Mike Colón Media

Thoughts on the New York Knicks returning to NBA Finals for the first time since 1999.

Allan Houston, Latrell Sprewell, Larry Johnson, Marcus Camby, and Chris Dudley. That was the starting lineup the New York Knicks rolled out on June 25, 1999, for Game 5 of the NBA Finals against the San Antonio Spurs. They lost the game and the series that day by a final score of 78-77. Despite a herculean effort by Sprewell, who scored 35 points, an Avery Johnson jumper with 47 seconds to go proved to be the difference.

1999 was a miracle run. In a lockout shortened season of just 50 games, New York finished a season defined by turmoil and inconsistency a mediocre 27-23. An eighth seed still led by an aging albeit still effective Patrick Ewing, that group, aided too by Houston, Sprewell, Camby, Charlie Ward, and Chris Childs, caught lightning in a bottle. Entering the playoffs that spring with low expectations from many a pundit, they responded resoundingly by upsetting their bitter rivals in the Miami Heat in the first round capped off by Houston’s dramatic game winning floater in the waning seconds of the fourth quarter of the deciding Game 5 (back when the first round was a best of five), handedly sweeping the Atlanta Hawks in the second round, and vanquishing another hated foe in Reggie Miller and the Indiana Pacers in six games the Eastern Conference Finals to punch their ticket to their second NBA Finals of the 90’s.

A title however, was not to be. Injured during the Indiana series, Ewing was rendered a spectator as the dynamic duo of Tim Duncan and David Robinson wreaked havoc on the makeshift New York front court of Johnson, Dudley, and Camby. Tim Duncan on that Friday summer night in Manhattan hoisted the first of what would be five championships during his illustrious Hall of Fame career. For the next 27 years that night would be the last time the Knicks would play that late into June. They’d make the Conference Finals again in 2000, but this time Reggie Miller and the Pacers would be the victors, winning that series in six games en route to their first ever NBA Finals appearance.

That night in the spring of 2000, a 93-80 Indiana victory, ended an era. The legendary Ewing would be traded to the Seattle SuperSonics that offseason, and with his exit also came the end of the Knicks as championship contenders. What would follow in the next 20 years is well documented. It was simply put, futility personified. Bad teams undone by bad coaching, horrid front office regimes and the backbreaking decisions they made during their hopeless stewardship from the bad draft picks, trades, and free agent signings that over those 20 years, coupled by the controversial ownership of James Dolan, served to render a once proud franchise a punchline of a league it once dominated.

By 2020, the jokes had reached a fever pitch. Missing out on key free agents in the summer of 2019 in Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, who instead opted to sign with the crosstown rival Brooklyn Nets, it didn’t just seem like the Knicks had hit rock bottom. It seemed like they had finally reached the very last crater of an endless abyss.

With the hiring of Leon Rose as team president in early 2020, no one was bothered to think anything would be different. After all, why would it be? How many executives had come in and made the same promises to restore the Knicks to relevance, only to leave the franchise even more beleaguered than they originally found it? Little did we know, this would be the beginning of brighter days.

In the immediate days ahead one of Rose’s first moves was to hire Tom Thibodeau, a head coach renowned as a floor raiser whose teams were well known for dogged intensity and relentless defense. Brought aboard for perhaps his toughest assignment yet, he for the most part he succeeded. Four playoff births in five seasons, including four playoff series victories and a trip to the Eastern Conference Finals would follow. Once an afterthought, his guiding hand played a significant role in a return to relevance and status as a playoff contender. However, after a bitter six game loss to the Pacers in 2025’s Conference Finals, the stubborn Thibodeau, a victim of his own rigidity whose lack of adjustments during the doomed series was heavily criticized, would be fired. Hired in his place, was Mike Brown, another veteran head coach with a solid track record and multiple championships to his name as an assistant under Steve Kerr’s dynastic Golden State Warriors.

