Knicks deliver best present for Father's Day with Larry O'Brien Trophy
Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns raise the Larry O'Brien trophy as confetti flows during the Key to the City ceremony at City Hall after the ticker-tape parade on Thursday. Credit: Newsday/William Perlman
In the hours after the Knicks ended their 53-year wait for an NBA title, Rick Brunson and Karl Towns Sr. made their way into the draped-off photo area and held the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
They posed together, a pair of fathers who had coached and watched their sons rise to the level that only they could have imagined years ago.
So as Father’s Day arrived, with a long season behind them — along with a week of appearances on television and at local stores and parties, and finally the parade through the Canyon of Heroes with approximately two million fans celebrating with them — Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns could be forgiven for not shopping for cards for their dads.
“I think we’re good,” Towns said when the photo of the dads together was shown on The Tonight Show. “We got them a trophy.”
The joy from father to son wasn’t restricted to the two most famous players on the team and their fathers, not even just among the Brunsons with their long history in the Knicks’ organization. (Rick Brunson was a bench piece the last time the Knicks got to the NBA Finals in 1999 and now is a lead assistant coach.)
Zev Rose got to stand beside Knicks president Leon Rose on the court in San Antonio as both tried to hold back tears. Along the parade route and in the arenas, there were fathers and sons, dads who had told tales about the 1970 and 1973 championship squads. There were dads who still felt the pain of the NBA Finals loss in 1994. There were tears.
My own father, now 90 years old, worked at the old Madison Square Garden when he was just out of high school before starting his own business. And after attending games during the Willis Reed and Walt Frazier days, he watched this run through the postseason mostly from hospital rooms, where he was watching over my mother, who had to spend more than a month there.
He wore a Knicks hat in the hospital almost every day, serving as a hub for the hospital staff and filling them in on scores and highlights (he didn’t ask me for any insider information, instead offering advice for me to relay to the Knicks’ coaching staff).
The championship even got the elder Brunson into a sports coat — the only time I’ve seen him out of sweats or T-shirts in his years in New York — to sit beside Jalen and talk one more time about the video that Jalen’s mom, Sandra, had filmed on a Virginia outdoor court when Jalen was 12 years old.
“The beginning, everyone sees the videos of me and him in the park, and getting on me,” Jalen said in an appearance together on the CBS Morning Show. “But no one saw the conversations after the fact or before, [with Rick] saying, ‘Is this what you want to do for a living?’ And the answer was always yes.
“So everyone thinks that he just kind of forced basketball upon me, but it was something that I chose to do, and he had the study guide, he had the blueprint, he did it before. It was clear as day to listen to him every so often.”
“Well, I just kind of believed basketball parallels to life,” Rick Brunson said. “Working hard on the court, habits you build, how you’re raised and things you do, kind of parallel to life. So this was an opportunity to get him better and he wanted to get better. We worked every day. But the credit goes to him. I just did all the yelling.”
When they got to make the trip through the masses on Thursday, Rick was back in a T-shirt and on a float with the entire family. And when they got to City Hall, Jalen offered one more thank you.
“I want to thank my family,” he said. “Truly, truly, without them, their sacrifice, and everything will be possible. My inner circle, they keep me humble every single day. They don’t let me get off track for nothing. Damn, New York, we really did it, man. We really did it.”
The forgotten man
It took the City Hall speech by Mayor Zohran Mamdani to voice it, but it’s worth mentioning.
While the 18 Knicks players were on the stage alongside Mike Brown, team executives and a handful of Brown’s assistants for the conclusion of the parade, one name to not forget when discussing how the Knicks earned the NBA title is Tom Thibodeau.
Fired after last season’s squad fell just short of the NBA Finals, Thibodeau sat out this season and remained in the background.
Brown repaid the trust that Leon Rose and the Knicks’ front office had in him, and maybe Brown’s open-door policy for ideas was the final piece to get the Knicks the title.
But when you saw those comeback victories in the postseason, when you saw the Knicks remain calm in the fourth quarter as the Spurs seemed panicked, when you saw other teams fade and the Knicks seem to have another gear, that was all formed under the direction of Thibodeau, who preached that mentality of 48 minutes for years.
The aftermath
When the parade was over, while the last choruses of Alicia Keys’ performance were still echoing around the park at City Hall, the street cleaners already were out, erasing the confetti that fans hadn’t scooped up as souvenirs.
But questions remained. Has Jeremy Sochan put on a shirt yet? How is Ariel Hukporti feeling? Did Tyler Kolek manage to get through the police lines?
Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
