That was awesome, and it’s not over yet.
I always want to remove emotion from my articles. If you’re gonna write about sports, you have to remove your biases and your opinions as best you can. Nobody wants to hear a homer in dark times, nobody wants to hear a doomer in great times. Personal stuff is mostly put to the side.
This is an exception.
I was not alive when the Knicks last advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals. My older brother was in middle school, my parents hadn’t met yet, and I know all of your lives have changed tremendously in the last 25 years, even if you did witness the 2000 ECF.
After the win, I scrolled through the comments of Russ’s “scenes” post and Andrew’s brief but fitting article after the final buzzer (side note: he wanted to publish it after Game 1, but waiting was such a great call). It was dozens and dozens of longtime P&T people celebrating the gigantic weight off the franchise’s shoulders and referencing decade-old running jokes that I wouldn’t understand being a relative newbie here.
I know many of you reading this have, in fact, seen this team advance this far. Some of you, I just know, are just like me. Young adults who haven’t seen the franchise you love win two playoff rounds. While it is a tragic low bar, I hope we can all reminisce on the road that got us here. We have home court advantage in the Eastern Conference Finals, for crying out loud! That hasn’t happened since ‘94!!!
Right now, an older fan would talk about the dark years after the Ewings and Houstons of the world fizzled out. The Isiah Thomas years. The late 2000s, before the brief revival, brought about by Amare’ Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony. That brief revival is where my story begins.
I started watching basketball in those winning times. A much younger me idolized Carmelo Anthony. He had such an influence on my basketball fandom that growing up playing rec basketball, I’d be yelled at by my older brother when I did his three-to-the-dome after making a shot. I loved Linsanity, I loved the hope that Knickstape brought. I played NBA 2K14 on my Kindle Fire and specifically remember really liking to use Beno Udrih to shoot threes. When everything fell apart in that 2013-14 season, I was too young to understand it beyond that my team had suddenly crashed and burned overnight.
Like many, I didn’t like the draft pick of Kristaps Porzingis, although I didn’t know much about him. That 2016-17 season, when Derrick Rose said we were a superteam? I ate it all up. I erroneously believed in those Jeff Hornacek teams with Melo halfway out the door, and the dysfunction turned up to 10. I didn’t care.
Phil Jackson was trying to force the two pillars of the franchise out at separate times. The day Melo got traded broke my heart. A younger me stupidly ripped apart one of his jerseys with scissors, mostly because I got inspiration from a YouTuber who did the same for Kevin Durant (shoutout LostNUnbound). At that point, I put all my basketball fandom into Porzingis, a man who today sat helplessly as the Garden that once saw him as their savior celebrated in pure ecstasy over toppling the 7’3” Latvian’s team.
When Porzingis came out on fire in 2017-18, I paraded “Porzingod” as an MVP candidate. Remember when he was averaging 30? Growing up near Philadelphia, I’d always compare him to Joel Embiid and say our franchise big man was better every step of the way.
Now, something we all share are some heavy delusions we picked up during the dark days. My big one was believing that Porzingis and Willy Hernangomez were going to be a top-shelf PF/C tandem for a decade. That was fun for a little while. One day at a game (I think it was 1/14/2018 against New Orleans), they did a postgame meet-and-greet with two players. To perfectly encapsulate Knicks basketball at the time, it was Damyean Dotson and Ron Baker. I believed in Dotson a lot, to the point where I was hyped when he came back for like two weeks in 2021-22. My dad hated Baker, for some reason.
Remember my rec basketball mention earlier? On February 6, 2018, I walked out of practice one day to see a Bleacher Report notification saying Porzingis left the game with a knee injury. That night, his Knicks career ended with a torn ACL. It also began the darkest year and a half imaginable for Knicks basketball.
Here are some names. Noah Vonleh. Emmanuel Mudiay. Mindaugas Kuzminskas. Dennis Smith Jr. Doug McDermott. Kyle O’Quinn. Henry Ellenson. Kadeem Allen. I went to and watched a bunch of games with those guys playing.
As for the picks during this time, yeesh. I was at a Knicks watch party in 2017 for Frank Ntilikina, whom I had no idea who he was. I hated the Kevin Knox pick, mostly because I wanted Villanova boy Mikal Bridges. The draft lottery was a yearly torture mechanism, by the way. Hope Mavs fans know how lucky they are.
Speaking of, that 2019 delusion was something. Remember when we thought we could get KD, Kyrie, and Zion? Turns out, the draft lottery gave us the third pick, and the two max slots we opened up were for nothing. I got bullied mercilessly after the Nets swiped the stars that should’ve been ours. In the end, we came out better!
The 2020-21 season will always hold a place in my heart, and so will most players from that team. When you only had faint memories of the last Knicks’ playoff run, being able to watch a winning team again was so fun, especially when I got to go to my first playoff game in the unfortunate beginning of Trae Young’s New York villain era.
My delusion came back that offseason. We got Fournier! We got Kemba! We finally beat the hated Sixers for the first time in four years! Oh boy, that season sucked. As much as I badly held onto hope they’d figure it out, they just never did.
I consider myself a long-term optimist with my sports teams. Even when the sky was falling early in 22-23, I still believed the Knicks were gonna be fine. However, not even I could envision the magic that began on December 4, 2022, when the Knicks outlasted their future playoff opponents, the Cleveland Cavaliers, 92-81.
If Spida made this, everything might be different. And I mean, everything. Thibs might’ve been fired. Randle might’ve been traded sooner. The joy we feel right now might never have happened.
The way 2023 ended was heartbreaking. The choke last year with a mountain of injuries was devastating. It felt genuinely weird that the Knicks entered this season with real expectations, and that boiled over into frustration when they underperformed.
But now, as we go through the middle of May, the Knicks have conquered the beast they’ve been attempting to slay since the very beginning. The narratives of being soft, overpaid, and overrated are gone. And it’s just incredible.
Think about this. OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges are the 3rd and 4th options for this team. For most of my life, they’d be running the show on the teams I’ve watched. That’s just insane.
Everything that transpired to get to this point is why I’m so grateful for the pillars of this Knicks revival. It’s why I shy away from calling out Leon Rose or Tom Thibodeau sometimes. It’s why I hold Derrick Rose and Julius Randle in high regard. It’s why Jalen Brunson means so much to me.
You probably could’ve gone without opening this article and reading these 1300 words of rambling. But I hope you gained an understanding of a fan that’s finally seeing his franchise do things he only could’ve dreamed of.