Young and Loving the Knicks

A Generation Joins the Party 

And Shakes The Suffering

By ELLEN YAN and JONAH E. BROMWICH

The New York Times - Mercoledì 10 giugno 2026

Pagina B11

New Yorkers under 30 have a notion of the suffering that older fans had endured, but are much more focused on celebrating a charge toward an N.B.A. championship. The line outside Pig Beach, a sprawling barbecue joint in Queens, is full of young people dressed in blue and orange and white. The oldest of the young are 30. They were toddlers during the last Knicks ascension.

They flow into the bar toward a large screen in the backyard where Game 1 of the N.B.A. finals is showing. Unlike their elders, they are confident that the Knicks are going to win.

Older generations have spent the last few weeks recalling past Knicks glory and the more recent pileup of failures. The 30-and-unders know that song.

“It’s 30 years of suffering,” Mark Santiago, 29, from the Bronx, said. “All we know is pain.” But that is not entirely true. It has not been true since 2022. That year, point guard Jalen Brunson joined the team. Ever since, Santiago and the rest of New York City have been treated to one marvelous playoff run after the other.

These Knicks come back from double-digit deficits. Win decisively. Turn doubt into faith.

The youngest have spent a larger proportion of their basketball-watching days with this version of the Knicks than anyone else. No wonder they are confident. These are, and will always be, the Knicks of their youth. And they are really, unbelievably, good.

The doors of Pig Beach open just before 6 p.m. on Wednesdays, and by 8:15, shortly before game time, almost 2,000 people are inside. Philip Germain, 42, a nurse practitioner from the Queens neighborhood of Laurelton, is here with his sons, Philip, 10, and Noah, 8. Both want to be professional basketball players. Both know they are witnessing Knicks history.

“They’re coming right at the peak,” Germain says. “The main thing they’re learning is don’t take things for granted.” Philip, in fourth grade, scopes out the scene. “I like that it’s outside on the big screen,” he says.

“You have Knicks fans all around you. It feels like you’re at the game.” Daniel Baker, better known as Desus Nice, the comedian and ultra-New Yorker, says that everything has changed at watch parties outside the Knicks’ arena. “Everyone wants to be by Madison Square Garden,” he says, adding, “That’s where you go to celebrate.” But things have gotten so out of hand that the police moved to shut down the parties before the mayor started them right back up again. During the first two games of the finals, the Police Department took more than 30 people into custody.

While fans from the latest generation pay tribute to their parents for handing down a passion for the Knicks, the young say their social media posts have brought new supporters far beyond their circles. And the scene outside the Garden has been dominated by them, often engaging in self-consciously outrageous behavior for the phone cameras always poised to capture the scene.

“Going to M.S.G., alone, was not a thing for a while because the Knicks were so bad,” Desus Nice says. 

“Now, you see the videos, and it’s literally fear of missing out.” But, he says, do not judge the young too harshly.

“Being an older Knick fan, I’m like, ‘Oh, look at these stupid kids, ’but they’re just having fun, ”he says. “They’re caught up in the moment. And also, sadly, they have no tradition to follow.

They’ve never seen the Knicks be good.” He adds: “Listen — they were out there pouring honey on themselves. They’re trying. They’re trying, and we appreciate it.” 

At Pig Beach, the third quarter of Game 1 of the finals, when the Knicks fall behind by 14, is a low point in the evening. If curses were in any way materially effective, the San Antonio Spurs would be in big trouble based on the bad things the young people at Pig Beach are saying.

The game gets closer in the fourth. Bodies tense. A woman with long white fingernails clutches her face. A man at the bar shakes his head.

And then, suddenly, the Knicks are ahead — slightly, then definitively. By 2 points, then 3. Six.

Eight. The game ends, and white fingernails and head-shaker scream and jump up and down and dance and use their phones to record the screen showing the game.Jose Lliguichuzhca, 39, a construction worker from Corona, Queens, is with his daughter Isabella, 9. 

Both of them are standing on a picnic bench, too delighted to touch the ground.

Lliguichuzhca was a little older than Isabella in 1999 when he watched the Knicks’ last trip to the finals.

“This is a special moment,” he says. “I never expected it, and I’m living it.” Isabella says her father tells her to pay close attention to these Knicks. They have a lesson to teach.

“We have to win,” she says. “And we can never quit.”.