Is the NBA Cup worth celebrating?
On the face of it, the question can seem sacrilegious in New York, a city haunted by the frayed, graying banners of 1970 and 1973. Banners are for champions. Anything else could be seen as lowering the bar. And yet here we are, more than 50 years removed from the last Knicks title, and New York is champion of the midseason tournament.
For a franchise that hasn’t won anything since Richard Nixon was president, the answer cannot be the same as it is for the Lakers or Celtics. History is not infinite. You can’t live off of 1970 and 1973 forever. The Knicks have never lacked pride. What they, and the fans, have endured is prolonged public shame. So raise the banner, if only to say, “We here.”
So yes. They should hang the banner, because it acknowledges the fans’ survival.
What a Banner Is Supposed to Mean
To ask whether this team earned it is to misunderstand what Knicks fandom has been for an entire generation. Millennials did not grow up with Willis Reed limping out of the tunnel. We grew up with Scott Layden breaking up the 1999 Finals team. We survived Isiah Thomas turning Madison Square Garden into poverty on and off the court. We survived Phil Jackson treating his players like property and the fans like fools. We survived Steve Mills and James Dolan.
Reading out the last two-and-a-half decades puts it into context. That’s poverty. Basketball poverty. A kind few other franchises, in any other sport, have endured. A banner in this context is a symbolic suture, stopping the bleeding and making room for fans to heal.
The Suffering That Came Before This Season
For decades, being a Knicks fan meant learning how to absorb humiliation. It meant watching other teams rebuild with intention while the Knicks failed without direction. It meant cycles of “saviors” who arrived loudly and left a mess on their way out.
Millennial fans were shaped by this. “I would absolutely hang the banner,” said J Ellis, founder and host of the YouTube NBA podcast, The Knick of Time Show. “This is not the level of an NBA championship, but it’s an achievement. We hung other banners up, like first in the East. Now, if we win the championship, we’ll have two banners for one year. It makes it that much sweeter.”
For the last 25 years, Knicks fans have learned to expect dysfunction. And yet they stayed. For fans like J Ellis, that loyalty was never passive. It was meant to be part of a larger struggle. Still, no one could have imagined the drought lasting 62 years, stretching into something epic, mirroring the great hero’s journeys found across world cultures.
So when a win comes like this one, especially one in the midst of championship contention, the response is, Hell yes, raise it to the rafters.
The Opponent Matters
This win mattered because of who the Knicks faced in the NBA Cup Final: the San Antonio Spurs, who had been the polar opposite of the Knicks since 2000, having won four championships. The last time the Knicks played a game this big against the Spurs was in the 1999 Finals, where they fell 4-1, kick-starting San Antonio’s two-decade dynasty.
They now have the league’s most promising young cornerstone in Victor Wembanyama, whose size, skill and defensive range are redefining the position. To beat the team that beat the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder in the previous round is badass.
When’s the last time you could say that about the Knicks game in the regular season?
It mattered how they did it, too. Mike Brown won it on adjustments, including a tough call when Mikal Bridges became a defensive target and Tyler Kolek came in as the steadier option.
Kolek’s presence helped calm the offense when San Antonio loaded up on Jalen Brunson, and the Knicks stopped playing scared of Wembanyama by forcing him into movement and decisions instead of letting him sit in the middle of everything. That is not the same as a championship, but it is the kind of high leverage, big stage win Knicks fans have not had enough of.
The Knicks were able to identify weaknesses that no other team was able to find against the Spurs. Then Brown showed the unmitigated gall to make those in-game changes on the fly and execute them with precision.
What the Banner Would Really Say
Hang it for the fans who had to learn endurance. For 25 years, fans have had to admit that both the present and the future were bleak. Hang it for the fans, especially the Millennials, who were too young to fully appreciate Patrick Ewing.
You didn’t have your picks, and the roster sucked. We’re a laughing stock. No free agent is coming to save New York, and fans are wearing brown paper bags over their head.
Now, fans have something to be proud of. And part of that pride is looking up and seeing recent achievements. Not just 1970, 1973, 1992, 1994, 1999 and 2013. Now you look up and you see 2025, it resets expectations.
We weren’t just good then, but we’re good again.
Having that reminder is crucial in how the Knicks are viewed and how the fans view themselves.
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