The Waiting Is Over!

It's a phrase that New York Basketball fans have waited a very long time to hear. Fifty-three years in fact. It took five games against a good San Antonio Spurs team to do it but for the first time since 1973, the New York Knicks are the champions of the basketball world.; New York has won its 3rd NBA title, and first since 1973, beating San Antonio in five games to clinch it.

And for a Knicks team that has been on the rise since the end of the 2021-22 season, this has to be one of the most cleansing feelings ever. This is a Knicks team that had made the playoffs three straight years at the turn of the decade in the 2010s, followed by a string of seven straight under .500 basketball. That was broken at the turn of the 202s with a winning record and a playoff appearance in 2021. They missed out again and finished under .500 the next year. That offseason was viewed as a major turning point for the club, who at the time were getting beat up pretty good by some experts in the media for the moves they made. Getting Jalen Brunson from Dallas that offseason, which was lambasted by the media at the time, proved to pay off bigtime four years later.

Each year after that was at least a 2nd round appearance. They made it all the way to the conference finals last year, before finally climbing to the top of the mountain this year.

October got off to a slow start for the Knicks, but by the time November had hit, they found their stride and never looked back. Sure, there was a bit of a dip with an under .500 month in January, but by the time we hit the seasons halfway point in the middle of January, the Knicks were sitting at 25 wins. Once March hit, the Knicks caught fire and, well, the rest is history.

After a scare early on the first round against Atlanta, losing games two and three of that series, New Ork hit their stride again. From there, they polished off the Hawks, then steamrolled pasted the 76ers and Cavaliers to reach the finals. Once San Antoinio became the opponent, outside of the hiccup if you want to call it that in game three, the Knicks kept right on rolling.

But during that run, there were two nights where you really felt there was magic in the air for this run. The first came in the opening game of the Conference Finals against Cleveland, where they trailed by as many as 22,. but stormed back. They liked that performance, the Knicks decided to do it again. This time it came in Game Four of the Finals at home against the Spurs. It was a 29-point lead for San Antonio that went poof thanks to the last second heroics of OG Anunoby, who tipped in the game winner right before time expired.

For that shot alone, OG will be a made man in New York the rest of his life, as will Jalen Brunson for that matter with the way he played during this entire Knicks run. And thanks to those two performances, the Knicks exercised a lot of ghosts of sorts from Madison Square Garden. It's the first title win since the 1973 finals. Sure, the Knicks had made the finals twice since then, losing to the Rockets in 1994 and then to the Spurs in 1999. In Between titles for the Knicks there had been some very lean years. There were some seasons in the mid-80s that were less than stellar. The 90s were better but they couldn't finally get to the top, having come oh so close twice. The turn of the century was even worse for the Knicks, but they finally turned the corner and are on top of the mountain once again.