The New York Knicks won their first NBA championship since 1973 on Friday night, ending a 53-year drought that has haunted this city like a particularly loud, orange-clad ghost. New Yorkers responded with exactly the kind of jubilant, chaotic, wholly unhinged celebration you would expect from a fanbase that has been emotionally waterboarded by this franchise for half a century. One of the school buses caught fire.
53 Years. A 4-1 Series. One Very Melted Bus.
The Knicks closed out the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 at Frost Bank Center, clinching the series 4-1 and lifting the Larry O'Brien Trophy for the first time since 1973, according to NBC News. This is only the third championship in franchise history. The team that last won this thing was playing in a different America, two years before Richard Nixon resigned.
Game 5 came just two days after the Knicks pulled off what NBC News describes as the largest comeback in NBA Finals history, so New York was already running on fumes and pure nervous energy by the time the final buzzer sounded. When it did, the city did not disappoint. Thousands of fans flooded the streets. Police officers and ambulance workers in Brooklyn announced the victory over their loudspeakers. Traffic around Madison Square Garden stopped completely. And somewhere in Times Square, a school bus began its short, fiery journey into history.
Spike Lee, Timothée Chalamet, and a Man Clinging to a Fire Truck
Down in San Antonio, the celebrity contingent was out in full force. Spike Lee, Timothée Chalamet, and Ben Stiller were spotted celebrating on the court after the win, per NBC News. Chalamet, described as a four-time Academy Award nominee, told ESPN: "Way rather this than the Oscars. Knicks are champions, baby." Stiller said he was the "happiest I've ever felt." Good for Ben Stiller.
Back in New York, the celebrations were somewhat less composed. According to the Associated Press, as reported by NBC News, fans climbed into and onto school buses in Times Square and attempted to hitch rides on a moving fire truck. Some scaled scaffolding and light poles. Others smashed windshields. Around 2 a.m., gunshots were fired near 42nd Street and Broadway. Bystander video captured at least seven shots and showed people running for cover. Preliminary reports indicated no injuries. The NYPD confirmed multiple arrests but had not released specific numbers or charges as of the time of reporting.
The school bus, for its part, did not survive the night.
The Mayor, the Parade, and the Keys to the City
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has been in office less than a year and just got handed the most straightforward political win imaginable, announced a ticker-tape parade, the first in Knicks history, along with a City Hall ceremony and the Keys to the City on Thursday. "For more than 50 years, New Yorkers have waited for this moment," Mamdani said, according to NBC News. "Through near misses, heartbreak and a hope that every year could be our year, this city never stopped believing in the Knicks."
The parade will run through the Canyon of Heroes in Lower Manhattan, the same stretch of Broadway that has welcomed moon-walking astronauts and World Cup-winning soccer teams. The Knicks will now join that list. It took 53 years, an enormous comeback, and one extremely combustible bus, but here we are.
Trump Weighs In, Because of Course He Does
President Donald Trump, who has never once missed an opportunity to attach himself to a sporting victory, congratulated the team on Truth Social. "Congratulations to Jim Dolan and the New York Knicks!!!" he posted, calling the victory "maybe the greatest in the history of basketball."
To be clear: this was not the greatest victory in the history of basketball. It was a 4-1 series win in the 2026 NBA Finals featuring a historic comeback in one game. It was genuinely great. It was not, by any sober measure, the greatest thing that has ever happened in a sport that has existed for over 130 years. But this is a man who described his own election wins in similar terms, so the calibration on "greatest in history" has always been somewhat loose.
The Dingo Take
Look, the Knicks winning is a genuinely good story. A long-suffering fanbase in a brutal sports city finally gets the thing they have been promised and denied in roughly equal measure for five decades. Spike Lee in his courtside gear, finally crying the right kind of tears. A city that needed something to feel good about getting exactly that. Even the chaos feels somehow right, like New York couldn't just have a nice, orderly moment without also setting something on fire to prove a point.
But can we talk about the school bus for a second? Because a school bus burned in Times Square during an NBA celebration and it is already being treated as a footnote. Gunshots on 42nd Street. People surfing fire trucks. The NYPD making multiple arrests and declining to give specifics at 3 in the morning. The Knicks owner, James Dolan, pleading with his own fans not to hurt anyone. This is the American sports celebration in its purest form: completely disproportionate, vaguely dangerous, and utterly impossible to look away from.
The parade is Thursday. The Keys to the City ceremony follows. Timothée Chalamet will presumably attend in some extraordinary outfit. The bus is already gone. New York City will declare a week of healing and also probably burn something else. This city contains multitudes, most of them orange and blue, and right now they are all screaming at the same time.
