There’s no monoculture anymore. Sometimes, something feels like it has the attention of every person in the country, like the Game of Thrones finale or a presidential debate. But then it turns out that many millions of Americans were just not paying attention to those things, and they felt more important to me because of my own little bubbles. Nothing actually occupies mental real estate for everyone at one time.
Except the 2026 New York Knicks. It’s not like this is the first New York–based sports team to make a deep postseason run in recent years. The Yankees played the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series not even two years ago, after all. But I have observed a certain inescapability about the Knicks right now, even as a person who does not live in New York, has never lived in New York, and probably will never live in New York. There’s a standard degree of profile bump that everything gets from being based in Manhattan, and then there’s the level of cultural juice this team has right now.
I don’t think this is just a vibe. Some of the ubiquity is quantifiable. The ratings for these NBA Finals, which the Knicks lead 2-1, are unusually huge. The ticket prices for Game 3, which the Knicks lost, might have made you puke. Current U.S. Google search interest for “knicks” is well more than double what it was for “yankees” at any point in the past five years, including during the 2024 World Series. This is a blunt-object measurement, but Knicks search interest is 20 percent higher than “super bowl” was at game time each of the past four years. The Knicks are even beating up on the World Cup domestically and mounting a pretty good charge at soccer’s flagship event globally. This is a disorienting amount of Knicks.
There’s just not been anything like this, for a long time, in pro sports. New York being New York doesn’t explain it. The NBA’s popularity certainly doesn’t. Even the Knicks’ status as longtime punching bags finally having a real moment does not offer a satisfactory explanation. What’s happening here is some kind of confluence, one that a lot of people are desperate to bottle up but that might not come around again.
I realized Knicks fever entered a different realm this week, when the franchise found itself (or, really, inserted itself) into a saga involving the White House, the mayor of New York, and the NYPD. Donald Trump attended Game 3 against the San Antonio Spurs, which promptly became the Knicks’ first loss since April 23. To accommodate the visit, the Secret Service established a big security perimeter around Madison Square Garden on Monday night. Trump’s night out meant no throngs of Knicks fans screaming in a mosh pit outside the Garden while their wealthier compatriots watched inside. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration set up an official watch party in Bryant Park, which didn’t exactly invalidate crowd-control concerns outside the Garden. A blame game ensued, with Trump pal and Knicks owner James Dolan running interference for his friend and labeling Mamdani and his police commissioner as “party poopers” who were infringing on Knicks’ fans right to party. In other words, the main flashpoint right now between the country’s dominant conservative politician/cult leader and its most famous leftist politician is about who’s at fault for inconveniencing Knicks fans during the NBA Finals.
Politicians attaching themselves to good sports teams is one of the oldest games in the book. But usually, the intensity dial doesn’t turn this high. In this case, maybe it was inevitable.
For the purposes of getting a lot of attention, the Knicks are in a sweet spot. They are the unchallenged team of New York in a way that the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Rangers, and Islanders are not. (The recently relocated Brooklyn Nets exist, technically, but have no claim on the city.) That trains the full might of the country’s cultural capital on the Knicks team, sure. But I would normally roll my eyes at being told to care about the Knicks, and I am not doing that this year. The Knicks haven’t been in the finals since 1999 and haven’t won them since 1973, as a series of ineffective leaders (most recently Dolan) have driven them into the ground. That the Knicks are now so close to a championship has made them a seductive proxy for me and many other fans of desperate, hopeless professional sports outfits. No team with this unmatched level of celebrity following should ever be some sort of scrappy underdog, but the Knicks, at the moment, are doing that. I don’t understand it any more than you do, but I do feel it.
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It helps that this team has cool players. The Knicks would inspire a carnival around them even if their roster were the NBA’s most insufferable pack of jackals. But these Knicks aren’t that. Jalen Brunson is the NBA’s best current story of a short guy, a second-round pick his old team gave up on, turning out to be a franchise player. Karl-Anthony Towns’ brilliance has never been in question, but he’s had to battle through immense off-court heartbreak and has been unusually open about his struggles with grief. He’s a deeply personal superstar who has shared more of himself with us than most of his peers. The Knicks fans in my life would take a bullet for him. Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges were Brunson’s college teammates at Villanova. The Knicks are oddly accessible, or at least they create that feeling by way of their personalities and the fact that a couple of their best players host a popular podcast together.
OK, then. New York’s team, which has been bad for a while, is now good, thanks to a likable crew of athletes. That still doesn’t explain this level of fuss, though. The fourth ingredient is our sick national obsession with making content out of everything. You know how you’ve seen a bunch of videos of Knicks fans frolicking around Manhattan during and after games? Influencers trying to get viral videos have stirred up at least some of the misbehavior. I have heard or read the term “Knicks for clicks” at least three times in the past month, and my understanding is that the phenomenon of performative, obnoxious Knicks fandom is not even limited to New York itself. (A bunch of my Los Angeles friends pack into a Knicks bar on the other coast. They complain about how people have forgotten how to act normally as the Knicks have gotten deeper into these playoffs.)
Occasionally, though, our virality-addled brains churn out something golden. You may have seen this viral rap verse going around: “My mayor’s Muslim / My bagel’s Jewish / My Christian Dior / Knicks in four.” The Knicks did not sweep, but the rap was still a breakout success story for whichever executive at Kalshi, the prediction market, dreamed up the marketing video in which it first appeared. The Knicks are such a huge spectacle right now that paid agitators have latched onto the mostly organic movement around them. These groups have poured gasoline on each other, and the result for our culture has been “more Knicks.”
The Knicks may or may not ever be this good again. That they currently have the all-time best average points differential in an NBA playoff run would point toward “no,” but I’m not in the business of doubting Brunson and his friends. What I am in the business of doubting is that you, an unaffiliated sports fan, will ever hear this much about a team in a compressed timeline like this again. Whether you’re obsessed with the Knicks or merely absorbing them through osmosis, you’re right: This summer isn’t normal.