Since my last entry in this series, over a month ago, the Knicks have gone on a tear through the NBA’s Eastern Conference. After starting the postseason by dropping two of their first three games against the Atlanta Hawks (sending a mild panic through New York basketball fans), the Knicks ripped off 11 straight wins to advance to their first NBA Finals in 27 years. New York hasn’t lost since April 23rd, and won’t play again until June 3rd.

But simply pointing out the length of the winning streak does not really capture how well the Knicks have been playing. They haven’t just been winning: They’ve been destroying these teams. They won Game 4 of the first round by 16 points, then the next game by 29, and then clinched in Game 6 with a 51-point victory. In the second round, the 76ers managed to keep one game in the single-digits, but led for less than 20 minutes over the course of the four game sweep. New York blew out Philadelphia by 30 in the decisive Game 4.

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It looked a little like the Eastern Conference Finals would be more competitive, at least through most of Game 1. With 7 minutes and 49 seconds left in the fourth quarter, the Cleveland Cavaliers led by 22… before an epic comeback sent the game to overtime where the Knicks, once again, won by double-figures. After that it was all but over. The Knicks won Game 2 by 16; they never trailed in Game 3. Last night, they went on a 20-0 run late in the first quarter, and the game was effectively over — they won by 37. That brings their average margin of victory to 22.75 over the course of the playoffs. Even if you factor in their two losses (both by one point), it’s nearly 20.

The haters will point out that the Eastern Conference is weak this year, and that the Knicks didn’t have to play the two teams seeded ahead of them, Boston and Detroit. But there have been weak conferences and playoff upsets before, and this kind of playoff run is almost unprecedented (outside of that obscene 2017 Warriors team). The lack of drama would almost suck the fun out of it, if Knicks fans weren’t so starved for a Finals run after a quarter-century of disappointment. And there has been an almost wholesome civic pride running through New York as the city unites around this team.

Things haven’t been QUITE as good for Mayor Mamdani (how could they be?)... but like the Knicks he’s faced a conspicuous absence of drama. He managed to fill the budget gap left by Eric Adams — but with a remarkably conventional approach. And he’s scored a bunch of Good Government wins, over the winter snowstorms and a crackdown on deed theft in the city. The ambitious plans he ran on — fast and free buses, cheap groceries, a rent freeze — haven’t yet materialized but he has made credible headway on all three. Perhaps most importantly, early polls show most New Yorkers approve of both him and the direction the city is going.

Still, it’s possible that the mayor is benefitting from the political equivalent of a soft schedule: There was so much fear-mongering about Zohran and so many predictions of doom for New York if it elected a socialist mayor that the mere fact that the city hasn’t fallen to pieces in five months is seen as a win for the Mamdani Administration. But he has not yet figured how to deal with the major structural barriers that a socialist mayor faces. Things like Albany’s refusal to consider real revenue increases, or the lurking rift with NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch are already brewing, even if they haven’t spilled over into a real crisis yet.

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Of course, it’s nice to enjoy the honeymoon. The vibes in New York are great! And a Knicks championship — well, let’s not jinx anything. After all, the irony of all this is that, for as good as the Knicks have played over the last five weeks, they will almost certainly be underdogs against whoever they play in the NBA Finals. The Spurs and Thunder are duking it out in the Western Conference Finals, and both teams feel like forces of nature.1 But we will confront the structural forces against us… later.

Ahead of the 2021 NBA playoffs, New York City announced that Madison Square Garden would be opened at nearly full capacity. There would be a socially distanced section with empty seats for unvaccinated fans, but even so over 15,000 people (over 75% of typical capacity) showed up for the first Knicks playoff game in eight years.

It wasn’t exactly a vintage Knicks crowd – masking requirements kept some of the crowd noise muffled – but it was the closest thing to real basketball anyone had seen in 14 months. When Immanuel Quickley hit a three to make it a one-point game late in the first half, the crowd erupted (and the cameras cut to Spike Lee) in a way that almost made you think it was 1994 again.

But the most memorable part of the game was noteworthy for its silence. With the game tied and 10.2 seconds left on the clock, the Atlanta Hawks inbounded the ball to their point guard, Trae Young.

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By now, Young is a four time All-Star and he led the league in assists last year; still, it’s hard not to feel like his career hasn’t lived up to the hype. There was so much excitement around Young coming out of college, and in his first few years, in a way that didn’t really match with his player profile. He was an undersized, volume-shooting point guard that couldn’t really play defense, and yet he was traded for Luka Dončić on Draft Day. This was partially because a lot of teams convinced themselves that he was the next Steph Curry,1 but also because of his brash personality. There were questions about whether he could be a true point guard in the NBA, but he just seemed like the kind of guy who could will his team to victory.

In the first 11:50 of the fourth quarter, Young had taken only one shot from the field, but he’d dished it out for two big threes to swing the game. The ball would start in his hands again on this final possession, but clearly the Knicks were going to try to force him to give it up. Coach Thibodeau made two defensive substitutions, first putting Reggie Bullock in for R.J. Barrett — that made sense, as Barrett was a young, inexperienced defender, and Bullock had been a reliable rotation player all season.

But then Thibs made the curious decision to put in Frank Ntilinka. The French guard had been a promising young player — the second-youngest player in the NBA during his rookie year — back when he was drafted in 2017, but by now he was mostly an afterthought. His offense had never really developed, and even on defense he seemed to gradually lose the trust of Coach Thibs throughout the 2020-21 season: Ntilinka played less than five minutes in all but two games over the last two months of the season. He was mostly reserved for garbage time, or if they needed a player to commit a foul. So far in Game 1 he’d played for only 23 seconds, when he replaced Derrick Rose on the final defensive possession of the first half.

And yet now Ntilinka was tasked with guarding Atlanta’s best player on the most crucial play of the game. Within seconds, he got so turned around that not only was he out of position to guard Trae Young, but he ended up inadvertently setting a pick on his own teammate, preventing Taj Gibson from playing help defense. Young blew past both of them and laid in the game-winning floater with 0.9 seconds. As the Garden crowd fell silent in disbelief, Young held a finger to his mouth and taunted the fans.

“It’s quiet as fuck in here! It’s quiet as fuck in here now!”

How had the Knicks blown this? How was it possible that the best defensive team in the league ended the game on such an embarrassingly bad defensive play? The truth was that, however exciting the end of the 2021 regular season had been, the Knicks really weren’t that good yet. Despite their good defense, they didn’t really have a lockdown defender, or an elite scorer. And without those things, a deep playoff run was always unlikely. Progress was being made in New York, but they weren’t ready yet…

Going into the 2021 election cycle, the new progressive movement looked ascendant in New York City. The outrage over Donald Trump’s first election had been channeled into local politics, first with a few City Council campaigns in 2017, then some notable victories in 2018 — not only Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but Julia Salazar and the rest of the No IDC State Senators. In 2019, the left nearly defeated the establishment choice for Queens DA, with Tiffany Cabán actually leading Melinda Katz on Election Night (only for some absentee and provisional ballots to eventually put Katz ahead by 20 votes). And in 2020, the NYC-DSA slate swept its statewide races, electing four new socialists to the State Legislature, including Zohran Mamdani.

Plus, 2021 was an opportune time to make inroads in city government. Not only was there an open mayoral primary, but 42 of the 51 seats on the City Council were becoming vacant thanks to the term limits passed in 2013. DSA ended up endorsing six candidates in the council races, an unprecedented number. Socialists were ascendant and by now NYC-DSA and the broader leftist movement that was burgeoning throughout the city had its own brand. Candidates who were running with that backing, and who could count on the support of the newly elected progressives like AOC, should cruise to victory.

But it didn’t really work out that way.

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One major problem was that NYC leftists had no obvious candidate in the 2021 mayoral race. As mentioned in an earlier post in this series, most of the credible potential candidates for mayor had decided to skip this campaign.

Into the void rushed a bunch of hacks who had never held (or in many cases even run for) elected office before. The most famous of these was Andrew Yang, who had run a longshot campaign for president in 2020. He’d done surprisingly well for a neophyte, but had dropped out after New Hampshire and taken a job on CNN. His name recognition, plus his enthusiasm and his reputation for innovative ideas, was enough to vaunt Yang into the early polling lead. But his grasp of New York City politics was minimal, and his campaign was quickly overrun with consultants and advisors aligned with ex-mayor and plutocrat Michael Bloomberg.

While Yang sucked up most of the early attention, there were several other candidates who were less famous but similarly short on experience, ideas, or familiarity with city government: Shaun Donovan was HUD Secretary under Obama and then Chair of OMB; Maya Wiley was a longtime MSNBC anchor; Ray McGuire was a Citigroup executive self-funding his campaign; Dianne Morales was a nonprofit director. Kathryn Garcia and Loree Suttton had run the city’s Department of Sanitation and the Department of Veteran Services respectively, which gave them more experience than most of their competitors, but neither of them had any electoral base to speak of, and Sutton dropped out early that spring. But in a race without any of the big names, the rest of these people convinced themselves they had a path to winning.

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One of the only candidates who’d actually run for office before was Scott Stringer, the City Comptroller, who initially looked to be the progressive candidate in the race. He launched his campaign with the support of, among others, socialist State Senator Julia Salazar, and soon other progressives in the city jumped on board, like Congressman Jamaal Bowman (who was also a DSA-endorsee), City Council Member Jimmy Van Bremer, and State Assembly Members Yuh-Line Niou, and Diana Richardson. Stringer also had the backing of progressive groups like New York Communities for Change and the Working Families Party.

But it was always an uneasy fit. While Stringer was certainly a progressive, he represented an older, Baby Boomer-style of New York City liberalism. His mother’s cousin was Bella Abzug and his father had worked for Mayor Abe Beam. Stringer got his political start in the 1980s, working for Jerry Nadler when he was still in the New York State Assembly. When Nadler ran for Congress, Stringer took2 his Assembly seat. He was elected Manhattan Borough President in 2005, and Comptroller in 2013.

So the vast majority of Stringer’s political career came before the backlash to Donald Trump and the leftist reawakening in the late 2010s. His brand was not that of a young firebrand, but of sort of a more competent Bill DeBlasio. In 2013, he’d successfully defeated Eliot Spitzer, New York’s scandal-plagued ex-Governor, by running as a boring but effective manager who knew city politics, and he looked to be running the same playbook in 2021. He scored the endorsements of prominent unions like the UFT and the CWA, but he’d never really campaigned to the newly engaged young voters that backed the victories of AOC and the NYC-DSA slate. Plus, he was an old white guy running at a time of heightened sensitivity to racial and gender equity issues. None of this was a dealbreaker… until he was accused of sexual misconduct.

The allegations against Stringer were serious but murky: They were decades old by the time of the 2021 race, and Jean Kim, the first of the two women to come forward, was a New York lobbyist, leading some to question her credibility and objectivity. Stringer strenuously denied Kim’s account, insisting their relationship had been consensual and appropriate, and later sued her for defamation. Whatever the truth, though, Stringer’s momentum was blunted and he quickly started to lose support. Most of his prominent progressive supporters, like Salazar, Niou, and Bowman, withdrew their support.

