The last time the Knicks made the NBA Finals, New York was a different world

By Alaa Elassar, CNN

New York, New York (CNN) — On a warm May night in 1973, in a working-class New Jersey suburb just across the Hudson from Manhattan, 17-year-old Greg Hourdajian stood in front of a television set shouting himself hoarse alongside his mother.

The New York Knicks had just put away the Los Angeles Lakers, 102-93, in Game 5 of the NBA Finals, securing what remains the franchise’s most recent championship. For Hourdajian — a basketball-obsessed son of Armenian immigrants who had grown up in Queens — it was one of the best days of his life.

More than five decades later, the television is different, the room has aged and the city skyline has transformed. But Hourdajian, now 70, still watches from the same living room, this time with his daughter Jenna.

The Knicks are one win away from a desperately-awaited championship, reaching the finals for the first time since 1999, and with every possession Hourdajian paces the floor with the intensity of a coach working the sidelines.

“This is the greatest win ever, ever, ever, ever, ever,” he said after Wednesday’s historic second-half rally when the Knicks closed a 29-point gap with 1.2 seconds to spare.

He could barely contain himself as his daughter filmed the emotional whiplash of a Knicks fan’s existence — despair giving way to belief, belief giving way to delirium.

The last time the Knicks were this close to basketball immortality was 1999. The last time they actually climbed the mountain was 1973.

Back then, New York was a city running on equal parts swagger and anxiety.

The gleaming corporate capital familiar to tourists today did not yet exist. Times Square flickered beneath a haze of fear and neglect, adult movie houses lining the blocks and graffiti-covered subway cars rattling through stations. Mafia influence lingered in the background like cigarette smoke in the city’s thousands of bars. New York was broke, fraying at the edges and dangerous in ways that became part of its mythology.

It was the New York later immortalized by Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” depicting yellow cabs drifting through rain-slicked streets, sirens echoing through the night, and a nightmarish landscape of crime, filth and decay.

Hourdajian arrived at New York University later in the year after that championship run and remembers a city divided block by block.

“When I went to NYU, it was tough. The village, Greenwich Village, was a prime area, obviously,” he said, an inconspicuous nod to the area’s Mafia roots. “If you went anywhere east of the village, like we when we would go to clubs on the east end, it was really a rough neighborhood, and then it changed.”

Since then, New York has remade itself over and over again. Entire neighborhoods have been transformed and landmarks have disappeared. The city has endured fiscal crises, blackouts, crime waves, terrorist attacks, recessions and a pandemic.

The Knicks have changed, too, cycling through coaches, owners, arenas and generations of players – but never losing hope for a third championship.

Yet as the team makes another run at a title, an exhilaratingly familiar emotion has returned.

“It’s a similar feeling, but this time it’s like it’s on steroids,” lifelong New Yorker and Knicks fan Quron Booker told CNN, his 9-year-old son sitting by his side.

Booker sees it everywhere, even in spontaneous conversations between strangers wearing blue and orange he would have never imagined sharing the same spaces with.

For a city that has spent decades waiting for this moment, the excitement feels bigger than basketball.

It feels like New York is recognizing itself again.

Different city, same roots

Hourdajian remembers when a ticket to a Knicks game could be had for less than $15. Today, he’s lucky if he can find a seat in the upper reaches of Madison Square Garden for $350. A Finals ticket?

Fuhgeddaboudit.

When the Knicks clinched the championship in Game 5 of the 1973 NBA Finals, tickets sold for as little as $7. More than 50 years later, fans are shelling out thousands just to get in the building. Courtside seats have climbed into six figures, transforming a blue-collar pastime into one of the hottest tickets in sports.

New faces – like Hollywood’s favorite Knicks superfan Timothée Chalamet whose game appearances command a decent bit of airtime – and familiar ones, like beloved filmmaker Spike Lee who sat courtside with Prince during the 1999 NBA Finals, have united behind one rallying cry: Knicks in five.

For Hourdajian, though, the stars on the court have always mattered more than the celebrities sitting beside it.

Growing up, he kept a photo of Bill Bradley on his bedroom wall. Bradley, the cerebral forward and NBA Hall of Famer who helped deliver two championships to New York before becoming a US senator from New Jersey and presidential hopeful, was his hero.

Then one day in 2006, while parking his car in Manhattan, he looked up and saw Bradley standing nearby.

