The imperial subject’s guide to the finals; or, how I stopped crashing out about the fact that Jalen Brunson will be an NBA champion
Finding peace with the world-beating New York Knicks
Big two weeks in the Neververse—everyone dying at the French Open except for the Italian guys, excellent Jeff Parker and Iceage albums, status update music, the NBA playoff’s flopping Red Scare, realizing too late that “Janice STFU” interpolates that Lykke Li song.
Not going to fully blog this out, but if a theme of 2026 has been my greatest opps defeating me at every turn, then it’s fitting that the Ben Lerner book is actually quite good. Lerner—have never really gotten the guy. Every blurb treats his prose in that breathless “Goop On Ya Grinch” cadence, but in my regrettably extensive encounters with it, I’ve found it underwhelming, overstudied, even pompous. It’s not fair, necessarily, to judge an artist based on his author portrait, but historically reading Lerner has felt like staring into his smug, bad-guy-from-Toy-Story mug. Lernermania has thus far imposed a great distance between my fellow man and me. All of which is to say: Transcription is pretty excellent! Engrossing, slight, considered…obviously, it’s at its worst when Lerner imagines his beast-mode academic mentor who lurks above the work as its organizing principle (it gives Ben too wide a berth to prove his intellect), but then it comes back with the most heartfelt representation of ARFID this side of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. All in all good shit, two thumbs up, I still wouldn’t, like, read it on the subway, but we don’t have that sort of thing in New Orleans.
Today’s dispatch was going to be a two-parter: how to cope with the inevitable New York Knicks on the A-side, a consideration of three recent movies on the B-side. Ended up going too long on the Knicks question, so hopefully there will be a supplemental Hungover at the Movies later this week. Onward:
The imperial subject’s guide to the finals; or, how I stopped crashing out about the fact that Jalen Brunson will be an NBA champion
Over the last two years, whatever public hope, private manifestation, karmic balance, reverent prayer, and quasi-spiritual superstitious ritual left over from my concerted efforts to ensure that the Boston Celtics would not win an NBA championship have been expended upon preventing the New York Knicks from winning an NBA championship. This, in and of itself, is both a source of great shame for me and also a fact as stable and natural as my having tied my shoes for every day over the past two years. A great deal of my most beloved friends—friends for whom I wish nothing but happiness—are devout Knicks fans, the knowledge of which has vaunted my otherwise childish petulance into the realm of genuine betrayal for which I am genuinely, helplessly sorry. My private torment has prompted an almost philosophical question: how can one reasonably say that they would jump in front of a moving car to save their friends’ lives, yet root so doggedly and aimlessly for their favorite team to lose? The answer, it appears, is that I would sooner be launched off the grille of a speeding Suburban than watch Josh Hart giddily shout pause after Mikal Bridges suggests that he, Larry O’Brien trophy in hand, is going to Chipotle for a celebratory double meat bowl.
My relationship toward the Knicks—that which has fostered such intense guilt in my in inner heart—is that of an imperial subject toward his hegemon. My feelings toward the Knicks only barely resemble the animosity inspired within me by the aforementioned Celtics. I hate the Boston Celtics and the broader Boston sporting project with the fire of a thousand suns. I resent their uninterrupted, bestowed-by-birth success, I resent their entitled and savage fans (an exception, again, carved out for those close personal friends for whom these otherwise infuriating characteristics have curdled into a lifetime of affection and love), I resent their vacuous stars, I resent their servile media apparatus, and most importantly I resent the legion of hyper-online fans who have somehow understood the above-listed facts as permission to perform a faux-contercultural “weirdness.” Ten years before the Department of Homeland Security began hiring pubescent groypers to post memes about deportation, there was “Weird Celtics Twitter” paving the way of using internet-native linguistic techniques to naturalize grotesque, entrenched power. It’s not that I hate the city of Boston and its outlying regions, per se; it’s a beautiful place to walk around, the leaves are really stunning, there are a number of great places to get a sandwich, and it’s genuinely cool that a major American city defines itself primarily as “the place where people go to school.” I’ve lived in Massachusetts and been terribly unhappy, but I can imagine living in Massachusetts and being happy; the apartment from The Drama was awesome.1 To the extent I have a complaint with Boston, it’s that it’s a sort of soft ethnostate—think, like, Denmark—within which participation is conditioned on, like, where you played high school hockey. But where Denmark coheres around its social safety net and beautiful people, Boston derives its civic identity from its sports teams’ complete and utter domination of their competition. It’s perverse.
