I spent the morning of Tuesday, May 13 partaking in an activity I find myself doing often after Knicks wins the last few postseasons: Scrolling through my phone, soaking in the ebullient Twitter chatter — the insightful clips breaking down the game, the jokes at the expense of the reigning champion Celtics, and of course, laughing at the fan videos. Knicks fan content outlets have their detractors, and I get it. It is a codification, a caricature, a funhouse mirror reflection of New York City that turns us into a gated-off community of loud, abrasive, brown-liquor-swilling jabronies preening for an iPhone camera. But I think the loudest of these critics are primarily old grumpy assholes who don’t understand manufacturing virality is how many young New Yorkers and many young Americans express their joy now.
What I primarily feel when I watch these videos is admiration tinged with maybe a hint of jealousy. These young fans — high off the endorphins of victory and potentially many other substances — didn’t live through the Jordan wars, they don’t know who Charles Smith is, they didn’t see that Starks three that would have finally won Patrick his championship get blocked by Hakeem Olajuwon’s fingertips in Game 6, they only know Reggie Miller as an unbearable color commentator, they don’t know what it means to wander through the desert for 25 years and then suddenly stumble on this oasis, this miracle of a postseason.
These fans are blessedly young, they are celebrating their preordained win molded by the hands of God specifically to crown this one perfect night at the apex of their youth, which will surely lead to a ring, a ticker tape parade, and joy that will last forever. I watch these children (and always a random guy in a Spiderman suit with a Yankee fitted) catching visiting celebrities or opposing fans lacking, grab the mic, scream horrible things about the Celtics, the city of Boston, and their romantic love for Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart.
And then, on cue, in each of these videos, they will evoke the name of 26 year old Atlanta Hawks point guard Trae Young, which prompts the blocks stuffed with people around Madison Square Garden, in the middle of the streets, hanging off street light poles, stretching as far as the eye can see, to join in a chant, a profane mantra, a rallying cry of “FUCK TRAE YOUNG”. And I laugh, as long as the chants and energy behind them are cast in the good nature that kind of sounds menacing if you don’t live here but isn’t actually intending harm, because it’s our patois, the trademark of the Knicks fanbase and New York itself. Here’s some footage:
It would be hard for anyone not privy to institutional knowledge of the recent playoff history of the Knicks to understand why — after the Knicks have toppled the Boston Celtics and find themselves on an unlikely ascent to the Eastern Conference Finals, with so many actual targets worthy of their ire — the fanbase would go after a largely disappointing Hawks point guard who bombed out of the play-in a month ago. Here’s a primer for the uninitiated.
Rayford Trae Young was born in Lubbock, Texas and played college ball in Oklahoma. He’s short (listed at 6’1) and wiry (164 lbs) which makes him a natural foul magnet and a net negative on defense, a weakness he turned into a strength with an affinity for going to the line that was at one time so effective that the league had to respond with a rule change. After his one year as a Sooner he was understood as a possible successor to Steph Curry, the first of a generation of shifty, dead-eyed child marksmen who grew up in the more notorious Splash Brother’s shadow and were trained to pull up from the logo, which Young does often, fearlessly. He also makes an abundance of highlight-worthy, flashy passes that he hunts for, Rajon Rondo-like, in ways that counterintuitively come at the expense of the offense. This is why, in what has become a footnote in Luka Doncic’s suddenly oddly contentious, tumultuous career, Doncic’s first (and now only second-worst) trade was from the Hawks, for a player the Hawks incorrectly viewed as just as promising in Trae, and a draft pick that became *checks notes* Cam Reddish.
In 2021, for the first time since 2013, the Knicks made the postseason and faced young Trae’s Hawks in the first round. They had pulled off a stunning turnaround in their first season with Tom Thibodeau and newly minted General Manager Leon Rose at the helm, transforming from a 21-45 basement dweller under the braintrust of David Fizdale, then (not that) Mike Miller in 2020 to a credulity straining 41-31, good for 4th in the Eastern Conference. It was powered by an MVP-caliber season from Julius Randle that truly no one, probably not even Randle, thought he had in him. The former is not an overstatement, he actually got MVP ballot votes. Randle took a roster that featured Reggie Bullock, Nerlens Noel (Mitchell Robinson was hurt), Taj Gibson and Elfrid Payton into battle against the Hawks (The Knicks also had a young underutilized backcourt-frontcourt combo of Immanuel Quickley and Obi Toppin, but that’s a sins of history lesson for another day).
It was an ugly series. The Hawks, overachieving under Nate McMillan, laser focused on all the weak spots in the Knicks’ thin roster, a group so shallow that Thibs “had” to play washed Derrick Rose nearly 40 minutes a game. They capitalized on the lack of a viable frontcourt and owned the boards and the rim with Clint Capela, they tilted the floor on Randle and applied his personal kryptonite, forcing him to make quick, often disastrous decisions, while also making Reggie Bullock dribble. It was Hawks in five and it was ugly, punctuated by Trae Young’s WWE theatrics, thriving off the hatred of a Madison Square Garden crowd focused on him and him alone like boos were water and oxygen. Atlanta went on to an improbable Eastern Conference Finals berth and the Knicks had something of a rebuilding year in 2022, missing the playoffs and gathering themselves in the wake of success that had come too soon for the impoverished condition their roster was in.
