The Knicks parade is tomorrow morning and I, a person who has been waiting his entire conscious life for this exact moment, am going to lose my entire mind in lower Manhattan.
Thursday, June 18. 10 AM. Battery Park to Broadway through the Canyon of Heroes, ending at City Hall Plaza where Mayor Zohran Mamdani is handing Jalen Brunson the keys to New York City. The Knicks parade 2026 is happening, it is real, and if you try to tell me to relax about it I will not hear you because I will already be on the PATH train with a blue-and-orange scarf that my mother bought me in 2004 and that has never once brought good luck until now.
Here is what you need to understand about what this actually means. This is not just the first Knicks championship since 1973. This is the first ticker-tape parade in franchise history. After the 1970 title with Willis Reed and Walt Frazier, Mayor Lindsay held a small ceremony at Gracie Mansion and called it a day — no Canyon of Heroes, no confetti raining down from the Financial District, nothing. After 1973, they got a slightly larger City Hall ceremony. Walt Clyde Frazier didn’t even make it. Lindsay had effectively banned ticker-tape parades for sports teams and the Knicks got robbed twice over. My dad texted me at 11:45 PM the night they clinched to inform me of this fact. (My dad just texted me about this.) He had to learn it from Twitter like the rest of us, but he felt personally wronged by a mayor who left office in 1973.
https://twitter.com/NBA_NewYork/status/2066161959968412155
https://twitter.com/TheDougRush/status/2066536335322619918
So no, this isn’t the second Canyon of Heroes parade in Knicks history. It’s the first one. Nobody alive who was at Madison Square Garden for the 1970 or 1973 titles ever got to stand on Broadway and watch ticker tape fall on their guys. We are about to do something that has literally never happened before.
Mayor Mamdani said it might be the largest parade in New York City history. He also said something that stopped me cold: “I was reading a piece this morning that wrote about often times in our city’s history, this kind of unity comes in a moment of tragedy, and it’s so beautiful that this unity is coming from a moment of joy.” I grew up in Bergen County watching this city absorb things: 9/11, 2008, the pandemic, and still buying tickets to a team that kept breaking its fans’ hearts. The Garden sold out through Isiah Thomas running the front office into the rubble. It sold out through James Dolan’s decade of malaise, through lottery picks that amounted to nothing, through years when the Knicks were a punchline on national television and we just had to sit there and take it. The suffering was not metaphorical. It was specific and sustained and we did it together.
Jalen Brunson scored 45 of the team’s 94 points in Game 5. Forty-five. And he made the clutch free throws in Game 2 when it mattered most. He was named unanimous Finals MVP and his postgame quote was “Holy s—. I have no words.” That’s your champion. Not some manufactured media darling, not a guy who demanded trades to get to a contender. A guy from New Jersey who chose this city, chose this weight, and then carried it all the way to San Antonio and back. He told the fans to be safe before the trophy was even in his hands. He was thinking about us.
The most un-glamorous superstar New York could have gotten.
Exactly the right one.
My dog Revis is too young to understand any of this, which is probably fine because I’m going to be crying on a stranger’s shoulder somewhere near Fulton Street and it would embarrass him. I was born in 2000. I have never once been alive when the Knicks won anything. My father watched the 1994 Finals on a bad television and has been waiting thirty-two years longer than me. He’s taking the bus in from Fort Lee tomorrow morning.
The Canyon of Heroes is ready. So are we.
