Greenberg has spent decades thinking about this. In 2014, when Super Bowl XLVII was New York, Greenberg said it was different than any of the other Super Bowls.

“I’d come to Midtown every morning and do my show, and it felt very Super Bowl,” Greenberg said of his Mike and Mike ESPN radio show. “But the moment I went down to the Village to visit my parents, you would not have been aware the Super Bowl was in New York. I’ve covered 30 Super Bowls. In every city, the moment you get off the plane, you never escape it. In New York, you would have never known it was in town.”

But right now, Greenberg said, you cannot walk a block in any borough without knowing what’s going on.

“The Knicks being in the Finals is bigger in New York than the Super Bowl,” Greenberg said.

Suzyn Waldman, the voice of the Yankees who covered the Knicks at WFAN for a decade before moving to baseball, has a theory why the Knicks resonate in New York.

“Every other sport has more than one team,” Waldman told USA Today Sports. “For a long time, it was just the Knicks. It’s the city’s sport. All you need is a basketball court and a ball. You rarely see an empty basketball court anywhere in the five boroughs. And for generations, the people running, coaching and playing pro ball were from New York. Everyone in the stands when I covered the Knicks for a decade knew a coach, a scout, a guy they played with or again, someone on one of the teams playing.”

Waldman’s point is made by scanning the Spurs roster. Julian Champagnie grew up in Brooklyn and played at Bishop Loughlin in Fort Greene before starring at St. John’s. Even Dylan Harper, the son of five-time NBA champion Ron Harper, is something of a local, having grown up over the George Washington bridge in New Jersey.

Harvey Araton, the longtime New York Times columnist who wrote When the Garden Was Eden, has been thinking about the same question for 40 years. He agrees with Waldman that the Knicks place in the city’s heart is from being the only NBA game in town for so long before the Nets moved to Brooklyn.

But he also thinks it is partly location.

“Football is divided. Baseball is divided. Hockey is more of niche sport,” Araton said. “But basketball is the city game. The Yankees play in the South Bronx. The Mets are out in Flushing. The Knicks play literally in the heart of New York. Penn Station runs right underneath the Garden. It connects everyone to this arena.”

After the Knicks swept the Cavaliers to clinch their spot in the NBA Finals, fans flooded Seventh Avenue. Mayor Zohran Mamdani is planning sanctioned watch parties around the city for every Finals game.

For fans like Greenberg, what’s at stake isn’t just a championship. It’s a generational story. He sat next to his father at hundreds of Knicks games growing up. He took his daughter to a game earlier in this playoff run. He’ll take his son to a game in the Finals this week.

“I’ve waited essentially my entire life to see one of my teams win a title,” he said. “I have no idea how I’ll react, because it’s never happened to me before. I think a lot of Knicks fans probably feel that way."

Araton thinks New York City will get a chance to find out. He has the Knicks in six.

“The feeling over the next two weeks in New York is going to be pretty overwhelming,” he said. “People are just so hungry.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Knicks vs. Spurs NBA Finals 2026: Why New York City is all in