My dad called me after Game 3 and said “don’t get excited yet.” He’s been a Knicks fan since 1969. He watched the ‘73 title. That man has been burned so many times he can’t even let himself feel it, and I refuse to be him right now.
The Knicks lead the Eastern Conference Finals 3-0. One win from the NBA Finals. One win from something this franchise has not touched since 1999, when a scrappy #8 seed somehow willed itself to the biggest stage in basketball and then lost to the Spurs in five games while the city briefly forgot how miserable James Dolan was going to make the next quarter century. I was two years old. I have never, in my conscious memory, seen the New York Knicks in the NBA Finals.
Monday night. Cleveland. Game 4.
Here’s the part that makes it physically hard to process: this team swept through the Cavaliers in three straight as part of a 10-game winning streak — the longest single-postseason winning streak in franchise history, and just the seventh time any team has done it in NBA history. Seven teams. Ever. The 2026 Knicks are one of them. Let that sit.
But I keep getting pulled back to the wreckage we had to climb out of. Because the wins feel better when you remember what losing looked like. The Isiah Thomas years. The 2003 draft where we took Mike Sweetney at nine — NINE — while Carmelo Anthony went third, Chris Bosh went fourth, and Dwyane Wade went fifth. We watched all of that happen and said “Mike Sweetney, that’s our guy.” Then there’s the $316 million we handed out to players who were already washed — Steve Francis, Penny Hardaway, Tracy McGrady — guys who came to the Garden to collect a check and die quietly. I spent my entire childhood watching the Knicks lose 50 games and then SPEND MONEY to lose 50 games again. It was performance art.
https://twitter.com/NBA/status/2057653480878191023
That’s Josh Hart, by the way. 26 points off the bench in Game 2, which was maybe the ugliest-beautiful basketball I’ve ever watched from my couch in Hoboken while my dog Revis barked at the TV like he understood the stakes. Hart said MSG was “definitely the best atmosphere in the league,” and he’s right, and it’s because the people in that building have been waiting their whole adult lives to feel something real from this team.
Which brings me to the guy who made all of this possible and did it in the most uncomplicatedly good way imaginable. Jalen Brunson left $113 million on the table — actual money, $113 million, one hundred and thirteen million dollars — to sign a deal that kept the Knicks under the second apron and allowed them to build something real around him and Karl-Anthony Towns. He was asked about it afterward and said “I’m completely comfortable with it.” No performance. No agency spin. He just meant it.
He’s averaging 27.8 points and 6.7 assists through 13 playoff games. He dropped 38 in Game 1 when we were down 22 points and the whole city briefly died and came back. He had 14 assists in Game 2, a franchise record since 1998. He chose New York when he didn’t have to, and then he became exactly what we needed him to be. That doesn’t happen to us. That has never, in my memory, happened to us.
The New York Liberty won the WNBA title last year. The Rangers have been to the Conference Finals. The Garden has started to smell like winning again, and it’s a smell I genuinely did not know from personal experience.
My dad texted again after I didn’t respond to his call. “Don’t get excited yet,” he said again.
I’m excited, Dad. I can’t help it. One win.
