Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Knicks owner James Dolan could be forced to bury the hatchet if the team clinches an NBA championship — for potentially the biggest ticker-tape victory parade in New York City’s history.
The Knicks’ instant-classic Game 4 victory Wednesday over the San Antonio Spurs puts the team one win away their first NBA championship in 53 years – and amped up talks about a befitting mega-celebration, insiders said.
Jinxes be damned, officials were said to have met in City Hall on Thursday afternoon to hash out the logistics of a throwing a ticker-tape parade as soon as next week if the Knicks best the Spurs during Game 5 in San Antonio on Saturday, according to sources.
“Nobody is going to not have a parade,” a former City Hall staffer said, before adding, “There could definitely be drama in the details.”
Major building managers along the Canyon of Heroes have held preliminary conversations with City Hall about a parade, according to sources.
Such a mega-celebration could awkwardly force Dolan and Mamdani together, as team owners and mayors traditionally stand on the same float or dais, sources said.
The two “will just have to suck it up and stand on the dais in City Hall for a couple minutes and give phony smiles,” a source said, adding, “but somehow it will work.”
Dolan and Garden officials have battled with the city all week over the airtight security zone stretching several blocks around the arena set up during the Game 3 attended by President Trump.
The drama hit a boiling point in the hours before Game 4, when Dolan deemed Mamdani and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch “party poopers” for approving an outdoor watch party outside MSG that’d only have 1,000 tickets available and come with tight NYPD security.
Dolan then took to WFAN radio to announce he canceled the watch party, pinning blame on Mamdani.
“He’s not a Knick fan,” he said about Mamdani, a professed avid acolyte of the team.
Mamdani and City Hall officials didn’t take jibes lying down. They publicly released MSG’s permit application, revealing arena officials only requested permission for a party with 1,000 attendees.
And the socialist mayor burnished his collectivist image by firing off a pointed X post announcing the city’s LinkNYC screens would play Game 4.
“When James Dolan cancels the watch party outside MSG, we bring the watch party to you,” he wrote.
A Knicks win after a five-decade title drought – and negligible crosstown rivalry with the Brooklyn Nets – could very well turn into a ticker-tape parade that’d dwarf those thrown for other triumphant Big Apple teams.
The city last held a ticker-tape parade in 2024, when the New York Liberty won the WNBA championship. The spectacle drew at least 80,000 cheering fans.
The ticker-tape parades for the New York Yankees’ 2009 World Series championship and the New York Giants’ 2012 Super Bowl victory each drew at least one million people.
”This will be the biggest parade we have seen in sometime if not the biggest,” one law-enforcement source said. “Don’t forget when the Yankees win the Mets fans don’t go, when the Giants win the Jets fans don’t go, but everyone is a Knicks fan.”
Planning for the parade would entail massive security considerations and other logistics, requiring better coordination between City Hall and Knicks management than thus far has happened.
Knicks fan Manuj Agarwal, 43, who was at Game 4, said Mamdani and Dolan should just squash their beef.
“I think it’s better for the city and the Knicks franchise to just let it be,” he said.
— Additional reporting by Steven Vago