Almost none of these animating gripes extend to the New York Knicks. The Knicks, for their part, have struggled tremendously (less, of course, than their fans would lead you to believe, but nonetheless meaningfully). Knicks fans, a group I would distinguish in kind both from many of the people actually able to attend Knicks games and the hordes that descend upon Madison Square Garden to cloutchase after playoff games), strike me as patient, charming, and dedicated; at their worst, they resemble the white-collar chauvinism of the New York Rangers, but en masse they evoke the sorts of people I love getting drunk with at Yankee Stadium. I feel great disgust toward many (though, importantly, not all) Knicks players, but this feeling is more of an epiphenomenon than an explanation; I’ve hated the Knicks since Jalen Brunson only had one closet full of LL Bean chore coats, and instinctively rooted against them even when I loved guys like Carmelo Anthony and Amare Stoudemire. Most importantly, I love New York City and New York sports; my childhood was defined in no small part by my obsessive Giants (though, as the impending World Cup fiasco will soon illustrate, the Giants are a New Jersey team) and Yankees fandom. It’s this relationship—that between city and team—that in many ways forms my opinion that New York is in fact da greatest city in da world; unlike Boston, New York does not live and die with its teams, because New York contains a great deal more than its professional sports organizations. It’s a sign of a great metropolis that one would be anywhere from mildly to extremely embarrassed to wear a sports jersey out and about on its streets. Which is all a long-winded way of saying that I love many people in New York City and want, sincerely, for them to be happy. How, then, to justify this feeling? What about such dissimilar subjects could elicit this similar an animosity? That, as is often the case, is where the Brooklyn Nets and the specter of New Jersey factor in.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: people have very strong feelings about what makes someone a “New Yorker.” It’s a debate I’ve long followed with a smirking, half-sincere enthusiasm, a question apparently revolving around birth location, years of residence, and genuine allegiance in a way typically reserved for determining where someone will be taxed for their income or what country will issue a person their passport. My interest in this contested topic is purely academic: I have never lived in New York (which, as anyone who has not lived in New York knows, does not exempt me from being inundated with essentially New York questions), and were I to ever move to New York, I know that I would never be a Real New Yorker. I know that, of course, because I root for the Brooklyn Nets, which is to say that I am from New Jersey. The two, you will see, are synonymous: if you are from New Jersey, you are a Nets fan whether or not you identify as such; if you root for the Brooklyn Nets, you are in every meaningful sense from New Jersey. This proposition is simultaneously unimpeachable in its logic and yet not readily apparent to many implicated by it. For instance, despite growing up in New Jersey, every childhood friend of mine has chosen to identify as a New York Knicks fan. Considering this fact calls to mind the scene from Mad Men during which Conrad Hilton and Don Draper meet for the first time while hiding from their respective country club engagements. Hilton, who has identified in Draper a fellow misfit in New York’s upper crust, offers a confession: “I’m Republican, like everyone else in there. But somehow, no matter how expensive my cufflinks, I feel I’ve got the head of a jackass.” All great works of art can withstand multiple readings. Here’s mine: Hilton and Draper, spiritually, are from New Jersey.
The Knicks stand unique among New York sports teams for their clarifying effect. There’s a reason that New York City is so electric when the Knicks are good: they are, in a real sense, New York’s only true team. New York divides its baseball allegiances between the Yankees and the Mets; it both splits and outsources its football fandom to the Garden State with the Jets and Giants. Madison Square Garden, hulking atop one of Manhattan’s arteries, hosts the only team for whom the entire city can come together to root (to the extent that people care about hockey, the Rangers’ Wall Street bullshit is inherently exclusionary; go Devils). The otherwise diffuse nature of New York sports offers participatory cover to the subjects of the Big Apple’s broader sprawl: there is no purity test for Yankees, Mets, Giants, or Jets fans. You can be a subject of New York City’s cultural hegemony and participate without complication in the vast majority of its sporting culture. What makes the Knicks different, for those hailing from the fiefdom of New Jersey, are the wretched Brooklyn, née New Jersey, Nets.
