Alicia Keys Performed At The Knicks Championship Parade And New York Lost Its Mind

The New York Knicks won their first NBA championship in 53 years on June 13 when Jalen Brunson scored 45 points in a 94-90 Game 5 victory over the San Antonio Spurs in San Antonio.

Brunson averaged 32.6 points for the series and was named Finals MVP unanimously. The Knicks rallied from double-digit deficits in four of their five victories against the Spurs, including the largest comeback in NBA Finals history, a 29-point deficit erased in Game 4.

The parade was Thursday.

Manhattan has not thrown a basketball championship parade since 1973. It showed. Hundreds of thousands of people flooded lower Manhattan starting in the morning, waving flags, climbing every available vertical surface and generating the specific collective energy of a city that had been waiting more than five decades for exactly this feeling.

Timothée Chalamet was on a bus from Madison Square Garden. Ben Stiller was there. Mayor Zohran Mamdani presented ceremonial keys to the city to players, coaches and staff, and notably did not give one to Spike Lee, at the City Hall ceremony that followed the parade route.

Then Alicia Keys took the stage. She performed Billy Joel's "New York State of Mind" and followed it with her own "Empire State of Mind." The crowd sang every word of both. "We've been waiting over 50 years for this moment," Keys said.

The pairing of those two songs, one by the man who has a banner hanging in the Madison Square Garden rafters alongside the Knicks championship banners, one by the woman who wrote the other great anthem of New York City, was the right call for a city that has been waiting 53 years to feel like this again. Keys understood the room, which was the entirety of lower Manhattan.

The Knicks' Legendary Run

Jalen Brunson, 29 years old, arrived in New York in 2022 via free agency from the Dallas Mavericks and spent four seasons systematically dismantling every argument that he was too small or too ordinary to carry a franchise.

He carried one to its first championship in 53 years with 45 points in the clinching game, scoring 29 of them after halftime, including 16 in the fourth quarter, in a city that had been running out of patience across the longest title drought in franchise history.

His teammates Mikal Bridges and Josh Hart became the first trio of teammates to win an NCAA title and an NBA championship together. Karl-Anthony Towns and OG Anunoby contributed throughout.

The Knicks were never the most talented team in the building, certainly not against Victor Wembanyama and the Spurs, and they won anyway, four times from double-digit deficits, because Brunson would not allow them to lose.

Alicia Keys sang "Empire State of Mind" on the steps of City Hall. Jay-Z and Alicia Keys wrote that song in 2009, the year Brunson was 12 years old. He grew up. The Knicks won. New York is back.