How smartphones and the New York Knicks created Brooklyn’s biggest block party
By Hannah Keyser, CNN
Brooklyn (CNN) — Early in the Eastern Conference Finals, as the New York Knicks pulled off miraculous comebacks and marched to unprecedented blowouts, I noticed that the official watch parties outside Madison Square Garden had become meta funhouse mirrors of phone screens.
Semi-professional streamers encouraged antics for cameras suspended on gimbals, which attracted the surrounding crowd to pull out their personal devices, only for the commotion to inspire attention from legacy news crews. Looking for something worth writing about, I found myself faced with a snake-eating-its-own-tail kind of content.
Anyone doing anything worth noticing made sure it was caught on cameras, lest they forgo the possibility of viral stardom which can be parlayed into a partnership with a savvy, if unsavory, prediction market.
Spectating has become performance.
As the playoffs progressed, I couldn’t stop noticing the implied presence of smartphones everywhere. The off-court story of this Knicks’ run was the passionate fanbase, awash in glory after waiting all century for the spotlight and growing bigger by the day as the bandwagon-friendly team convinced casuals to climb aboard. Every win gave way to new visual testimony that the city was Knicks-obsessed. The videos felt anthropological, but each one made me think about how the act of observing something inevitably alters it.
It felt, if not quite dystopian, at least vaguely depressing. Part of what makes sports so special is their ability to simultaneously articulate and collapse time across generations. We compare on-court exploits as if the contexts remain static. We argue about GOATs who never faced one another. We find commonality with our predecessors in futility and, finally, success.
It’s been so many seasons since the Knicks last won it all; fans who cheered for them as children when they last won a championship in 1973 have grown up, become mothers and fathers, and raised a new generation who had kids of their own and perhaps watched their parents pass away. Literal lifetimes separated the city from getting to celebrate the basketball team that feels like a family heirloom.
In an instant – or rather, through a grueling, ugly, then gritty, then triumphant Game 5 – that temporal distance is temporarily undone. Fans are reunited in spirit, which is an incredibly cheesy thing to say, except that it’s sort of the whole point.
The glow of the omnipresent iPhone is a little anachronistic, then, isn’t it?
I had felt that way. And then I went out to watch Brooklyn watch the Knicks clinch.
Separately, together
The official watch party outside MSG was back on. So were the ones in Central Park and Radio City Music Hall. Every bar and many bodegas were showing the game. But even that wasn’t enough to satiate the city’s desire to watch the Knicks in proximity to one another, even if they had to do so on many palm-sized screens.
At a major intersection in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, the streets were packed with people who came prepared. They had picnic blankets, beach chairs and plenty of libations with which to ply the basketball gods. They bought ice cream from trucks that truly had nowhere better to be, grabbed pizza from slice shops down the block, and emerged from bodegas sipping from brown bags.
They had gathered to see the game projected onto the side of a building by a Cuban restaurant with a large outdoor dining area. The size of the crowd, however, had become a traffic concern, and the police forced the game to be turned off for the time being. (It was later turned back on in time to see the clinch.)
Some of the surrounding establishments had communal TVs with the sound on, but most people could only catch a glimpse of those, if anything. The sidewalks, unfortunately, are not equipped with stadium-style seating to accommodate many rows of looking in the same direction. And so, by and large, people – who stayed despite the temporary change in plans – watched the game on their phones. Separately, together.
This was true throughout the neighborhood, which established itself this month as a secondary mecca for Knicks fans. The Brooklyn Academy of Music had a 16-foot screen positioned in front of steps that did, in fact, create a staggered seating area.
But, of course, it still wasn’t sufficient. The sheer size of the crowd meant the majority of people gathered were so far on the periphery that they wouldn’t have seen Jalen Brunson put the team on his back to overcome yet another early deficit if they hadn’t pulled out their phones.
People came because they wanted to watch the Knicks on a giant screen and stayed because they wanted to be part of something even bigger.
