The Knicks Are Trying to Become the Team Who Used to Haunt Them
In the '90s, the Jordan Bulls represented New York's ceiling. But now, the 2026 Knicks have followed a similar path from 3-year build-up to Finals breakthrough.
Fifty-three years is a long time to wait for anything. But it’s an especially long championship wait for a franchise that carries itself like a prestige organization, even if the results have rarely matched that aura since the early 1970s.
For all the star power — from Patrick Ewing and John Starks to Latrell Sprewell, Larry Johnson and Allan Houston, to Carmelo Anthony and Jeremy Lin,1 to now Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns and company — and for all the big-market glitz at Madison Square Garden, the Knicks have spent the past half-century posing as basketball royalty but without a crown. A lot of that was self-inflicted, of course, with dysfunctional ownership leading to front-office and coaching churn, bad trades and contracts, and entire lost decades that turned one of the league’s most glamorous franchises into one of its most cautionary tales.
But a lot of it was Michael Jordan’s fault, too.
From the franchise’s last championship in 1973 through last season, the Knicks made the playoffs 28 times, and no team eliminated them more often than the Bulls. Chicago knocked New York out six times in that span, five of them during the Jordan era, losses that came to define the Patrick Ewing-era Knicks as a very good team — often an all-time defensive team — still forever running into the one player and dynasty it could not solve.
In an alternate universe where Jordan played baseball from the start, the Knicks’ title drought would likely not extend anywhere near 53 years. But the universe we got belonged to MJ, and the Knicks were mere side characters in his larger story.
So there’s a certain irony to the fact that, now, Jordan’s Bulls actually provide the template for what the NBA Finals-bound Knicks are currently trying to accomplish.
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