It wasn’t that long ago however where Brown like his predecessor, was facing the music and perhaps, a firing of his own. Down 2-1 to the Atlanta Hawks in their first round series after back to back gut wrenching one point losses in Games 2 and 3, losses which seem like a lifetime ago now, everything looked bleak. The body language of the team looked awful, and the Knicks looked like a team destined for both an upset and in the offseason to follow, a break up. Then, like a light, like 1999, a switch was flipped, and a group that had won 53 games during the regular season all of a sudden remembered their potential.

Since then, New York has won a franchise record 11 playoff games in a row, including along the way a record breaking 51-point series clinching victory over that same Hawks team threatening to upset them, a dominating sweep of the rival Philadelphia 76ers in the second round capped off by a 30 point road victory to complete the series in Game 4, and another sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers, led by native New Yorker Donovan Mitchell, who admittedly grew up a Knicks fan. That series included one of the greatest comebacks in playoff history, as the Knicks stormed their way through a 22-point deficit with seven minutes remaining to take Game 1 in overtime by a score of 115-104. Cleveland never recovered.

The catalyst? Only the most important Knick since Patrick Ewing, and only the most important acquisition either team at Madison Square Garden has made since the Rangers traded for Jaromir Jagr back in 2004, Jalen Brunson. A 6’2 guard out of Villanova, the New Jersey born Brunson, whose father Rick was also a guard and a member of the Knicks 1999 Conference Championship squad as a reserve player, has been since his summer 2022 signing as a free agent, like Jagr was for the Rangers in the mid-2000’s, the main cog in the motor by which this incredible revival has occurred.

Stabilizing the position of point guard in a no way no player for the Knickerbockers has since the days of Walt “Clyde” Frazier, Brunson has carried this team to heights not seen since the Frazier or Ewing days, and with the way things used to go around here not too long ago, heights of success we weren’t sure we’d ever get to see again. Never was that more apparent than in New York’s conference clinching 130-93 decimation of a victory over the Cavaliers on Monday night. A balanced effort between all starters, it was Brunson with 15 points and 5 assists to finish off a series that saw him average 25 points and deservedly win the Conference Finals MVP.

Each of the years he’s been in New York, the team has advanced to at least the second round, making the springs mean something in the five boroughs again. Now, in a city that is already madly in love with their Knicks, he’ll have a chance to deliver one more time and with it, deliver something the city hasn’t had since 1973: an NBA Championship. His clutch shooting, masterful running of the offense, and Cool Hand Luke demeanor, has made the Garden the Mecca once again of a sport this franchise may just at long last have a chance to reign supreme over. The atmosphere will be electric, the city will be on fire, the hunger for a ticker tape parade never more palpable.

As for who they play? That remains to be seen. Will it be the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder led by two-time MVP Shai Gilgeous Alexander? Or will it be the San Antonio Spurs, the same Spurs who vanquished the Knicks in 1999, led then by the generational talent that was the aforementioned Tim Duncan, led now by another generational talent in Victor Wenbanyama? With that riveting series tied at two games apiece, the dust is far from settling. But for now? None of that matters. What matters is the they’re here. What matters is they’re back. Back for the fans who did see the glory years of Clyde Frazier, Willis Reed in the 70’s. Back for the fans who saw Patrick Ewing leave it all on the court night after night, spring after spring, in the 90’s. Back for the fans lived through two decades of doldrums where the only realistic chance the Knicks had of winning a title was in a video game. Back for a city starved for its first major title since Eli Manning and the Giants toppled for the second time in five years the Tom Brady led Patriots dynasty with a 21-17 victory in Super Bowl 46 all the way back in 2012.

It is deserved, it is amazing, it is to be savored. The New York Knicks are the 2026 Eastern Conference Champions. Maybe just maybe, they’re soon to be NBA Champions. Kings of the Garden, kings of a city eating out the palm of its hand, restorers of what Madison Square Garden is and was always meant to be: the Eden of the NBA.

Mike Colón is the host of the Mic’d In New Haven Podcast which can be found on all podcast platforms and is simulcast in video form on YouTube