Knicks to get first ticker-tape parade after third NBA title
New York will honor the champion Knicks on Thursday, decades after their 1970 and 1973 teams missed the Canyon of Heroes.
By Daniel Okafor · Business Editor
3 min read
The New York Knicks will receive their first ticker-tape parade Thursday after winning the NBA championship, the Associated Press reported. The celebration closes a long gap in the city’s sports ritual: the Knicks’ title teams in 1970 and 1973 were honored by City Hall, but not with a parade down lower Broadway.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has cast the event as a major civic celebration, according to AP. The parade is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. near Battery Park and finish at City Hall.
Mamdani, a Democrat, said Monday while visiting a city facility making temporary “Champions Way” signs that the event could be “the largest parade in New York City history,” AP reported. He said the celebration would include performances, New Yorkers, the team and history.
Why the earlier champions did not get a parade
AP reported that there is no single confirmed reason the Knicks did not get ticker-tape parades after their 1970 and 1973 championships. The context points to then-Mayor John Lindsay’s decision to scale back the city’s frequent confetti-filled events during a period of tighter budgets and growing complaints from lower Manhattan businesses.
Lindsay, who took office in 1966, and his public events commissioner, former Knicks captain John “Bud” Palmer, preferred smaller and less expensive ceremonies for visiting dignitaries, according to AP and other news reports from that period cited by AP. Palmer was paid a symbolic salary of $1.
By 1970, AP reported, the country was in recession, New York’s events budget had been reduced, and Palmer was upset that officials rejected a $372 expense bill for materials tied to a 1969 ticker-tape parade for the New York Mets’ World Series victory. City Department of Records & Information Services memos put the modern equivalent at about $3,300, according to AP.
The city also skipped a ticker-tape parade for the New York Jets after their 1970 Super Bowl win, AP reported. That victory came soon after a parade honoring the Apollo 8 astronauts for orbiting the moon.
When the Knicks beat the Los Angeles Lakers for the 1970 NBA title, Lindsay sent congratulations by telegram and hosted the team at the mayor’s official residence, according to contemporary coverage cited by AP. After the Knicks defeated the Lakers again in 1973, Lindsay held a City Hall celebration and invited New Yorkers to attend.
More than 2,000 fans, many of them young, showed up for the 1973 event, according to a New York Times account cited by AP. Police had trouble keeping the speakers’ area clear, but the ceremony proceeded, and Lindsay presented the team with medals marking the 75th anniversary of New York City’s five-borough consolidation.
A long-running city tradition
The Downtown Alliance and the Museum of the City of New York say the city’s ticker-tape tradition dates to an 1886 event for the Statue of Liberty’s dedication. The groups say the practice became city-run in 1919, when New York welcomed home World War I soldiers, and athletes first received such an honor in 1924 for the U.S. Olympic team.
According to the Downtown Alliance and the museum, the parades later honored achievements and figures tied to aviation, war, sports, music, space travel, public service and foreign diplomacy. AP reported that championship team parades became more common in later decades; the city’s most recent ticker-tape parade honored the WNBA’s New York Liberty in 2024.
This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.