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The last place I expected to hear people talking about the Knicks was the Tony Awards.
Yet there I was, interviewing Daniel Radcliffe on the red carpet and asking him about the energy in New York. Radcliffe, of course,
knew I was talking about the Knicks’ playoff run (though maybe I shouldn’t say of course: I later asked Lorne Michaels the same question and it went right over his head).
The last time Radcliffe witnessed a major New York sports team win a championship was when the New York Giants won the Super Bowl in 2012. And he’s not alone — the entire city has been waiting that long. To put that in perspective, that was less than a year after the final “Harry Potter” film was released.
“And I’ve obviously never been in New York for the Knicks getting even close,” Radcliffe continued, “let alone doing this.”
The “obvious” comes from the fact that the Knicks last reached the playoffs 15 months before Radcliffe was cast as The Boy Who Lived. And their last championship? J.K. Rowling was even younger than Radcliffe was when he auditioned for Harry Potter.
The drought only made this run more extraordinary. Every game in the Finals was defined by razor-thin margins. And the 29-point comeback in Game 4 that culminated with OG Anunoby’s thrilling tip-in will go down as, according to one of my closest friends and Yankees broadcaster Emmanuel Berbari, “The top two or three greatest moments in New York sports history.”
During the final game, which we watched with friends at The Rutherford across from Madison Square Garden, I raved to him about how I haven’t been this invested in a sports team since the 2015 Mets (shoutout to DeGrom, Syndergaard and Bartolo effin’ Colon) because of the stakes at hand. And then they won.
What followed, which I’ll chronicle to the best of my ability, is a night I never even imagined I’d witness in New York.
“What happens [if they win]?” Radcliffe questioned T-minus six days until the big win. “Is it going to be like what happened in Philadelphia? Cars on fire and flipping stuff? Let’s see.”
Moments after the Knicks’ win, The Rutherford blasted Frank Sinatra’s “Theme From New York, New York” and “Empire State of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys. The people loved it and sang along. Classic. Nostalgic. Expected. Wouldn’t exactly say that for how the rest of the night ended up.
Immediately, people in the rooftop section of The Rutherford started smashing glasses and beer bottles onto the ground. I was shocked by how calm the security personnel and patrolling NYPD officers remained.
I’ll never forget the expression on one officer’s face. He stood as still as a statue, bug-eyed, watching five twenty-somethings smash glass after glass before softly suggesting: “You don’t have to smash that many.” A bar employee then swept forward like a pawn on a chessboard and started sweeping the rubble.
At this point, I was eager to explore the chaos unfolding in the streets. I grabbed my two friends and we ventured outside the barricades, not realizing there would be no realistic way to return to The Rutherford with the others. Knicks fans were being guided like livestock through Midtown, with police officers lining the streets and metal barricades blocking off entire sections of the neighborhood.
In an effort to “teleport” to a less congested area, we ducked into a subway entrance and cut through Penn Station. The station’s cavernous corridors created the illusion that the crowds weren’t all that bad, but that quickly changed once we tried to get back outside. Nearly every exit was closed, including the grand escalators leading up to Madison Square Garden. Police directed thousands of people toward a single exit, creating a bottleneck unlike anything I’d ever seen in Penn Station in all my life living in New York.
The two friends I was with decided to cut their losses and catch the train back home, even after I was insistent on staying to “witness history.” Suddenly alone, I started questioning my own decision not to head back uptown.
As I shuffled towards the exit, squished like a sardine between thousands of sweaty Knicks fans, the cops had blocked off the final portal to the streets, sending people back the other way and creating a wave of mass confusion.
Cooking in a claustrophobic person’s worst nightmare, I felt a bit of anxiety quell. Looking at the emotionless expressions on the cops’ faces, I started imagining worst-case scenarios. One confrontation. One bad decision. One spark. I could already picture the CNN breaking news alert.
But once I managed to break free from the main current of foot traffic, I forced myself to stop and wait for the exit to reopen. As I stood there, I started noticing the acts of kindness around me: teenagers and twenty-somethings on the verge of panic, being comforted by friends, partners and strangers. Little signs of humanity appeared in every direction, quietly defusing what could have become a disaster instigated by fear.
And once I finally made it out onto the streets, I kept noticing the same thing. Amid the chaos, people were patient with one another. Friendly. Understanding. Bumping into someone wasn’t met with frustration, but with a grin and a comment about the Knicks, as if the entire city had agreed to give each other a pass from the stereotypical crankiness for one single night.