It is sometimes suggested that the allegations against Stringer were frivolous, and that it was only in the specific, hyperwoke window of 2020-21 that they would have undone a campaign. This seems to trivialize the accusations, which include things that would be condemnable at any time, like groping and forcible kissing. But it is probably true that Stringer’s denials would have carried more weight, and that his allies may have stood by him at a different time. Indeed, there was a real divide among city progressives on how to handle the accusations, with most of the unions and Jerry Nadler standing by him, or thinking it was too late in the campaign to find a new progressive candidate.

But Stringer was always an awkward standard-bearer for the city’s new leftist coalition, and his younger supporters started to abandon him in droves. Looking for a new candidate, a lot of them ended up supporting Dianne Morales, a political neophyte from the world of education nonprofits.

It speaks to the dearth of credible candidates that Morales became the leftist standard bearer for a while in 2021. She had never run for office before, had little experience in organizing, and did not consider herself a socialist. But she garnered the support of some prominent leftist politicians, like Jabari Brisport and Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas, as well as prominent progressive organizations like the Sunrise Movement and the Working Families Party. Her campaign was led by two prominent leftist organizers, Ifeoma Ike and Whitney Hu, and it attracted volunteers from the city’s recent surge of leftwing campaigns.

The main reason for this was, essentially, the Defund the Police movement. The 2021 mayoral race was a strange moment in the life of Defund, because it was simultaneously the first New York City campaign since the crest of the movement around the 2020 George Floyd protests AND the peak of the backlash to Defund as violent crime spiked in the wake of the pandemic. The result was that a lot of NYC politicians who had been eager to embrace Defund just a few months ago were now running quickly away from it.

But Morales didn’t budge: She advocated billions of dollars in cuts to the NYPD, as well as routing emergency calls to other agencies. This attracted a lot of the activists who had spent the last year protesting police brutality, and gave Morales some excitement and energy. In a common theme among leftwing campaigns that attracted talented young volunteers, she had the most distinct and visually compelling campaign logo and graphics.

Then in late May, just a month before the election, Ike and Hu abruptly quit, and another Morales campaign organizer called on her to drop out, saying she had created “a hostile work environment towards Black and Brown staffers.” The dispute seemed to stem over the behavior of two people Morales had brought into the campaign, which many deemed toxic and abusive. A nascent unionization effort at the campaign was recognized by Morales, but the union alleged that some of its leaders were fired in retaliation. The details were murky and the whole thing played out like a satire of leftwing infighting and incompetence; within a few days, dozens of top staffers had abandoned the campaign and several politicians and organizations withdrew their endorsements.

It would be a stretch to say that the Morales campaign “imploded” because, in truth, she was never polling that high to begin with. She maxed out at the high single-digits, and never advanced very far in the ranked-choice simulations. Her campaign was always a longshot, but whatever hope it had rested on the army of volunteers she was amassing — and now they were all gone.

With nowhere else to go and just weeks before the election, the left turned to Maya Wiley as the last plausible candidate standing. Like Morales, Wiley had never run for office before. She HAD worked in city government, as Mayor De Blasio’s counsel, but her real claim to fame came after that, when she worked as a legal analyst on MSNBC. Like a lot of politicians in the Trump era, she thought she could parlay that TV prominence into electoral success, only to find out that the cable news fans are a very narrow sliver of the electorate.

Wiley managed to earn the support of SEIU 1199, the largest union in the city — a huge coup for a first-time candidate. But most of her other support came from politically-adjacent celebrities like Kathy Griffin, Rosie O’Donnell, and Yvette Nicole Brown — and believe it or not, these people didn’t carry much sway with the public. As the weather warmed up at the end of May, Wiley was stuck polling in the high single digits, behind Yang, Adams, and Garcia.

But once it was clear that neither Stringer nor Morales were viable, the left rallied around Wiley. The Working Families Party, which had previously issued a tepid, three-headed endorsement of Stringer, Morales, AND Wiley,3 now regrouped and issued a clear, solo endorsement of Wiley. Our Revolution had been toying with a split endorsement, but also stuck with just Wiley. A wide range of Congress members joined her side: national progressives like Katie Porter, local ones like Nydia Velazquez, and even establishment figures like Hakeem Jeffries.

The biggest domino to fall, though, was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. AOC had stayed out of the mayoral race, and mostly avoided local politics since winning her congressional seat in 2018. Some thought she might never actually endorse in the mayor’s race, or put out some mealy-mouthed split endorsement. Her PAC, Courage to Change, put out a baffling list of City Council endorsements, which often included multiple candidates in the same race with no preference on how to rank them. But eventually, when it looked like NYC’s left might be bereft of a mayoral candidate, Ocasio-Cortez took a side and picked Wiley.

Almost overnight, Wiley’s support doubled. On May 31st, Ipsos released a poll showing Maya Wiley in fifth place, still behind Scott Stringer and struggling to crack 10% in the first round of ranked-choice votes. On June 5th, AOC made her endorsement and three days later, Emerson put out a poll showing Wiley in second place, just six points behind Adams on the first ballot.

It is perhaps unfair to attribute this remarkable turnaround to AOC alone — her endorsement was joined by a slew of other local socialists like Jamaal Bowman, Julia Salazar, and Emily Gallagher. But it was clear that what changed was a coalescence of the left. Velazquez and Jeffries had issued their endorsements in March and May, respectively, and neither had come with any obvious polling bump. But AOC and her comrades launched an also-ran into the top tier in less than a week.

And Wiley stayed there through the election. Because of how the ranked-choice tabulations shook out in 2021, people remember Kathryn Garcia as the runner up in that election. But on the first ballot it was Wiley who was in second place, and she was ahead of Garcia through the first six rounds of RCV. It was only in the seventh round, when Andrew Yang was eliminated and his votes were redistributed, that Garcia finally pulled ahead by 12,000 votes.

Just days before the primary, in a desperate attempt to revive his now-flailing campaign, Yang had told his supporters to rank Garcia #2, presumably in the hopes that doing so would curry favor with her New York Times reading supporters. It didn’t work, and Garcia didn’t reciprocate, but enough of Yang’s voters listened that nearly ⅓ of his votes were redistributed to Garcia. By contrast, only ~11% of his votes went to Wiley, so Garcia advanced to the last round, where she fell short of Adams by just 7,197 votes.

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Ironically, if the initial results had been the same under the city’s old system, before ranked-choice voting, then Adams would have advanced to a runoff against Wiley, not Garcia, and this would have been a much better result.4 For one, Wiley would have a very good chance of defeating Adams in a one-on-one matchup. She could’ve honed in on his now-obvious liabilities as a candidate, and probably made inroads with his base in working class Brooklyn.

But more importantly, this would have been a much more clear-cut divide between a corrupt, establishment figure and the anointed leftist candidate. Maya Wiley obviously wasn’t a perfect candidate for the left, but she was sure as shit better than Eric Adams, and the left would have benefitted from the contrast. Plus, the left would have gotten the credit for propping up an obviously flawed candidate as an alternative to Adams.

Instead, the 2021 mayoral election was seen as a major setback for the NYC left. Eric Adams’ victory was a triumph of law and order centrism over the woke mob, and the runner up, the candidate who would fill What If? fantasies for the next four years, was Garcia, a boring bureaucrat who rode a NYT endorsement to 19% of the vote. Maya Wiley would end up mostly forgotten, and the left was deemed unserious, a bunch of kids who alienated the broader electorate and tore down their leaders, but couldn’t actually get anything done.

In the less profile campaigns, the results were similarly muddled and unsatisfying. The 2021 City Council races saw a lot of young progressives win seats, but with so many Council members term limited out, there were no evil incumbents to be defeated, a la Joe Crowley or the IDC Senators in 2018. Most of the leftists ran races against other progressives, making it hard to draw clear contrasts. The progressive ranks grew, but there was no marquee victory or clear leader to emerge, and they didn’t have enough power to defeat Adams OR control the council: Adrienne Adams, who would eventually become the Council Speaker, was as close to an old-fashioned machine politician as you see these days.

For the socialist left, the results were especially disappointing. Four of the six candidates on the NYC-DSA City Council slate lost. Many lost to other progressives — Shahana Hanif, who defeated a DSA candidate in Park Slope, also described herself as a socialist and had sought the DSA endorsement — but the electorate’s refusal to back socialists over typical progressives was a real setback.

NYC-DSA never came close to endorsing in the mayoral race, which in part reflects the poor quality of the candidates, but it left people confused about where the organization stood. As mentioned, some NYC-DSA electeds eventually endorsed Wiley to stop Adams (although, notably, Zohran never did), but this only led to more confusion.

Even now, looking back on that 2021 race, it’s hard to know what to make of it. There were some real bright spots for the left: Tiffany Cabán was elected to the City Council, and traditional progressives pulled off upsets in less profile races like Comptroller and Brooklyn Borough President. But the overall results were disappointing. The left didn’t seem ready for the proverbial spotlight, and it wasn’t clear what the future held. After the last election, just eight months earlier, New Yorkers had celebrated in the street. Even most leftists were willing to swallow their pride and accept Joe Biden if it meant defeating Donald Trump. It was a moment of possibility. But with Biden’s victory came a massive demobilization that would catch the emergent left off-balance. The momentum had stopped dead. Nobody was celebrating in the streets that June; it was quiet as fuck out there.

After Trae Young’s shot sank the Knicks in Game 1, the rest of that playoff series was anticlimactic. The Knicks managed to win Game 2, despite trailing for most of the game, but then they had to go to Atlanta, where the Hawks took control of the series for good: They won the next three games, all by double-digits.

By the end, the series was less about the Knicks versus the Hawks and more about Trae Young versus New York. He was already a hateable player, but his taunts at the end of Game 1 certified him as a prime new villain for Knicks fans. In Game 2, a fan spit on him (and was subsequently banned from Madison Square Garden). In Game 3, Young got into a scuffle with the Knicks’ Reggie Bullock in the final minutes. And in Game 5, with the Hawks up big in the fourth quarter of the clinching game, he launched a three from the logo and took a bow for the New York fans.

At the time, it seemed like a coming out party for a new NBA superstar, but Young never again matched those heights and the Hawks haven’t won a playoff series since. On Saturday they’ll start a rematch with the Knicks, but Trae Young won’t be there: Atlanta traded him to Washington in January (and subsequently got a lot better).

What feels significant about that 2021 series now is not Young, who never lived up to the hype, but the excitement of the New York crowd. Their eagerness to find a villain — for years, Knicks fans would chant, “Fuck Trae Young” even in games when he wasn’t playing — showed how hungry they were cheer for something. If the Knicks weren’t ready for a deep playoff run yet, then they would settle for hating an opponent in the meantime. But even though it didn’t seem clear at the time, the Knicks — and NYC’s socialists — had a future to be excited about.