A word, here, of preemptive defense. I love New Jersey, and I love being from New Jersey. New Jersey has brought the world any number of immeasurable gifts: baseball, Frank Sinatra, Mk.gee, Jane Remover, cloud rap, Mach-Hommy, the Clavicular news cycle from four months ago that got every freelance writer a decent check. A good deal of emo bands and Jack Antonoff, too, but every great exporter has its bad batches. The Jersey Shore is the greatest place on earth, the Hoboken Italian-American Festival constitutes a more meaningful contribution to American culture than Coachella, and at one point I’m pretty sure the majority of Pavement and Sonic Youth lived in my hometown. New Jersey is great. And yet if the overwhelming, non-Californian majority of America is marked by its non-New-Yorkness, then it stands to reason that New Jersey is the truest American state by dint of its being The Most Not New York. New Jersey, in case you have not heard the jokes, is definitionally Not New York, a fact driven personally home by my having grown up in a city that literally exists in Manhattan’s shadow. I don’t wish I were from New York, either: the place is great, but I like being from its Wario. These sorts of feelings between neighboring states, regions, and metropoles is what organized sports exist to mediate: one justifies their decision to live in non-paradise by rooting for their team to beat the Lakers, one feels a surge of civic pride when their public university gets the best of Duke, and one, mercifully, is not from Oklahoma City. What I mean to say is that my feelings toward the Knicks as a Nets fan would have remained on the level of petty but passionate regional rivalry had the Nets not committed the cardinal, age-old sin of attempting to reinvent themselves by moving from New Jersey to Brooklyn.
What I mean to say is that by moving to Brooklyn, the Nets either unwittingly or carelessly embroiled their fans in a one-sided rivalry imbued with existential questions of belonging, legitimacy, and worth. It’s possible that sports, writ large, are not able to handle such a loaded dynamic; whatever the case, it is evident that the Brooklyn Nets cannot. The Brooklyn Nets, of course, are far from the first professional sports team to have relocated; what makes their relocation to ostensibly greener pastures at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic so metatextually significant is what it signals to its fans. In order of importance: 1) you, New Jerseyan, belong in New York; and 2) in order to meaningfully matter, you must belong in New York. The Brooklyn Nets, like many a gentrifier before them, displaced native Brooklynites to build a nice home for former New Jersey residents to move into in the name of greater access, opportunity, and cache. In so doing, they conscripted a (small, it bears saying) legion of fans into a subtly massive sociocultural gambit; all of a sudden, I, a guy from New Jersey, was asked to stake some claim on New York itself. I mean, Jesus Christ, I’m pretty sure I own one of the Coogi print jerseys! The Brooklyn Nets conditioned their future success on their ability to make inroads into a city for which basketball fandom was not an open question, an original sin that has cursed the franchise since the moment it attempted to bite into the Big Apple. Almost every chapter of the Nets’ voluminous woes since their move to Brooklyn has been a downstream consequence of ownership’s attempts to jump-start the process of peeling a fanbase off from Knick defectors, a strategy that has typically borne itself out through splashy acquisitions of past-prime or impossibly mercurial superstars at the total disregard of a long-term future. When that gambit inevitably failed, the first thing the Nets did was draft a Russian teenager and two Israeli kids—ill-fated gambits, doubled-down upon, generate transparent cynicism.
The answer, then, is that I hate the New York Knicks because the Brooklyn Nets have driven me mad. In the Knicks’ city-unifying, hard-earned success, I see a double-indictment of the Nets’ failures. The Knicks, in their current iteration, stand as a counter-model to the Nets’ reckless and outdated approach to team-building and timeline-leaping; more crucially, their broader, continued existence serve as a rebuke to the Nets’ aspirations of victorious assimilation. The Knicks, merely by making the NBA Finals, remind the Brooklyn Nets that they will never be real New Yorkers, extinguishing a possibility that would never have crossed my mind had my favorite basketball team not attempted to brute-force its way into the city in the first place.2 In this light, my specific disdain for Mikal Bridges is instructive: what I loathe about Bridges is that he committed the greatest sin that a Nets player possibly could by acknowledging this natural inferiority and publicly lusting for the shine of the Garden. My hatred for the Knicks, then, is but a misdirected rage toward the Nets for initiating this existential question of belonging in the first place.
And so as we stand at the precipice of the eternal scoundrels Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart lifting the Larry O’Brien trophy (and, let’s be real, of course they are going to win), the only path toward peace—the only cope, if you will—is one of resignation. I don’t want the good people of New York to suffer, and Zohran seems to be having a lot of fun with this. Karl Anthony Towns is the only Knick I can stand (again, shout-out New Jersey), and though I don’t like the way that people talk about him on the internet, I can find it in my heart to smile for him when he wins Finals MVP. It’s all good. My grievance, ultimately, is not with the Knicks for reminding me that I will never be a New Yorker, but for the Nets for attempting to convince me that that is something to be ashamed of.
Worst thing that happened to me was living in Massachusetts when they banned vapes. Everyone says they want progressive governance until they have to live underneath its yoke.
Of course, the Knicks in their current iteration have made quite a meal out of their essential New York-ness, in effect selling a fetishized “New York culture” to the legions of moneyed transplants that increasingly constitute the city’s purchasing class, a concept that Minh Tran wrestled with well but which, ultimately, is none of my business.