Why Knicks fans are the hardest done to in world sport

Loyal supporters of the New York basketball team have not had much to cheer in the past 20 years

An all too familiar scene over the past two decades, as New York Knicks players stand dejected during a match against Atlanta Hawks earlier this year. Picture: Kevin C Cox/Getty Images

Are Knicks supporters the worst treated fans in sport?

In basketball’s NBA there are two teams based in the boroughs of New York: the Brooklyn Nets and the world-famous New York Knicks.

New York has always been a 
premium market for sports and stars alike. In baseball, if you play for the New York Yankees then you become a superstar overnight. In Flushing, Queens, the Mets have a far less storied history and the bar for the working-class team is set considerably lower than that in the Bronx, yet every win is greeted by a party atmosphere.

The Big Apple has it all covered. For ice hockey’s NHL you have the New York Islanders based in Brooklyn and the more storied Rangers on Manhattan Island. American football’s New York Giants and New York Jets and MLS “soccer” team New York Red Bulls are all based in New Jersey but use New York in their name.

The Nets have always been the second-class citizen of the basketball pair, almost like the Mets to the Yankees. They were formerly part-owned by American rapper Jay-Z, which made them the 
stylish organisation that they are seen as today. The Nets have never won an NBA Championship but can claim that they are the premier Five Boroughs team right now.

The Knicks and their supporters, on the other hand, are in the depths of a long barren period that nobody would ever have thought possible during the 1980s and Nineties.

From 1980 until 2000 the Knicks were a perennial play-off team. In those 20 years, the Knickerbockers missed the play-offs just four times, and while they could not emulate their Seventies era of two NBA Championships, they did make the finals twice.

Since the turn of the century the most valuable team in the NBA (according to Forbes) have made the play-offs only five times, and in one of those seasons they managed to make the post-season with a losing record of 39 wins and 43 losses.

The Knicks have only made it past the first round of the play-offs once, in what was arguably the weakest Eastern conference in the history of the NBA.

Not only on the court have the team repeatedly failed to get success, but their front office has struggled in every fashion during that time.

In the 20 years since the turn of the century, the Knicks have had 13 head coaches – which is almost double the number of play-off wins they have achieved in the same two decades.

As for draft picks, the Knicks haven’t had much luck there either. In the NBA, a rookie contract lasts for four years, with the first two guaranteed. The Knicks have not signed a rookie on to extended agreements since 1994.

In the last decade alone they have drafted Kristaps Porziņģis, now a superstar in Dallas, Tim Hardaway Jnr, also a star in Dallas and Danilo Gallinari. All three players would make an excellent foundation for a playoff-bound team each season.

What makes it all the more 
galling is that the New York Knicks currently have some of the most supportive fans in all of sport. The average attendance at Madison Square Gardens this season is a little under 19,000, well inside the top ten in the league. The team sell 96 per cent of tickets to every game.

As for commercial enterprise, the Knicks reported a profit of 
$63 million during the 2016/17 season and in that year won just 31 games (they lost 51). Forbes rank the Knicks as the most valuable team in the NBA with a value of $4.6 billion.

Knicks supporters deserve more from the organisation. Team owner James Dolan must surely realise that he has a fanbase that show up even when things are bad and that cheer every bench player who appears. Imagine what he could have if the team were winning.

Any team in world sports would love to have fans as loyal and supportive as the Knicks but maybe now is the time for them to stand up and speak out. The product they are receiving is wanting and it’s about time the Knicks delivered some results worthy of their fans.

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