In the last month, Manhattan’s played host to half a dozen art fairs, the spring auctions, and more galas than one can shake a stick at, including the grandest of them all at The Met. But there’s an argument to be made that the borough’s power center during that whole stretch was one place, multiple times a week: courtside at Madison Square Garden as the New York Knickerbockers, the NBA team named after Washington Irving’s sobriquet for a blue-blooded local, made their unlikely march through the playoffs. This cosmopolitan city’s avenues of influence come from a wide diversity of industries, from banking and media to real estate and health care, and the Brahmins of each converge to root for the Knicks.
That’s not the case when other NBA teams host a playoffs matchup at home. Maybe in Dallas you get oil barons, and at Warriors games you get Silicon Valley bigwigs, but in New York, the city’s rich history of literary and cultural philanthropy is on full display in its basketball fandom—it’s not just A-listers and pop stars, like at, say, a Lakers game.
Noah Baumbach, indie movie hero, is a New York basketball mega-fan whose debut film featured scenes where the main character gets voicemails from his father, played by Elliott Gould, with updates: “Did you see the Knicks-Bulls exhibition on Saturday?” “Call me. Knicks in trouble.”
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav appears to be a big Knicks fan, as does his occasional seatmate Larry David. Does it surprise you that Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas, the avatar for a new generation of downtown rock and roll, loves the New York Knicks? It should not.
I’ve been to a few games in good seats, and even when it’s not the playoffs, it’s astounding: billionaires, Wall Street titans, Hollywood studio heads, socialites, art dealers and their whale collectors, real estate tycoons and notorious financiers. The 150-odd spots that line the court at the world’s most famous arena make for a modern-day Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, with the roll call acting as a written history of who is on top in Gotham on that very evening.
Let’s start with the people who you’ve already seen on the Jumbotron. You may have noticed Spike Lee at a few Knicks games over the years, and he was indeed present at the decisive win over the Celtics in the Eastern Conference semifinals May 16. That is, until he had to fly to Cannes to premiere his film Highest 2 Lowest…in which Denzel Washington plays a Celtics-hating Knicks fan with a signed Jalen Brunson jersey on his wall. Also present is the high chieftain of Knicks X, Ben Stiller—yeah, he made Severance, but he also posts some fiery hot takes from the Garden. Ed Burns and his wife, Christy Turlington Burns, have been Knicks fans long before they landed in the playoffs with some regularity. Same with Michael J. Fox. Credit where credit is due.