Нью-Йорк Никс NBA-гийн аварга боллоо

SAN ANTONIO — The New York Knicks are the champions of the National Basketball Association, and those absolutely needed to be the first dozen words of this piece.

I never thought I would type them, and you bet I felt it in my hands when I did. For many years, I would have believed in Santa, the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy before I believed in the Knicks as the last team standing.

But here they were Saturday night in San Antonio, eliminating the same opponent in Game 5 of the NBA Finals that eliminated them in Game 5 in Madison Square Garden in 1999, the last time the Knicks advanced to the championship round. Twenty-seven years after Tim Duncan lowered the boom on them, Jalen Brunson was the hammer and the otherworldly Victor Wembanyama was the nail.

At long, long last, the big city recaptured the city game a couple of hundred miles from Houston, where they blew a 3-2 finals lead in 1994. The Knicks weren’t blowing anything this time around, and there is no need to offer a detailed rundown of why. You know the drill by now.

They shared the ball on offense and got into people’s faces on defense. Above all, they loved playing for one another, just like the franchise’s only other two title teams — the 1970 and ’73 Knicks, led by Walt Frazier and Willis Reed.

Frazier said multiple times that these Knicks were just like his all-for-one, one-for-all Knicks. He told The Athletic after the Game 1 victory over the Spurs that theirs was “a season of destiny” and that the captain, Brunson, has “the tenacity of Willis Reed and he’s got my cool.”

Beyond all that, in the frantic final seconds of Game 4, OG Anunoby made that OMG play near the Garden rafters that will be talked about as long as this league exists.

These Knicks, as a whole, will also be talked about 100 years from now. They seized the championship by winning 15 of their last 16 postseason games, including 13 in a row by a combined 273 points, unprecedented domination in the NBA playoffs.

They accomplished so much on the court, and impacted their region so much off it, that they don’t merely deserve to go down as the finest Knicks team ever.

They deserve to go down as the greatest team in the history of New York sports.

How do you define greatness?

Of course, “greatest” is a subjective term applied by flawed humans who cherry-pick statistics and other methods of measuring performance to support a case. These are exclusively mine as someone who has watched and processed sports for more than half a century and has covered them in the New York area for 40 years.

The titanic teams from segregated times are eliminated. Babe Ruth would have found a way to be special in any era, but sorry, the 1927 Yankees and any team in any league that shut out Black athletes — given the moral offense and the record-breaking accomplishments of athletes of color to come — simply cannot qualify. The Yanks didn’t suit up a Black player until Josh Hart’s great uncle, Elston Howard, appeared in 1955, so I count the 1998 Yankees, who won 125 games, including a then-American League-record 114 in the regular season, as the gold standard of New York’s most successful franchise.

They belong on the mountaintop, right next to these Knicks, who suffer in the regular-season comparison with “only” 53 victories for “only” a .646 winning percentage (the ’98 Yanks were at .704). The two champs ended up with nearly identical postseason winning percentages — the present Knicks at .842, the past Yanks at .846.

But I always view regular-season competition the way Mike Brown did this year, and the way George Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman viewed it when they spoke openly about a championship as their annual mission statement. October is all that matters in the Bronx. April, May and June were all that mattered to Brown and the overlords who fired Tom Thibodeau: James Dolan and Leon Rose.

Those 82 games were little more than a series of experiments designed for the Knicks to come up with The Answer, in the spring, for the first time in 53 years.

Over the decades, several teams have come and gone that could lay claim to GOAT status in the New York metropolitan area. The 1969 and ’86 Mets. Broadway Joe Namath’s 1968 Jets, who changed the game. The 1986 and 2007 Giants, who beat the NFL’s all-time coach (Bill Belichick) and all-time quarterback (Tom Brady) and stopped the 18-0 Patriots from becoming pro football’s all-time team. The 1982 Islanders, the best edition of the four-peat Stanley Cup champs. The 1994 Rangers, who slightly edge the Knicks on the biblical drought front, winning the Cup for the first time since 1940.

Joe Namath delivered on his guarantee to beat the Baltimore Colts in 1969, but the Jets had to win only two postseason games, including the Super Bowl. (AP Photo)

And I would point out that none of them faced the 24/7 scrutiny that today’s Knicks had to manage in the advanced social media age, when everyone is in constant possession of a recording device and people are crushing public figures on public platforms, trying to penetrate their gated world to bring them down a notch. Or three.

