This past weekend, I attended my 25th high school reunion in New Jersey and spent a lot of time greeting people with salutations along the line of: “Duuuude. THE KNICKS!” The last time the New York Knickerbockers were this good, I was in high school listening to Britney Spears, watching Dawson’s Creek, and wanting nothing more than for Patrick Ewing to finally win a title.
That was 27 years ago, and by now you’ve almost certainly seen the memes. Back in 1999—when the Knicks made their most recent trip to the NBA Finals, where they suffered a gentleman’s sweep in five games at the hands of the San Antonio Spurs—there were no iPhones, Xboxes, or Fast and Furious feature films in our midst. Hillary Clinton was first lady of the United States, Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City, and JFK Jr. was there in the Madison Square Garden stands in pleated slacks and suspenders.
The Spurs had a formidable 22-year-old phenom named Tim Duncan on their roster. Victor Wembanyama, San Antonio’s current formidable 22-year-old phenom in the year 2026, was years away from being born. (Knicks game-changer Jalen Brunson was a toddler hanging out in the Knicks’ facility with his dad, Rick.) In other words, it’s been a very long time since Larry Johnson’s four-point play and Jeff Van Gundy’s Diet Cokes. And in that time a whole lot has gone down—not just in the wider world but also in and around Madison Square Garden, the very center of the universe.
For Knicks fans who watched the 1999 run, the team’s upcoming rematch with the Spurs has caused a giddy, silly swell of memories about the 27 years in between, most of them nominally bad and ultimately kinda cherished. Botched drafts! False hopes! A firm belief that Kevin Knox could be someone! That time we were just trying to settle in for a family viewing of that Pixar movie Soul, only to be barraged by punch lines at the Knicks’ expense written into the otherwise wholesome script!
To be a New York Knicks enthusiast is to be truly lucky: after all, not everyone gets Mike Breen and Walt “Clyde” Frazier as their local broadcast crew, and not everyone gets to reminisce about J.R. Smith untying opponents’ shoes. Of course, on the other hand, liking the Knicks also means being disappointed in fading stars like Antonio McDyess and—more alarmingly—being intrigued by the likes of Raymond Felton.
Year after year, for more than a quarter-century, the Knicks have been a dead end, a lost cause. This year, they’re a water cooler, a beating heart, a skip in your step as the days keep getting longer and the games somehow keep staying fun. Whatever happens in the NBA Finals, it’s been a ridiculous road to get here.
To celebrate and prepare, I recruited my colleague Howard Beck—a former Knicks beat writer from 2004 to 2013, among many other things—to take a stroll with me down 27 years of Madison Square Garden memory lane. Here are 27 moments, for better or for worse, that brought us here.—Katie Baker
1999: The Knicks Draft … Frederic Weis??
Baker: To listen to New York sports radio on WFAN right near the tail end of the 20th century was to have heard months of raves about this one young Queens-born defensive menace named Ron Artest, who’d just helped lead the Johnnies to an Elite Eight berth in the NCAA tournament. And so what incredible luck when, in June 1999, Artest was still there on the board for the defending Eastern Conference champion Knicks to nab with the 15th overall pick.
Ah, well, nevertheless. The Knicks instead shocked a lot of people that June when they zagged and took [checks notes, damnit, still the same] the unproven, 7-foot-2 French homme Frederic Weis instead. One of those people was Artest himself! “I’ve never seen the big guy,” he harrumphed about Weis. “I don’t even know who he is. He might be a great player. Patrick [Ewing]’s about to be gone. Patrick’s knees are gone.” Tough but fair, it turned out.
2000: Reggie Ends the Ewing Era
Baker: Patrick Ewing’s proud, sad reign as the flat-topped avatar for the almost-greatest generation of New York Knicks basketball began with a frozen envelope in 1985 (kidding, kidding!! Unless …) and officially ended on Sept. 20, 2000, when the Knicks dealt the Big Fella himself to the Seattle SuperSonics in a four-team trade. The move marked the bitter end of a shoulda-woulda-coulda era of Knicks basketball only a few months after Reggie Miller twisted the knife (yet again) and scored 34 points (half of them in the fourth quarter) in Indiana’s Game 6 Eastern Conference final–clinching win over New York.
2001: The Allan Houston Rule
Beck: It was funny enough that the Knicks gave Allan Houston’s Bad Knees such a misguidedly large contract—six years; $100 million—that a few years later, when the NBA created a new amnesty clause giving teams limited takesies-backsies abilities, it became known as “the Allan Houston rule.” But what’s really funny is that the Knicks didn’t even wind up using the Allan Houston rule on Allan Houston: instead, they used it to waive a player named Jerome Williams, known as “Junkyard Dog.” Sounds about right.