A citywide watch party
A plaza with no promise of TVs was packed with small groups gathered around metal tables, with propped-up phones playing the game. Extension cords snaked down the sidewalk to power laptops. A parked motorcycle with a phone plugged into it garnered a small group. A lone waiter at a classy, semi-subterranean bar that was decidedly not showing the game kept leaning down to look at his phone, which was resting horizontally against a wine bottle on the bar.
Bars hosting watch parties put up frantic-looking signs attesting that they were at capacity and could not accommodate any more Knicks fans, or else required reservations just to enter the premises. What they could offer, however, were vibes and a discernable vibration every time the Knicks scored. So, late-arriving fans simply stood outside, watching on their own and cheering in unison.
It was like a giant live-action commercial for pocket-sized screens, and a really successful one at that. When anywhere can be a watch party, everywhere is a watch party.
Beyond that, it was a testament to the intensity of wanting to experience a championship clinch as a part of a community.
Knicks fans didn’t all disperse when the projection of the game was turned off. They didn’t go home because the bar was full. They could have watched it in comfort on their own couches with a real television affixed to the wall and never gotten perilously close to losing battery power.
But then it would be a basketball game and not a block party. The beauty of this past month in New York is that a city so diverse has shared a common interest and a communal language. People wore blue-and-orange on off days, said “Go Knicks!” as a greeting to strangers, and squabbled over what it means to be truly from here, which is just another way of talking about how cool it is to live here.
A TV inside could be anywhere. Everyone knows New Yorkers don’t live at home; they live in their neighborhood.
And besides, at home, there would be no screaming crowd to film when the phone was no longer necessary for streaming.
A night for the people
That didn’t bother me anymore, either. The way the celebrations are performances now, too, with a sea of glowing rectangles held aloft as the fourth quarter ticked away tensely. Everyone was angling for their own angle on the moment it became real: New York Knicks, 2026 champions.
I get it, though. The future montages of these incredible, come-from-behind Knicks will show the players who became household names and the celebrities who could afford to sit courtside at MSG or fly to San Antonio. But all over the city, millions of people will have mediocre-quality phone footage of friends, strangers and neighbors in an ebullient state of unspoken agreement: “This is our party, too.”
Maybe in Manhattan they burned the city down, as had been oft-referenced as a giddy pseudo-threat in the lead up to the title. But I think even there, the bad actors were merely a pyrotechnic minority.
The Brooklyn I witnessed was joyous and multigenerational. Cars honked – not in impatience as their egress was completely stalled by streams of fans, but in solidarity. “Empire State of Mind” blasted from open windows on most blocks. There was a brass band and a samba-reggae drumline, seemingly celebrating the Knicks and Pride Month with equal jubilation.
As more raucous fans scaled a pair of city buses and danced atop them, a relatively sober-looking woman not wearing any Knicks gear appraised the situation and wondered aloud, “Which one looks easier to get on?” And, a beat later, “Which one looks easier to get down from?”
After having selected her target, the crowd helped to hoist her up, where she flashed peace signs for photos before safely descending. The involuntary drivers of the buses that had become momentary monuments fist-bumped the fans who streamed past them.
More than an hour after the game had ended, when Saturday night had seeped into early Sunday morning, the revelry still included kids taking full advantage of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s officially suspended bedtimes. In Prospect Heights, a preteen wearing a Brazil kit for the World Cup and a bucket hat made of different flags declared OG Anunoby “the king!” to a similarly decked-out peer.
On a patch of asphalt that had been colored with chalk to look like a rainbow in honor of Pride, a breakdancer spun for a cheering crowd and an associate who filmed the performance. When he was done, a young kid with a bowl cut and a striped shirt took his place.
He was really good at breaking, and to be honest, I don’t know if he cared about the Knicks at all or if he just wanted an excuse to stay up late and dance in the street. When he was done, the original breakdancer pulled him over and the pair posed for a series of photos.
It makes sense; it was a night worth remembering.
The-CNN-Wire
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