As the Knicks prepare to celebrate their first NBA title in 53 years, The Post’s writers and columnists provide insight into the indelible moments they’ll remember forever from this championship season and legacy this team will leave after an incredible run.
The final buzzer went off for Game 5 and my mind went to two places: Jalen Brunson and my sneakers.
Neither was for sentimental reasons. The sneakers are clean and white, a proud accomplishment I’ve been able to maintain, shockingly, throughout an entire season in airports, snowy slush in Toronto and the sticky floors of every NBA arena.
A league official warned prior to tipoff that the sneakers would certainly be doused by champagne if the Knicks win, and maybe stained with cigar ash or beer or whatever else tends to spray in the locker room celebrations.
I’m not accustomed to these things covering the Knicks for 11 years. Remember — they didn’t celebrate the NBA Cup very enthusiastically.
“Oh yeah,” the NBA PR person said. “RIP to those sneakers.”
Brunson was on my mind for a practical reason. He was the subject of my column that required filing ASAP. And through the typing, it crossed my consciousness — too briefly to put in the story — that I couldn’t recall Brunson’s first game with the Knicks.
When a player of his magnitude joins a team, the first appearance is usually a big deal. We all remember Carmelo Anthony’s “Coming Home” game. Since I was there, the Knicks debuts of Kristaps Porzingis and Derrick Rose are also logged in my memory. They were certainly the subjects of my story those nights.
But Brunson? The outlook of his impact seemed so mediocre that there’s no recollection. As it turned out, Brunson debuted on Oct. 19, 2022, in Memphis. It was a thrilling overtime loss for the Knicks and the hero — the subject of my main story — was … Cam Reddish.
Brunson had 15 points — fewer than Reddish, Julius Randle and Isaiah Hartenstein. Of the 10 Knicks to play that night, only Brunson and Mitchell Robinson are still on the team.
And for the point guard, it’s been a ride through the impossible, through the humble beginning in Memphis and on to the championship podium. My sneakers? They also shocked the world (my version of it, at least), leaving San Antonio still crispy white.
It really didn’t hit me for several minutes after the final horn, when the media was allowed onto the floor. The Knicks chants were deafening, fans of the orange and blue taking over Frost Bank Center.
Then, I saw Patrick Ewing and Allan Houston, two members of the last Knicks team to reach the NBA Finals. They were beaming – two great Knicks who came close, but never got to experience this as players.
It was particularly gratifying for them, because of that trip to the Finals in 1999, against these same Spurs; Ewing couldn’t play, due to a torn left Achilles tendon in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals. Houston did all he could, but it wasn’t nearly enough against Tim Duncan, David Robinson and Co.
This championship, the franchise’s first in 53 years, holds great meaning to so many. To fans. To former players. To everyone who has followed this team.
“It means everything to the city,” Ewing said.
Growing up in the city in the 1990s myself, the Knicks owned the sports landscape every spring. Baseball season didn’t really begin until the Knicks’ season was complete. There isn’t a team that unifies everyone quite like the Knicks. We’ve seen that this spring, Knicks fans taking over road arenas in each round. There is a different buzz when the Knicks are this good, when they play this deep into the spring.
It’s why Thursday’s parade figures to be an epic party we haven’t seen in these parts in what feels like an eternity.
I thought: I’ve been doing this job a long, long time. I’d had the privilege of writing the column nine times after one of the teams we cover has won a championship, either here at The Post or elsewhere at papers in Newark and Middletown, N.Y.
Each one of those columns — five for the Yankees, two for the Giants, one each for the Devils and Rangers — I keep in a safe place, preserved and protected. Maybe someday I’ll make a collage out of them for a wall in my office. Maybe not. But I sleep better knowing I have them safely tucked away.
One thing, though.
Growing up, my father always insisted: “We root for New York in this house.” So while peer pressure later on insisted I needed to declare one or the other in every sport — and I picked the Mets, Jets, Knicks and Islanders — I never rooted against the other teams. And it was a joy to chronicle their titles.
But they weren’t “my” teams.
