The Knicks won’t be raising a banner to the rafters at Madison Square Garden to commemorate their victory in the 2025 NBA Cup, and you can count your humble narrator among the faction that wishes they’d chosen differently. I’m not quite sure when it became mandatory to rinse as much fun out of sports as possible, but we’re sure trying.
Nobody will ever confuse the NBA Cup for the real thing. The Lakers have 18 championship banners arrayed in the upper reaches of Crypto.com Arena. When a full house of 19,079 fills the joint, what catches the eye are the 17 devoted to the 17 Lakers teams that won the NBA Finals. Maybe they notice the one memorializing the 2023 NBA Cup, maybe they don’t.
But it’s up there. They won it. They aren’t ashamed of it. They don’t minimize it.
(And if I can add this: at the Garden, there aren’t only banners already hanging for the Knicks’ five Atlantic Division champions [name those five years, win valuable prizes] and for all the various division titles and Presidents’ Trophies the Rangers have assembled through the years, there are also banners for Billy Joel, Harry Styles and Phish. Put it this way: this isn’t exactly as sacred a space as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, OK?)
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
