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The Knicks Lifted a City on Their Backs

After 53 years, the city and its basketball team can finally celebrate together.

New York Knicks fans celebrate the Game 4 win in the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs, on June 10, 2026, in New York City.

After a 53-year drought, the New York Knicks—my lifelong team—won the NBA championship. Many journalists are writing about how the squad’s improbable title run has transformed the city over the last two months: the impromptu chants on the subway, the hugs and high-fives with strangers, the watch parties that spilled out of bars and filled parks and streets, the way royal blue and orange made a city defined by loneliness among crowds feel connected and humane.

Others are writing about how their hardscrabble, masterful leader Jalen Brunson is now “the king of New York”—an implausible fate for a player once derided as “too small” to start for an NBA team, let alone lead a team to a title. Brunson is now the most unexpected superstar in the history of basketball. He was a second-round draft pick cast-aside by the Dallas Mavericks. Basketball podcasters, yipping heads, and other insufferable opinionists mocked the Knicks when they signed him as a free agent. He was an All-Star, but listed at only six-foot-two (and we can all tell he’s really a bit shorter), most pundits thought he could never be the best player on a title team. But Brunson will now forever be the the guy who scored 45 of his team’s 94 points, many over the outstretched arms of San Antonio Spurs’ seven-foot-four French skyscraper Victor Wembanyama, in the decisive Game 5 of the Finals.

I’m also not going to write too much about those gut-wrenching Finals contests—every one of which came with elevated blood pressure. By Game 5, it had the feel of a karaoke bar. The beats were similar every night: The Spurs came out as if shot out of a cannon. They took a big lead while the Knicks bided their time, counting on the Spurs to crack under the exhaustion and pressure. The Knicks, astoundingly, only led for 24 percent of the games yet won four games to one. They rope-a-doped the Spurs. This team was Muhammad Ali against George Foreman in the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle fight, in which Ali let Foreman punch himself out before he went in for the knockout. Now this whole never-say-die squad—particularly forward OG Anunoby—will never buy a drink in........

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