It didn’t take a full 24 hours after the New York Knicks clinched their first NBA Finals berth in a generation for the hot-take cycle to go nuclear. The morning after the Knicks completed their embarrassing Eastern Conference Finals sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers, ESPN’s First Take and Stephen A. Smith and longtime New York radio personality Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo debated whether that was accomplishment enough to put Knicks guard Jalen Brunson atop the franchise’s Mount Rushmore of players, a GOAT among GOATs.
Never mind that Walt “Clyde” Frazier, the centerpiece of the Knicks’ last championship campaign, was alive and present when Brunson raised the ECF trophy in Cleveland, or that the same was true of Patrick Ewing and Charles Oakley, around whom the team built contenders in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Most fans old enough to recall at least the Knicks’ Ewing-Oakley era would dismiss crowning Brunson before his first Finals Game One, which tips off in San Antonio on Wednesday. But if the substance of their Brunson debate was absurd, Smith and Russo were onto something. Those earlier generations of Knicks didn’t just represent eras in which New York teams could reliably be counted on as perennial contenders; they represented a time when those teams’ stars moved culture more than any athletes elsewhere.
It’s a bygone era, faded by decades of mostly losing efforts from the major New York franchises and the rise of dynasties in Boston, Oakland and San Antonio, whose Spurs are the Knicks’ foil in the Finals. It’s also marked by the digital era’s displacement of Gotham as sports’ cultural center of gravity, where athletes with good social media teams need neither championships nor New York’s bright lights to become transcendent stars. Shedeur Sanders, who played the first half of last season as a rookie backup quarterback in Cleveland, still raked in a record $17.7 million bag for licensing of his name on jerseys and other merch.
Meanwhile, consider what’s happened in New York sports since 1997, the last time the Knicks played for the Larry O’Brien Trophy. Aside from the Yankees’ World Series threepeat in the 1998-2000 seasons (admittedly, a threepeat, even 25 years ago, is a big caveat), the Big Apple has claimed only four championships in three decades: another from the Yanks in ’09, two from the NFL’s Giants in 2007 and 2011, and one from the WNBA’s Liberty in 2024. (In soccer, NYC FC and Gotham FC have also won titles, but soccer still holds nowhere near the cultural weight of basketball or football.)
The Knicks, Nets, Jets, Mets and the NHL’s Islanders and Rangers are all zero for a generation in the hunt to bring New York sports back to glory. Among New York teams that have won titles, has any produced an athlete who, like Ewing or Frazier, still carries the torch as a defining sports figure for the city? Having won two Lombardis, Eli Manning is best known today as his older brother’s sidekick on ESPN’s alternate Monday Night Football broadcasts.
Derek Jeter has a permanent place in Yankees’ lore, but it’s debatable whether his place in New York’s cultural tapestry rivals that of, say, Stephen Curry’s in the Bay, Allen Iverson’s in Philly or even Tom Brady’s in Boston. Breanna Stewart, the Liberty’s only WNBA MVP in history, has the bona fides—she’s at least from upstate New York, has only played professionally in NYC and won a championship just as the W found its own oxygen among men’s leagues. But alas, misogyny still exists.
None of them quite feels the same as the potential for the Knicks, led by a legitimate superstar in Brunson, to win their first NBA championship since 1973. That feels like a kid putting on a fresh pair of Ewings in 1989, Queen Latifah or De La Soul’s debut albums playing in the background. It feels like hip-hop before rap beef, like sports as appointment viewing instead of marquis games hidden from fans on streaming platforms.
It feels like if they win, Brunson will have a legitimate claim to a piece of New York’s sports legacy, even if it’s not as one of the city’s GOATs.