Photo: Gregory Shamus/Getty Images

One of the more amusing videos to come out in the wake of the New York Knicks’ thrashing of the Cleveland Cavaliers on Monday night, which completed a series sweep and booked New York a ticket to the NBA finals, featured a look at what Celebrity Row looked like the last time the Knicks made it this far. This was back in 1999, when Timothée Chalamet was 3 years old and Jalen Brunson was a 2-year-old puttering around the Knicks locker room with his father, Rick, a backup guard for the then–Eastern Conference champs.

How much have things changed since 1999? Here’s what celebrity row looked like for Game 4 of the Finals – the last year the Knicks made it that far until 2026

— Velodus✨ (@velodus.bsky.social) 2026-05-26T03:22:25.461Z

It’s incredible. You’ve got JFK Jr., Woody Allen, Tiger Woods, and an apparently digitally de-aged Spike Lee and Ben Stiller, both of whom are, of course, still fixtures at the Garden, and who wear every single Knicks loss since ’99 on their faces.

That’s the thing to emphasize about this 27-year-long Finals gap for the Knicks: exactly how terrible things have been for this team in the interim. Since that last Finals appearance, the Knicks have not been the eternal bridesmaid, forever falling just short. They have been the laughingstock of the entire NBA, a truly miserable franchise haunted by sexual-harassment scandals, a fan-engagement policy that seemed to exist for the benefit of facial-recognition technology, and a long string of terrible seasons — so, so many terrible seasons. One example of Chalamet’s status as a real Knicks fan is that, as a child in 2010, he won a fan contest on Twitter to meet two Knicks players in Grand Central Terminal. The players he met were Landry Fields and Andy Rautins — lifelong scrubs who happened to be among the best, most recognizable Knicks at the time. In 2010, the Knicks hadn’t even had a winning season since that 1999 Finals appearance: If you made it through that decade and remained a Knicks fan, man, you have seen some shit.

The Knicks have been absurdly, almost surreally dominant this postseason — their 11-game win streak has featured the largest average point margin over an 11-game stretch in NBA history, regular season or postseason — in a way that justifies everything team president Leon Rose has done since taking over just before the pandemic. Rose built the team slowly and methodically but also aggressively: Once he had his core in place, he kept taking big swings, ultimately compiling enough talent that the Knicks just needed everything to finally click into place. That has happened in these playoffs, with everyone reaching their maximum potential. Mikal Bridges is finally justifying all the draft picks the Knicks traded for him; OG Anunoby playing like the best defensive player in the league who isn’t a seven-foot-six Frenchman; Josh Hart is being his usual glorious lunatic self; Karl-Anthony Towns is at last silencing a decade of naysayers by playing with a joy and calm that for most of his career had eluded him.

But this remains — and will forever be — Jalen Brunson’s team. Signing him in 2022, back when he was often pegged as undersized, overrated, the sort of star you couldn’t build around, was the key to everything. (And signing him to an extension in 2024, which allowed the Knicks financial flexibility to keep adding to the roster, was essential, too.) He is already the most universally beloved New York City athlete of the last 25 years, and if the Knicks win the Finals, he may be in the conversation for most universally beloved ever.

But the Finals don’t start until Wednesday, June 3, so there’s no need for that kind of grand thinking right now. Right now, let’s just revel in all the muck the Knicks, and their fans, had to wade through to get to this point. Just hearing the most notorious names will bring back all their trauma: Isiah Thomas. Jerome James. Andrea Bargnani. Renaldo Balkman. Michael Sweetney. Eddy Curry. (You can read them all.) The Knicks spent nearly three decades as a Jim Dolan punch line, a wretched franchise torturing a fan base that deserved so much more. On Monday night, all that pain became worth it. Sticking with this team actually paid off. The Knicks are back in the NBA Finals. It’s just the damndest thing.

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