I grew up a Chicago Bulls fan. Jordan and Pippen pulled me into basketball in the first place, watched from Germany off tape delay and highlight reels. So there is a small irony in what I am about to write. The team that raised me is the same team that made the Knicks miserable through most of the 90s. And here I am, thirty years later, glad New York finally has its banner.
The Knicks beat the San Antonio Spurs 4-1 in the 2026 Finals, a rematch of the 1999 title round I previewed before Game 1 here. They closed Game 5 on the road, with Jalen Brunson dropping a Finals-record 45 points on his way to MVP. First title since 1973. I covered the parade and the citywide chaos that followed in a separate piece. This one is about why a German Bulls kid cares at all.
How I Found the Knicks
My first real season, the one I stayed up through the night for, was the year the Houston Rockets beat the Knicks in the Finals. Hakeem Olajuwon's Rockets took it in seven. I was rooting for New York, hard, and they came up short. That is where my soft spot for this franchise started. Not the winning. The almost.
Years later, on my second trip to New York, I got into Madison Square Garden for a regular-season game against the Philadelphia 76ers. My favorite player of all time, Allen Iverson, was on the floor. The Sixers took it on the final possession, because the Knicks could not get a bucket when it counted. Early-season game, nothing on the line, and the Garden still shook. Not Eintracht Frankfurt loud, I have to be honest, but close enough that I understood the fuss. This is why they call it the Mecca of basketball.
The 90s Knicks and the Boom Bap Era
Hip-hop and the Knicks came up together in this city. The 90s teams built around Patrick Ewing, John Starks, Charles Oakley and Anthony Mason played physical, grind-it-out defense and reached the Finals in 1994. Sports Illustrated writer Chris Herring later called that era Blood in the Garden in his book on those teams. The same decade gave the world Illmatic, The Infamous, Enter the Wu-Tang and Ready to Die. The sound was ruff, dark and built on hard drums. The team matched it.
John Starks has said hip-hop shaped that group's identity, that the players walked onto the Garden floor to the music of the neighborhoods they came from. That connection was the same city speaking in two forms.
Rap Never Stopped Repping the Blue and Orange
The love shows up in the music, decade after decade. Skyzoo, Brooklyn to the core, made a whole record out of it. "Blue & Orange Everything," produced by Marc Nfinit, is his love letter to the franchise, and I broke it down while New York was mid-Finals run here. He points straight back to the 90s, to the "Go NY Go" chant and to watching Ewing and Starks fall short year after year.
The franchise knows the currency it holds. In 2019 the Knicks built a recruitment pitch around Wu-Tang Clan to try to land Kevin Durant, framing New York as a place where legends become myth as I wrote back then. Durant chose Brooklyn in the end. The pitch still told you how tightly the team and the culture are wound together.
Clyde, Jordan and the Style Thread
The link runs through fashion too. Walt Frazier, the point guard who ran the 1973 champions, earned the name Clyde from the wide-brim hats and suits that echoed the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. His fur coats made him one of the first athlete style icons, the template rappers would spend decades running with. He still calls Knicks games on the MSG broadcast.
And here my Bulls history comes full circle. On parade day, Jordan Brand rereleased the "Knicks" Air Jordan 3 in team colors. A Jordan shoe, timed to a Knicks title, from the brand of the man whose Bulls tortured this franchise for a decade. Business is business, and the culture eats it up either way.
Why This One Matters
The 2026 championship is a basketball result. It is also a New York culture moment, and the city knew it. The blue and orange has lived in the music for thirty years, from Ewing-era bars to Skyzoo's love letter. Now there is a banner to sit next to it. I came to this team as a Bulls kid who got hooked on a loss and once stood in the Garden for a game that did not even matter. New York got the ending it waited half a century for. I am happy for them. Do not tell my inner nine-year-old in the Bulls jersey.
