Jose Alvarado brought the Larry O’Brien Trophy to Puerto Rico on June 25th and I have watched the airport video seven times and I am going to watch it seven more.
According to El Nuevo Día and Primera Hora, Alvarado touched down at Aeropuerto Internacional Luis Muñoz Marín to a crowd that looked like New Year’s Eve and a World Cup final had a baby. Thousands of people. Governor Jenniffer González Colón was there. Carlos Beltrán was there. Félix “Tito” Trinidad was there. Butch Lee was there, the man who won a ring in 1980 and waited 46 years for someone to do this again. Daddy Yankee was there. The whole island showed up.
This is the single best sports video of the year and I have no notes.
Here’s what makes it genuinely insane: Alvarado had to get special NBA authorization to even take the trophy out of the building. The Larry O’Brien is normally kept at league headquarters under security protocols Carlos Arroyo described to Primera Hora as “complicadísimo” — and Arroyo said Alvarado made it happen anyway. JJ Barea won a championship with Dallas in 2011 and could not pull this off. Barea was there at the celebration watching Alvarado do the thing he never could. The NBA doesn’t just hand you the hardware and say good luck on the flight. Alvarado willed this into existence.
He is 28 years old, Brooklyn-born with Puerto Rican roots, and only the third Puerto Rican in history to win an NBA title. After Butch Lee in 1980. After Barea in 2011. Three people in 46 years. And now Alvarado showed up on that island with the actual trophy, not a replica, the real one, and let thousands of strangers hold the thing they had been waiting their whole lives to see.
Standing at the airport he said: “No saben lo mucho que significa ver estas leyendas para mí, es especial.” You don’t know how much it means to see these legends. It’s special to me. He said it looking at Trinidad and Butch Lee like a kid who can’t believe any of this is real. Which, fair. He carried the championship home on a plane and the island lost its mind. None of this is real.
The caravan from the airport drove through metropolitan San Juan to the T-Mobile District, and if you haven’t seen the street footage, go find it now and clear your afternoon. This isn’t a parade in the conventional sense. This is a city pouring itself into the streets because one of their own, a guy who signed a hometown discount to stay in New York and was at the Puerto Rican Day Parade ten days earlier saying “I’m blessed. And a little drunk,” went and did something nobody from that island had done since the Clinton administration.
https://x.com/AlvaradoJose15/status/2069210850372546956
I don’t care about salary cap math right now. I don’t care about second apron implications. When the Knicks ended 53 years of waiting by beating San Antonio 94-90 in Game 5, the moment belonged to the whole team. But the Knicks ended 53 years of waiting and this — this airport scene — is what that actually looks like when it lands somewhere. Not the Canyon of Heroes parade, not the press conferences, not the confetti. This. Thousands of people in San Juan at noon on a Wednesday, screaming themselves hoarse over a golden trophy that one of their guys carried home on a plane.
He said the small things matter. “Son las cosas pequeñas las que importan. Soy como ellos.”
I am like them.
Man.