It’s here I should mention: I genuinely haven’t lost an ounce of sleep over any team since 1993 or so, with the notable exception of the St. Bonaventure basketball team. Whatever devotions I had previously have been channeled into the Bonnies, exclusively, for almost 35 years. Generally I root for me: good stories, early start times, no overtime.
But a few years ago it occurred to me: You know, at some point, I’d really like to write at least one column on the day after one of the teams I grew up rooting for won a title. And when the final seconds bled off the clock, it occurred to me: now I would.
And I vowed to make the thousand or so words that followed worth the wait. Who knows when the next chance might be?
I, like most New Yorkers, am too young to have seen the Knicks’ first two championships.
I spent decades looking at names — Frazier, Barnett, Monroe, Reed, DeBusschere, Bradley — in the rafters of Madison Square Garden, described as less than gods but more than men, representatives of the way the game should be played.
Finally, the torch has passed to another Knicks team guided by selflessness, to a group that was constantly reminded about a 53-year drought and saw it as an opportunity, rather than a burden.
The title celebration was surreal — thousands of Knicks fans taking over San Antonio, players passing around bottles of booze like frat brothers, lining up to take pictures with the Larry O’Brien Trophy — but Game 4 remains at the forefront.
It was the one moment of doubt, when unimaginable joy looked set to be replaced by familiar pain. The Garden was eerily silent — en route to a 29-point deficit — overshadowing six weeks of a dominant, dream-like run. Somehow, that night ended with the Garden’s all-time apex, capped by OG Anunoby’s mind-melting, heart-swelling, series-saving tip-in.
In the bowels of the building where he first became a champion, Bill Bradley, 82, walked down the hall, smiling, shaking his head in disbelief, speaking to no one in particular — “Incredible” — and for everyone who bleeds orange and blue.
He knew they would be making room in the rafters, that the moment would live longer than those who witnessed it, becoming iconic to the unborn, who one day will look up to the pinwheel ceiling and long to have seen those legends — Brunson, Towns, Anunoby, Hart, Bridges — representatives of the way the game should be played.
I was born in 1999. I was only a few months old when the Knicks lost in the Finals that year. By the time I started making tangible memories, the electric ’90s were well in the past and the Knicks had already established themselves as a perennial laughingstock.
Like so many kids my age, all I had was stories from those older than me. For me, it was my father and grandfather. All I heard was: “It wasn’t always like this,” or “You don’t get how special it is when they’re good.” To me, it felt as close as the stuff I learned in my history textbook in school – it was then, not now.
I am lucky to also have a father in the industry who covered the first half of that magical ’90s era. Back then, they let the reporters sit courtside. He spoke of smelling the burning rubber of their sneakers on the court.
He told stories of waiting around Michael Jordan’s locker – after he repeatedly broke the Knicks’ hearts – and meticulously screwing in his earrings. He reminisced about Patrick Ewing telling everyone to “watch the toes” as they crowded around him. He had endless tales about Pat Riley.
Meanwhile, I was building my fandom around guys like Nate Robinson, Jamal Crawford and Danilo Gallinari. The way longtime MSG PA announcer Mike Walczewski used to yell “Threeeee point goalllll, Daniloooooo Galllllinarrrrrriiii” made him one of my first favorites.
What did I think of when the Knicks won the championship? I thought of Carmelo Anthony hitting those two 3-pointers — at the end of regulation and overtime — against the Bulls on Easter in 2012.
For most of my life, that was the most electric moment I could think of surrounding the Knicks. When I went to college at Wisconsin, and tried explaining to non-New Yorkers what MSG was like, that was the highlight I’d show them. They’d, of course, retort that it was a regular-season game.
So when the final buzzer sounded to end Game 5, I thought of my generation of fans — who now finally have a library of real memories for themselves. Not ones we heard from our parents. Not ones we saw on YouTube.
Ones we saw with our own eyes, in real time. Ones we can trash-talk our out-of-state friends with.
Ones we will eventually pass down to the next generation, just like the ones before us did with theirs.
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