Knicks Provide Boon To Mamdani Political Brand

NEW YORK — Luckily for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Knicks fever is contagious.

As the Jalen Brunson-led squad has gone from underdogs in the NBA Finals to a team within reach of its first championship in more than 50 years, the ebullience and camaraderie that have noticeably shifted the vibe of the nation’s largest city have been rubbing off on the man who runs it.

After a hard-fought loss to the San Antonio Spurs on Monday night, the New York Knicks are still up 2-1 in the best-of-seven series, marking a generational achievement for the franchise, a salve for New York’s long-suffering fans and the type of electoral gift for Mamdani that can’t be bought, earned or even planned.

The mayor has not let it go to waste. He has popped into watch parties, cruised by celebrating fans, visited a subway station painted in Knicks colors, touted the economic impact of the finals ($90 million per home game) and sported a Knicks jersey beneath his suit jacket.

For any city executive, presenting as a sports fan carries risk. New Yorkers can smell a phony. They’re superstitious and can be quick to blame a mayoral curse for a poor showing. But if handled correctly, a championship sports franchise can provide an extraordinary opportunity to build good will across partisan lines in a way that would be difficult to replicate through policy or campaign promises.

“If you’re like most New Yorkers and you see the mayor enjoying his role as head cheerleader for our city and the Knicks, it makes a difference in how you view him,” said Democratic consultant Jon Paul Lupo, who worked for a certain Red Sox-supporting predecessor of Mamdani’s. “It doesn’t mean that if he does something horribly wrong or something you disagree with you’ll give him a pass. But it does mean in a city where people only consume small amounts of info about their leader, they will see him having a good time and that will help his likeability.”

Short of an alien invasion (not that alien), it would be hard to imagine the five boroughs this united against a common foe.

In baseball, the city is split between the Yankees and Mets. In football, it’s the Jets and Giants. Yes, the Nets play basketball in Brooklyn, but New Yorkers by and large support the Knicks. They’re the second-most-valuable NBA franchise for a reason, haven’t clinched a title since 1973, and their rabid fans desperately want to see them win it all. That they’ve not done so since the end of the Vietnam War has created a sense of frenzied joy over the past two months in a city that can sometimes grind down residents through its high cost of living, big crowds and infuriating subway snafus.

On game nights, small twilight gatherings have been materializing in front of bedsheet projector screens in Brooklyn. Bars with a television have been attracting crowds that spill onto the sidewalk to approving honks from passing motorists. New Yorkers have willingly entered NYPD paddocks at sanctioned watch parties for the chance to go nuts next to hundreds of fellow fans. Commuters, ignoring the cardinal rule of keeping to oneself on the train, have been spitballing about the team’s prospects during the morning and evening rushes. And Knicks fanatics amassing outside Madison Square Garden, already known for their virality, have been yelling stranger and ever more memorable things into the cameras of influencer types capturing the mayhem.

Mamdani, whose campaign excelled in the viral video space, shares a particular strand of DNA with that culture. As a candidate, he interviewed Knicks fans outside the Garden with a similar visual vernacular and participated in some of the on-screen hijinks that have come to define post-game crowds. In April, he was asked by a creator of Sidetalk, the original chronicler of Knicks-inspired lunacy outside the Mecca of Basketball, what the city would do in the event of a win.

“You’re torn as a New Yorker and the mayor,” Mamdani said. “As a New Yorker I cannot wait for this. As the mayor? Absolute chaos.”

Since the Knicks have entered the finals, Mamdani has dropped into bars showing the game. He attended in-person at MSG Monday night. He’s signed an executive order repealing bedtime for New York schoolchildren for the duration of the tournament. And he’s placed several hand-painted cutouts of all-time great Knicks in and outside City Hall. The artist responsible for the homage is Tom Sanford, a notable figure in Knicks fandom who in early April posted on social media that the mayor’s personal account appeared to have liked his works.

“Within an hour, I was on the phone with someone from City Hall asking if they can borrow the things,” he said. “It’s a dream come true.”