2003 (to 2008): The Back Page Signings Begin
Beck: You get a max! And you get a max! Isiah Thomas was absolutely certain of one thing: “You can’t rebuild in New York.” He said it repeatedly. And he acted accordingly, trading for every high-priced, marquee name he could get his hands on, turning MSG into a way station for flawed stars and bloated contracts: Stephon Marbury. Penny Hardaway. Tim Thomas. Jamal Crawford. Maurice Taylor. Quentin Richardson. Eddy Curry. Jalen Rose. Steve Francis. Zach Randolph. When Thomas wasn’t chasing stars, he was overpaying role guys (hello, Jared Jeffries and Jerome James). For a half-decade, the Knicks spent more than any other franchise—and lost more than nearly all of them.
2004: Shooting Star(bury)
Baker: The image looked so fierce, so promising. “Can Steph and Isiah Save the East?” ESPN the Magazine asked on its February 2004 cover.
No, dear reader, they could not even save themselves. Those Knicks never sniffed .500, nor won a single playoff game, in the Marbury-Thomas years. They did, however, raise the bar for franchise toxicity together and—with an assist from Larry Brown—make “dysfunction” the defining descriptor of the era. Brown coached just one season, in 2005-06. By the time it was over, Marbury hated Brown, Brown hated Thomas, and Thomas hated them both. Along the way, the Knicks acquired Francis to play alongside Marbury and the two of them hated Brown together.
2006: The Anucha Browne Sanders Lawsuit
Beck: The era was best summed up by commissioner David Stern, who in 2007 pointedly declared that the Knicks were “not a model of intelligent management.” The topic at the time was Dolan’s decision not to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by a former team executive (though the statement could have applied to the basketball, too). A jury awarded $11.6 million to the former exec, Anucha Browne Sanders. The damage to the Knicks went deeper. The jury determined that Isiah Thomas had sexually harassed Browne Sanders. And testimony included Marbury admitting to an affair with an intern.
2006: 5-foot-9 Nate Robinson blocks 7-foot-6 Yao Ming
Baker: Rare proof that not every memory from this decade is bad!!
2008: Knicks Beat Bulls! … in the D’Antoni Sweepstakes
Beck: Mike D’Antoni was the NBA’s hottest coaching commodity in 2008, having turned the Suns (with an assist from Steve Nash) into the league’s most electric team. The Bulls badly wanted him. But the Knicks got him, injecting a shot of optimism into the Garden. It lasted seven seconds, or less. D’Antoni benched and then banished Marbury. The Knicks spent four years trying (and failing) to find a Nash facsimile to run D’Antoni’s beautiful offense. When they finally found one, Jeremy Lin, it was too late. D’Antoni had lost a power struggle with Carmelo Anthony, and resigned in March 2012, just as Linsanity—and all the momentary euphoria it inspired—began to ebb.
2009: Kobe Drops 61
Baker: As the Knicks sought and struggled to land effective superstars over the years, a number of the league’s top players simply turned the World’s Most Famously Porous Arena into their visitors’ playground instead. And while I enjoyed the byline on this article—about Kobe Bryant dropping 61 points on the Knicks at Madison Square Garden to set a new record in 2009—I did not so much enjoy LeBron James going for 52 a few days after that, or Steph Curry popping off, or James Harden tying Bryant’s 61-point mark a decade later.
2010: Amar’e Declares: The Knicks Are Back! (Sort of)
Beck: The Knicks spent two years clearing cap room, in hopes of landing LeBron James or Dwyane Wade or Chris Bosh. Except those three, it turns out, had conspired to join forces in South Beach, leaving the Knicks with … Amar’e Stoudemire! At the time, he was a great consolation prize—an explosive, charismatic All-Star who’d thrived under D’Antoni in Phoenix. He was also the first star to choose the Knicks after a decade of rejections and despair. “The Knicks are back,” Stoudemire declared upon signing, and for a moment it felt true. But his knees deteriorated, and the Knicks’ best season (54 wins in 2012-13) came mostly with Stoudemire sidelined.
