There are sports stories, and then there are days where every podcast, every clip account, and every host in the building is locked in on the same thing. The Knicks finally hoisted the Larry O'Brien, and Wake Up Barstool was less a content rundown than a group therapy session for fans who had spent two decades waiting for exactly this. Clem set the tone early, openly admitting his phone now has three sacred clusters of photos — his daughter's birth, his son's birth, and the Knicks winning a title.
Clem ranks the championship alongside the births of his kids, which tells you everything about the Knicks-fan mental state right now.
My phone has three clusters of photos on certain dates that tell you a big event happened in my life. My daughter won born, my son was born, and the Knicks won a championship
Pardon My Take spent the morning turning the celebration into bits. The headline gag: Knicks fans in San Antonio reportedly had to cartoonishly sneak past a wall of Spurs supporters on the Riverwalk just to get to the after-party, which the hosts retold in studio with the kind of giddy energy you only get when your team actually won. From there it was straight into a champagne-flute toast that the audio supplied a 'Fuck Wemby' caption to — petty, perfect, on brand for a fanbase that has been bullied by the league for years.
PMT recounts the Riverwalk stealth mission, Knicks hat firmly on.
They also took a beat to actually honor the moment with a tip of the cap to the late great Bing Bong era — the meme that carried Knicks fandom through some genuinely dark basketball — before pivoting to the financial reality of what Jalen Brunson did. PMT keeps hammering the point that Brunson took a reported $100M pay cut to stay in New York and chase exactly this, which is the kind of decision that ages from 'crazy' to 'legend' the second a trophy gets handed out.
The PMT desk on Brunson's pay cut, now retroactively the best contract decision in the league.
That same Brunson energy is why nobody on the Knicks side had any interest in Stephen A. Smith's mea culpa on First Take. Eric Hubbs flagged how visibly unbothered Brunson was by the apology, which is the correct response when a guy who spent years dunking on your ceiling tries to slide back in once the banner is going up. Meanwhile Chicks in the Office made sure the celebrity wing got its due, with Karl-Anthony Towns hoisting the trophy and superfan Timothee Chalamet floating around the locker room like he just got drafted.
KAT, Chalamet, and Jordyn Woods in the champagne-soaked locker room scene.
Sports Central closed the loop with the take that ties the whole morning together: this Knicks team was simply the perfectly constructed roster to beat the Spurs, and they might be the most likable champ in recent memory. Whether you buy that or think it's a New York fan-base hallucination, the evidence is right there in the feed — even Clem's For You Page is, by his own sarcastic admission, nothing but curated Knicks content on a 48-hour loop. The hangover is just getting started.
Sports Central's roster-construction take on why the Knicks were the Spurs' kryptonite.