The New York Knicks are NBA champions for the first time since 1973 after their squad of often-overlooked players beat Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs 94-90 on Saturday night.
If Jalen Brunson (who had 45 of the Knicks’ points in the clincher), Karl-Anthony Towns and the rest of the tight-knit group are curious what comes next, they can look to the enduring treatment of some New York’s finest stars from five decades ago to see how winning a title in this city changes lives. Already, new deals are rolling in.
Gotham all but invented the concept of the megawatt athletic endorsement, as it was New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath who paved the way for the phenomenon of the jock who makes more cash on the side than when in uniform. Knees jellied by repeated trauma, Broadway Joe was already well into an agonizing decline when the pantyhose people reached out to his handlers in 1973 (he won his guaranteed Super Bowl four years prior).
Namath’s willingness to shill for everything from La-Z-Boy recliners to Hamilton Beach popcorn poppers to Hanes Beautymist allowed the hobbled superstar to remain the most recognizable, and bankable, athlete of the early ’70s … and his dominion over the emerging market may have played a role in keeping many of the Knicks out of the commercial spotlight.
Not that you would have suspected as much if you’d been keeping an eye on Clyde Frazier’s off-court activities. In 1973, the Knicks’ floor general took a page out of Namath’s playbook and leveraged his heightened profile to launch his own signature shoe with Puma. In overseeing the design of the Puma Clyde, Frazier also became the first baller to get paid to wear a pair of sneakers—for which he initially commanded the princely sum of $5,000 (or just shy of $40,000 in today’s hyperinflated currency)—and he wore the kicks everywhere.
In keeping with Frazier’s superfly styling-and-profiling, Puma cranked out nearly 400 color combinations of the shoe to ensure he’d always have a perfect match lined up to go with one of the thousands of eye-popping custom suits he had made for himself. That level of concierge service was not at all common at the time; in a sense, Puma’s white-glove handling of their larger-than-life spokesman served as a template for the sort of perks that are now de rigueur in the endorsement game.
The deals Frazier’s teammates landed were distinctly less razzle-dazzle. Dave DeBusschere appeared in a decidedly less-than-dope commercial for Clairol’s Great Day, a product used to color graying hair. Earl “The Pearl” Monroe’s famous Jordache tie-up didn’t arrive until designer jeans became a thing in the early ’80s, and future U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley got more endorsements on the campaign trail than he did as an NBA player. Willis Reed also didn’t make a ton of extra dough after the 1973 title (or following his indelible walk-on role in Game 7 of the 1970 series), but Madison Avenue’s seeming oversight of this New York legend was a function of how Black athletes were largely overlooked by marketers of the era.
That barrier has shrunk in the ensuing decades for NBA stars, and New York City’s local football teams are not hogging the current cultural zeitgeist, creating opportunity for the current crop of Knicks. The downtrodden Jets and Giants have combined for just one winning season since 2016.
Yet, until recently, no active Knicks contributor was seriously considered a championship-grade player outside New York. By extension, most were not treated as top-tier national marketing figures.
None entered the playoffs with signature shoes or ranked in the top 25 in Instagram followers among active NBA players. Towns, the only Knicks star in Sportico‘s top 20 highest-paid players list, came into the season trailing at least 17 of his peers in endorsement money at $5 million per year.
Critics suggested the entire New York roster was burdened by clear fatal flaws. Brunson was too short to finish the job—a charge WNBA head coach and TV analyst Becky Hammon infamously made last year. OG Anunoby was too injury prone, and for marketers, too quiet. Josh Hart was a Winning PlayerTM, but one who could also be game-planned off the floor in the biggest moments, as the Indiana Pacers succeeded in doing in 2025. Mikal Bridges was a role guy mentally broken by the expectations that came with New York giving up a basket of future first-round picks to acquire him from the Brooklyn Nets.
Worst of all, Towns was widely considered “soft as Charmin,” said to embody the most shameful traits of the modern NBA star. Basketball fans treated him more cruelly than even pre-championship Pau Gasol, a Hall of Famer peppered with vitriol in the 2000s as sports TV and the web entered the hot take era.
“He’s built like a whole f***ing bitch,” former NBA guard Gilbert Arenas said of Towns on his Gil’s Arena podcast last year.
In 10 NBA regular seasons before 2025-26, Towns averaged 23 points and 11 rebounds on 40% 3-point shooting, significantly better than Gasol’s 18.8, 8.6 and non-existent 3-point shooting before the Spaniard lifted the Larry O’Brien in 2009.
Like Gasol when he was still Kobe Bryant’s fall guy, Towns’ stats did decline in April and May, both in terms of per-game averages and efficiency. But rare is the NBA star who didn’t take his lumps before breaking through. Towns still averaged 20 and 10 in the playoffs before this season.
The Towns trolling has often been bizarrely personal and, at least on social media, sometimes connected to homophobia. People have relentlessly mocked the pitch of his voice, suggesting his speaking style makes him inferior to other basketball players. This isn’t a fringe “joke”; it’s something even brands, such as PrizePicks, have alluded to in social media posts this year in search of virality.
Towns mostly ignored the attacks, at least in public, even when he had every reason to swipe back. His mother Jackie Cruz-Towns died in 2020 of complications from COVID-19. The Minnesota Timberwolves stunned him with the 2024 trade that sent him to New York, removing him from the community that had his back during some of his worst personal moments as the rest of the country mocked him.
Towns arrived in New York with his fate already decided by many national media members.
“Oh buddy, the Knicks are really going to do this???” former ESPN host Bomani Jones, a longtime Towns critic, wrote on social media after news of the trade broke. In a follow-up post, Jones wrote, “It’s a transparently awful idea. … this is gonna be hilarious.”
The joke, it turns out, is on the non-believers.
All the Knicks fans who have unconditionally backed Towns—and the rest of the roster—are vindicated. As Towns has stuck it to critics, including a Game 2 Finals performance where Charles Barkley remarked at halftime that the center was “just taking [Wembanyama’s] ass to the woodshed,” New Yorkers feel in some way they have done so, too.
For what it’s worth, though, Namath can attest that not all endorsement juice in store is worth the squeeze.
At a premiere party in 2012, Namath said he’d always had mixed feelings about the Hanes commercial, for which he memorably poured himself into a pair of women’s hosiery. The ad landed Namath on Nixon’s Enemies List, but that’s not why Namath didn’t care for it; as he recalled from a distance of more than four decades, his initial concern was that his mother would disapprove.
“She thought it was funny, which I guess helped me see the humor in it,” Namath recalled. “But I gotta tell you, I didn’t go back and look at it again for a long, long time.”