NEW YORK (AP) – New York is celebrating the Knicks in classic style Thursday, throwing a tape show of the team that brought home the NBA championship coveted by generations of fans.
The Knicks’ victory — after a 53-year drought — electrified New Yorkers, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani predicted Thursday’s show could be one of the biggest in the city’s history.
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The mere fact that it is happening is history in itself. Although the Knicks won two championships in the 1970s, the city never hosted a show for them. Then-Mayor John Lindsay had cut back on tape sales for financial and other reasons, and instead honored the Knicks at a reception in 1970 at the mayor’s mansion and a packed event in 1973 outside City Hall.
This time, the whole town comes out.
“There will be performances, there will be New Yorkers, there will be a team and there will be history,” said Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday.
The parade will begin at 10 a.m. Thursday near Battery Park and head up Broadway on a sky-high walkway called the “Canyon of Heroes.” The procession will end at City Hall, where players will also receive another traditional tribute: the keys to the city.
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Knicks legends Walt “Clyde” Frazier — a member of the 1970s championship team — and Patrick Ewing are expected to participate in the show, according to a person familiar with the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details before they are made public. The person said Mike Breen, the Knicks’ play-by-play broadcaster on the MSG Network, was to emcee the City Hall event.
Alicia Keys, the singer who collaborated with Jay-Z on the 2009 New York love song “Empire State of Mind,” has been tapped to sing it.
“How could I not?” Keys said Wednesday in a social media video that showed him on the phone with Knicks forward OG Anunoby.
Police are planning to deploy 10,000 officers to protect the event, which follows the raucous but sometimes chaotic street celebrations and some violence during the Knicks’ run to victory over the San Antonio Spurs.
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“We want people to enjoy this time,” Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a planning meeting Wednesday, “but public safety comes first.”
Some 650 sanitation workers have been assigned to clean up what could be tens of thousands of kilograms of waste, if recent history is any guide.
Ticket tape shows get their name from the thin strips of paper used by telegraph-era “stock ticker” machines. New York factory workers began throwing paper out of their office windows during parades in the late 19th century, adding a moving spectacle to the festivities.
Over the years, especially until the mid-1960s, the city held ticker-tape parades to honor visiting foreign leaders, mark historic anniversaries and hail events in aviation, war, sports, music, space travel and more.
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The Knick’s parade will be the 210th, and it comes after the ticker-tape bash of the WNBA’s New York Liberty in 2024.
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AP Basketball writer Brian Mahoney contributed from Southampton, New York.
