New York Knicks

Ned Irish's house team

The franchise was set up in 1946 by Ned Irish as a founding member of the Basketball Association of America, the league that became the NBA. The name came from Washington Irving's pen name, Diedrich Knickerbocker, and the Dutch settlers of old New York it stood for. Under Joe Lapchick the team reached three consecutive Finals from 1951 to 1953 and lost all three, and it has played in the Madison Square Garden that opened in 1968 ever since.

The first silverware came under Red Holzman, with Willis Reed and Walt Frazier: titles in 1970 and 1973, both at the expense of the Los Angeles Lakers. Frazier never really left the building. On 20 October 2026 it was Frazier, now a Hall of Famer, who handed out the championship rings before the Knicks' opening game.

The long gap

Patrick Ewing's 15 seasons from 1985 produced two Finals appearances, in 1994 and 1999, and no title. The 1999 run then stood as the club's last trip to the Finals for 27 years, through a stretch in which the Knicks were better known for front-office churn than for contending. Across the whole of that history the franchise has won five conference titles.

Jalen Brunson's arrival in 2022 started the turn. Tom Thibodeau took the team as far as the Eastern Conference finals and was dismissed on 3 June 2025 after five seasons; Mike Brown was hired as head coach on 7 July 2025, with Leon Rose as president of basketball operations and Gersson Rosas as general manager. Brown inherited a side that had just lost in the conference finals and was expected, in New York terms, to finish the job.

The season that ended it

The 2025-26 Knicks went 53-29, second in the Atlantic Division and third in the Eastern Conference — not a dominant regular season by seeding, and the lowest seed of the four teams left standing in May. Brunson averaged 26.0 points and 6.8 assists, Karl-Anthony Towns 20.1 points and 11.9 rebounds, OG Anunoby 16.7 and 5.2, Mikal Bridges 14.4 points and 3.7 assists. Jordan Clarkson and Guerschon Yabusele had been added in free agency, Jose Alvarado arrived in a trade with New Orleans on 5 February 2026, and Mohamed Diawara came in as the 51st pick.

The playoff run went first round against Atlanta, won 4-2 between 18 and 30 April 2026; then Philadelphia swept 4-0 between 4 and 10 May; then Cleveland swept 4-0 between 19 and 25 May, with Brunson named conference finals MVP as the Knicks booked their first Finals berth since 1999.

The Finals against San Antonio ran from 3 to 13 June and finished 4-1. The game that decided it was Game 4 on 10 June, when the Knicks came from 29 points down to win 107-106 — the largest comeback in NBA Finals history. Brunson took the Finals MVP award, having averaged 28.4 points a game through the playoffs. It was the franchise's third title and its first since 1973.

A thrifty summer and a stock ticker

The summer of 2026 was about keeping the bill down. Mitchell Robinson left for Boston, Ariel Hukporti for Philadelphia and Jeremy Sochan for Portland. Andre Drummond and Jordan Clarkson each signed for one year at $3.9m, Jose Alvarado re-signed for three years at $14.5m, Landry Shamet for four years at $24m and Diawara for four years at $10m. Nine of the top ten players in the title-winning playoff rotation came back, which is unusual continuity for a champion, though extension talks with Towns were reported as nowhere close. Bookmakers set the win line at 52.5 and the price on a repeat at +1000; no team has won consecutive titles in the run of eight different champions in eight years.

The bigger change was corporate. On 27 October 2026 Madison Square Garden Sports completed a split that gave each team its own listed company: the Knicks trade as MSGK, the Rangers as MSGR. MSG Sports was renamed MSG Knickerbockers and keeps the G League affiliate in Westchester; MSG Rangers holds the AHL's Hartford Wolf Pack and the training centre in Westchester County. James Dolan is executive chairman and chief executive of both. The stock had risen 16% when the plan was announced in late September, and the Knicks became the first NBA team to trade as a standalone equity. Sportico has noted one consequence buried in the tax code: from next year, the deductible compensation for each company's five highest-paid players is capped at $1m.

Nine days of the defence

Opening night, 20 October, was a party followed by a defeat. Frazier presented the rings, the blue banner reading 2025-26 World Champions went up to join the other two, the Larry O'Brien trophy was driven through all five boroughs in a glass-walled bus, and Philadelphia then won the game 106-100. A home loss to Orlando followed on 25 October, 111-102, and the champions were 0-3.

The first win came on 27 October against a Detroit side that had not lost: 111-97, built on a 37-13 third quarter that opened a 25-point lead. Towns had 27 points and 20 rebounds, Brunson 23, and Bridges made his first four three-pointers of the season. It was the Knicks' first victory since Game 5 of the Finals in June and it avoided what would have been only the second 0-4 start by a defending champion in league history.

The night after, in Chicago, they came from 19 down to win 133-127, Brunson scoring 38 with seven assists, Anunoby 23 and Towns 19 with 13 rebounds, a 10-2 run in the fourth quarter deciding it. That leaves the Knicks at 2-3 as of 29 October 2026, with the shape of last spring visible again in the closing minutes if not yet in the first quarters.

What it costs to be in the room

Demand has reset the market. Resale prices for the home opener ran more than 500% above the equivalent game last season, with the cheapest listed seats at $1,346 including fees, an average around $2,600 and the best seats above $50,000. Across the season as a whole the cheapest available ticket to a Garden date averages about $344, against $234 last year, and the single cheapest home game on the schedule was found at $169 with fees — so the range between the quiet midweek fixtures and the marquee ones is now very wide.

Getting in takes time. During the Finals, streets were closed for five blocks in every direction hours before tip-off and the queues ran through airport-style screening. For ordinary regular-season dates the cordon is smaller, but the screening is the same.