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One day last month I happened to pick up the Greenpoint Star, one of the hyperlocal newspapers that you can, remarkably, still find in the city, and I read something about “the six year anniversary of the pandemic.” The phrase struck me, since I hadn’t seen any reference to such an anniversary anywhere else in the media. Even the Star only referenced it in passing — it was not an anniversary that got much or any commemorating.

Obviously the pandemic is not a pleasant thing to remember, but this still seems strange. We commemorate all kinds of tragedies, after all. But in this case, there is no obvious political message. It is not a nationally unifying memory, like Pearl Harbor or the JFK assassination, and there is no political coalition pushing to keep its memory alive, like 9/11 or Martin Luther King, Jr. No matter your political ideology, everyone prefers to pretend the pandemic never happened.

Plus, there’s the issue of when to actually mark the “anniversary.” The paper didn’t specify a date, but March includes New York’s first confirmed Covid case, its first death, and the initial Stay at Home order that began the “lockdown” phase of the pandemic. When people talk about “the pandemic,” though, it’s often a little unclear if they are referring to that initial lockdown period, or the extended reopening phase that is much harder to pin down.

Initially, Governor Cuomo’s executive order shutting down the state — officially named the “New York State on PAUSE Order” — was in effect through April, then it was extended through May and into June. But the rules kept changing: masking requirements were added, the lists of “essential businesses” expanded. Towns and counties were allowed to “reopen” early if they met certain criteria.

In New York City, parks opened in May, but with weird social distancing rules that, in some cases, involved big circles painted on the grass. Dining sheds started popping up in June, so you could go to a restaurant and eat outside, but only with a mask on whenever you stood up or while you were talking to the staff. Schools reopened in the fall with a remote option for students, but in-person instruction was shut down completely again after a few weeks, when Covid cases started to climb.

By 2021, the vaccine was available, but the rollout was slow, since there weren’t enough shots to go around initially. The first vaccine was administered in New York in December of 2020, but it wasn’t available to all adults until the following April. Even then, slots were hard to come by, and the two-dose requirement meant it took months for most people to be “fully vaccinated.” New York tried to turn the summer of 2021 into an official “reopening,” and for a while that kind of worked, but the rise of the Delta variant eventually dampened the enthusiasm. New Yorkers still had to abide by weird rules, and now vaccine requirements started to replace masking requirements.

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In other words, things in the City were pretty weird for a long time, far longer than the initial lockdown period. There was never any official “end” to the pandemic; everyone eventually moved on at their own pace. At the time, it wasn’t obvious at all if or when things would return to normal. Indeed, for a while there was a lot of talk about a “new normal,” about long-term adaptations we would need to make to a post-pandemic world. Maybe masking would become the default. Maybe nobody would go to the office anymore. Maybe New York City would be hollowed out as everyone moved to the suburbs.

In retrospect, it’s remarkable how LITTLE actually changed. One day you looked up and realized people were eating inside again, nobody was wearing a mask, and the person behind you in line wasn’t standing six feet away. Occasionally you’ll still run into a relic of the pandemic, like a restaurant with a QR code menu or a sad, lonely bottle of hand sanitizer at the library, but for the most part there were no major, long-term changes. Remote work increased, but not by nearly as much as people predicted. Rents and property values in the city returned to sky-high levels. Popular programs like outdoor dining and open streets were slowly killed off.

Instead of being a momentous turning point, “the pandemic” is now remembered as an extended interruption, a weird two-year parenthetical in history.

Whenever I see people talk about “2020/21” I am reminded of NBA seasons. With football and baseball, you can talk about “the 1996 season” since they play their regular season within the confines of a single calendar year.1 But since basketball starts in the fall and goes into the following spring, they always have to list their season with this ugly “1995-96” format. When we’re talking about the long Covid hangover, though, this format actually helps.

Most of the time, when people talk about how the pandemic affected the NBA, they talk about The Bubble, where the league played the end of the 2020 season and the playoffs. But neither of New York’s teams was invited to the Bubble, and in some ways the weirdness of the Bubble obscures the weirdness of what came after.

The NBA’s 2020-21 season started just 72 days after the 2020 season ended. The long delay after they suspended the season, plus the logistics required to get the Bubble up and running, meant that the 2020 NBA Finals were played in October instead of June. And the league wanted a mostly normal schedule for the following season, which meant a compressed 72-game schedule and a very brief off-season. So training camps opened less than a month after the Lakers won the Finals, the preseason started in December, and official games were played before Christmas.

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“And on the 288th day, there was basketball,” wrote Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic. The New York Knicks opened the season on the 23rd in Indiana, and played their first game back in Madison Square Garden three days later. But there were no fans at either game, and unlike the Bubble, there were no fan videos playing over the court either. Instead crowd noise was pumped in over the loudspeakers as they played in front of empty seats.

The first time the Knicks played in front of any kind of “crowd” was two games later, when they played in front of 300 fans at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland. Julius Randle led them to victory with a triple-double, pulling New York to 2-2. Knicks fans had it so bad for so long, that just being .500 after four games was noteworthy. Victor Mather at The New York Times wrote about the hope surrounding the emergence of Randle.

Julius Randle is not exactly a Knicks legend, but his role in the team’s turnaround should not be overlooked. Originally drafted in 2014 — as part of a draft class that would become famous for its disappointments — Randle spent the beginning of his career on some bad Lakers teams in the post-Kobe, pre-LeBron era. He went to New Orleans for one year before signing a low-risk, three-year deal with the Knicks before the 2019-20 season.

Signed after the Knicks missed out on Zion Williamson and all the marquee names of the 2019 draft class, Randle at first seemed like part of a lackluster consolation prize. His first year in New York was eminently forgettable, but in 2020-21 he emerged as the team’s leader under new Coach Tom Thibodeau. As an undersized, not-quite-star who wasn’t elite at any one thing but very skilled at many things, Randle was a perfect fit for Thibs, who loves workmanlike, do-everything grinders who fill up the stat sheet.

Randle stayed farther from the basket than usual that season, taking more threes and at times piloting a Knicks offense that was without a real point guard for most of that year. This hurt his rebounding numbers slightly, but increased his scoring and assists. He made his first All-Star team and won the league’s Most Improved Player award. Perhaps the most important stat Randle had that season, though, was minutes: He led the league in minutes played, anchoring the rotation Thibs settled on in his first year as New York’s head coach.

But Randle still wasn’t the kind of superstar the Knicks had hoped to land in 2019, and his development didn’t turn the team into contenders overnight. In true Coach Thibodeau fashion, the Knicks were a tenacious defensive team: They had the third-best defense in the league — only the second time since 2001 that their defense was better than league average. But running the offense through Randle so much had limitations: The Knicks had the slowest pace in the league that year, and below-average offense.

For most of the season, they were hovering around .500 toggling between 5th and 10th place in the Eastern Conference. A bunch of teams were clustered around the middle of the pack that year: The Knicks traded spots in the standings with half a dozen other mediocre teams that were all trying to avoid the NBA’s Play-In Tournament: the mini-tournament of teams seeded 7th through 10th to decide the final two playoff seeds that the league had just introduced. This kind of gimmicky consolation prize seemed like the Knicks’ destiny.

The East was expected to come down to either the Philadelphia 76ers or the Knicks’ neighbors in Brooklyn, the Nets. As you may recall from an earlier entry in this series, this was the season when the Brooklyn Nets were finally supposed to cash in on their free agency bonanza in 2019, when they signed Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant. Not only was Durant coming back from his torn Achilles, but James Harden had forced his way out of Houston and demanded to join the Nets superteam.

It took a little while for a Harden trade to come together, but when he landed in Brooklyn he made an immediate impact. He had a triple double in his first game and won Eastern Conference Player of the Week in his second week with the team. The Nets’ Big Three couldn’t ever seem to all get healthy at the same time — Harden, Irving, and Durant only played eight games together in the regular season — but they seemed poised to dominate the playoffs, and dominate New York, once everyone healed. And in the meantime, they were still near the top of the Eastern Conference, and Harden quickly turned into their most reliable contributor. A mural of the Beard went up across from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

If the Brooklyn Nets were poised to take over New York City basketball, the problem was that nobody could see them. There was a superteam budding in the Barclays Center, but for the first half of the season nobody was allowed inside. Indoor events were still tightly restricted, well into 2021, and so any fan excitement the Nets were engendering had to be experienced purely through a TV screen, mostly at home.

The Knicks and Nets did play in front of crowds in some road cities in the first half of the season, and it’s mostly places you expect: Atlanta, Cleveland, Houston, Phoenix, etc. By the second half of 2020, and certainly into 2021, the partisan divide around the pandemic had set in, and cities in red states were trying to open earlier. But even they only had partial openings: The biggest crowd either New York team played in front of in the first half of the 2020-21 season was a quarter-capacity crowd (4,249 people) in Orlando in mid-February. By then Governor Andrew Cuomo had already announced plans to reopen arenas in New York at reduced capacity — a reminder that the differences between red and blue responses to Covid are often exaggerated in our memories.

On February 23rd, the Knicks and Nets both played home games in front of actual fans for the first time in eleven months. It would be nice, for narrative purposes, if the return of in-person crowds marked some sort of turning point in either team’s season… but that’s not what happened. There was no great Return to Normalcy once Madison Square Garden and Barclays were reopened. If anything, the arrival of fans only underscored how weird everything still was.

The Knicks had only ~1,900 fans in their first game. The Nets went even smaller, hosting just 324. The New York Times said the Barclays Center “felt like an uneasy blend between a haunted house and a private Beyoncé concert at a corporate retreat.” The crowds were small enough that fans could hear players talking to each other on the court. And they never got much bigger all season long.

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In April, the Knicks made their way to Brooklyn for their third matchup with the Nets that season. The Nets had won the first two meetings, and were in first place in the East at the time, but Kevin Durant didn’t play, and James Harden tweaked his hamstring in the game’s first five minutes (an injury that would linger through the playoffs). Still, Kyrie Irving kept the Nets in the game with 40 points, and a pair of free throws from Jeff Green gave the Nets the lead in the final seconds.

Julius Randle, who had a triple double in the game, had a chance to tie it at the buzzer, but his shot bricked out (the second time he had blown a chance to tie the game against the Nets) and the Knicks fell short again. It felt like a simulacrum of their season: good but not great, competitive but unable to beat the really good teams. Being mediocre was a nice position for Knicks fans used to being putrid, but it wasn’t anything to get excited about. Another loss a few days later dropped them to 25-27, and firmly in the middle of the Eastern Conference’s bell curve. They were tied for 7th-place, and facing the dreaded play-in tournament.

And then, for reasons nobody could quite discern, things got better all at once. On April 9th, the Knicks staged a 13-point comeback win against the Memphis Grizzlies, starting a nine-game winning streak and a stretch of 16 victories in their final 20 games. It was a glorious five-week stretch that pushed them to the top of the six-team pile-up in the middle of the Eastern Conference. The Knicks went into the playoffs as the 4-seed: Not only did they avoid the play-in tournament, but they would have home court advantage in the first round of the playoffs.