2011: Melo-ing Out
Beck: If Stoudemire made the Knicks respectable again, Carmelo Anthony made them positively glamorous. His arrival, in a blockbuster trade with Denver, electrified the fan base and made the Knicks a potential power in the East. Just one hitch: Dolan had hijacked the trade talks at the 11th hour and given the Nuggets every good asset the Knicks had, leaving the roster thin and the cupboard bare. GM Donnie Walsh resigned in frustration. Anthony clashed with D’Antoni and never clicked with Stoudemire. The Knicks made the playoffs three times in Anthony’s six-plus seasons, and won just one series. By the time he was traded to Oklahoma City, in September 2017, fans were often booing Melo for his plodding isolation play.
2012: Oh, the Linsanity!
Beck: If we were to rank fleeting moments of Knicks joy from 2000 to 2020, Jeremy Lin’s exhilarating, three-week run of stardom might be no. 1. It was surprising. It was organic. It felt like a fairy tale. And it was, in that it was too good to last. After outdueling Deron Williams, outshining Kobe Bryant and Dirk Nowitzki, and hitting a buzzer-beater in Toronto, Lin began to cool off as a knee injury flared up. He lost his biggest backer when D’Antoni departed. Then he lost his Knicks residency entirely, when Dolan refused to match a contract offer from the Houston Rockets. The backlash was so fierce that some fans swore they’d never root for the Knicks again.
2012: Break Glass in Case of Playoffs
Eddy Curry had the persnickety ticker. Quentin Richardson needed that microdiscectomy. And then there was Amar’e Stoudemire, who punched a glass-encased fire extinguisher after a Game 2 playoff loss to the Miami Heat in 2012, “mangling his left hand on the glass and causing a chaotic scene that saw paramedics wheel a stretcher into the room,” as one does when things are going smoothly for one’s basketball team.
2013: The Bargnani Debacle
Baker: “It’s one thing to get someone to take your hot garbage,” began a merry article in the Toronto Star in the summer of 2013. “It’s another to convince them to pay you for it.” The occasion: The New York Knicks were acquiring 7-foot bust Andrea Bargnani from the Raptors in exchange for Marcus Camby, Quentin Richardson, Steve Novak, a first-round pick, and two second-rounders.
“This is a confusing transaction,” assessed SB Nation's Mike Prada, “typical of the Knicks since 2000.” (The Wall Street Journal noted that “the team’s rabid fan base was vocal and sour about the deal.”) Hey, it wasn’t all bad: In his two seasons as a Knick, Bargnani definitely earned a PFLTFD (Pump Fakes Leading to Failed Dunks) franchise record.
2013: An Endless Cycle of Steve Mills
Beck: The September 2013 announcement that Steve Mills had been hired as Knicks president was striking for three reasons: (1.) It came on the eve of training camp, with no indication the team was even looking for a new exec. (2.) Glen Grunwald was still in the job. (3.) Mills had been demoted as MSG president five years earlier and left the company. But rash decisions and rampant turnover were a Dolan trademark. From 2000 to 2020, the Knicks hired and fired more lead basketball executives (eight) and head coaches (10) than any other franchise. Mills’s reign in 2013 was brief—he was soon demoted to make way for Phil Jackson, who spent three tumultuous years in the job before getting fired and replaced by … Steve Mills.
2014: Everything Zen (I Don’t Think So)
Beck: Appointing Phil Jackson as team president made no sense to anyone except Dolan, who generally hired two types of people: celebrities or loyalists.[2] Jackson fit the first category, as a famous former Knick with 11 rings, lots of gravitas, and zero experience as a front-office exec. It showed. Jackson made questionable head-coaching hires (Derek Fisher, also with zero experience), questionable signings (Joakim Noah for $72 million), and questionable statements (too numerous to list). He alienated Carmelo Anthony with his public critiques, but only after giving him a regrettable no-trade clause. Jackson did draft Kristaps Porzingis, who made an All-Star team in his third year and briefly provided a glimmer of hope. But the Jackson era was as big a bust as his other lottery pick, Frank Ntilikina.
2015: Derek Fisher Gets Beaten Up
Baker: If you could fight any Knicks coach, past or present, who would it be? I think I’d steer clear of the Olympic gold medalist named Moose and the sticktoitive king Jeff Van Gundy, but I have always wanted to give Don Nelson a piece of my mind for benching John Starks …
Anyway, NBA player Matt Barnes asked himself this same question during the preseason in October 2015. His answer? Derek Fisher, who was in the midst of a 40-96 Knicks tenure after being handpicked by Phil Jackson to lead the team. (And who was, at the time, busy kicking it with Barnes’s soon-to-be-ex wife—whom Fisher later married, lol, please try to keep up.) The Knicks’ triangle offense in those years was ultimately pretty wack. But we’ll always have that 95-mile drive and the Knicks’ “love triangle skirmish” to cherish.
