These Knicks fans who refused to defect to the Nets are on top of the world

On Wednesday, the New York Knicks will play in their first NBA Finals game since 1999, finally breaking onto the NBA’s big stage for literally the first time this century. The Knicks did not avoid success accidentally for the last 27 years. Instead they seemed to intentionally choose all manner of ways to trip themselves up. And during that three decade reign of ignominy, the Brooklyn Nets came across the river from New Jersey and began a campaign to win the hearts and minds of New York basketball fans.

In 2019, following a season where the Knicks went 17-65 for the second time in five years and traded their still-promising homegrown franchise savior Kristaps Porzingis for a bag of balls, the Nets snagged Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving in a pair of free agent signings that seemed to indicate the Brooklyn newcomers had replaced the Knicks as the hottest team in the league’s biggest market.

Right before the Durant and Irving free agency decision, I did a story for amNewYork where I asked a number of Knicks fans living in Brooklyn if they were finally sick enough of all of the losing, all of the dysfunction, all of the embarrassment and baggage that came with being a Knicks fan that they were willing to cast aside Knicks orange and blue for Nets black and white. None of them were, even at one of the lowest moments in franchise history. And in 2026, as the Knicks get ready for a Finals appearance the Durant/Irving Nets could never accomplish, I was curious to see if everyone I spoke to seven years ago had stuck with the Knicks.

“I was sad when the Nets were doing well, but they've crumbled,” Yolanda Solomon, a pastor on Roosevelt Island and lifelong Knicks fan, who nevertheless told me in 2019 that the Nets were “doing everything I want in a team” told The Groove last week. “There’s schadenfreude. I remember that New Yorker cover when they had the three Nets, and then the Knicks are the little brother, and it's just beautiful to see. Keeping the faith has paid off, but I would never have it any other way.”

Seven years later, I checked back in with the five fans I spoke to to see if they kept the faith, and not a single person I spoke to could pull themselves away from the Knicks to defect to the Nets. 

“It’s [considered] immoral to cut the suffering part out of the equation and just show up for the good times,” one of them told me back then. “That the satisfaction will be greater if you endure the suffering. Which is, of course, ridiculous and stupid. But I also kind of believe it.”

And now with a Finals berth in front of them, they all said that satisfaction is finally here.

“I'm gonna fly out and I'm gonna go to a game, and my kids asked ‘Can we go?’ and I said, ‘You haven't suffered enough, you don't have enough equity to earn this trip.’”