Sixers

I Personally Disagree with Mike Sielski’s Opinion that We Should Appreciate the Knicks Uniting New York City

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Jun 15th, 2026 · 11:10 AM EDT

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This one lit up the weekend timeline like a Waffle House grease fire:

Sorry, Philly fans. The #Knicks unite New York like no other team in that city and region. There are fans of all races, creeds, colors, genders, and classes who have waiting for this for more than half a century. If you don’t appreciate that, you don’t really appreciate sports.

— Mike Sielski (@MikeSielski) June 14, 2026

Alright, so I think the perspective is pretty easy to understand. Mike is an Inquirer columnist and published author. He’s part of the old school journalist group that hyper-focuses on stories. They love to identify stories, write about stories, and talk about stories. They romanticize the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd and they can tell you all about that time back in 1964 when “Johnny Two Fingers” threw that fastball at Connie Mack Stadium. They don’t view sport through the parochial lens of the fan, who cares mostly about the box score while supporting the concept of rivalry in its many forms.

In an emotionless vacuum, the Knicks winning their first title in more than 50 years is a good story. They did it with discarded Villanova players. Jalen Brunson is a small guard who left money on the table, and then cut back on his foul grifting Trae Young bullshit to play a more ethical game of basketball. Mikal Bridges, Josh Hart, OG Anunoby, and Karl-Anthony Towns were deemed non-essential by their previous team(s). The Knicks fought back from big deficits and showed a lot of resilience and grit during these playoffs, and they all seem like genuinely decent people, so that part of their championship I think can be appreciated.

But Mike is talking about the unification of New York, which nobody down here gives a rat’s ass about. Why would we care about the galvanization of these miscreants? Why would we care about Knicks fans of “all races, creeds, colors, genders, and classes” who have been waiting for this for 50 years? We just watched that same thing happen down here when the Eagles won their first Super Bowl in 2018. We don’t need to appreciate this happening in New York because we recently saw it happen in the region where we all live and work.

I’m sure there are friendly and educated Knicks fans who have been waiting a long time for this moment, and congratulations to them. But we’ve mostly been exposed to the jabroni portion of the fanbase that’s trashing Manhattan and assaulting Spurs fans and being wankers in general. We’ve been exposed to Timothee Chalamet and his Pottstown white trash facial hair and assorted plastic celebrities in the front row who wouldn’t know their arse from their elbow. These frontrunners couldn’t name a single Knicks player until two weeks ago. They wouldn’t know Miles McBride from Miles Teller.

So I get where Mike is coming from, but as a counterpoint, fuck the Knicks and fuck New York City.