The whole city felt like it was riding on a collective high. Maybe it was all the second-hand smoke, but there was a palpable magic in the air that’s hard to describe without sounding corny. When tens of thousands of people are sharing the same emotion at the same time, it becomes contagious.
As I made my way east, I stumbled into Herald Square: the epicenter of the madness. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Dozens of people hung from scaffolding, scaled stoplights and street signs, and turned every object within reach into their own personal playground. One guy was multiple stories up the side of a ventilation shaft. Another, wearing a plain white T-shirt, sat hunched inside, watching someone climb past his apartment window.
Knicks fans also held impromptu pull-up competitions on pedestrian signs. Some of those perched atop the street poles formed circles with their arms, turning themselves into makeshift basketball hoops while people below launched shots toward them. It took a while, but when someone finally sank one, the crowd erupted.
A pair of men sprinting across the top of the scaffolding unleashed clouds of smoke from fire extinguishers, creating the illusion that the city was on fire. Below them, a man and his girlfriend stomped on the roof of a Hyundai Tucson. Its windshield had been shattered, and every car nearby was coated in a layer of spray paint, dust and fire-extinguisher residue.
Just across the street, fans had claimed an enormous yellow tow truck as their own. They stood atop it, waving flags and chanting into the night. At one point, a glass bottle came flying from above. It sailed over the crowd before shattering on the pavement below, just inches in between a group of people unaware of the situation. For a split second, the celebration froze. Then, in a hivemind-like fashion, dozens of New Yorkers instinctively started shouting at the young guy who threw the bottle.
The culprit — wearing tinted hippie glasses, a white tank top and a flower-print skirt — responded with a sheepish shrug and a smile. Then, almost as quickly as it had begun, the moment passed. No fight. No retaliation. The crowd returned to celebrating. It was a pattern I would witness throughout the night: moments that seemed destined to spiral that were instead absorbed by a city operating on a strange combination of adrenaline, joy and mutual understanding.
What made all of this behavior even more surreal was that it wasn’t taking place unsupervised. A battalion of unarmored NYPD officers stood on the perimeter of Herald Square watching the madness unfold. In the three hours I spent in the streets, the only time I personally witnessed officers intervening was to help vehicles navigate through the crowd.
“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” an officer said to a biker trying to cross the barrier entrance. He pointed toward an approaching vehicle. “You don’t see the car coming through?” Then he smiled, as if letting all the air out of his remarks. “You’ve gotta be careful.”
In my conversations with the officers, who were friendly and talkative but constantly alert, they told me they were enjoying the spectacle and were primarily there to keep people safe.
“What’s going to happen to all these people climbing the stoplights?” I asked one younger officer (who, I must say, had a killer mustache). “Are they going to get arrested?” Under New York law, climbing a traffic-light pole or perching on its crossbars is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail, a $1,000 fine, or both.
The officer smiled. He could tell I wasn’t asking out of mere curiosity.
“It’s funny. This is probably the only night they’d ever get away with this, right?” I asked again.
“You know,” he said, glancing back and forth, “this is your chance.”
So there I was, perched halfway up a street sign, watching tens of thousands of New Yorkers bask in the glory of controlled chaos.
The New York Post published a sensational Instagram graphic this morning highlighting the 63 arrests, four stabbings and one shooting reported across the city after the Knicks won — set against images of fire and smoke that suggested widespread mayhem — but that’s not accurate to what I saw go down.
What I witnessed was a city letting loose after a long-awaited cultural victory. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers pushed the boundaries of acceptable behavior, and the NYPD, recognizing the moment for what it was, focused on guiding the chaos rather than suppressing it.
For years, New York has been portrayed by outsiders as a crime-ridden city in decline. And in the years following George Floyd’s murder and other deeply troubling incidents, many Americans (including myself, admittedly) have come to view police officers through an equally rigid lens.
As I was thinking about this, I walked past a young Black man in street clothes shake hands with an Irish police officer. The two were bantering back and forth with smiles on their faces before continuing on their separate ways.
A few minutes later, I climbed onto the stone wall in Greeley Square and sat beside one of the bronze eagle statues overlooking the crowd. After hours of wandering through the streets, it felt like the perfect place to take one final photo before trekking back up to the Upper East Side.
“Yo, you almost just stepped on my fucking head,” a voice barked from below.
I looked down. A twenty-something dude in a blue Knicks jersey was staring back at me. I apologized. His face softened. “It’s okay.” he said. “Let’s fucking go Knicks. That’s all that matters.”
After a few moments of silence, he looked up again. “It’s a pretty great view, isn’t it?”