The burst of excitement came at exactly the right time. Just as fan expectations around the season had started to settle in, the team pushed to a new ceiling. Unlike the Nets’ superteam, who entered the 2021 playoffs with sky-high expectations and could only disappoint, the Knicks entered with the rare feeling of a mission accomplished: whatever they did in the playoffs would be gravy to a successful season. The team had a likable young core, with Randle and RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley, plus a new identity. Tom Thibodeau won Coach of the Year.

And it matched a moment of general optimism in the spring of 2021. In the days after the regular season ended, New York restored 24-hour subway service and Covid testing recorded the lowest positivity rate since the pandemic began. Vaccine eligibility was expanded to include teenagers, and the City announced that it had administered over 8 million shots. New York announced that it would be officially “reopening”; in an absurd mirror to the initial shutdown, Mayor De Blasio first announced a July 1st date, only for Governor Cuomo to intervene and move it up two weeks just to mess with him.

The celebratory highs of that spring and summer would eventually be forgotten. It wasn’t so much that the pandemic came back — despite the Delta/Omicron variants, the death rates in New York City never returned to the early highs, and the city never shut down again. But the unrestrained optimism, the idea that everything was fixed, and the city would just return to normal would come to seem incredibly naive. Weeds had been planted during 2020/21 that would take years to pull out by the root. But at least for one simple moment, the Knicks were in the playoffs…

Who are the Knicks’ biggest rivals?

It’s not an obvious question to answer. Thanks to the way the NBA structures its divisions and its schedule, its rivalries tend to come from repeated playoff matchups, instead of the regular season or geography. And since the Knicks only recently broke an extended playoff drought, they haven’t had a lot to pick from: Most of their rivals still date from the 1990s.

You could make a strong argument that New York’s biggest rivals are the Miami Heat. The teams have history, iconic moments, and bad blood: In 1995, Pat Riley resigned from the Knicks (via fax) so he could take a job as team president of the Heat, a job he has held ever since, winning Executive of the Year and multiple championships. Two years later, the teams met in the playoffs for the first time; the Heat won a seven game series best remembered for the infamous PJ Brown brawl.

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The Knicks would beat Miami in the playoffs in each of the next three seasons, but the Heat beat New York again in both 2012 and 2023. Miami has a reputation for relentless competence and stability: They’ve had the same coach and front office for decades now, and they’ve only missed the playoffs four times since 2003. Meanwhile, the Knicks have been known for volatility, extended mediocrity, and unmet expectations. So there’s both a legitimate contrast and actual animosity between the franchises.

But no, I think the actual answer most Knicks fans would give would have to be the Indiana Pacers. The 1990s series between New York and Indiana were even more cinematic than the ones with Miami — literally: One of the first great 30 for 30 films was about this rivalry. And, of course, Reggie Miller was a better antagonist than anyone on the Heat.

And it just so happened that the Pacers knocked the Knicks out of the playoffs in each of the last two seasons. When Tyrese Haliburton did the Reggie Miller choke gesture to cap off a jarring comeback in Game 1 of last year’s Eastern Conference Finals, it reopened wounds for Knicks fans that, it turns out, were still pretty raw.

When Haliburton then tore his Achilles in the NBA Finals, it was bittersweet. For one, it meant an anticlimactic end to the season, but it also meant the Pacers would be a non factor in the East, leaving the Knicks without an obvious antagonist for the 2025-26 season. Had Haliburton stayed healthy, then it would have been obvious what the Knicks would need to do for 2025-26 to be a “successful” season: beat the Pacers. If they could finally get past the team that knocked them out two years in a row, then Knicks fans could feel like progress was being made. If not, then you start to wonder if the window on this team is closed.

But with the Pacers mired in last place in the East, it’s been harder to pinpoint exactly what success means. Winning the Eastern Conference would feel like progress, but would it even feel worthwhile if you don’t go through Indiana? How good would it feel to beat the Pistons — a team that hasn’t won a playoff series since 2008 and doesn’t have a history of animosity with the Knicks?

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Then last week, Jayson Tatum came back and I had a scary thought: Oh no, what if we just get swept by the Celtics? Tatum also tore his Achilles in the playoffs last year, and was not expected to contribute this year. But Boston has played much better than anyone thought in his absence — they have a better record than the Knicks — and now Tatum is back and he looks pretty good for someone coming off an Achilles injury.

Losing to the Celtics would hurt even more, oddly, because they’re NOT really a rival of the Knicks. That’s unusual for Boston and New York, who are natural rivals in most sports, but in the NBA they haven’t actually had much beef for as long as I’ve been alive. The Celtics have deeper, more historic rivalries with the Lakers and the Pistons and even the Heat. The Knicks are barely on their radar.

So watching the Celtics emerge, yet again, as the favorites in the Eastern Conference, is like watching the Knicks miss their moment. This was supposed to be a wide open year in the East, a year for the Knicks to finally return to the NBA Finals, and yet it’s starting to look like the window might already be closed. And the annoying piece of it is that, even if the Knicks do knock out Boston, it won’t feel like progress: After all, New York beat them last year,1 and this was supposed to be a down season for the Celtics. This is why rivals are important: We are whatever we are fighting against.

I fear we have lost track, a little bit, of the central figure in the political side of this story, Zohran Mamdani. Our timeline so far has mostly focused on 2020, when he was running a little-noticed campaign for State Assembly in Queens. But it’s worth spending a little time on his opponent in that race, Aravella Simotas, because of what an ill-suited foil she really was.

Last year, when Mamdani defeated Andrew Cuomo (twice), it became conventional wisdom in many circles to attribute his success to the weakness of his opponent. For many pundits, this was a way of pooh-poohing Mamandi’s success, and dismissing the appeal of socialism in general. And it obviously fails to provide a complete explanation for Mamdani’s victory; there were a dozen other, non-socialist candidates who ran against Cuomo and got virtually no traction.

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But it’s also true that Andrew Cuomo WAS a perfect foil for a grassroots socialist campaign. Cuomo was a bully who had run the state for years, who was a longtime antagonist of both progressives and New York City politicians. Plus, he had two major scandals in his recent past: multiple verified instances of sexual harassment, plus his dishonest and incompetent handling of the Covid-19 nursing home deaths. There were a lot of voters who, when confronted with the idea of Cuomo’s return to power, would understandably flee in the other direction, regardless of any ideological preferences.

And Zohran was a perfect stylistic contrast. Cuomo was old; Zohran was young. Cuomo was a nasty bully; Zohran was always friendly and smiling. Cuomo seemed to hate New York City; Zohran obviously loved it. These differences only amplified their differences on policy and ideology, and made people who might normally be skeptical of socialism more amenable to what they saw as simply a rejection of Cuomo-ism.

Amanda Litman

The case against Andrew Cuomo

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a year ago · 27 likes · 1 comment · Amanda Litman

This was an extreme example, but it was a pattern that the left was used to exploiting in New York City. There was the IDC, Joe Crowley, Melinda Katz, Martin Dilan, even Anthony Weiner — establishment figures viewed as corrupt or immoral or incompetent have been useful foils for progressives catapulting themselves into positions of power and prominence. Heck, this is even how Bernie’s initial campaign against Hillary went so well in 2016 — it’s not exactly a groundbreaking strategy.

But Aravella Simotas, the Assembly Member from Astoria that Mamdani challenged back in 2020, did not really fit this pattern at all. Simotas was young, only 42 at the time of the election. She was well-liked by her peers, and she faced no scandals. Nor was she an odd demographic fit for the district, as Joe Crowley had been; Simotas was an immigrant and her parents were part of the Greek diaspora,2 which has a strong presence in northern Queens. And she had deep ties to the City, going to public school and then Fordham for college and law school.

Nor was Simotas was a particularly easy foil on policy issues either. She had been endorsed by the Working Families Party. She supported progressive legislative priorities like GENDA and Raise the Age. (She even introduced legislation to close loopholes in the latter law.) One of her colleagues in the Assembly said, “I’ve worked with Aravella, and I’m not quite sure how you could be more left-leaning than she is.”

In other words, Simotas was not a natural villain for a socialist campaign. At several points during the primary, Simotas said that she agreed with every issue Mamdani had highlighted on his website. Even Zohran sometimes struggled to find points of contrast, bringing up years-old bills that had never even come to a vote.

In reality, there was nothing really wrong with Simotas on paper. She was a pretty standard, Obama-era progressive. The real reason that Simotas was targeted was quite simple: NYC-DSA was running a slate of candidates in 2020, and her district was densely populated with DSA members. This made it an enticing opportunity to grow the ranks of socialist legislators in Albany — which, prior to 2020, stood at exactly one.

Zohran Mamdani was a promising candidate and a committed socialist. He had held prominent roles in prior NYC-DSA campaigns, most notably Khader El-Yateem’s 2017 City Council campaign in Bay Ridge and Tiffany Caban’s 2019 run for Queens District Attorney. And it just so happened that he lived in Simotas’ district.

At the time, plenty of people picked up on what was going on, but Mamdani’s campaign couldn’t exactly come out and say that they were only going after Simotas because she wasn’t a socialist (hence all the harping on obscure bills). Political races in the US are supposed to be about the specifics of the candidates. During the campaign, Simotas emphasized that she had deeper ties to the district and that she WASN’T part of any broader movement: “I did not get into this business because you know, a club, a politician or party asked me to, I went for public office to be a public servant and to help my neighbors and New York and create systematic change for all of them,” she told the Queens Chronicle.

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This was clearly a shot at DSA, but that contrast was precisely why Zohran was running in the first place. The premise of NYC-DSA’s electoral program was that electing nice, upstanding progressive Democrats was not good enough; you needed to elect people who were accountable to a broader socialist movement. In a vacuum, there didn’t appear to be much difference between Simotas and Mamdani — but politics doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

Of course, most people don’t think this way. Most elections DO come down to the specific candidates for most voters, and when NYC-DSA has run other races against good enough progressives (like Crystal Hudson in 2021 or Grace Lee in 2022 or even Ritchie Torres in 2020) it has not fared as well as when it runs against the clear villains like Cuomo. But socialism does not only fight against the ugly, obvious corruption of Andrew Cuomo; it also fights against corruption that is more charming and insidious.

That’s important, even if it isn’t always successful. And for a moment in 2020, even people who weren’t DSA members and didn’t think of themselves as “socialists” were hungry for something bigger, something more ambitious. It didn’t matter that Simotas wasn’t a villain; she lost just the same. When the votes were finally counted that summer, the NYC-DSA slate swept all five of its races. Zohran’s win wasn’t the most decisive, but it wasn’t the closest, either.3

Now, nearly six years later, I worry about the temptation to see this race as part of Zohran’s personal story — as an early example of his charisma and his political talent. And I suppose it is partly that. But it’s ALSO an illustration of socialism being willing and able to reject the status quo even when it comes in a friendly package.