“I said, ‘Senator Bill, my favorite Knick of all time!’ and I’m shaking his hand, and he’s going, ‘Thank you,’ and I go, ‘And I voted for you three times!’”

These days, picking a favorite Knick isn’t as easy.

“It’s a lot of working-class guys. We love Josh Hart, but we have to root for Jose Alvarado, a Brooklyn kid who played high school ball in Middle Village, Queens,” Hourdajian said. “I was following him when he was in high school, and when he went to college, and he’s the perfect fit for this team. He’s unselfish, he’s not a big guy, he’s tough.”

The qualities he admires haven’t changed much over the years: grit, sacrifice, hustle, resilience, courage and “never say die” toughness. And the game is as hypnotizing as ever, from OG Anunoby’s tip shot in Game 4, Jalen Brunson’s ice-cold, nonchalant response to a missed foul after Victor Wembanyama shoved him in Game 3, and Karl-Anthony Towns erupting for a second-quarter scoring barrage in Game 2.

In the old days, basketball shaped the city as much as music did.

The city was a cultural laboratory, a place where entire genres seemed to emerge from cramped clubs and bars – a hotbed for musical revolution ranging from hip-hop to salsa to underground disco and punk rock.

Hourdajian spent countless nights at The Bottom Line in Greenwich Village, a legendary venue that helped define New York’s folk scene and hosted acts like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith. Just a few neighborhoods away, another revolution was brewing at CBGB, where punk rock was beginning to rewrite the city’s soundtrack.

“I got tickets for us to go to see a show at CBGB’s, and we walked in, and we’re typical Bergen County kids. We had jeans, a T-shirt, and a leather jacket, pretty clean cut, jockey looking kids, and we walk in and see everyone with the spiked hair,” Hourdajian said. “The New York Dolls were playing with David Johansen and my friends are looking at me going, ‘My God, I can’t believe we’re here.’ That epitomized the punk scene in New York City.”

What hasn’t changed is that New York remains, at its core, a city of immigrants.

Like the city they represent, the roster of the 2026 Knicks reflects strong immigrant roots, with global connections to the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Britain, France and Poland.

The Hourdajians’ roots in New York City also stretch back nearly a century. Both of his grandparents survived the Armenian genocide, his father being just 1 year old when he arrived in America in 1924, one of the last waves of immigrants processed through Ellis Island before immigration restrictions dramatically tightened.

“My dad was an independent film editor whose studio was on 44th Street and Sixth Avenue, which right off Times Square,” Hourdajian said. “When I was a little kid, it was a very dicey neighborhood. It’s been completely gentrified since my dad worked there.”

Neighborhoods once associated with crime, drugs, disinvestment and abandonment have become some of the most sought-after real estate in the country. Places like Williamsburg, Bedford–Stuyvesant and parts of Brownsville now attract young professionals, artists and newcomers, AKA “transplants,” from around the world.

The New York of boarded-up storefronts, graffiti-covered subway cars and cheap rent – as low as $111 in 1970 and $486 in 1990 – has largely disappeared. In its place is a shinier, wealthier city.

But on Knicks nights, especially during a playoff run that included an historic 13-game win streak, the old New York still peeks through.

“When they were down by 29 and they won…everyone said, ‘You must be going crazy,’ and I was very subdued,” Hourdajian said. “Because this is not over yet.”

From one generation to the next

When the Knicks erased a 29-point deficit against the Spurs in one of the most improbable playoff comebacks in franchise history, 9-year-old Bryce Booker burst into tears.

“They won by one point,” he sobbed into his father’s arms, who filmed the sweet moment after Wednesday’s game. “OG got the last point.”

Knicks fans immediately welcomed Bryce into one of New York’s oldest traditions: good-natured suffering. “Bro not old enough to be crying that hard for the Knicks, he hasn’t been here long enough,” one commenter joked. “Can’t front lil man I was ready to cry too until I realized I was in a room full of grown adults,” another Knicks fan said.

Bryce follows in his father’s footsteps, living and breathing basketball. He watches it obsessively and plays whenever he can — imitating his favorite player, Knicks captain Jalen Brunson.

When New York last reached the NBA Finals in 1999, Brunson was just 3 years old, darting around locker rooms while his father, Rick Brunson, was a backup point guard for the Knicks.

More than a quarter-century later, the Brunsons have become the first father-son duo in NBA history to each play in the Finals for the same franchise, both times against the San Antonio Spurs.

