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The Knicks Fan Takeover is the Most Overblown Bullshit Ever
Published:
Michelle Beadle doing some rage bait here, which we’ll use to set up a blog post:
Lou Williams knows what he’s talking about because he actually played here and lived here.
But anyway, as tiring as this is, let’s lay it out one final time before we move on, just so everybody has it straight:
- The Knicks haven’t won shit in years and they are finally good. Their fans have been starving for decades and now there’s a lot of energy for that team. Interest is high.
- The Sixers have been trying to get out of the 2nd round, unsuccessfully, for almost ten years now. The majority of Philly sports fans are tired of this team, don’t believe in this team, and don’t care about this team. Interest is low.
- In 2024, the Sixers were a seven seed and series underdog against the Knicks. They were not expected to win.
- In 2026, the Sixers were a seven seed and series underdog against the Knicks. They were not expected to win.
- The New York City metropolitan area is almost four times as populated as the Philadelphia metropolitan area.
- When you put it all together, it is completely understandable that excited Knicks fans would travel 2 hours south and buy tickets from unexcited Sixers fans.
There is nothing surprising or concerning or shocking about any of this. This topic is catnip for dorks. A large and enthusiastic fan base will overwhelm a smaller and less enthusiastic fan base in the same way Phillies and Eagles fans have taken over opposing stadiums from D.C. to Los Angeles over the past 15-20 years.
It’s funny because you don’t have to be that old to recall the Knicks being terrible, and the best they could do in Philadelphia was send a few thousand morons down here to go crazy for “Linsanity” when the Sixers were a Doug Collins 8-seed type of squad. That early 2010s era of New York basketball, by the way, comically maxed out with a second round exit to Paul George and Roy Hibbert’s Pacers. Then both the Sixers and Knicks were crap through the Process era and the Sixers got good first, right around 2017. Do you recall any Knicks fan takeovers between 2017 and late 2020? No. Because the Sixers were a 50-win team and the Knicks were rolling out Kevin Knox and Allonzo fuckin’ Trier en route to 17 dubs. Sixers fans even went up to MSG en masse, but there was no fake crisis about New York being a bad sports town. It just so happened that all of their teams outside of the Yankees sucked during that particular era, leading to things like this:
The one particular thing that makes me laugh about this is applying it to other sports. Why do you think Giants fans have never taken over Lincoln Financial Field? Going out on a limb, it could be because the Giants are a fat joke and the Eagles have won two Super Bowls since 2017. Same thing with the Mets and Yankees. When the Phillies are good the Bank goes on long sellout streaks, which keeps out the Bernie Madoff types who support the Metropolitans. And we rarely host the Yankees anyway, so when their people come down it’s more like a field trip for them vs. anything meaningful.
It’s true that Rangers fans do infest South Philly every so often, but once again, the Flyers were dog doo for the last half decade and are only turning the corner now. Expect to see a lot of Flyers fans at MSG, Prudential Center, and UBS over the next several years.
Why? Because these things are cyclical. The fake news national sports media should understand this, but is a group filled with dum dums and most of them are based out of New York or Los Angeles anyway.
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