By Hannah Keyser, CNN
New York City (CNN) — Dan Klein went to bed at 9 p.m. and awoke at 1 a.m. local time in London. The 37-year-old wanted to watch Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals live, albeit alone and 3,400 miles away from a city celebrating the New York Knicks’ return to the Finals for the first time this century.
At least this way, he could talk to friends and family in real time.
“You feel the excitement, even through the text, of everyone’s watching the same thing and going crazy,” he told CNN Sports.
It validated something he had been thinking as the Knicks made their incredible run through the playoffs: He had to get back to New York. Not to attend a prohibitively priced game, but just to experience the heady atmosphere in the city – even if he had to spend over $1,000 and fly back from Europe to watch it on TV again. At least this time, he would be in the same city.
The Knicks are playing in the Finals for the first time since 1999. And while that team was a long-shot eight-seed, this one is formidable, with a real chance to win the NBA championship for the first time since 1973. If they do it – go from league laughingstock to hoisting the Larry O’Brien Trophy – the history will be made on the court, inside the rarefied confines of Madison Square Garden or else hundreds of miles away in San Antonio.
But the celebration is already on in the streets, in the bars, and subway cars and the way New Yorkers are not just making eye contact with strangers, they’re making small talk. Except they’re not strangers. They’re fellow Knicks fans. You can tell because they’re wearing Starter jackets in June, because Knicks gear doesn’t usually have to be summer appropriate and also because everyone in New York is a Knicks fan right now.
“I seen Hasidic Jews break dancing with Black kids. This is the greatest unification of the city since 9/11,” the rapper Fat Joe said when his presence at the Knicks’ press conference during the Finals turned into an impromptu stump speech on how the Knicks have given the greatest city in the world a sense of small-town camaraderie.
Bing bong! Fans say to each other. And Knicks in four! And, after having moved past the salutations into something more substantive: “If we lose, we’re gonna tear the city down. If we win, we’re gonna tear the city down,” as overheard on the downtown D train after Game 2.
“I just need to be around it,” Klein said of the energy back home.
A fever dream
Klein couldn’t have known what he would miss when he gave up his Knicks season tickets ahead of this year. He and his fiancé, both in between jobs, realized that with the cost of living soaring in New York City, they could afford to travel Europe instead of staying in the city. They left in January, bouncing around Portugal, England, and most recently into Albania, not planning to return until August.
Then the magic happened.
The Knicks arrived at the NBA Finals riding a historically dominant 11-game win streak, with each victory coming on a double-digit margin. They swept through the Eastern Conference Semifinals and Eastern Conference Finals, crushing opponents so definitively that opponents seemed to almost give up in games with their season on the line.
For a fanbase that had grown so used to dysfunction and disappointment that they’d come to expect it, the Knicks became a welcome source of disorienting delirium. The success has coincided with summer weather arriving in New York City, turning a notoriously tough metropolis into a multi-borough block party. Social feeds overflowed with videos of blue-and-orange revelry.
“It feels like a fever dream,” Klein said. And that was despite his relative isolation. Until Game 4 against the Cavs, Klein had been watching the playoffs on tape delay. Silencing his phone to avoid spoilers and setting his alarm for 6 a.m. to watch the game from the night before.
“I kept kind of imagining what would happen if they won – sitting in the dark at like five in the morning in a random Airbnb in Albania, trying not to wake up my fiancé,” Klein said. “It didn’t feel like it would be the right thing for me.”
And so he booked flights back. It will take him and his fiancée around 14 hours and $1,100 to travel from Vlorë, Albania, where they went after London to spend their days swimming in the Adriatic Sea, back to New York City. They’ll arrive on June 9, the day before the first day the Knicks could clinch if they sweep the Finals. They’ll stay with friends in the city until the 20th, the day after what would be a Game 7.
“Where I’m going to watch the games, I don’t know yet,” Klein said. “I can’t really afford to buy a ticket.”
A priceless ticket
Hardly anyone can. The get-in price for Finals games in New York is astronomical and keeps going up. It’s become a national news story that even the president was asked to weigh in on. The cost of attending a game at MSG is so insane that a not-insignificant contingent of Knicks fans in New York realized it would be cheaper to fly to Texas and attend a game there rather than spring for seats back home.