2017: The Oakley Incident
Baker: A player long beloved for his good old days spent diving headfirst into the stands for the ball, the Oak Man, Charles Oakley, was escorted out of the stands in 2017 at the behest of da boss, Knicks owner James Dolan. (And what’s more, he was charged with assault.) While Oakley was on hand in Cleveland for the Knicks’ ECF clincher, he’s banned at MSG and was in litigation with the Knicks for years.
This was not the first time the Knicks owner has wound up involved in a loud feud. Since taking control of the Knicks this century, Dolan has been in the middle of near-constant drama, subterfuge, and spiteful behavior, riling up fans with the relish of a man slappin’ the bass. His brouhahas have included, but are not limited to:
- Getting cursed out by Latrell Sprewell in 2003 in the middle of a game (though, unlike Oakley, Spree is now an honored courtside guest at MSG);
- Blocking a trade for Toronto’s Kyle Lowry in 2013 because he feared executive Masai Ujiri had “fleeced” the Knicks already in other previous trades (such as for Carmelo Anthony);
- Lashing out in a 2015 email to a fan to “start rooting for the Nets because the Knicks don’t want you”;
- Banning a fan from MSG in 2019 for having shouted “Sell the team!” (and then going on TV to say that he was “ambushed”
- Inconveniencing Spike Lee in 2020;
- Refusing to let the Knicks issue a statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, as 29 other NBA teams did
- Leading the league in vindictive surveillance initiatives—just ask all those JDs who got a straight shot outta there, hey-o!
2017: Frankie Smokes the Whole Pack
Baker: Despite all the negativity that Knicks enthusiasts have been enduring for decades, the fan base has a way of being almost shockingly optimistic whenever anyone on the roster exhibits even a hint of promise/personality/tenacious D/friendly vibes. Players who have captured the fancy of our starved fan base have ranged from Wilson Chandler to Ron Baker to Mindaugas Kuzminskas, but it’s Frank Ntilikina whose image once went above and beyond.
Take, for example, this ancient 2017 post chock-full of Ringer employees weighing in far too enthusiastically on the then-teenage Frankie Smokes with reactions like: “…lift the spirit of a misanthropic fan base…” “…like washing my face with the Shroud of Turin…” and “…that's how moved I am by the loving way this young European has been tending to the leper colony that is MSG." Was he—were we—really ever so young?
2015-18: Porzingis: a Knicks Career in Three Acts
Baker: Here’s a ranking of the three seasons Kristaps Porzingis suited up for the New York Knicks, in ascending order of “you have got to be kidding me”:
- 2015-2016: Porzingis, that poor dingus, is booed on draft night. Ha, ya gotta be kidding me!
- 2016-2017: Phil Jackson decides to air dirty laundry about Porzingis to the media after he skips a season-end exit meeting, noting that the Knicks are entertaining trade requests for the 21-year-old. Ugh, you have got to be kidding me…
- 2017-2018: On January 23, Porzingis earns a spot on the NBA All-Star team on the strength of his best season yet. No kidding! And two weeks later, on February 6, Porzingis tears his ACL. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE %@*#ING KIDDING ME.
2019: Two Max Slots!
Beck: For months, Twitter sleuths obsessed over a 24-second video clip featuring Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant, in which the former (allegedly) says to the latter, “Two max slots. It’s time.” Boom, Kyrie and KD to New York confirmed! Knicks officials clearly thought the same, because—two weeks prior to that viral clip—they’d shipped Kristaps Porzingis and others to Dallas in a straight salary dump to create, well, “two max slots.” But Irving and Durant instead chose the two max slots in Brooklyn—a blow so devastating it prompted Mills to issue a statement acknowledging fans’ disappointment. Durant later poured more fuel on the fire, telling a radio host, “The cool thing now is not the Knicks.” But this Knicks misfire proved fortuitous. They spent their cap room on a handful of less-flashy players, including Julius Randle, who blossomed into a star (and was eventually traded for Karl-Anthony Towns). And the KD-Kyrie era in Brooklyn? Well, that’s a tale of dysfunction for another day.
2021: Fuck Trae Young!
