Unconditional love, and surrender, in New York

Halfway through the NBA playoffs, the Knicks are running wild.

Karl-Anthony Towns

They weren’t a dynasty, even by today’s facile standards, and they never exactly dominated. But the New York Knicks of the late 60s and early 70s still live.

Few teams made people fall in love with basketball as hard as they did. They were an island of unselfishness, an engine that never get out of tune. And they were distinct: Walt Frazier the unhurried maestro, Willis Reed the undersized, all-heart center, Dave DeBusschere the two-sport defender, Bill Bradley the Ivy Leaguer with the reliable shot, Dick Barnett the fall-back-baby scorer, succeeded by the original stylings of Earl Monroe. Running the show was the raspy lifer, Red Holzman.

The end of their careers didn’t stop them. Bradley became a Senator and a Presidential candidate. DeBusschere was the last commissioner of the ABA and helped mid-wife the merger. Reed was a coach and general manager. Frazier remains the Knicks’ TV analyst, and Barnett, armed with a doctorate, campaigned to make sure his Tennessee State teams got recognized by the Hall of Fame.

Coming off the bench was a tornadic collection of elbows named Phil Jackson, who would capture more NBA titles than any other coach.

DeBusschere wrote a diary of the 1970 championship season, entitled The Open Man, which is who Holtzman wanted to have the ball. They played the Lakers in the finals three times in a four-year span and won twice, in 1970 and 1973. In 1970 all the starters averaged at least 14.5 points, and Frazier and Reed averaged more than 20, and DeBusschere averaged a double-double, and the Garden, then as now, throbbed with “Dee-FENSE” whenever the organist cued it up.

Since then, Knicks’ history has been full of ill-equipped saviors. The city exulted when the Knicks got Patrick Ewing in 1985, but he never won a championship and didn’t get to the Finals until 1994, when they lost to Houston and Hakeem Olajuwon. In 1999, they survived a cage match with Miami in the East Final, then became the first team to lose a championship round to San Antonio. They were Michael Jordan’s favorite foil. Pat Riley was going to lead them, then Carmelo Anthony, then Stephon Marbury, then Amare Stoudamire. The Knicks stumbled into a fine player when they drafted Kristaps Porzingis, and eventually he couldn’t wait to get out. They became so dysfunctional that free agents routinely snubbed their money and their city.

All of this makes the spring of 2026 such a giddy time that true Knicks fans are afraid to finish the Cracker Jack box, as if the advertised prize will somehow escape. The Knicks beat Atlanta in six games in the first round, winning Games 4-6 by an average of 33 points. They torched Philadelphia in a 4-game sweep, which ended with New York fans coming south and staging an arena takeover. They are now resting for the Eastern finals, since Cleveland and Detroit will play at least six games, and they will be favored to barge into the NBA Finals like a cybertruck,, unafraid of what Oklahoma City or San Antonio might say. More important, these Knicks are unintentional sons of the 70s. They win pretty.

They’re also ruthless. In this six-game tear, they have surpasssed 50 percent shooting every time. Their average margin in the Philly series was 22.3 points. They had 40-point leads in Games 1 and 4, and they hit 25 three-pointers in the finale For the series they shot 54.5 percent overall and 44.8 percent from long distance, and Karl-Anthony Towns, Mikal Bridges and OG Anunoby all shot over 60 percent. New York had a 6-game string of 50-point nights in the paint alone, and in the last Atlanta game the Knicks were 37 for 49 from 2-point range.

The starting lineup of Towns, Anunoby,, Bridges, Josh Hart and Jalen Brunson has played 318 postseason games. Hart, Bridges and Brunson were national champions at Villanova. And all five came from elsewhere. Brunson was a relatively quiet free-agent acquisition from Dallas whose uniform will hang from the Garden ceiling someday. He’s the type of small guard (6-foot-2) that doesn’t quite fit today’s NBA, but his shoulders are wide enough for four teammates when the clock gets short. Brunson averaged 29 points in the 76ers series.

Anunoby, a refugee from Toronto, is the defensive stopper. Bridges, who came from Brooklyn, is an NBA iron man who defends, runs and shoots. Hart is even more versatile, an insistent rebounder who the Lakers drafted in 2017 and banished to the G-League.

But the face of this surge belongs to Towns. He came to New York in a splashy trade with Minnesota that cost New York Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo. He’s a 7-footer who is a career 40 percent shooter from three, and his defense wasn’t up to the local standard at first. This season, new coach Mike Brown, a controversial replacement for Tom Thibodeau, didn’t try to fit Towns into a painted keyhole. These days Towns plays at the foul line or beyond and he basically runs the offense, so Brunson doesn’t have to. He averaged 15 points, eight rebounds and a team-high 7.5 assists against Philadelphia, in fewer than 24 minutes.

When Towns goes out, as he often does because of uncontrollable fouling, Brown sends in Mitchell Robinson, an old-style shot-blocker and rebounder. Robinson is Mr. Magoo from the foul line and thus is often fouled, but whenever he even makes one of two, the Garden howls. Add the shooting of Jordan Clarkson, Miles McBride and Landry Shamet from the bench, and the Knicks can quickly turn a snowball into a life-threatening emergency. At one point in the last Atlanta game, they led by 61 points (101-40).

There once was a fear that New York teams, with their riches and glamour, would subjugate the rest of the sports world. That fear has dissipated. The Liberty won the WNBA title two years ago and New York FC took the MLS Cup in 2021. But the Giants haven’t won a Super Bowl since the 2011 season, the Jets haven’t since the 1968 season, the Yankees haven’t won a World Series since 2009 and the Mets since 1969. The Rangers haven’t won a Stanley Cup since 1994,, the Islanders since 1983 and the Devils since 2003. The Knicks are ringless since 1973 and the Nets have been unencumbered by jewelry since they won the final ABA championship in 1976.

None of those teams are embraced more tightly than the Knicks, in a city that rightly or wrongly feels it is the cradle of basketball, in a place where Woody Allen and Spike Lee revel in watching two-hour scripts they didn’t write. Ironicaly these Knicks don’t make good movies, because the plot doesn’t thicken, and the good guys win by halftime. Will their superpowers hold up when they hit the big screen? Hard to say, but the previews are loud.