For Bryce, this playoff run is new. For his father, who remembers the 1999 Finals like it was yesterday, it feels like history circling back.

It brings back memories – both of basketball, and how much the city has changed, a lot of it for the better.

“Where I’m from, downtown Brooklyn, a lot of people that grew up down there, the mothers, the aunts, the grandmothers, and grandfathers, a lot of them didn’t get to experience the freeness, things like healthier food options and better living, and a safer community, that’s the bittersweet part,” Quron Booker told CNN. “Those who were there when it was so rough aren’t really available to really see the fruits of where we are now.”

His passion for the game once helped derail a high school relationship. At another point, he said, he came close to pursuing basketball professionally himself. Through every stage of life, the sport has been a constant companion.

Now he gets to experience it all over again through his son.

“I love the fact that everyone is coming together in harmony, there’s a lot of togetherness,” he said.

“Speaking from a human standpoint, whereas before it was more so like, ‘Hey, you’re White, and I’m non-White, and we have this misunderstanding on who we are individually, but now it’s like, ‘We’re human, we all are trying to navigate this thing,’ and the Knicks are playing such a pivotal role in doing so.”

Booker teaches Bryce that it’s okay to be emotional, that there’s nothing wrong with vulnerability or crying.

After all, Knicks fans have had plenty of reasons to.

“I remember saying I’m done, I’m not messing with the Knicks no more, but then I’ll still watch it. When Charles Oakley was running around, when Anthony Mason came, we had hope. Allan Houston, leading up to Jeremy Lin, and Carmelo Anthony, it’s been constant hope that turns into, ‘Damn, will we ever get a championship?’” he said of former Knicks over the years.

At one point, he even tried becoming a Brooklyn Nets fan, he jokes, but the attachment wasn’t the same. They weren’t the Knicks, and it wasn’t Madison Square Garden.

Now, with the Knicks one win from a championship, Bryce and his father have their own rituals. They pray for the team’s good fortune and to protect their good luck – and Bryce has a simple message for anyone listening:

“Keep God first and never give up.”

The fans who will never stop believing

Gentrification may have transformed much of New York City, but the people who call it home have a remarkable way of staying the same.

Outside of The Bakery in Harlem, graffiti artist and clothing designer Doms has spent over 10 hours a day for weeks creating old-school NYC-inspired Knicks shirts while blasting an iconic soundtrack straight out of the city’s golden era of hip-hop.

The playlist jumps from Big Pun’s “The Dream Shatterer” to Jadakiss and Young Jeezy’s “Something Else” to D-Block’s legendary Hot 97 freestyle. Spray paint hisses and music envelops Amsterdam Avenue as Knicks colors cover the sidewalk. One of his most popular designs features the Knicks logo framed by bricks and the shadow of the Manhattan skyline, a tribute to the city that raised him.

Like many real New Yorkers, he refused to give up hope for the Knicks. This run feels different.

“It’s way more energy around the game now. Social media amplifies that,” he says in between coats of spray paint on a fresh batch of tees. “In 1999, I was still actively doing graffiti on buildings. I’m more of a businessman now. Paint was cheaper also,” he says, laughing.

For a few hours, and sometimes all night, on game day, the city seems to operate on a different set of rules.

Construction workers, firefighters, lawyers, teachers, immigrants, lifelong New Yorkers and recent arrivals all find themselves screaming at the same television screens throughout every borough. Every point results in cheers and car horns– and on the eve of their past three wins, the city buzzes with a passion that’s simply irresistible, even for the bandwagon fans.

Miranda Sanchez, a daughter of a Knicks fanatic and Nuyorican – a Puerto Rican born and bred in NYC – says she’s never seen her father happier in his life.

“I’ve inherited being a Knicks fan from my dad since birth,” she said. “I think any Knicks fan will tell you it’s been a really rough couple of years.”

In just a few hours, New York will turn its attention to Game Five. Fans are praying, some building makeshift altars, shushing anyone who discusses the series too confidently, worried they’ll jinx the good fortune. Hope, anxiety, and riding the rollercoaster of emotions have become as much part of the Knicks experience as pick-and-rolls and three-pointers.

“The fun thing about being an underdog,” Sanchez says, “is that the wins feel that much powerful.”

For New Yorkers, the Knicks have been underdogs long enough.

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