Mamdani is a more recent Knicks convert, having failed to name a player beyond Brunson in a debate last year. But he has credibility in other corners of the sports universe.

He created the cricket team as a Bronx High School of Science student and, above all else, is a fan of the north London soccer team Arsenal.

The mayor keeps tabs on the Gunners by catching up on highlights. And according to Zara Rahim, a former Mamdani adviser who worked on the campaign and in City Hall, the mayor’s inner circle is typically aware of how the team performed.

That superfandom has come through in events and press conferences where Mamdani has promoted the World Cup, which will begin later this month. The finals of the global tournament will be played in New Jersey and will bring legions of fans into New York City, a prospect that has so excited Mamdani that it has led to tension with his police commissioner over the scale of celebrations that can reasonably be planned.

“Brazilian New Yorkers are going to sit next to Moroccan New Yorkers. Ecuadorian fans are going to try and convince their German counterparts that Piero Hincapié can defend Serge Gnabry,” Mamdani said last month when announcing a discount ticket program. “Our city will watch together, celebrate together, shout at referees together — respectfully — and share this tournament together.”

He is also, according to Rahim, a curious sports consumer. After visiting the U.S. Open, she said Mamdani became particularly invested in a player from Queens, showing a type of pan-sport enthusiasm that is now being applied to the city’s premiere basketball team.

“One of the reasons people responded to him politically is that he participates in the city the way New Yorkers do, and the Knicks are inseparable from New York culture,” she said.

Mamdani’s New York sports enthusiasm comes after a long drought.

His immediate predecessor, former Mayor Eric Adams, was an unserious fan who created a loathsome hat featuring a portmanteau of the Yankees and Mets logos. Bill de Blasio, who served two terms before that, supported New York City’s archrivals, the Boston Red Sox. Michael Bloomberg was another Beantown import (though he was courtside for Game 3 Monday night, as Knicks guard Jose Alvarado can attest).

Oddly enough, Mamdani’s sports instincts most resemble former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a die-hard Yankees fan. Not only did that endear the Republican executive to a significant share of New Yorkers who supported the Bronx Bombers, it gave him credibility to celebrate other New York wins. The former mayor wasn’t a longstanding supporter of the New York Rangers, for instance, but the hockey team won the Stanley Cup during his first term.

“He obviously hosted and participated and did a lot of things for the Rangers, and it wasn’t phony. He’s a sports guy,” said Bruce Teitelbaum, a former aide to Giuliani in City Hall. “Being associated with winners, it sort of rubs off on you a bit. It’s all positive. But what’s important is you have to be real, and you have to be authentic.”

The fate of Giuliani’s favorite team also had a practical effect on municipal policy.

“We all knew if you wanted to ask him something and increase the possibility of a yes, you do it right after the Yankees won,” Teitelbaum said. “I’m not kidding.”

This mayor, like others before him, will never win over his harshest critics, no matter how many sports titles are secured. And there are longtime supporters who look down on the bandwagon, Johnny-come-lately crowd once a team like the Knicks starts winning.

If they perform poorly, there’s also the chance Mamdani catches some of the blame. The New York Post made much hay out of a New York Mets losing streak it attributed to the mayor hugging Mrs. Met, a hex they dubbed the Curse of the Mambino. Fans have already blamed President Donald Trump and poor officiating for the Knicks’ Game 3 loss.

But as the two teams head back to the Garden for Game 4 Wednesday night, there’s also the sense that, no matter the outcome, the mayor will share in the emotional ups and downs of a hard-fought run that gave the city a shared experience increasingly rare in an age of media consumption fractured into individual algorithms. How well a mayor is doing in the eyes of constituents often depends not on metrics, but how New Yorkers are feeling. And at the moment, the city is in a very good mood.

“They have lit this city up. You can just feel people's excitement across the five boroughs,” Mamdani said during a recent radio interview, harkening back to the last time the Knicks were in the finals. “I would say it's 1999, but I wasn't even 10 years old at the time.”