The Knicks championship celebration in New York City ended with school buses on fire, 63 arrests, a 17-year-old shot in the foot near 42nd and Broadway, and ABC News running the headline “Mayhem mars euphoria” — and I want to be very clear that all of this is completely on brand.
Fifty-three years. That’s what was sitting on the city’s chest when Brunson’s 45-point masterpiece ended the Spurs’ season at 107-106 Friday night. Nineteen thousand, three hundred and ninety-two days. You think that just evaporates cleanly into the night sky?
Times Square is the most surveilled public space on earth. There are cameras on every corner, cops on every block, and tourists who haven’t stopped filming since 2019. It still couldn’t hold us.
https://x.com/nypost/status/2066170447805264214
People climbed scaffolding. They scaled light poles. They climbed on top of school buses — then, apparently, some of those buses caught fire. (My dad just texted me about this and I’m ignoring him.) Fans tried to hitch rides on a moving fire truck. Windshields got smashed. Fireworks went off in Brooklyn and Central Park. Four people were stabbed or slashed. Ten NYPD officers got hurt, one punched in the face, one hit with a glass bottle.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked fans to represent “the very best of our city.” James Dolan urged everyone to celebrate responsibly.
Neither of them grew up rooting for a team that hadn’t won since Nixon was president.
The chaos wasn’t a failure of New York City. It was proof of how much this meant. You want a quiet, dignified championship celebration? Root for a franchise with recent success. Root for someone who isn’t Knicks fans, who spent five decades taking loss after loss after loss and still filled the Garden every single night. When that pressure releases all at once, it doesn’t come out as a polite round of applause.
It comes out as a school bus on fire in Times Square during a Knicks championship celebration.
I know a 17-year-old getting shot is serious — he was taken to Bellevue in stable condition, three people were arrested, a firearm recovered — and I’m not laughing at that. I’m not laughing at the stabbings or the 10 injured cops. None of that is a punchline. But I also refuse to let the worst 0.01% of a crowd define what happened Friday night in this city.
What happened was New York — the full, complicated, beautiful, chaotic, impossible New York — going completely off the rails because it finally, finally had something to go off the rails about.
The Knicks championship celebration turned Times Square chaos into must-see television at 2 AM. People streamed out of every bar in Midtown. Fans packed the block outside MSG chanting into the night. The NYC celebration that Mamdani is now trying to shepherd toward something orderly — his parade kicks off June 18, Canyon of Heroes, 10 AM, Battery Park to City Hall — started in the streets the moment Brunson hit the floor.
For the full ride on how we got here, check out our NBA coverage.
Thursday, the city gets a parade. The Knicks get the Canyon of Heroes. Jalen Brunson gets the Keys to the City. And I, personally, will be standing somewhere on Broadway at 10 AM, having not slept, crying into a bodega coffee.
Revis doesn’t even know what’s happening. He just knows I keep yelling.