But then you wouldn’t get to experience the energy in the Garden. And as Steve Codd, a diehard Knicks fan now part of the diaspora, told CNN Sports, “there’s nothing else like it. Nothing.”
Which is why he is making the financially imprudent reverse trip. The former New Yorker, who works for a software company, now lives in Houston, Texas. And yet, rather than take advantage of his proximity to San Antonio, he’s flying back to New York to attend Game 3 at MSG.
He bought the ticket before the Knicks had even clinched a spot in the Finals and the flight as soon as they did. The flight was $400 round trip. The ticket was $3,000 for a single seat in the 200 level.
“It’s one of the worst tickets you can get,” Codd said. But it’s worth more to him than even a small fortune would be.
“There is no world, no world, where I would sell this ticket,” he said, although he could turn quite the profit with the way prices have since skyrocketed. “Even at, like, 10 grand, I don’t think so. I’ve been saving this money for a decade in the hopes that one day they would go to the Finals and no matter where I was, I would be able to buy a ticket.”
Now a father to a four-year-old, Codd is committed to making the trip – a little absurd by nature – as efficient as possible. He arrives Monday morning in New York, will attend Game 3 that night, and go right from MSG back to the airport, where he’ll sleep on a chair, if at all, and fly home on the first flight out Tuesday morning. No other plans, no hotel.
“There’s no point,” Codd said. “And the city is so expensive.”
Which is not to say there won’t be any additional discretionary spending. His daughter, disappointed to learn she wouldn’t be joining him for the game, has been promised a Jalen Brunson shirt.
“I’ll probably spend way too much money at the MSG shop,” Codd said.
The Knicks return to play the first Finals game at the Garden in 27 years up 2-0 in the series. They’ve now won 13 playoff games in a row, the second-most in NBA history. With President Donald Trump planning to attend Game 3, an official watch party outside MSG, which was raucous in previous rounds, suspended after a particularly rowdy night during the Conference Finals, and returned for the Finals, has been canceled. (An MSG spokesperson said the cancellation is not a direct result of the President’s attendance, though the Secret Service acknowledged the need to maintain a secure environment played a role in canceling the party)
Emptying the savings to be in the city
But right now, anywhere in New York with a screen and the ability to stream the games is a watch party. While the Knicks took the first two games in San Antonio, New Yorkers waited in lines down the block to get into any bar that was showing the games. And every bar was showing the games, sound on. Many places turned their televisions toward the sidewalks or positioned them outside entirely so on a perfect 80-degree Friday night, you could wander for miles in Manhattan tracking nearly every possession by sight or the sound of the crowds reacting.
Knicks fans who have left the city now have a newfound appreciation for that kind of community.
“I literally have been wearing all my Knicks clothing for what feels like months now, and it’s kind of sad, because if I’m out in public, no one’s really saying anything,” said Chi Romano, a 44-year-old Knicks fan who moved to Phoenix last year. “If I was in New York, it would just be constant, seeing your people. So I need to go back there, feel this energy.”
Romano was among those who traveled to San Antonio for Game 2, when the Knicks eked out a one-point win. She said that, at least in the 200-level, the crowd seemed evenly split between Spurs and Knicks fans. Or maybe it’s just that New Yorkers are so much louder, especially after a victory that pushed their hosts to the brink. (No team has ever lost the first two games at home and gone on to win the series.)
Romano called it one of the best games she’s ever attended. On Saturday, she flew home to Phoenix. And on Sunday, she was back on a plane to New York.
“Very early on in the playoff run, I was like, if they make it to the Finals, I’m definitely coming back,” she said. “I have to be there, whatever happens, like empty my savings.”
As of right now, she doesn’t have tickets to either Game 3 or Game 4. The point is just to be a part of something special in the city. But the Knicks’ unrelenting and almost unfathomable success is creating something of a conundrum: The chance to see the Knicks win 15 straight playoff games, sweep the Finals, and clinch at home in New York.
“Let’s see how I feel after Game 3,” Romano wrote in an email over the weekend. “If we are really looking like we are going to sweep, I may go into debt for Game 4.”
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Knicks fans know they’re seeing something special. They’re flying from around the world to NYC to be a part of it News Channel 3-12.
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