The Knicks had to hear perpetual references to 1973, and yet they never seemed burdened by it, carrying themselves with lightness and grace. The ’94 Rangers also pulled it off, but they went 16-7 in the playoffs; these Knicks went 16-3. And though New York is a helluva hockey town, when it comes to the iconic Rangers and Islanders’ runs, basketball has the larger footprint.

The ’86 Mets? They won 108 games before going 8-5 in the postseason, though the manner of their comeback victory over Boston in the World Series makes them a club for the ages. Nonetheless, the ’98 Yankees would have beaten them in six.

The 1986 Mets captivated fans with their thrilling victory over the Boston Red Sox in a seven-game World Series, but they rank behind the ’98 Yankees. (Frank Becerra Jr. / USA Today)

Truth is, the Knicks have built-in advantages over their counterparts in other leagues. The Giants’ four Super Bowl-winning teams each won only three or four postseason games, and Namath’s Jets had to win only two, including the Big One. Their sport doesn’t give them a chance to go on a magical 13-game winning streak in the playoffs.

The basketball fan base in the tri-state area isn’t split like the fan bases in baseball (Yanks-Mets), football (Giants-Jets), and hockey (Rangers-Islanders and some Devils, who have won three Stanley Cups). The Nets were good for two ABA titles in the 1970s, but they haven’t won it all in the NBA and — sans KD/Kyrie/Harden — have sunk into a sad state of irrelevance.

New York’s favorite team

If you are a local basketball fan, you are a Knicks fan. And these Knicks have appealed to, and united, an entire metropolis defined by its diversity. People who a couple of months ago couldn’t tell you what position Karl-Anthony Towns plays, or what college Brunson, Hart and Mikal Bridges attended, made Knicks games appointment TV (check the ABC/ESPN ratings) and fell head over heels for this team.

They love the fact that Brunson was an undersized second-round pick forever doubted as a legit superstar in the making. They love that KAT was considered a soft player with the Timberwolves before he started looking awfully tough with the Knicks.

They love the fact that Hart, Landry Shamet and Jose Alvarado are ham-and-eggers just trying to grind through the day.

“This city is built on toughness, grit, blue-collar people,” Hart said, “and I feel like I’m the same person. They can look in the mirror and see myself, just because that’s how I look at myself, and I just happen to hoop.”

For so many years, the Knicks tried to hurdle steps in the roster-building process by chasing the biggest available names, from LeBron James to Phil Jackson. Rose ended all that. He made some early mistakes in the form of Kemba Walker, Evan Fournier and Cam Reddish, but he carefully constructed a contender piece by piece. Rose landed an absurdly undervalued free agent in Brunson, made a series of smart trades, and ultimately hired the low-key Brown for the post-Thibs flexibility needed to take the final step.

The result was a cross between Red Holzman values and Linsanity volume. Could these Knicks have beaten the 1970 and ’73 teams?

Frazier-Brunson, Reed-KAT and DeBusschere-Anunoby would’ve been worth the price of admission, but today’s basketball is played at a much higher athletic level and, in the end, Holzman’s teams weren’t dealing with never-ending internet surveillance and quite the same drought. (The current Garden had opened just two years before the Knicks won it in ’70.) And those teams went a combined 24-12 in the postseason.

Edge, 2026 Knicks, who have some distinct character traits of past New York winners. The leader, Brunson, has Derek Jeter’s disposition and the Hall of Famer’s fearlessness in the face of potential failure. Anunoby is, like Eli Manning, delightfully oblivious to all the good and bad noise. KAT has the big-bodied energy of Michael Strahan from the ’07 Giants and the playful spirit of Victor Cruz from the ’11 Giants.

Karl-Anthony Towns celebrates after the Knicks’ 107-106 victory against the Spurs in Game 4. (Al Bello / Getty Images)

Unlikable under Dolan’s rule for so long, the Knicks represent the most likable team I’ve ever covered.In assessing greatness, likability matters to me. So does the impact on a home community. The ’98 Yanks certainly weren’t unlikable, but they had already won their 23rd World Series title two years earlier, and they just didn’t move the people of the city and the region like these Knicks do. I was there, and I don’t think it’s particularly close.

And that’s why I believe the Knicks won two important and distinct things Saturday night — the official Larry O’Brien Trophy, and the unofficial title of the greatest New York sports team of all time.