Baker: Nested inside New York’s 27-year Finals drought was a denser, arguably grimmer stretch: zero playoff appearances whatsoever between 2013 and 2021. (The Knicks: a matryoshka doll of interregnums!) Joy filled the land when the Julius Randle-led squad—one also featuring Elfrid Payton and Nerlens Noel in its starting lineup—finally returned to the postseason. But those smiles faded fast when Atlanta Hawks antagonist Trae Young hit a floater with 0.9 seconds left to win Game 1; physically shushed the MSG crowd; then went on to average 29.2 points and 9.8 assists in the Hawks’ 4-1 first-round handling of the Knicks.
Young’s reputation as a Knicks killer (and his time as a Hawk) wouldn’t totally last. But the memory of that spring sure did! Earlier this month, when the Knicks beat the entirely unrelated Cavaliers team in overtime of Game 1, a giddy chant broke out: “Fuck Trae Young!” It’s the “Potvin sucks!” of hoops.
2023: Dolan Sues the Raptors
Beck: Even as the good times rolled on the court, Dolan continued to lash out at all of his enemies (real or perceived) off the court. In 2023, in an unprecedented move, he sued the Raptors for allegedly stealing proprietary information, via a former Knicks staffer who had gone to work for Toronto. (The case was withdrawn in 2025.) It was an extreme measure, but emblematic of Dolan’s combative stance in recent years. He’s voted against WNBA expansion teams in San Francisco and Toronto. He’s voted against the NBA’s budget, and opposed the election of a new board of governors chairman. He’s railed against the league’s revenue-sharing system, which helps teams in smaller markets. He’s accused Commissioner Adam Silver of favoritism. As a basketball team, the Knicks are respectable again, normal even. But as an organization, the Garden remains as bonkers as ever.
2025: Pacers Haunt the Knicks Again
Baker: Be careful what you wish for! During the Knicks’ quarter-century of futility, New York fans far and wide were constantly out there pining for a return to the franchise’s 1990s form. But in the 2025 Eastern Conference finals, the monkey’s paw curled and gave everyone a reminder of how painful “1990s form” can feel.
In an eerie echo to 30 years ago, when Reggie Miller and the Pacers tortured Knicks fans with impossible swishes and choking pantomimes and 8 points in 8.9 seconds, the 2025 Pacers trailed by 14 with fewer than three minutes to play in Game 1—and, with Miller smirking on the TNT broadcast, came back in overtime to win the game (and ultimately the series). Watching Tyrese Haliburton physically channel Miller that spring, I felt totally sick to my stomach. And I’d kinda missed that feeling, you know?
2025: Thibs Gets Canned
Beck: Over five seasons as head coach, Tom Thibodeau restored order and respectability, won 56.5 percent of his games, guided the Knicks to consecutive 50-win seasons and took them to their first conference finals in 25 years…and the Knicks fired him last year anyway, after falling just two wins short of the NBA Finals. But Thibs lasted longer than any Knicks coach of the century—an achievement unto itself.
2025: Knicks Win the NBA Cup
Beck: How much value do you place on a championship, awarded in the winter, based on a handful of games, in a soccer-style tournament that was created just three years ago? Skeptics (hi, it’s me) could look at the title the Knicks won last December and wonder if it meant much at all. But the Knicks, who hadn’t won any kind of title since 1973, celebrated like it did. They whooped and danced and hugged. As it happens, the Cup final—which pitted the Knicks against the Spurs—proved to be an uncanny preview of the June version. Dolan pointedly refused to hang the Cup banner, perhaps as another slap at Silver, or perhaps because he was waiting for a bigger one.
2026: The Devil Wears Prada 2 Premieres
Baker: The Knicks were in the middle of battling back from a down 2-1 scare in the first round of the playoffs when the film The Devil Wears Prada 2—featuring a cameo from Karl-Anthony Towns as his smiling self at a chichi Hamptons backyard bash—hit theaters at the end of April. Now, in the weeks since its wide release, the Knicks have gone 9-0 with a combined margin of victory of 217, the largest delta of any team in NBA history. Which brings us to the (you, us, we) now. Cerulean-orange City Connect jerseys when?!
Lead actress Anne Hathaway has described herself as a “gentle, loving, motherly fan” with a soft spot for OG Anunoby (extreme same, lady.) In the movie her character, Andy, meets and compliments Towns. “It was a great series,” Andy gushes in KAT’s direction (juuust non-specifically enough that the line would land no matter how the Knicks wound up doing this spring). “It was a thrill to be a New Yorker!” It’s been 27 years since the last time the New York Knicks were this thrilling, and there are still (at least) a few more days to bask in our team being so, so, so back.
