New York Knicks

The Knicks arrive in the new NBA season as reigning champions for the first time since the Nixon administration, and Madison Square Garden has had all summer to get used to the idea. Jalen Brunson, named Finals MVP after the win over the San Antonio Spurs, carries the weight of a franchise that spent 53 years waiting for exactly that outcome.

The wait mattered because of how it started. Ned Irish, who ran Madison Square Garden, put the team together in 1946 as one of the founding members of the Basketball Association of America, and the Knicks have never left Manhattan since — one of only two clubs, along with the Boston Celtics, still playing in the city where they began. Their first game came that November in Toronto, a two-point win over the Huskies that nobody in the building could have known would outlast the opponent itself.

Between that beginning and this year sit two championships from 1970 and 1973, built around a team whose totem was Willis Reed, and whose most enduring image is not a box score but Reed limping onto the court for a Finals game he was not supposed to play. Walt Frazier and Patrick Ewing carried different eras of the franchise's identity without adding another banner, which is part of why 2026 landed the way it did.

Across the river, the Brooklyn Nets have given the Knicks their sharpest modern rivalry, the Battle of the Boroughs, a fixture that only existed after the Nets moved to Brooklyn in 2012 and suddenly New York had two teams instead of one.

Nineteen thousand, eight hundred and twelve is the number the Garden seats for basketball, and for the first time in over half a century, every seat in it watched the Knicks.