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Knicks Fans Taking Over Xfinity Mobile Arena is Hardly an Indictment on Philadelphia as a Sports City
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The Sixers lost to the Knicks on Saturday. Tyrese Maxey took a bad shot at the end and Jalen Brunson embellished after a little bit of contact from VJ Edgecombe. Typical performative nonsense from him.
Also, Knicks fans showed up again:
Knicks fans think this is some flex, that they come down to Philly and take over the arena, which ends up being some indictment on Philly as a sports town, that we’re not as great as we claim to be, or something along those lines.
The bottom line is that the Knicks have a good team after being shit for years. They went seven seasons without a playoff appearance under a combination of Mike Woodson, Derek Fisher, Jeff Hornacek, and David Fizdale. Then they stumbled into relevance with Thibs and a bunch of Villanova players, so naturally they’re excited about their team. This current squad has only really been at it for three seasons, maybe four if you want to count the 2022 playoffs when they lost to the Hawks, but there’s a freshness to it after they went to the conference finals last season.
Philly, meantime, has been unenthusiastic about the Sixers for a few years now. Certainly the hardcore fans continue to believe. Tyrese Maxey has been a revelation, Edgecombe is good, and Embiid is currently playing the best basketball he’s played in a long time. But so many of the four-for-four casual types think the next Embiid injury is just around the corner, or they were already out to begin with. It’s “wake me up when the playoffs begin” for a team that has tried and failed since 2018 to get out of the second round.
So one fan base is hyped, the other is not. Same thing with Phillies fans taking over Nationals Park back in the day. It’s a quick trip for some cheap tickets to support your good team against a team that isn’t as good. It ebbs and flows, as is the cyclical nature of sporting fandom.
Case in point – Knicks fans weren’t taking over shit in South Philly when the Sixers turned the corner coming out of the “Process” era.
The other part of this is simple economics. There are a lot of Knicks fans in Jersey and it’s a cheap trip to come down here. Cheaper than going to MSG, where the get-in price for a Tuesday night January game against the Sacramento Kings is more than $150. By the time you fill up the lower bowl with celebrity actors and posturing Wall Street scumbags, there isn’t a ton of space for the blue collar fans who live in an 8.4 million population city. So a decent portion of the Staten Island and Bronx rats come down here instead.
It is what it is. No big deal. If the Sixers were on the come up and fans were engaged, this wouldn’t be a thing. There would be pockets of Knicks fans behind their bench and up in the nosebleeds, like it used to be. But Philly fans put a lot of equity into the Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons teams and got nothing in return, so they’re keeping the Sixers at arm’s length, and it’s totally reasonable.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com