Objection: Everything We Need to Know, We Can Learn From the Champion New York Knicks
A pay cut, a 29-point hole, a kid from Christ the King, a jersey signed by the Pope, and a chant that turned the whole city into one room. What the 2026 champion Knicks can teach all of us.
“The 2026 New York Knicks. They will be forever remembered as the team that proved: no lead is too big, and no guard is too small.”
That was Tyler Murray on the ESPN New York radio call as the final buzzer went Saturday night, and I have been thinking about it ever since with tears in my eyes. The Knicks won their first championship in fifty-three years. That number is older than I am. I cried. The people in my building cried. Strangers were hugging on the sidewalk like a war had ended.
If you usually come here for politics, courts, and power, give me this one. I promise it connects, and it connects harder than I expected when I sat down to write it. Subscribe and stay with me.
Because this run wasn’t only basketball. This team handed all of us a blueprint, and I think we could use one badly right about now.
No one believed in him, and it didn’t change a thing. When the Knicks signed Jalen Brunson in 2022, the experts lined up to call it a mistake—too much money for a guard they decided was too small to ever matter. Stephen A. Smith was running whole segments about it. Brunson never argued back with any of them. He just kept getting better every single season until Saturday, when he dropped 45 points in the closeout and walked away with the Finals MVP trophy while those old takes got quietly scrubbed. The doubt was never about him. It was only ever about the people doing the doubting.
He took less so the whole team could eat. Two years ago, Brunson left somewhere around $113 million on the table, signing early and under market so the Knicks could keep Karl-Anthony Towns, Mikal Bridges, Josh Hart, and OG Anunoby together. The best and highest-earning guy on the roster decided a ring mattered more than the distance between very rich and obscenely rich. The man who gave up the most is the one holding the trophy this morning. Remember that the next time someone tells you there isn’t enough to go around.
Down big was never the same as done. In Game 4, the Knicks trailed by twenty-nine points, and many people doubted them (personally, I placed a $5 bet on them at halftime at +2000 to prove I still believed, so I went home with an extra $100). They won that game 107-106, and they clawed back from double digits in every one of their Finals victories. Nobody on that floor played like the game was already over.
They let us watch them feel it. Brunson buried his face in his father’s shoulder and sobbed on live television. KAT looked up at the sky for his mother, Jacqueline, who he lost to COVID in 2020, and told the world, “Thank you, mama, I appreciate you getting me one.” Enormous, powerful men weeping in front of millions of people, and not one of them shrank an inch for it.
Alvarado brought it home for the block that raised him. Jose Alvarado—our own GTA—grew up in the Berry Street Houses, NYCHA public housing in South Williamsburg, back before that stretch of Brooklyn was all waterfront high-rises and expensive lattes. His family moved out to Queens by the time he was starring at Christ the King in high school, but he never stopped being a Brooklyn kid. He wears number five as a nod to the five boroughs, and he's the only native New Yorker on the New York Knicks. This spring, he stood in front of a crowd of kids from his old neighborhood and told them he was “just like y’all,” and in February, he got traded home to prove it. A public-housing kid just won a championship for the city that made him.
And not one of them did it alone. This was a whole team that chose the win over the highlight, coached by Mike Brown, who took years of doors slammed in his face and walked through this one with the city at his back.
But there’s one last part that has been on my mind, the part that’s bigger than the game.
A 23-year-old fan named MD Ahnaf Hossain grabbed a microphone during the Finals and rattled off four lines that the New York Times went on to call “pure New York City poetry”:
My mayor Muslim, My bagel’s Jewish, My Christian Dior, Knicks in four.
It went everywhere. Millions of views, T-shirts, a city councilman reciting it from a stage at Governors Ball, and our actual Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, posting his own giddy version after the Game 4 comeback. The reason it caught isn’t the rhyme, which barely holds together if we’re honest. It caught because it’s true. This is a city built by immigrants, holding every religion and race and language and way of loving each other inside the same crowded blocks, and for one June, we all stood in the same overcrowded bar screaming the same words at the same screen.
That is the New York that certain people are terrified of. A place that runs on its differences instead of merely tolerating them, led right now by someone who seems a lot more interested in the people than in the power. And that city just won a championship and threw its arms around itself in front of the entire country.
And it’s worth remembering who showed up to bet against all of that. The one game the Knicks lost in the entire Finals was Game 3, the night Donald Trump showed up at the Garden as James Dolan’s guest—the first sitting president ever to attend an NBA Finals, booed loudly before the game even tipped off, his security detail shutting down the street watch parties fans had been planning for weeks. The Knicks lost their first game in 13 with him sitting there, then went on to win the next two without him to take the title. Call it a coincidence if you want. The city he’s sneered at for a decade didn’t want him in the building, and went out and proved it. We hate him.
And honorable mention to the fact that so much of the joy was in the small stuff:
The Nova boys—Brunson, Bridges, and Hart—winning a title together as pros after winning one together in college, the only trio ever to pull off both.
Jordyn Woods’ lucky bag.
Spike Lee courtside in a #14 Knicks jersey signed by Pope Leo XIV himself, a Villanova man
Taylor Swift and her Stevie Knicks shirt
Charles Oakley living to watch this team win it all.
A team with two anthems.
Mike Brown’s quiet, total revenge.
Elmo getting canceled for saying, “Elmo hopes both teams have fun!” (Personal favorite was “don’t you dare forget your roots you little red fuck”).
Rick Brunson on the sideline screaming “I’M TRYING TO HELP YOU” at his own son, the Finals MVP.
Watch parties all over NYC, including in the streets, and jubilant New Yorkers everywhere. The sense of camaraderie and joy we all feel.
And the fans. God, the fans. Knicks fans are so fucking loyal it should be studied in a lab. We show up win or lose, we travel, we make the building shake, and we have loved these boys through decades of heartbreak that would have broken anyone with more sense. This title is ours too.
So maybe it’s just basketball. Or maybe a point guard who took the pay cut, a big man playing for his mother, a Brooklyn kid, and a whole gloriously mismatched city just reminded everyone how this is supposed to work. You give up some of what’s yours so the people next to you can have more, and that's the version that wins. They proved it under the brightest lights we’ve got, and they’re champions this morning because of it.
My mayor Muslim, my bagel’s Jewish, my Christian Dior.
Go Knicks. Forever.
xo,
Eliza
P.S. See you at the parade on Thursday!
Omg— did I actually spawn the person who wrote this extraordinary peace about the extraordinary Knicks? I could not be more proud! ❤️ #PROUD MOM
I love that picture Liz. You look great.