And don’t worry about Aravella, she ended up doing ok: The good enough progressive who agreed with everything on Zohran’s website ended up taking a nice, cushy job doing communications for REBNY, the real estate lobbying group.

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Back in 2014, Steve Kerr was going to become the Knicks’ head coach. It was the worst kept secret in basketball. Phil Jackson had been hired to run the team’s front office in March, and even before he officially took the job he was meeting with Kerr and openly discussing the possibility of hiring his former player.

Kerr had never been a coach before, not even an assistant, at any level. Most of his post-playing career had been spent as a broadcaster, and his three year stint as General Manager of the Phoenix Suns had mixed results. But Kerr was so well-liked and well-respected around the league that most people assumed he would be a good head coach. Even skeptical Knicks fans were mostly optimistic about Kerr, seeing him as a philosophical extension of Jackson, whose landing in New York had been greeted with so much excitement.

Of course, at the last minute, Kerr turned down the Knicks, and instead accepted a job with the Golden State Warriors. The rest is history: The Warriors immediately turned into a dynasty, making it to the NBA Finals in each of Kerr’s first five seasons, and winning three of them. After a brief, injury-plagued hiatus, they won it all AGAIN in 2022, giving them four titles and six Finals appearances in eight years.

Kerr, then, has to be considered one of the best coaches of all time — but when he was asked what would have happened had he gone to the Knicks, he was clear: “Gone in two years. Guaranteed.” Most of this, of course, was about Stephen Curry and the other young talent that was already on the Warriors. Kerr succeeded because he recognized the genius of Curry, and leaned into his specific skills:

But the other piece of this was the Knicks, who have a long history of making splashy coaching hires that never quite live up to the hype: Rick Pitino, Larry Brown, Mike D’Antoni. Even Pat Riley, who sort of lived up to the hype and got the Knicks to the NBA Finals, had more success in both of his other jobs.

Being head coach of the Knicks is just one of those cursed jobs, where it’s almost impossible to succeed. It confers a high degree of attention without enough corresponding power to determine your own success. That’s probably true of every coaching job in pro sports, but it’s especially true for the Knicks head coach, who faces the full glare of the New York media in a league where players and stars are especially powerful, and for the last few decades has had to deal with the Dolan regime. It’s no wonder that Steve Kerr doesn’t believe he would have been successful here…

Instead of Kerr, Phil Jackson hired another former player, Derek Fisher, who was fired after less than two seasons. The guy who replaced him (Jeff Hornacek) lasted only two seasons, as did the guy who replaced HIM (David Fizdale). If you count interim coaches, then by the summer of 2020, the Knicks were looking for their eighth coach in a decade.

Who would want a job like that?

In terms of cursed New York City jobs that nobody can do well, Head coach of the Knicks might be up there, but there’s really nothing that tops Mayor. Famously, no Mayor of New York City has ever gone on to hold elected office again, and most have ended their terms in disrepute. Bill De Blasio’s image was so battered by his time as mayor that he was chased out of a Congressional primary in his old neighborhood the year after leaving office; Eric Adams basically had to flee the country.

This is a tradition that goes way back. I wrote last month about how John Lindsay’s once-bright reputation was dimmed after a few years in Gracie Mansion. Even Fiorello La Guardia, the one mayor all New Yorkers now say they like, ended his third term so unpopular that he dropped out before facing reelection.

It’s just very hard to be Mayor of New York. The job will make you famous, but it doesn’t come with a lot of actual power. That’s why so many mayors end up playing second fiddle to governors or presidents. But the mayor represents the city in a way that is hard to resist. There is so much romanticism around New York City that mayoral races tend to attract big personalities. It might be a dead end job, but there are usually a bunch of ambitious politicians who think they can conquer it.

But not in 2020…

At the same time the Knicks were looking for yet another new coach, the 2021 mayoral race was taking shape — and nobody seemed to want to enter it.

Political Currents by Ross Barkan

Why Doesn't Everyone Want to be Mayor?

In 1977, New York City was two years removed from near-bankruptcy. Violent crime was skyrocketing, the subway was malfunctioning, and the streets and rivers were filled with filth. Vacant buildings were torched for the insurance money. The fiscal crisis had…

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6 years ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · Ross Barkan

For years, big names had been rumored to be circling the 2021 mayoral race. Nobody had seriously challenged De Blasio in the 2017 primary, meaning it had been eight years since there was a competitive race. And those were an eventful eight years: Bernie Sanders had pulled the Democratic Party to the left; Donald Trump’s first election had enraged the city’s multiracial populace; AOC’s insurgent victory in 2018 had energized the local electorate. Surely all those changes would make the 2021 mayoral campaign a doozy.

But one by one, all the candidates seemed to be skipping this one.

• Letitia James had won two elections to be Public Advocate, a common launching pad to the mayor’s seat, and seemed poised to recreate Bill De Blasio’s winning coalition of the Working Families Party and Black Brooklyn… but instead she took a spot on Andrew Cuomo’s ticket as Attorney General back in 2018.

• Jumaane Williams had just replaced James as Public Advocate, winning a special election by a convincing margin. He’d also run a surprisingly competitive statewide race for Lieutenant Governor (where he’d actually run ahead of the incumbent, Kathy Hochul, in the five boroughs), so he could have been the frontrunner for mayor… but he declined to run, choosing to run an easy race for reelection as Public Advocate instead.

• Rubén Díaz Jr. was in his third term as Bronx Borough President. Before that he had served three terms in the State Assembly, and he was the son of powerful Bronx power broker Rubén Díaz Sr. He had avoided most of the offensive cultural views of his father, and he seemed to be angling for a mayoral throughout his whole political career: He announced his intention to run as early as 2018… but in January of 2020 he announced he wanted to spend more time with his family, and dropped out.

• Ritchie Torres was an up-and-coming city politician in 2020. He had been elected to the City Council at just 25-years-old, and there was a lot of speculation about what he would do when he was term-limited out… but he decided to run for Congress in 2020, getting out of City government all together.

Max Rose, the former Staten Island Congressman, flirted with a run before quickly abandoning the idea. Gale Brewer, the Manhattan Borough President, decided to run for her old job on the City Council instead of pursuing a mayoral campaign. Christine Quinn, who had been an early frontrunner in 2013, declined to make another run. Neither Hakeem Jeffries nor AOC showed any real interest in the campaign.

For a while it seemed like Corey Johnson, the Speaker of the City Council, would be the prohibitive favorite. His work during De Blasio’s second term (when the mayor was off on his vanity campaign for president) led some to call him the “shadow mayor,” and he had deep ties to the city machines. But in the fall of 2020, even he dropped out, citing depression and burnout from his work during the pandemic.

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Ultimately there WERE a lot of names on the ballot in 2021, but it was a bunch of people who’d never held (or, in most cases, even run for) elected office, like Dianne Morales, Maya Wiley, and Andrew Yang — plus New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer and, of course, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. What was really notable about the 2021 mayoral field was not who stayed in, but how many people stayed out.

No members of the City Council ran for mayor — despite almost all of them being term-limited and needing new jobs. Four of the five borough presidents skipped the race. Neither the current nor the former Public Advocate were running. None of the members of Congress representing New York City had any interest in the job. There wasn’t even anyone from New York City’s deep bench of weirdos, perennial candidates, and disgraced ex-politicians running for mayor: no Anthony Weiners or Jimmy McMillans or Norman Mailers.

It says something about how deeply weird of a time it was in New York City. It’s tempting to attribute this to the pandemic, but it was really more about a deep anxiety about what would FOLLOW the pandemic. As the mayoral field was taking shape in 2020 and into 2021, there were serious worries about how the city would be reshaped by the pandemic.

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This was the only time in recent memory that New York City apartment rents actually fell, as people fled New York for the suburbs to get away from the subway and have more room for home offices. Remote work was going to end commuting, thereby wrecking the value of Manhattan office space. Nobody knew if or when tourism or Broadway or high end retail would rebound. This stuff was all lining up to wreck New York City’s budget, and leave the city as a hollowed out shell of itself — something for which the next mayor would surely be blamed.

Of course, in retrospect, it’s remarkable how little actually changed. There are obviously things that have gotten worse, but New York City in 2026 is a lot like it was in 2019, and the alarmism that crested in 2020 looks a little silly now. But at the time it was real enough to shape the 2021 mayoral race. Everyone was taking a wait-and-see approach to the future of the City. It was an approach that left the City’s emerging socialist movement without a mayoral candidate, and would allow Eric Adams to sneak into Gracie Mansion.

There is obviously a lot to say about the campaign that elected Eric Adams, but for now at least the main thing is probably just this: He actually wanted the job at a time when nobody else seemed to, and sometimes that’s all it takes.

Tom Thibodeau wanted the Knicks job. He wanted any job, really — Thibs had been out of the game for a year and a half by the summer of 2020, and he’s not someone who can really stand being away from basketball for that long. Thibodeau has been on a sideline for basically his entire adult life.

He grew up in New Britain, Connecticut and went to college at Salem State, a public school in Massachusetts where he played for their Division III basketball team. After graduating, he stayed on the team’s coaching staff for four seasons before becoming an assistant coach at Harvard. After four seasons there he jumped to the NBA, where he spent two decades moving from Minnesota to San Antonio to Philadelphia to New York to Houston to Boston, all as an assistant. His first head coaching job (not counting a single season he spent as the head coach at alma mater) came in 2010, when he was hired by the Chicago Bulls. He was 52 years old.

At the time, the Bulls had been mostly an afterthought since Michael Jordan retired, having won just a single playoff series since 1998. In Thibs’ first season as the head coach, though, the Bulls surged to first place in the Eastern Conference, Derrick Rose became the youngest player ever to win the MVP award, and the team made it all the way to the Conference Finals, before losing to LeBron James and the Miami Heat. They finished first in the conference again the next year, and it looked like the Bulls and Heat would be vying for supremacy in the East for years… but then Rose tore his ACL.

The Derrick Rose injury derailed what had seemed like a budding dynasty, but Coach Thibodeau kept Chicago relevant even afterwards: The Bulls made the playoffs every year he was the coach, and won two playoff series after Rose got hurt. But Thibs eventually wore out his welcome in Chicago, and was fired after five seasons despite winning nearly 65% of his games. The Bulls put out a long, baffling statement after the firing, accusing the coach of basically not playing well with others:

“Teams that consistently perform at the highest levels are able to come together and be unified across the organization -- staff, players, coaches, management and ownership. When everyone is on the same page, trust develops and teams can grow and succeed together. Unfortunately, there has been a departure from this culture.”

Of course, since firing Thibs over a decade ago, the Bulls haven’t won a playoff series and have missed the postseason completely in eight of ten seasons. So conclude from that what you will about who was doing what for Chicago’s “culture” in that time…

After the firing, Thibodeau’s reputation was still very good. He coached Team USA, where Mike Krzyzewski called him “one of the great coaches on the planet.” People were clear about his drawbacks: He WAS, by most accounts, difficult to get along with. But it came from a rabid devotion to the game of basketball. Thibs has no children. He has never been married. People who know him say he has no other hobbies or interests. He is demanding because it is basically impossible for normal people to match his commitment to the game.

