NEW YORK – The city-wide celebrations since the Knicks won their first NBA Championship in 53 years culminated on Thursday with a ticker-tape parade that saw massive crowds pay tribute to their newest basketball heroes.
On Saturday, the Knicks defeated the Spurs in Game 5 of the NBA Finals to clinch their first championship since 1973, ending a 53-year title drought.
NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch said on Wednesday that 10,000 police officers would be assigned to the parade’s one-mile trek from Battery Park to City Hall. It’s the biggest police presence at a planned event in the city’s history. Tisch encouraged New Yorkers to arrive early with the expectation of attendance reaching the millions.
She wasn’t wrong.
By 6 a.m., the NYPD was turning away fans from the barriers to the parade as thousands of New Yorkers arrived early—some in the middle of the night—for a prime spot along the route. A Starbucks across from City Hall was so busy at 6 a.m. that an employee called to turn off mobile ordering because of the overflow of customers.
In the morning, subways were so jammed that some parade-goers were forced to wait 30 minutes to exit, according to some reports. Members of the media had to go through layers of police to get to their assigned area with some cops not knowing where to properly direct them.
Up against impossible crowds, NYPD officers helped fans and did their best to bring some measure of calm amid the chaos.
The start of the parade was delayed half an hour as the Knicks, their celebrity fans, and other performers such as marching bands and the police prepared to deploy along the route and didn’t arrive at City Hall until around noon.
While the parade winded through downtown Manhattan relatively peacefully, it wasn’t all smooth. The NYPD said a man was slashed with broken glass near the parade route, while 10 people were arrested, according to reports.
one glaring error that got a lot of attention online was a Knicks No. 33 jersey hanging on City Hall’s facade along with the rest of the roster for two-way player Dillion Jones. The 24-year-old former first-round pick played seven games for the Knicks this season while wearing No. 1, but was mistakenly listed as No. 33 on the team’s online roster. No. 33 is retired, and synonymous with Knicks legend Patrick Ewing, who played 15 seasons for the team and is regarded among the greatest players in franchise history.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani addressed the crowd as did Knicks owner James Dolan, president of basketball operations Leon Rose, and Finals MVP Jalen Brunson. Longtime play-by-play announcer Mike Breen served as the master of ceremonies.
New York politicians such as Gov. Kathy Hochul and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were also in attendance. Alicia Keys closed out the ceremony with a rendition of “Empire State of Mind”—her 2009 hit song with Jay-Z.
In his speech, Mamdani described how the Knicks run resonated with New Yorkers and the city’s work ethic, while showing off his fandom of the team. He thanked former coach Tom Thibodeau for helping create a championship caliber team and mentioned notable former Knicks such as Larry Johnson and Charles Oakley, who is in a years-long lawsuit with Dolan, in addition to players from the team’s leaner years such as Langston Galloway.
He talked about the Knicks being down 20 points with nine minutes left in the fourth quarter of Game 4 and how the Spurs had a 99.6% chance to win and even the series 2–2.
“It is in that .4% that we go to work,” Mamdani said.
Brunson noted him being counted out as an undersized player at 6-foot-2 and how he was able to ignore it and help lead the team to a championship.
“There’s a lot of people who have a lot of negative stuff to say,” Brunson said. “There’s a lot of people who have their own opinions. But when you prove them wrong, you don’t have to say shit to them. They don’t deserve it.”