Since that series, there have been occasional run-ins with the Hawks, some goofy showboating from Trae designed to get on the nerves of the MSG faithful, but while Young has kept fully embracing his villainy status in New York, Atlanta never reached those heights as a roster again, while the Knicks have been on the opposite trajectory.
And yet Trae has remained as an object of derision in the Knicks fan subculture. He’s a symbol, our Guy Fawkes, our Robert Paulson, our bizarro Rosie the Riveter, a figure who represents an inflection point in Knicks history, when the team got off the mat of hapless ineptitude and became a real team with stakes, and hope for a future. This is how a fandom that was raised in darkness and pessimism gets back on its feet, with customs and language and a revolutionary political slogan that nods to past trauma and history, that celebrates its war wounds, and only make sense to them.
New York and its Knicks don’t seem like a place or a fanbase where you have to instill and relearn culture, but that appears to be what is happening here, and Trae has become the magnet, the avatar for a renewed pride and righteous anger at how long it was gone. Why did the team suck for so long? What happened to the hungry, dangerous, brawling Knicks that contended throughout the ‘90s? The easy answer is James Dolan and the series of false prophets he anointed after Pat Riley abandoned the team: Isiah Thomas begat Donnie Walsh (innocent) begat Carmelo Anthony begat Glen Grunwald begat Steve Mills begat Phil Jackson begat Kristaps Porzingis begat Steve Mills again. You can look at the hair-raising results, the years of miserable regular season records and “remembering some guys” rosters and over the hill “superstars” with no draft pick — or for some reason always the No. 8 or No. 9 draft pick — to look forward to, the maybe once or twice a decade playoff appearances with no real expectation of getting any further than a first or second round, but it’s really a story of bad process, no faith or overriding philosophy, no continuity, no patience to take your time and build a roster the right way, one sober move at a time, as this one has been constructed.
Imagine you were born in New York City in the year 2004. You barely have any relationship with the Knicks until you are six years old, when the team acquires an in its prime superstar, Carmelo Anthony, traded to the team for a king’s ransom that will deplete the franchise’s assets and more or less cripple it for the next decade. You’ll get three years of lackluster first and second round outs for that trouble, then for eight years, from the age of nine until you are nearly through high school, the Knicks will be mired in an exasperating slog. But suddenly, at 17, for the first time in your adolescent life, the Knicks are back in the top half of the East playoff bracket, and have a winnable opponent, and for a second, you dare to dream that this team that has been a joke your entire life could be legit again. They’re not, and you’ll be devastated, and you’ll hold onto that devastation, because in the pain you also felt something you didn’t think was possible: Hope. And now you are of drinking age, the Knicks are in the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time this century, and your life exists as a series of meaningless hours between games, which you spend in a closed street mosh pit around a dome on the westside of Manhattan, where you drink too much, and learn for the first time what it’s like to root for a team of destiny.
This postseason is a testament to the idea that you can eschew a grand strategy and play the field in front of you in this modern NBA, make the best moves, win every trade (except maybe giving away Obi Toppin and Quentin Grimes for loose change), keep yourself in the mix, and perhaps one sweet day the Basketball Gods and the injury luck will finally fall in your favor. But that pragmatism does something of a disservice to the grand architecture of this Knicks team, a talented and dangerous group that appears to be coalescing at the exact right moment, and anyone with eyes to see knows how scary and formidable this team is when all the pieces fall together. The Knicks are once again, at last a force to be reckoned with, a team that must be taken seriously. Ask the reigning champs. Up next is a revenge series against the Pacers — who barely eked by the injury-riddled Knicks last year — that the fanbase is all as hungry for, if not more hungry for than they were for Boston, because this time there are some very recent scores to settle.
The multiversal results tree branches out before us. Perhaps the Knicks get run off the floor by a fast, suddenly very dangerous Pacers offense. Perhaps they get past the ECF and make it to the Finals, where they’re overmatched by whoever survives the West, as the team anticlimactically was in 1999. Perhaps the Knicks win the fucking NBA championship. In each of these realities, regardless of which one the dice settle on, the Knicks have outkicked their coverage, have remapped a city’s understanding of what a modern New York basketball team is and what it can be, and have retained our capacity for astonishment.
Trae Young’s journey through the NBA never quite matched the heights of that initial playoff run. Atlanta has tried, over and over again, to put a team around him that makes sense, dipping from different schools of thought in regards to what kind of roster could work around him, as the talent on the market shifts. The team has actually drafted fairly well, but partially due to bad luck and partially due to Trae potentially maxing out as a good stats (if you don’t look at the three-point percentage) bad team guy better suited for social media “TRAE YOUNG WAS A PROBLEM” edits than National Basketball Association wins. His Hawks have been a perennial play-in contender and Trae a perennial possible trade candidate.
Even if such trends continue, I hope his name remains a symbol in the Knicks collective consciousness far longer than his playing life does. That 50 years from now, long after he’s faded from memory, “Trae Young” lives as an idea, a reminder, an incantation evoked in May and maybe even June when the midtown streets fill with the young and eternally hopeful, the drunk and ecstatic Knicks fans who live in a world in which they never knew their team as a punchline/afterthought, but never forget that first blush, reacclimation with both pain and glory. Friends, Romans, drunk guys in Spiderman suits, the Knicks are ascendent, the Hawks are in a ditch. “Fuck Trae Young” is dead. Long live “Fuck Trae Young.”
