All is well inside Madison Square Garden, the basketball mecca where the New York Knicks play. The team has won 11 consecutive playoff games and will return to the N.B.A. finals for the first time in more than a quarter-century.<\/p>\n
But outside the Garden, the outlook is more complicated. New York City has officially canceled watch parties outside the stadium going forward after postgame celebrations there became raucous and occasionally violent.<\/p>\n
Fans nonetheless gathered outside the arena on Monday night after the Knicks completed a sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers. The police said that conditions were less raucous than they had been at the Knicks most recent home game on Thursday, but there were six arrests, and fans scaled subway entrances, drank in public and blocked traffic.<\/p>\n
Longtime die-hards have rued the cancellation of the official watch parties. Many claim they had been ruined by that ancient sports enemy: fake fans \u2014 posers \u2014 using the vivid scene outside the Garden as fuel for viral videos.<\/p>\n
Those videos have come to define Knicks fandom online and, increasingly, in person. Five years ago, Sidetalk<\/a> \u2014 a popular cross-platform account specializing in man-on-the-street content \u2014 shot a video showing fans outside the Garden celebrating a double-overtime victory against the Boston Celtics too emphatically and crudely to even be linked to by The New York Times. Its crucial moment was its most brief and, perhaps, family friendly: A fan named Jordie Bloom shouted \u201cBing Bong.\u201d<\/p>\n Before the existence of the social internet, the phrase, which refers to the sound the subway doors make as they close<\/a>, might have been a shibboleth, an insider slogan Knicks fans traded after wins. But the video went viral. It\u2019s been viewed more than 6 million times on YouTube and Instagram, and \u201cBing Bong\u201d has become a catchphrase. And while rowdy postgame celebrations are a staple of professional sports, Knicks fans and N.B.A. insiders believe that the video helped supercharge the atmosphere outside Madison Square Garden.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of people now say its \u2018Knicks for clicks.\u2019 Everyone\u2019s going crazy \u2014 they want their Knicks viral moment,\u201d said Danny Safdeye, 33, a managing partner at SCL Footwear Group who appeared in the original video.<\/p>\n Mr. Safdeye added that he did not mind the imitators. \u201cWe had to walk for these people to run and go absolutely viral and change their lives,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Desus Nice, a comedian, actor and die-hard Knicks fan who also appeared in the first video, said that its energy had been pure and authentic.<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t even do it to go viral,\u201d said Desus, whose real name is Daniel Baker. \u201cWe were just having fun. Sidetalk came in and the rise of TikTok happened and the onus was on people to go viral, become a meme and get remembered.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNow,\u201d he said, \u201cpeople looking in from the outside, they think that\u2019s the average New York fan.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Bloom, meanwhile, declined to comment, having leveraged his viral moment into a job with the Knicks\u2019 business operations, which he said would prefer that he not speak on the record.<\/p>\n New York City has long been defined by the image of the crowd, a raw crush of people gathering in streets, parks and thoroughfares. In recent years, that natural tendency has been amplified by social media.<\/p>\n The Knicks are part of the trend. As excitement has grown around the team, \u201cBing Bong\u201d has become a rallying cry for a portion of the Knicks\u2019 faithful \u2014 and, over the last two seasons, a major pain in the badge for the Police Department.<\/p>\n Last May, as the Knicks beat the Celtics to progress to the Eastern Conference Finals, Knicks fans took over Seventh Avenue outside the arena, tossing beer bottles and traffic cones into the air and even lighting flares, according to The Daily News<\/a>. The police shut down subway entrances and threatened arrests in an effort to contain the crowd. Similar scenes followed other wins, ending only when the team was knocked out of the playoffs by the Indiana Pacers.<\/p>\n