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After a year off from coaching in the NBA, Thibodeau got hired again by the Minnesota Timberwolves. Expectations were high: After 12 straight years of missing the playoffs, the Timberwolves finally had a bevy of young talent, including Andrew Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns, the previous two Rookie of the Year award winners. And after his first season as head coach, Minnesota traded for Jimmy Butler, who had been a star for Thibs back in Chicago and who had a “love-hate” relationship with Thibodeau. The thinking was that with all that young talent, plus Thibs as coach and Butler to provide veteran leadership, the Wolves would emerge as a dominant force in the Western Conference.

But it didn’t really work out like that. In fact, the whole experiment blew up in everyone’s face. While they made the playoffs in 2018, they were the 8-seed and got easily dispatched by Houston. More to the point, Butler never clicked with Wiggins or Towns, openly challenging their commitment and ability to win before demanding a trade and humiliating them in practice. The coach never really regained control of the squad, and he was fired midway through his third season, with the team stuck at 18-21.

Coach Thibodeau was still the same guy, but now his reputation was different. Instead of the brilliant coach unjustly fired for just caring too much, he was now the much-hyped tactician who couldn’t meet expectations or connect with the younger generation of players. But the idea of him walking away from the game was absurd. Coaching basketball was all he’d ever done. Thibs dabbled a little in TV analysis, but it was not a natural fit:

@nba_newyorkSomebody put the fear of God into bro about smiling on camera 😂 #thibs #Knicks #NewYorkKnicks #NewYorkBasketball #Newyork #Basketball #ESPN #TV #TVSports #Announcing #FYP #NBA

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So when the Knicks needed a coach in the summer of 2020, Tom Thibodeau was an obvious choice. There were some parallels with the 2014 Steve Kerr situation: Like Kerr, Thibs became a frontrunner thanks to a prior personal relationship with a newly hired head of the Knicks front office (this time it was Leon Rose instead of Phil Jackson). And like in 2014, the coaching search stretched on longer than anyone initially expected (although this time it was mostly due to the pandemic).

But in a lot of ways, Thibodeau was the complete opposite sort of candidate from Kerr. Kerr had played for iconic NBA dynasties; Thibs had never played above Division III. Kerr had no coaching experience; Thibs had nothing BUT coaching experience. Kerr was charming and likable and good on TV; Thibs was curmudgeonly and demanding and uncomfortable smiling. While Kerr would have been a flashy hire, and he would go on to become one of the most successful coaches in NBA history, even he says that if he’d taken the New York job he would’ve been fired in two years and gone back to TV.

Thibs never wanted to go back to TV. He was not flashy. When he finally accepted the job, it was a little bit boring. But the most successful Knicks coaches have been kind of boring. Two of the three winningest coaches in franchise history — Red Holtzman and Jeff Van Gundy — were assistants who only got the job after more famous names were fired mid-season. Thibs knew that well: He’d served as Van Gundy’s assistant for five seasons in the late 1990s, and stayed even after Van Gundy abruptly quit in 2001.

He’d seen that this wasn’t something you necessarily did forever, but he was willing to do it as long as they’d let him. He didn’t care that there was a good chance he’d be fired in two years. He’d been living that life for four decades. He just wanted to do the job, and sometimes that’s all it takes.

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There is a specter haunting the 2026 New York Knicks, a question that has hovered over the team for awhile now: Should they trade for Giannis Antetokounmpo?

Such a deal might not even be feasible. The Knicks don’t have draft picks they can trade, and they are over the first apron, meaning they cannot take on more salary than they give up in any swap. But as long as a Giannis deal is theoretically possible, it shapes how Knicks fans have thought about this whole season. The rumors died down last offseason, but now that Antetokounmpo seems to have (finally) officially requested a trade, they are burning anew, hot and fast.

As I mentioned back in Part I of this series, Knicks fans have spent decades fantasizing about adding a superstar who would restore them to relevance. So it is tempting to see a potential Giannis deal in the same light as their pursuits of LeBron or Carmelo or KD or Zion. But this is really something different — the Knicks already ARE relevant. They would be adding Giannis as the final piece of the puzzle, not as a desperate attempt to undo their own mediocrity.

This makes the deal more enticing, but also riskier. There’s actually something to lose now: New York likes this team already, and going all-in on a deal for Antetokounmpo would completely reshape the roster. There’s a risk that such a trade would end up blowing up in the Knicks’ face, like so many recent pursuits of 30-something NBA stars (Durant to the Suns, Lillard to the Bucks, James Harden to the Sixers).

But at a certain point moral victories aren’t enough. The Knicks have now had three seasons of impressive playoff runs, and are coming off their first trip to the Conference Finals in a quarter century. It’s a nice story, but by now the fans want a championship. Giannis may or may not be the missing piece for New York, but as long as he’s out there, some fans will wonder what this team could be with a two-time MVP. This is the burden that comes with having expectations: Eventually, you have to actually win.

The story of John Lindsay and the 1969 snowstorm is a semi-famous piece of New York City lore: In February of 1969, towards the end of Mayor Lindsay’s first term, a blizzard hit New York City with 15 inches of snow, and the city was paralyzed for days. Things were particularly bad in Queens, where half of New York’s 42 storm-related fatalities were recorded. When the mayor tried to visit the borough to restore faith, his limo got stuck in the snow and he had to get out and walk, where he was heckled by angry New Yorkers.

Lindsay’s poor handling of the storm is seen as the beginning of the end of his once-bright political career. The former golden boy of New York City would lose the Republican primary that year, and his mayoralty would be remembered as a failure, one that was long on idealistic talk but short on competence or accomplishments. The term “limousine liberal” was first used that year as an attack on Lindsay by one of his rivals.

This story was on the minds of many political observers this week, when new Mayor Zohran Mamdani faced another major snowstorm — and seemingly handled it successfully.

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But it’s worth pointing out that the narrative about Lindsay and the snowstorm is mostly bullshit. In fact, John Lindsay won his re-election bid in 1969. And even though he received less support than he had in 1965, he did so without the benefit of either major political party — the only time in the City’s history that someone on an independent ballot line has won a regularly scheduled mayoral election. In other words, Mayor Lindsay was still roughly as popular with the New York City electorate as he’d been before the snowstorm.

His electoral problems were really a result of the shifting ideological terrain in New York City. John Lindsay was among the last of a dying breed of liberal Republicans that had been a powerful force in New York City and State politics for most of the twentieth century, but were, by the 1960s, quickly losing ground to a new breed of conservatism. The Conservative Party of New York was founded in 1962 to pull the Republicans to the right (William F. Buckley had been its mayoral candidate in 1965), and John J. Marchi, the Staten Island State Senator who defeated Lindsay in the ‘69 GOP primary, was one of its members.

This kind of conservatism mostly killed the Republican Party in New York City, of course. Marchi came in a distant third in 1969, and no Republican candidate would get 250,000 votes in a mayoral race for 20 years. But it kept Lindsay from being viable within the Republican Party even as he himself stayed popular with New Yorkers: His vote total in the 1969 election was higher than that of any future winning candidate until Zohran Mamdani finally exceeded it last year. Lindsay was just a political orphan caught between a newly conservative GOP and the emerging multiracial Democratic Party.

Still, people are drawn to the snowstorm story because it reinforces ideas people like about democracy. It suggests that idealism and governance are in tension, that voters respond to material concerns, and that ultimately bad leaders lose the support of voters. I don’t think any of these things are as true as people want to believe they are, but they create a powerful narrative that politicians have to contend with. I suspect the Mamdani Administration was very aware of this dynamic last week, and knew that some people were itching to say I Told You So if there was any hint of municipal dysfunction. Hence the social media blitz with Zohran himself out shoveling snow.

His team evidently hopes that this kind of Good Government messaging can convert the enthusiasm of his campaign into popular approval while in office. Similarly, when Mamdani gave a press conference this week about the “fiscal crisis” he inherited from Eric Adams, he was sending a similar message: I am taking this seriously. I am not just lofty promises with a good social media presence. I can be serious about governing. This ought to defend him against the charges that supposedly sunk Lindsay, that he was all flash and no substance.

But at some point Mamdani is going to have to engage, as Lindsay did, with the shifting ideological ground underneath his feet. Indeed, on the same day of his budget announcement, the mayor reiterated his pledge to disband the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, the paramilitary unit that has been attacking peaceful protesters for years, and this week arrested people protesting at an ICE detention facility.

Of course, Mamdani’s pledge to disband the unit is at odds with his decision to retain Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who was appointed by Mayor Adams and has vocally opposed efforts to rein in the department. Keeping Tisch was itself an effort to preserve Mamdani’s Good Government bona fides, since Tisch has developed a reputation as some kind of bureaucratic wunderkind, earning praise across the political spectrum, from The New York Times to the New York Post, from Kathy Hochul to Curtis Sliwa.1 Firing her would have provoked charges of idealism at a.time when he is striving to look pragmatic.

So far, Mamdani has diligently sought to avoid any direct clash with the NYPD. He’s done this in part to keep his focus on the affordability issues he ran on, but also because any such conflict would come at the expense of looking serious and competent. His administration seems to understand that the NYPD, in addition to being a brutal threat to civil liberties, is also a minefield of municipal mismanagement, and that any attempt to reform it will probably just precipitate a narrative around governmental dysfunction, a la Lindsay’s snowstorm.

But remember: It wasn’t really the snowstorm that hurt Lindsay, except symbolically. He stayed personally popular — his approval rating actually increased over time — but he was doomed because the political movement he represented collapsed. At a certain point, Mayor Mamdani will face the same dilemma. He will have to confront the political conflict between the movement that elected him and the right wing forces in the federal government and his own police force. The Good Government strategy may keep his popularity afloat for a while, but eventually he will have to deal with the ideological confrontation he has been avoiding. Political movements require more than moral victories; eventually you have to actually win.

It’s hard, but not impossible, to maintain popularity in the face of losing, as the Knicks found out this month. Part of the reason that a Giannis trade is so enticing is that the Knicks seemed to go into free fall right after the new year. On New Year’s Day, they lost to the Spurs, beginning a stretch of nine losses in eleven games. Before that swoon, they were vying with Detroit for the top seed in the Eastern Conference. Now, even after a four-game winning streak, they’ve fallen back to the middle of the pack, six games behind the Pistons in the loss column and caught in a four-way pileup with Cleveland, Toronto, and Boston.

Being tied with the Celtics is the real slap in the face: Boston was supposed to be a non-factor in the East this season, since Jayson Tatum is out with a torn Achilles. That was a major reason for the hype around the Knicks going into the season. They were supposed to dominate a wide open Eastern Conference, but instead it looks like they’ll head into the postseason the same way they did the last few years: seeded somewhere between second and fifth. Trading for Giannis (assuming he is healthy by the playoffs) would presumably make them the favorites.

