Why the New York Knicks Haven't Won a Title Since 1973

Published June 8, 2026 · By The Basketball Fans Editors

The New York Knicks last won the NBA championship in 1973. That is 53 years, the fifth-longest active title drought in the league. They last reached the Finals in 1999. Everything in between has been some mix of near-misses, thin rosters, and a fanbase that kept filling the most famous building in basketball to watch teams that could not finish.

The 2026 team finally got back to the Finals. Whether it ends the title wait or not, it is worth understanding how long that wait has been, and how close New York came twice without breaking through.

The two titles

The Knicks have won exactly two championships, both in a four-year window. The 1970 team beat the Los Angeles Lakers in seven games, with Willis Reed limping out of the tunnel for Game 7 and hitting the first two shots of the night before Walt Frazier went off for 36 points and 19 assists. The 1973 team beat the Lakers again, this time in five.

Reed won Finals MVP both years. Those teams, built around Reed, Frazier, Bill Bradley, and Dave DeBusschere, are the only New York rosters to ever lift the trophy. Everything since has been measured against them.

1994: two points short

The Patrick Ewing teams of the 1990s were the closest the franchise came after 1973. The 1994 Knicks reached the Finals and pushed the Houston Rockets to a seventh game. They lost it.

The Game 7 most fans remember is John Starks going 2 for 18 from the field, 0 for 11 from three, on the night the title was there to be taken. Houston won, Hakeem Olajuwon took Finals MVP, and the best Ewing team New York ever had came up a couple of plays short of the only thing that would have mattered.

1999: the eight seed and the Spurs

Five years later the Knicks did something no team had done before. In the lockout-shortened 50-game season they slipped into the playoffs as the eighth seed and then ran the table in the East, becoming the first eighth seed to ever reach the Finals. Larry Johnson’s four-point play against Indiana in the conference finals is still one of the loudest moments the Garden has ever produced.

Then it fell apart at the worst time. Ewing tore his Achilles during the conference finals and missed the Finals entirely. A team running on Allan Houston and Latrell Sprewell ran into the San Antonio Spurs, who won the series in five for the first title of their dynasty. The Knicks have not been back to the Finals since. Until 2026, the team they lost to that year was the last one to send them home from a Finals.

The lean decades

The 2000s and 2010s were mostly bad. After the run to the 2000 conference finals, the franchise spent years cycling through expensive rosters, the Isiah Thomas front-office era, and a long stretch of missing the playoffs entirely. From 2001 through 2020 the Knicks won a single playoff series, beating the Boston Celtics in 2013 during the Carmelo Anthony years before losing to Indiana in the next round.

The wait, and 2026

The rebuild that finally worked was not built around a single superstar draft pick. It was Jalen Brunson signing in 2022, a defense-first supporting cast assembled around him, and a front office that stopped chasing names and started building a team. That group produced the 2026 playoff run and a return to the Finals.

The opponent, fittingly, is San Antonio again, in a 2026 Finals that mirrors 1999 with the roles flipped. The Knicks are the favorite this time. The number that matters has not changed in half a century: the last New York team to win it all did so in 1973. Everything since has been the wait.

Gear

For the full story of the Ewing-era Knicks and the teams that came closest, read Chris Herring’s Blood in the Garden, the definitive account of the 1990s.

Blood in the Garden on Amazon →