6 with the Mets still needing to close in Game 7.
The Yankees delivered another dynasty, with Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera leading the winningest franchise among the major North American sports leagues to five of the franchise’s 27 championships.
The Islanders won four consecutive Stanley Cups in the early 1980s, while the Rangers, the other tenant of Madison Square Garden, ended their 54-year title drought in 1994 with a heart-stopping run that featured seven-game series victories in the conference finals and Final. The Liberty, after years of playoff heartbreaks, claimed the 2024 WNBA title over the Minnesota Lynx.
But while New York has split allegiances in baseball, football and hockey, this city is a Knicks town and always will be. And New Yorkers have almost always been united in their shared misery.
FOR FIVE DECADES, the Knicks have chased the heights reached by the 1970 and 1973 championship teams.
One reason was how great they were. With Walt Frazier and Earl Monroe in the backcourt, Bill Bradley, Dave DeBusschere and Willis Reed up front, those Hall of Fame Knicks rosters were built on togetherness, ball movement and synergy and have long been considered a paradigm of how basketball should be played.
Another reason is that, for so long, it felt impossible for the city to rediscover that feeling.
There have been plenty of near misses. Charles Smith’s botched layups in the 1993 conference finals against the Chicago Bulls. John Starks’ 2-for-18 performance against the Houston Rockets in Game 7 of the 1994 NBA Finals. Reggie Miller’s eight points in 9 seconds (Game 1) and Patrick Ewing’s missed finger roll at the buzzer (Game 7) in the 1995 East semifinals. The infamous suspensions that cost New York the 1997 East semifinals against the Miami Heat. And, after a surprising run as an 8-seed in the lockout-shortened season, a five-game loss to the San Antonio Spurs in the 1999 Finals.
Then, for a generation, the Knicks were the laughingstock of the league.
The franchise became so rudderless that, in 2008, then-NBA commissioner David Stern pressured owner James Dolan to hire team president Donnie Walsh away from the Indiana Pacers to clean things up. But after that move led to another several years of failed transactions and disastrous basketball, Dolan ran Walsh and general manager Glen Grunwald out of town in quick succession.
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From 2001-02 through 2021-22, New York lost over a thousand games and had the NBA’s worst winning percentage in the regular season (40.1%) and playoffs (26.7%) over that span. Those 21 years featured 14 coaches, five seasons of fewer than 25 wins and just eight playoff victories.
Instead, the World’s Most Famous Arena instead became known as every rival star’s most favorite arena.
From Paul Pierce and Jason Kidd to Kobe Bryant and LeBron James to Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry, the game’s top stars would come through and laud over the arena’s electric atmosphere — in part because they almost always walked away with a win.
But New York fans would soon find a rush of hope in a team devoid of a traditional superstar.
SUCCESS IN THE NBA, more than any other professional team sport, is determined by having the best player. And the Knicks have hardly been in that position.
Across their 80 years as a franchise, only Reed has won the league’s Most Valuable Player award — and it’s not a coincidence that lined up with the franchise’s only time atop the NBA mountaintop. And only five Knicks have been named to an All-NBA first team: Reed, Frazier, Ewing, Bernard King and Harry Gallatin.
But that hasn’t stopped this franchise’s legions of fans from repeatedly believing the promised land was just around the corner.
They wanted Curry, only for him to be selected one pick before New York was on the clock in 2008. They dreamed of LeBron and Durant signing with them as free agents, only for neither to ever seriously consider it. They prayed for lottery luck in the form of Zion Williamson.
And yet here they are, with their talisman, Finals MVP Jalen Brunson, being the godson of the team’s president of basketball operations, a player who was signed to a contract deemed as an overpay four years ago — only to completely transform the franchise upon his arrival.
But Brunson’s star turn didn’t remove the existential feeling of doom that has always been hanging over the Knicks, and specifically Madison Square Garden. There have been so many ugly moments and rough losses on that court that there’s always a feeling inside that arena that things will eventually start to break against the home team.
And even after putting together the greatest stretches in NBA history to take a 2-0 lead in these NBA Finals, an ugly second half of Game 3 and a horrific first half of Game 4 at MSG had fans on edge. New York was down 29, and “Spurs in 6” was being thrown out all across the building.
For a franchise that had endured so much misery, it seemed only fitting that the Knicks would, on the verge of the ultimate triumph, deliver the cruelest blow to their fanbase yet.
Only that’s not what happened. With every Spurs miss, with every Brunson make, with every ball that bounced in New York’s favor, the crowd just got louder and louder until the building felt like it might shake off its foundation. And that was before, when all looked like it was lost, that Anunoby skied through the air and somehow redirected the ball through the basket.
It was why no one wanted to leave in its aftermath, soaking in the impossible becoming possible. The franchise that’s been on the wrong end of so many memorable playoff moments had authored up one for the ages. Then, Saturday night, the Knicks finished the job.
It took more than a half-century, but a new heir to that throne has arrived. The New York Knicks are the 2026 NBA champions. A trip through the Canyon of Heroes awaits.
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