The New York Power of the New York Knicks

The small city, I’ve always believed, is most conducive to feeling the intensity of a championship run. Take a city with less than one million people, hand them a sizzling team, and watch the resurgence of a monoculture that, these days, can only exist for sports. The charitable view is that a smaller city is more communal, more intimate, neighbors more likely to know neighbors; the sneering New Yorker, like me, might shoot back that the small city just has less going on. I’ve long thought that, for New York, this was always a bit of a problem when it came to professional sports. I’ve been an inveterate Yankee fan from early childhood and I’ve followed basketball and football with varying intensity over the years—less in recent times, if I’m honest—and this has allowed me to make a study of big city fandom. And my observation, from watching the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Rangers, and Islanders go on long playoff runs, is that all of these teams will only matter so much in a city of eight million people, especially since loyalties are divided.