New York Knicks fans outside Madison Square Garden (Alamy / Kerry Burke / New York Daily News)
New York Knicks fans outside Madison Square Garden (Alamy / Kerry Burke / New York Daily News)
The New York Knicks are two victories shy of winning the 2026 NBA championship. They’d won thirteen games in a row before their loss on Monday night. As the basketball commentator Zach Lowe said recently, if the Knicks capture the title, this stretch would be ‘in the conversation for the greatest playoff run in the history of the NBA’.
New York City is riding high. Fat Joe, the Bronx rapper, has called it ‘the greatest unification of the city since 9/11’. Legions of casual Knicks supporters are now dedicated fans; those of us who were already devotees have become entirely possessed by the prospect of winning the championship for the first time since 1973. Even during away games, Madison Square Garden has been jammed to capacity with fans watching the action unfold on its jumbotron. Thousands more have gathered outside the arena to watch the games broadcast on giant outdoor screens.
‘Knicks in four,’ the crowds had been chanting, hoping for a straight win in the best-of-seven series. But Monday’s loss means it will take at least five games to beat the San Antonio Spurs and their formidable 22-year-old 7’4” centre, Victor Wembanyama. They’re playing at Madison Square Garden again tonight.
For decades, the Knicks were a byword for mediocrity. Since the turn of the millennium, the team’s failures have hung on their owner, James Dolan, whose father put him in charge of the family empire’s sports division soon after acquiring it in the 1990s. Now executive chairman of Madison Square Garden Sports, Madison Square Garden Entertainment and MSG Networks, Dolan is as paranoid and thin-skinned as the next billionaire. He has reportedly constructed a vast biometric surveillance network throughout Madison Square Garden. Chanting ‘Sell the team’ at a Knicks home game may be cause for immediate removal and a lifetime ban.
Dolan invited Donald Trump to Monday’s game. (‘I’ve known him for a long time,’ Dolan told ESPN in 2018. ‘I got married at Mar-a-Lago. I’m a member of Mar-a-Lago, and I support him as a friend.’) The two men watched together from a luxury box. The mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, was also in attendance; he bought his own standing-room only ticket.
Trump’s grinning face was shown on the jumbotron during the national anthem before the game, but ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ provided little refuge for the president, whose appearance on screen provoked a chorus of boos so loud that they drowned out the singing – far worse than the jeers directed at the visiting Spurs. Trump didn’t seem too burdened by it all: once play was underway, he was caught on video apparently dozing off.
The enhanced security for the president meant excruciating queues for fans and reduced pedestrian access for several blocks around the stadium. The huge, raucous rallies outside MSG were prohibited altogether – a microcosm of the way power operates in America, and for whose benefit.
I’m following the NBA Finals thousands of miles from midtown Manhattan. In my North London flat, I set the alarm for 1.20 a.m. on game nights, just in time for tip-off, and watch on my laptop. I inherited my fandom from my father. When he landed in Brooklyn as a teenager, nearly fifty years ago, rooting for the Knicks was one of the ways he became American. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t a fan. Knicks stars were my earliest childhood heroes; their rivals, including the Spurs, the first targets of my disdain.
Tribalism in sport can be as ugly as any other form of tribalism, but fanbases are more welcoming than some other kinds of imagined community: unlike nation states, their doors are open to all who wish to enter. Geography often supplies the grist for fandom, but is hardly essential. Supporters of several Premier League football clubs outnumber British passport holders.
Vaporous as kinships in sport may be, their materiality, too, is undeniable – as is evident now in New York. I know I’m looking on from afar, but a flood of testimony from friends, family and social media paints a picture of a unified, swaggering city. A sort of truce seems to be in effect, papering over the sectarianism pulling at the seams of American life. However briefly and superficially, the city’s infinitely fissiparous social, political and cultural spheres have, for now, cohered – millions watching together, cheering for an end to the Knicks’ half-century of humiliation.