No more 'Woe is us.' New York sports are back!
The New York sports scene is experiencing a revival, thanks in large part to success and excitement around the Mets, Liberty, Yankees and Knicks.
Remember the 2010s in New York-area sports? You are forgiven if you would prefer to forget.
The lack of fun started after the Giants won Super Bowl XLVI on Feb. 5, 2012, then simply kept going and going and going and going.
There were some exciting moments but mostly a stretch of awfulness only made worse by big doings elsewhere. In Boston, especially.
The metropolitan area has a combined 13 MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, WNBA, MLS and NWSL franchises. The collective failure defied statistical logic.
Now a beacon of light has creased the firmament, bestowing a happy glow on all. (Well, almost all. Not football fans.)
Heck, it never even rains around here anymore, with rarely so much as a cloud in the sky to darken our collective mood.
It began modestly with NYCFC winning the MLS Cup in 2021, then Gotham FC winning the NWSL in 2023, soccer toes dipped into an ocean of despair.
But here in 2024, we are in full-blown success mode, complete with an actual parade down the Canyon of Heroes scheduled on Thursday. That would be for the Liberty, New York’s first pro basketball champion since Julius Erving and the Nets won the ABA title at Nassau Coliseum in 1976.
The Liberty are as apt a symbol as any for the recent change in metropolitan-area sports fortunes.
In the late 2010s, they played before sparse crowds at the Westchester County Center, an afterthought on the local athletic scene.
On Sunday night, they packed Barclays Center for their championship-clinching overtime victory over the Lynx.
The question is whether that Liberty triumph was a prelude to what would be another monumental development: New York’s first MLB/NFL/NBA/NHL title since Eli Manning’s Giants won it all in Indianapolis.
As you might have heard or read, the Yankees open their first World Series since 2009 against the Dodgers in Los Angeles on Friday night.
Those of us born prior to the first moon landing recall when this sort of thing was a regular occurrence, including three meetings between 1977 and ’81.
But now it is a novelty, an MLB and Fox executives’ dream matchup between the two biggest markets and two biggest stars in Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani.
If this is not enough to give baseball a ratings boost on Fox, the sport might as well cancel its national TV contracts and go all-local.
The Yankees nearly faced the Mets, who were two victories from a pennant, and given Steve Cohen’s deep wallet figure to be contenders for years to come.
Then there are the Knicks, whose opener against the defending champion Celtics on Tuesday night has gotten a bit lost in the baseball shuffle but which is a huge event itself. There has not been a more widely anticipated season for the Knicks since Jalen Brunson was learning to read picture books, not defenses.
Unlike in hockey, baseball and football, the Knicks have the vast majority of local fan support on their side, and for that reason there is nothing quite like it when they are good. Now they are both good and fascinating, given their new-look roster.
(The other local NBA team is the Nets, who will need a minor miracle to match the 32 wins of their Barclays co-tenants the Liberty – in twice as many games.)
Hockey? Yeah, that, too.
Either the Islanders or Rangers have reached the NHL final four in four of the past five seasons, and there is no reason for the Rangers not to be a contender again this spring.
Even St. John’s basketball, a sleepy shell of its traditional self for years, is back to big-time relevance under coach Rick Pitino.
Someday, presumably, the local football teams will figure out a way to match the competence elsewhere on the area sports map. The Jets have tried, and they will be interesting even if their season goes completely down the drain with Aaron Rodgers at the helm. The Giants will continue not to be interesting.
Let’s not get greedy, though. These are heady times.
In the 1910s, New York endured an entire decade without a professional sports championship, a drought the likes of which was not seen again until . . . the 2010s.
The 1920s ended up bringing championships for the Yankees, baseball Giants, football Giants and Rangers.
Now the 2020s are trending in the right direction, too. That Sunday night triple-feature of big Liberty, Mets and Jets games illustrated the point.
New York sports are back. Start spreading the ticker tape.
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