But it could come at the expense of the team’s popularity. Since the Knicks don’t really have any draft picks of their own to trade, they would likely have to part with one or all of OG Anunoby, Josh Hart, and Mikal Bridges. Anunoby is probably the most popular player on the team besides Jalen Brunson, and Hart/Bridges have been part of the cool “Nova Knicks” story — former college teammates and friends who have teamed up again in the pros. In other words, it would be hard for fans to say goodbye to any of these players.

James Dolan is not usually known for having his finger on the pulse of Knicks fans, but he really nailed it earlier this month:

“We love our team right now. They have chemistry; they all like each other…I’d say we want to get to the Finals and we should win the Finals… Getting to the Finals, we absolutely have to do. Winning the Finals, we should do.”

There’s obviously a tension there, between loving the team as it is and demanding it achieve more, and that’s the tension that makes a possible Giannis deal so fraught. I don’t want to see this team broken up, and I’m wary of the downside of any possible trade. I love this Knicks team too. But love only gets you so far… at a certain point, you have to actually win.

On March 11, 2020, the Knicks blew an 18-point fourth quarter lead to the Atlanta Hawks, who at that point were 14th in the Eastern Conference — one of the few teams in the league who actually had a worse record than New York. But Trae Young, who had just made his first All-Star game, scored five points in the final minute to force overtime.

The Knicks managed to hold on and win in the extra period, but it hardly mattered. Their season was, quite literally, already over: During the game, the NBA had announced that the season would be suspended, after Rudy Gobert tested positive for Covid-19. Just days earlier, Gobert had made light of the virus, and the league’s new precautions for dealing with it, by facetiously touching every mic and tape recorder on the table during a press conference. Now he was sick, and had seemingly infected his teammate, Donovan Mitchell.

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The Gobert thing seemed to illustrate how fast the pandemic had become real, going from the kind of news story you might joke about to one that could shut down an entire basketball season in ~48 hours. Things changed so quickly that the Knicks/Hawks game was allowed to start, with fans in attendance, at 7:30 PM, just two hours before the suspension was announced. By the time it ended, the remaining fans were chanting for Vince Carter to get in the game, seemingly aware that the season was over and this would be the end of his 22 year career.

When the NBA season resumed four months later, it was in The Bubble — a miniature village in Florida, at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Disney World, that had strict rules to prevent the spread of Covid-19 to the players.

The Bubble, like so much of 2020, is hard to remember accurately. At the time, it was a godsend for basketball fans who had spent months cooped up at home with no live sports to watch. And despite the strange concept of the Bubble, it was remarkably effective: There was not a single case of Covid in its entire four month run.

But there was an uncanny valley quality to Bubble basketball. There were no fans in the arenas: Crowd noise was pumped in over speakers, and via eerie videos of fans watching at home, which were projected around the court to give the illusion of a crowd. Also, players had goofy “political” messages on their jerseys, like “Education Reform” or “Group Economics,” where their names should have been. This was one of the many weird corporate nods to racial justice that popped up throughout 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests that erupted in May and June of that year. In retrospect, it all feels quite goofy, but at the time it was very serious.

Midway through The Bubble, the season was interrupted yet again when players on the Milwaukee Bucks refused to play after Jacob Blake was killed by a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Other players joined in solidarity, and the NBA was forced to suspend its postseason. This felt like a momentous act, the kind of thing that could be a real break from politics as usual. But amid confusion over what the players should be demanding — and an important, momentum-killing phone call from Barack Obama urging them to keep playing — the movement sputtered. Players voted to end the strike and nothing much changed.

Again, it’s easy to look back on this and roll your eyes. Oh, a bunch of pro athletes are going to go on strike to end racism? But in the moment, things like that really did seem possible.

Conspicuously absent from The Bubble were the New York Knicks, who had already been eliminated from playoff contention and thus didn’t get an invite to Orlando. This was a far cry from where the team had expected to be a year earlier. Going into the 2019 offseason, Knicks fans had once again talked themselves into a quick fix that was going to turn their fortunes around and restore them to their rightful glory.

For one, they were slated to have a high draft pick in a draft that was expected to have at least one, and possibly two, generational talents. Zion Williamson was the presumptive #1 pick, and had more hype going into the draft than any player since Anthony Davis. Plus, there was a vocal contingent of scouts who expected Ja Morant to be at least as good or better.

Whenever there’s a player like that in the NBA Draft, there are fans who expect the league to rig its draft lottery in favor of the Knicks. This seems to trace from 1985, when the Knicks won the league’s first lottery and drafted Patrick Ewing, and various conspiracy theories emerged over the legitimacy of that process. So Knicks fans expected the balls to bounce their way in 2003 (when the Cavs won the right to draft LeBron), in 2007 (when the Trail Blazers won the right to draft Greg Oden), and especially in 2019.

Of course, none of this really makes sense. If the league has any tendency, it’s to favor the low-payroll, small-market teams. And, in fact, even though the Knicks had the worst record in the NBA the year before, the league reduced the odds of the worst team winning the lottery that year, from 25.5% to just 14%. So New York ended up with the third overall pick, missing out on both Zion and Ja.

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They still had hope, though, because the 2019 free agent class was the NBA’s best in nearly a decade: Kawhi Leonard, Kevin Durant, Jimmy Butler, Kyrie Irving, and Kemba Walker were all among the names slated to be available that year. And just like Knicks fans expect the league to rig draft lotteries for them, they also expect prized free agents to be desperate to play in Madison Square Garden. Leonard was expected to return to the west coast, but other two biggest prizes — Durant and Irving — were rumored to be interested in the Knicks. Both players had won championships, but had been overshadowed by their superstar teammates, and were looking for a place to make a legacy of their own. And what better place to make a legacy than New York City?

Except that when they came to New York, they ended up in Brooklyn, not Manhattan, playing for the Nets, not the Knicks.

The Nets moved to Brooklyn from New Jersey back in 2012, and had developed little real connection to the city, but they were a blank slate. By signing there, Durant and Irving seemed to be saying that they wanted to play in New York City, but without the Knicks’ baggage. Far from being a team that stars wanted to play for, because of its history and its glory and its organic fanbase, the Knicks were a team that free agents were actively avoiding.

But the Brooklyn Nets represented a darker side of the city. They seemed interested in the idea of “New York” or “Brooklyn” for the global brand that it represented, but not in any actual connection to the city itself. Their arena, named after a trillion-dollar British bank, looks like a spaceship parked on the ghost of the Brooklyn rail yards, and the circumstances of its construction sound almost like a morality play about urban development.

It is probably beyond the scope of this series to do a whole rundown of the scandal that is the Atlantic Yards project. But suffice to say that it played out essentially like a parody of the gentrification debate. Real estate developer Bruce Ratner bought the Nets back in 2003, and then used their relocation to Brooklyn as a Trojan horse to get access to a billion-dollar development deal in the middle of Brooklyn. Eminent domain was invoked to clear out local businesses and make room for Ratner’s development — at which point he promptly sold the team to a Russian billionaire (who later sold it to a Chinese billionaire). Promises were made and broken about affordable housing and public parks, and instead big luxury apartment towers went up around an ugly arena where basketball tickets are usually a little too expensive and the sound quality at concerts is always disappointing.

It’s such a familiar story that it barely even registers as scandalous. By 2020, this kind of thing was so normal that it was barely worth fighting. So there was something almost symbolic about the Nets being ascendant — they made the playoffs in the Bubble and, while they were swept in the first round, that was better than a lot of fans expected given that Kevin Durant had still not returned from his torn Achilles — while the Knicks were absent. But there were rumblings that things were changing.

As the players strike in The Bubble illustrated, a lot of things were happening very fast in 2020. In June of that year, the New York Times wrote that the “once-loathed” Barclays Center was quickly becoming a protest mecca. The small plaza between the subway entrance and the arena was where die-ins were staged to honor George Floyd, where marches across the Brooklyn Bridge were launched from, and where loaded confrontations with the NYPD took place. Soon it wasn’t just Black Lives Matter protests happening at Barclays — it was voter registration drives and Muslim prayers and candlelight vigils.

None of this made the Barclays Center good exactly; but it was what New York had to work with. As Margo Gibson, who lived nearby, told the Times: “When it was first built, I thought it was a waste of space. And when I was there the other day I thought: It’s not enough.”

The 2020 protests felt like a major political turning point and it is hard, looking back, not to be disappointed by how little they achieved. But they were also the beginning of something new — at least in New York. The George Floyd protests were obviously a national phenomenon, but they had a specific flavor in New York City. After all, the City had been protesting against police brutality for years — decades really.

Even if we limit our scope to the modern Black Lives Matter movement, New York City had played a prominent role for years leading up to 2020, with its fight against Stop-and-Frisk and the protests over the 2014 killing of Eric Garner. In 2019, that movement linked up with an electoral left that was newly energized over the Trump Administration; it had just elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress and a batch of new progressives to the State Legislature.

Now they would run a young public defender, Tiffany Cabán, for District Attorney of Queens County. It seemed like a long shot — Queens is much bigger than any one Congressional district or state legislative seat — but Cabán actually led on Election Night. It was only with the counting of provisional and absentee ballots that the establishment candidate prevailed by just 60 votes (a 0.06% margin).

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It was a heartbreaking loss, but it was a testament to both the growing anger at the criminal justice system and the Democratic Party establishment AND the impressive electoral muscle that the New York left was growing. In 2020, one of Cabán’s field leads, a 28-year-old named Zohran Mamdani, would be one of a slate of young democratic socialists running for the state legislature, in campaigns that explicitly called to Defund the Police.

Those elections — like all politics from that year, like basketball in The Bubble, like basically everything that happened in 2020 — can sometimes feel like a collective fever dream, like a weird aberration to everything that came before and after. But that isn’t really right. The anger hosted at the Barclays Center that spring and summer had been brewing for years, and it didn’t completely go away when people went back to work and the haze of 2020 lifted.

Two and a half months after The Bubble ended, a new basketball season began. This time the Knicks were playing in MSG and things were mostly back to normal — but normal wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Last night, right after midnight at an abandoned subway station under City Hall, Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist Muslim immigrant, was sworn in as the mayor of New York City. (There will be another ceremony this afternoon.)

It’s not exactly enough to make one optimistic about politics, given the current state of everything, but it is at least a reminder that the world is impossible to predict. Even last spring, after the Mamdani campaign began and did better than anyone could have reasonably expected, it still seemed hard to imagine that he could actually WIN. Even over the summer, after he resoundingly won the Democratic primary and led every general election poll, it still seemed easy to imagine that something would happen to prevent this seemingly impossible outcome from coming to fruition.

