Did the Knicks Just ... Save Us?

A series of conversations and experiences four years ago compelled me to reframe my relationships with prayer, with church, with Christianity, with God, with faith. The impetus for this shift was the realization that the deity I’d conjured was a product of my anxiety. A God whose purpose was to wait for me to fail and then punish me for my failures. My ecosystem of faith was built around that conceit, which put a ceiling on what should be defined by its ceilinglessness, and narrowed the universe until it was small enough to fit inside of my shame.

I do not know what urges us to seek. But I believe that humanity is defined by the search and finds meaning in the embrace of what we believe we’ve found. Even deducing there’s nothing to believe in is its own form of faith. And I believe that searching is what I was doing while gathered outside with several dozen of my neighbors, watching Game 5 of the NBA Finals, waiting for what felt like the inevitability of the Knicks.

It is here that I will share, before we continue, that I was rooting for the Spurs. Mostly because as a 47-year-old who played college ball, and still hoops twice a week, I’ve seen so much basketball in my life that what moves me most now as a fan is the unseen, and nothing encapsulates the “what could?” and the “what might?” and the “WTF” better than Victor Wembanyama. But as the game concluded, and the Knicks had just completed their fourth fourth-quarter comeback in the five-game series, I realized I was looking in the wrong place.

I should also share that this watch party was a block party. My neighborhood hosted a yard sale that morning and afternoon. Three streets had been barricaded off from car traffic to accommodate the thousands who attended. That evening, after the sale ended and the blocks settled back, one neighbor pulled his TV from his living room out to the street, others erected tables and chairs and bought pizza and beer, and we all watched the game, and then we all stayed in the street for an hour after it ended. We cheered. We drank. We hugged. And then we walked back to our homes, in Pittsburgh — yes, Pittsburgh; not Midtown or Bed-Stuy or Long Island City, but, again, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — full from what we found.

How does a nation allow itself to fall in love with a star-less and relatively nondescript professional basketball team from New York City? They’d been destroying other teams in the playoffs, sure. But they did it with basketball that was somehow both beautiful and unspectacular. Professional basketball, more than any other major team sport, is reliant on virtuosic spectacle. The teams that have captivated the nation — in my lifetime that’s Magic’s Lakers, Bird’s Celtics, Jordan’s Bulls and Steph’s Warriors — did it with either a singular player or a style of play that subverted and expanded our understanding of the architecture of possibility on a basketball court. The Knicks, well, they just have hoopers and dogs. While LeBron James might be as close as we’ll ever see to a real-life Dr. Manhattan, Jalen Brunson is basketball’s Mark Watney, problem-solving his way off Mars. And then there’s the New York of it all. I’m actively mourning, while writing this, how this championship has obliterated my lifelong edict to never give that city or anyone from that city more reason to believe that they’re always the main character. I am half suspicious that I have been victimized by a collective psychosis to consider a team from New York City to be the morally righteous underdogs.

But this — all of it — is it. The search for the overtly spectacular obscured how the regular can be spectacular, and how the spectacular regular can be ethereal. We’re not as captivated by the Knicks if they become NBA champions in 2009 or 2023, because our need for something good to counterbalance everything bad would not have been as strong. It matters that the president is who he is, and that the only game he attended is the only game they lost in a month. And the only Knicks home game in the Finals he didn’t attend saw witness to the greatest comeback in NBA playoff history. Even the harshest skeptic of the supernatural’s ability to be telekinetic can’t ignore the cosmic directive of the basketball gods giving Trump the finger. The joy vacuum with the pathological disposition to make everything about himself couldn’t derail their destiny. (I’m choosing now to ignore team owner James Dolan’s claim that the Knicks will be the first NBA team to visit a Trump White House, because I’ve learned not to trust people who make bad art.)

It matters that the Knicks play relatively highlight-adverse basketball and are led by one of the few NBA players who could also convincingly pass for an Allstate insurance adjuster. I will not do what many others have done this week when describing Brunson’s stature and shrink him; he’s 6'3" in shoes, the same approximate height as Steph Curry, Kyrie Irving, Dame Lillard and other scoring guards considered small in an NBA context but not diminutive. What matters isn’t his height, it’s his stout regularness — in comparison not just to Wemby’s otherworldliness but also to the Spurs’ precocious and lanky-tentacled guard tandem of Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper.

It matters that the Knicks are a testament to the power of a united collective. Before Game 5, three different players (Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns and OG Anunoby) had a realistic chance to be named Finals MVP. Brunson’s 45-point masterpiece ended that possibility, but the $113 million he left on the table to enable the Knicks to sign other championship-level players began it.

It matters that it’s NBA basketball — the sport most consistently maligned by right-wing sycophants, who signal their virtue by broadcasting and platforming their disgust with it. (No one has ever been more excited to share how much people don’t care about a thing.)

It matters that the Knicks are in New York, still America’s biggest city and the world’s most important one. What happens there reverberates everywhere. It matters that the impossibly popular and disturbingly competent Zohran Mamdani already had the city vibrating with how it’s positioned itself to be the socialist antidote to America’s sickness. It is still the place that most terrifies the people scared of diversity and progressive politics and even their own shadows (because they’re black too). And it is still the place that takes the most pride in being that place.

What’s behind this, what’s happening to us, is a thirst for an opportunity for communal joy. An intrinsic desire to just feel good about something good. And maybe this doesn’t end here. Maybe the Knicks and New York and Mamdani and even the World Cup fusing into a vortex of unstoppable joy is enough of an energy transfer to reverse course and save a country that felt, even a month ago, predispositioned to self-destruct. I do not know. I like to lean on what theoretical physicist and cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein — who has written extensively on the connections between the physical and the intangible — shared with me this week:

“I guess the thing my mind has been on a lot is what my grandfather” — the historian C.L.R. James — “wrote about in ‘Beyond a Boundary’ with respect to cricket: sports can become an organizing force for a community and a foundation for the political work of understanding what constitutes a people. When the team wins, it’s not just the players who win, but everyone who invested in cheering them on. And when the people feel like they’re winning, they are experiencing the potential of being winners in a broader sense.”

I am no closer to answers about the metaphysical than I was four years ago. But I am interested today in why I still want to believe. And less uninterested in questioning, and less terrified of the void that exists past the limitation of my understanding. What is happening with us and the Knicks maybe can’t be explained. But explanation isn’t necessary for something to be real.

Damon Young is a writer in Pittsburgh. He is the author of “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays,” which won the 2020 Thurber Prize for American Humor.