By 
IF YOU’VE BEEN following the NBA play-offs this week, you’ll know that the streets of NYC have been convulsing with the kind of unbridled fan jubilation normally associated with winning a championship.
Specifically, the area outside of the Knicks’ home court at Madison Square Garden has been witness to a distinctly ‘New Yawk’-form of celebration that involves a heady mix of joy, five-boroughs brio, mob mayhem and no small amount of performative mugging for the camera.
Certainly, the Knicks have accomplished something. They are the 2026 Eastern Conference champions. The team, which earlier this week swept the Cleveland Cavaliers in four games, is returning to the NBA Finals for the first time in 27 years. There they’ll face either the Oklahoma City Thunder, who are aiming to become the first team since the 2018 Golden State Warriors to claim back-to-back titles, or the San Antonio Spurs, led by the sport-altering alien known as Victor Wembanyama, or just Wemby.
It’s a great story, one that reminds you of the power of sport to transcend barriers, uniting folks from diverse backgrounds and transporting citizens from the daily drudgery of their otherwise atomised, algorithm-driven lives – the ‘opiate of the masses’ delivered in a glorious blue, orange and white intravenous hit.
On the other hand, you do have to wonder if the Knicks’ achievements in this post season thus far, warrant quite this level of hysteria. For while ECF champions is, particularly for success starved fans, an unquestionable feat, it’s not a championship. The Knicks haven’t won one of those since 1973, when Elvis was still alive and Time Square was a bedevilled sinkhole of crime and destitution, rather than the sanitised neon ballroom of corporate America it is today.
If, against considerable but, it-must-be said, shrinking odds, the Knicks were to prevail against the Thunder or the Spurs, then you would have to fear for the city’s social cohesion. Riots are an ugly feature of American sports celebrations – eight people infamously died when the Detroit Pistons won the NBA title back in 1990. Hopefully Knicks fans would favour goofy delirium over wanton destruction.
So, what does the current emotional tenor of the team’s fans tell us about them and the city? You could easily, and perhaps credibly, construct a narrative that draws a straight line between the depth of fan fervour and the current state of the US. In dark times, the Knicks’ success offers a beacon of hope yada, yada, yada – forgive me, this is an article about New Yorkers.
Equally, you could point to the fact that NYC is the spiritual home of hoops, in the same way England is the home of football – a nice parallel; if England were to somehow triumph in next month’s FIFA World Cup, celebrations in Trafalgar Square would be the only true rival to those witnessed in Time Square this week. Perhaps success is all the sweeter when it happens to those who feel they are most entitled to it.
But there is perhaps a baser explanation for the crazed, if overly performative nature of Knicks’ fans celebrations: social media virality. The algorithm is rewarding an ecosystem beset by content creators who routinely wander into crowds of Knicks fans to do interviews that quickly devolve into mass chanting. It began back in 2021 after the Knicks’ victory in the season opener over the Boston Celtics, when Instagram account Sidetalk posted a pastiche of bonkers fans, one of whom used the now iconic phrase ‘Bing Bong’, a reference to the New York City Subway “doors closing” warning sound. ‘Bing Bong’ was, of course, accompanied by the now-viral ‘Fuck Trae Young’ chants – a reaction to the diminutive then-Atlanta Hawks guard, who famously played the role of Madison Square Garden villain to a tee, bowing and shimmying his way to a 4-1 victory that ousted the Knicks from the 2021 play-off race.
‘Fuck Trae Young’ has since become Knicks’ fans calling card, deployed on increasingly incongruous occasions. This season, the chant has been used any time the Knicks lose, or fans feel wronged, rarely when Young, a since maligned and diminished figure, has actually been playing. Sometimes, in fact, ‘Fuck Trae Young’ is used in victory – fans reportedly chanted it after the Knicks’ game 1 win over the Cavs in the recent ECF finals. And sometimes it’s used for no reason whatsoever, the irony of its dissonance underscoring the craziness of the fans and perhaps, a self-awareness among them of their own ridiculousness and their joy at being part of something bigger than themselves. Perhaps.
It’s mostly good fun and makes for great content, though, there is in the recent hysteria a sense of contrivance – many fans seem to be straining to capture the lightning-in-a-bottle sense of joy and distinctly ‘New Yawk’ boisterousness captured by Sidetalk in the original ‘Bing Bong’ video. The MO for most fans gathering in mobs outside MSG this week appears simple: appear as unhinged as possible. Some of this, to be sure, is fed by the mob, its members egging each other on. But as with everything in the social media age, it appears that even joy must be performative and celebration confected.
And so, in the interests of authenticity, let’s hope the Knicks do win the title this year. For if that happens, history will have been made, histrionics will be justified, and just maybe, Trae Young will finally have been fucked.