Now that Zohran is officially the mayor, though, it’s a little bit like the dog that caught the car. Nobody knows precisely what is supposed to happen next. Already, some of his supporters have grown disillusioned, turned off by various choices he’s made in the run up to actually governing. He’s now being covered in the mainstream media and embraced by establishment politicians in a way that makes him seem less… exceptional. The Mamdani transition has come laced with a tinge of the cynicism that the Mamdani campaign so successfully avoided. This is not meant as a criticism of him; it’s just a reminder that the highs of a political campaign inevitably have to come back to earth.

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All of this is enough to make you feel stupid for ever being optimistic in the first place. Electoral politics, at least for the American left, is a place of cruel defeats and bitter disappointments. Even the small victories — Obama in 2008, Bernie in 2016 and 2020, AOC in 2018 — are coated with the bitter taste of either unmet expectations or outright betrayals.

And yet cynicism is a triumph for the oppressors. There is no shortage of people willing to say I Told You So, to tell you it was foolish to ever hope for something better than what you got, to convince you never to get your hopes up again. But socialists DO believe that a better world is possible – it’s kind of our whole thing. So in the wake of Zohran’s election, it is useful to strike a chord of optimism without abandoning our values, to find some untrodden ground in between cynical disappointment and blind faith. And for that, I suggest we look at the New York Knicks…

There was a moment last spring when it was both fun and theoretically possible to imagine a world where the Knicks won the NBA Finals AND Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral primary. If anything, a Knicks championship seemed more likely — at least there was precedent for that. The Eastern Conference was wide open after Jayson Tatum tore his Achilles. The Knicks led by 14 with less than four minutes left in Game 1 of the Conference Finals! And they had Jalen Brunson, after all. It didn’t work out, but for a minute there it was shockingly easy to picture.

Ever since 2000, when the Knicks last made the Conference Finals, the team and its fans have tried to talk themselves into some absurd fantasy of future success, some Next year in Jerusalem when the team’s problems would disappear and the Knicks would reign over the NBA. Stephon Marbury was going to fix everything. Then Larry Brown was going to turn the franchise around. LeBron James was going to sign here, then Carmelo Anthony was the savior. Phil Jackson was supposed to be the miracle-worker for a while. They were going to draft Zion Williamson; they were going to get Kevin Durant.

None of these pipe dreams ever came close to happening, and yet Knicks fans were usually CONVINCED of their certainty. It was an iron law of nature. Of course every prized free agent would want to play here — this is New York! Of course the league would rig a draft to send them a young superstar — this is New York! Of course any fading All-Star could be rejuvenated by the magic of the Knicks — this is New York! It’s possible that no fanbase in sports has a more inflated sense of their own importance.1

In truth, the Knicks had occupied an embarrassing rung just below mediocrity for the two decades prior to this current run. Their history was too good for them to become lovable losers, but not good enough to earn the prestige of the Celtics or Lakers. So basketball fans mostly just resented the outsized attention they got, and relished their frequent embarrassing moments, like when the owner banned people for criticizing him, including an iconic former player.

This kind of schadenfreude is common when it comes to New York, and not at all limited to sports. People like to hate this city, and it’s easy to understand why. The general air of exceptionalism, as if normal rules don’t apply to New York, grates on people pretty fast. The way we talk about bodegas like we invented the concept of stores, or hype up local music venues as if they’re not all owned by Live Nation. The way people reminisce about young Bob Dylan or young Marlon Brando or young Madonna, as if most of the young artists living here are not subsidized by rich parents paying for studio apartments.

In this way, the Knicks came to represent how people thought of New York today: Dining out on a romanticized version of a distant past and hyping up a potential renaissance that never came to fruition. This went on for so long it was hard to know how the city would react to a Knicks team that was actually good. Would it Bring the City Together? Could you Feel the Energy in the Streets? Would it Capture the City’s Attention? I’m always skeptical of these sorts of cliches when they are used in other, smaller markets, and it seemed impossible to imagine applying to New York City. Was there anything — even a Knicks playoff run — that could make the real New York match the one we imagine?

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After all, it’s not like this city is unfamiliar with sports success: The Giants won two Super Bowls not that long ago; the Yankees and Mets both made the World Series in the last decade; the Liberty won a championship just in 2024. And as much fun as those teams were, none of them really Galvanized the City in any way that I could observe.

New York is just too big for any of those cliches to apply here. At the risk of being that annoying New York exceptionalist, this city is just different. There’s too much going on, too many subcultures and disparate enclaves for any one thing to really seize its full attention. Plus, this is a city of transplants. Basketball fans come here with their own allegiances. Is an actor who moved here from Indiana going to give up on the Pacers? Is some tech bro who came here from the Bay Area really going to trade the Warriors for the Knicks? Does an FIT student from Texas care if Karl-Anthony Towns scores 30 points?

And let’s be real here: This city is not the New York that New York exceptionalists romanticize about. The city once known as a haven for immigrants and people pursuing their dreams is now global in a different, darker sense: We have empty apartments owned by anonymous Russian oligarchs and luxury sports complexes financed by Abu Dhabi oil funds. New York is now a “home” to the class of globetrotting superrich who have no real connection to the city, and are simply the last ones who can afford to buy property here. It has become an illustration of spiraling inequality.

That inequity made it hard to imagine the kind of civic pride a basketball team’s playoff run is supposed to inspire. The idea of fans coming together over a Knicks title chase seems premised on an egalitarian spirit that the economics of contemporary New York City make impossible: affordable tickets to Madison Square Garden; local neighborhood dive bars to watch the games; public spaces shared by New Yorkers of all socioeconomic backgrounds; etc.

All that stuff felt like a relic of a different city. Nowadays the only people who can afford to attend Knicks games are transplanted millionaires and Spike Lee, and the only place to watch the game is some overpriced, VC-funded sports bar where you order with a QR code.

And yet…

Despite all this, when the Knicks finally got good over the last few years, there WAS a real energy in the city. I mean, who knows? Maybe I’m projecting. Maybe this is just something sports fans tell themselves to mask the fact that they’re getting emotionally invested in millionaires playing a game for children. But I don’t know — it really felt different!

There was something about this Knicks team. For one thing, the Knicks own New York in a way that New York’s other teams cannot, because they haven’t shared the city with any other team for most of their existence. Some New Yorkers grew up Mets fans, and some grew up Yankees fans; some grew up Jets fans and some grew up Giants fans; some are Islanders fans and some are Rangers fans. But, despite the Nets’ move to Brooklyn in 2012, the Knicks actually UNITE the city. That they play in the heart of Manhattan also feels significant.

More important, though, was that this team was LIKABLE. Unlike the last Knicks team to win a playoff series — the 2013 version of the Carmelo team — it wasn’t built on flashy acquisitions who didn’t quite pan out. This Knicks team has been built on chemistry and coaching and shrewd acquisitions of guys like OG Anunoby, Josh Hart, and of course Jalen Brunson. There was the Villanova connection, which harkened back to the old days of the Big East. They were coached, until this year, by Tom Thibodeau, a longtime Knicks assistant who, like a lot of people who call themselves New Yorkers, grew up in Connecticut. In other words, the team seemed relatable and reflective of the city in an organic way. Even the celebrities who showed up to the games — Larry David, Desus Nice, Timothee Chalamet — had a New York flavor.

So the city really did respond in a way that felt almost… quaint. Spontaneous conversations with strangers that really did start with, “How about those Knicks?” Camaraderie at the bodega or wherever people were reading the remaining New York tabloids. Unusually peaceful exchanges between new casual fans and old diehards reminiscing about the 1990s. It was a reminder that, beneath the dystopian veneer, there really are millions of people in New York who are hungry for that civic identity, in a way that goes deeper than just annoying nostalgia.

Again, New York City is just SO BIG that it’s easy to forget how much it contains. For all the talk about how Manhattan is a playground for the rich, or how You need a six-figure income to live comfortably in the city, the median income here is still ~$80,000, so half of the people here live on less than that. Despite everyone’s best efforts, this is still a working class city. It’s still a city of immigrants. It’s still where people come to pursue their dreams. All that crap…

And this, of course, was the entire premise of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. For the last few years, the politics of New York City have been dominated by figures like Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo and Michael Bloomberg, who gesture at New York nostalgia with their outer borough accents and invocations of old New York icons. But, as political actors, their rise has been intimately connected to this new, hostile New York. Not just in their cozy relationship with Wall Street and rich donors, but in their explicit promise to voters: They will protect you from the angry hoards.

They will keep the city heavily policed and keep taxes low. There will be luxury apartments you can’t afford to live in and new stadiums you can’t afford to attend, but the city will look nice and the homeless will be kept out of sight. There will be gang databases you cannot see and surveillance of Muslim communities you’re not supposed to know about, all while they give speeches about the importance of immigration and religious diversity. In other words, they will pay proper lip service to the New York of old, while quietly but enthusiastically expediting the inequality driving us apart.

The Mamdani campaign, on the other hand, was infused with a real optimism about what New York could be. In stark contrast to Cuomo, Zohran seemed to actually like living here.

His campaign wasn’t about protecting people from the dangers of the city; it was about offering the wonders of New York to more people. In other words, it was about optimism. It represented a kind of fandom of the city.

This kind of sentiment doesn’t seem ideological, which is a major part of why Mamdani’s campaign broke out from the narrowly leftist lane that many first confined him to. But it sort of IS an ideological position. After all, the socialist message is that A Better World is Possible; we do not have to settle for the least bad of the options we have in front of us. In New York specifically, Zohran stands on top of a movement that has been brewing for years. It was behind the election of AOC in 2018, the near-election of Tiffany Caban in 2019, and the slate of state legislators that Zohran was a part of in 2020.

Usually these campaigns are understood as part of the larger leftward trend that has taken place since 2016. But I think it’s a mistake to ignore the specifically New York elements. There is something about the way the city has evolved, about the particular political opportunities that have emerged over recent years — the exact same timeframe as the resurgence of the Knicks — that, I suspect, reveals useful lessons about political realism, about how to remain idealistically hopeful while working within the real world.

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Over the next few months, as the Mamdani Administration takes shape and the Knicks season unfolds, I want to tease out this connection, this relationship between democratic socialism and the Knicks, as tenuous as it may first appear to you now. I swear to you that Josh Hart’s defensive prowess has something to do with fast and free buses. If you don’t believe me yet, then please join me for a series of posts on this theme, exploring questions including, but not necessarily limited to:

• To what extent is any city’s “identity” ever really reflected in a professional sports team?

• Do the Knicks in particular have any kind of hold on New York City, and will it last beyond the initial honeymoon stage? Will anything short of an NBA Finals appearance this year be a disappointment?

• What can the Knicks and sports fandom teach us about the value and limits of optimism?

• Will Mamdani withstand the inevitable disappointments that come with actually governing?

• What is it about New York specifically that has led to the socialist mini surge that elected Zohran, and is that momentum sustainable?

In general, this series will be an attempt to tell the story of New York City over the last few years through the lens of the New York Knicks. Whether such a perspective even makes sense will be a central subject, but I believe it is: I believe it as a Knicks fan, and I believe it as a socialist invested in the future of New York City.