Five Spiritual Lessons from the Greatest Comeback in NBA History

Friends, let us now meditate on the New York Knicks.

I have been a Knicks fan for roughly forty-five years.

Not a diehard fan — not one of the long-suffering devoted who are now gnashing their teeth out of hope, anticipation, and anxiety. I’ve never been that kind of fan. But still, I remember following the stats in the Times as a teenager, insisting to friends that Bernard King would’ve been great were it not for the injuries, and enduring a fair amount of disappointment during the Ewing years.

Mostly, though, I am a fan of story. It’s the thing I love most about sports — not the competition or the statistics or even the details of play, but the Cinderella tales, the redemption arcs, even the ‘complicated’ players whose struggles play out on the Jumbotron. And Wednesday night’s game, capping an improbable playoff run, was as dramatic a story as professional sports can provide: the biggest comeback in NBA playoff history, sealed at the buzzer, by a team that hasn’t won the championship since 1973. Here’s the highlight reel of the comeback itself, culminating with the miraculous final basket with 1.2 seconds remaining on the clock:

In my experience, a lot of people are surprised by my affection for sports, idiosyncratic and atypical as it is. (Some are even more surprised that I’ve run two marathons and several half-marathons, and for many years coached ultimate frisbee.) It’s definitely true that I’m not a conventional fan. But as I’m still reeling from the game — “That was incredible!” is now the agreed-upon encapsulation of it — I thought I’d offer a few contemplative reflections on it, from my usual position as a meditation teacher/rabbi/psychedelics scholar/journalist. So here goes.

1. Joy in Perilous Times

As I’ve written about in these pages, over the last couple of years, I’ve sometimes found it hard to fully let go into joy and celebration. With intoxicants, sure. But sober, it’s been harder to forget the outside world and dance or celebrate like I love to do, and have loved to do for decades.

This has been a visceral feeling, not a rational moral response. It’s not that I rationally believe it is Inappropriate To Dance when migrants are being jailed, civilians are being bombed, and elections are being undermined. It is not. If slaves and former slaves and prisoners and refugees and people living in wartime can sing and dance and make love, obviously you and I can too. It is human to do this. The ‘dual state’ — the simultaneous realities of oppression (for some more than others) and ordinary life (same) — is how this species has always lived.

Yet when it’s dialed up to 11, as it was this week, the joy breaks through. What are the fans celebrating, after all? They’re not saying everything is wonderful in the world; they’re saying that there are some wonderful things even when many other things are terrible.

Can this slide into escapism? Obviously. Does it have to? No.

New York f—-ing needs this too. Not just because Knicks fans have waited half a century for it (more on that in a minute) but because the city itself needs something to celebrate, living under a regime that most New Yorkers despise and that is committing human rights violations at ICE facilities in the city and in Newark. There’s just a joy on the street right now — everyone in the city can see it. This is so refreshing.

Honestly, just the My Mayor Muslim/My Bagel Jewish meme is enough to make me smile and exhale, after all the rancorous discord about Mayor Mamdani, especially in my own Jewish community. Maye this won’t end antisemitism, the anti-antisemitism moral panic, and Islamophobia, but it couldn’t hurt. It’s like a tonic.

This is how life is. It can feel obscene, I suppose, but again, far more oppressed people than you and I have created spaces for joy amidst tragedy. So I am grateful for this sheer, unmitigated joy.

2. Joining Together

Does all that mean that all those people celebrating are, you know, good liberals who agree with me on everything? Obviously not. Sports fans, like any other group of people, are a diverse bunch, with plenty of political views I find problematic. But maybe it’s time to let go of the cancel-culture-purity vibe that’s been so predominant these last few years on both the Left and the Right and try to coexist. I mean, if Zohran Mamdani and James Dolan can agree about the Knicks (even as they’re also busy fighting about party permits and security measures), maybe I can too.

And even if I’m not participating myself, I love the feeling of mudita, as it’s called in Pali and Sanskrit: taking joy in the joy of others. Of course, mudita is easy to cultivate when it’s my team that’s winning. Arguably it’s not even mudita. I’m not watching videos of gleeful San Antonio fans, after all. But still, it’s allowing your heart to fill up with joy. Isn’t that a good use of time?

This isn’t to minimize the unsafety many people (especially many women) experience in spaces where jock culture predominates. That’s real, not imaginary, and not okay, and it is the fault of masculinism, misogyny, and violent masculinity. I am more able to safely enter these spaces than other people are, and I don’t mean to idealize or whitewash their toxic aspects. My point is only that when it is possible to join together with people who are on the other sides of our political and social divides, that is a good thing. Not that we’re going to suddenly let go of our principles and all just get along, but because there is at least a hope that we might disagree less violently. If we have this moment of shared joy, there is a small amount of hope that we can at least humanize the other and find a moment of common ground. That is enough.

3. Bad Owners Are Not the Point

In the case of the Knicks, there’s one “other” in particular — the team’s owner, James Dolan, who is, for progressives at least, a bad person. He was a bully before bullying became the dominant mode of conservative politics. He is a yuge supporter of Donald Trump, who he resembles in many ways. He not only had ties to sex criminals Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein but has been credibly accused of trafficking women to them. He has instituted a hideous private surveillance state at MSG, Radio City Music Hall, and other properties, which he has weaponized against entire law firms that represent people suing him, political enemies, and, it appears, trans people. He has stood in the way of fixing Penn Station, even as he’s sucked at the teat of government tax breaks since 1982.

Fortunately, hating James Dolan can, itself, bring people together, since he is widely loathed among Knicks fans for meddling in team operations to the team’s great detriment. The jocks hate him too.

Now, I’ve heard that some progressives aren’t joining the Knicks bandwagon because they don’t want to support Dolan. I think this is bad thinking. Yes, Dolan will benefit if/when the Knicks finally win a championship, but so will a lot of deserving people, like the long-suffering fans, the players rising to the occasion, their families, and the city as a whole. Really, the owners are beside the point; the points are the team, the fans, the community, and the game. Boycotting the Knicks because of Dolan is like boycotting anything American because of Trump.

Moreover, there have been bad sports owners since at least the Roman Empire (have you seen Gladiator?): Don Sterling (racist), Dan Snyder (sexual harassment), Marge Schott (antisemite), and team-wrecking villains like Bob Irsay, William Clay Ford Jr., Harold Ballard, and many, many others. This is a tradition so long that it’s almost a cliche. These guys may think they have MCE. They think they’re Alphas, in charge of everything. But in fact, they are NPCs, incidental to the real plot. Sure, they have power, temporarily, but few owners are remembered fondly once they’re gone. (Some owners are, of course, kind and good and supportive of their communities.) Bad owners are just stock villains, soon to be forgotten. James Dolan is not the main character of the story, and I am not going to let him dominate it.

4. Surfing the Waves, Not Smoothing Out the Ocean

As I mentioned, it’s been a long, long time since the Knicks won a championship in 1973. It’s been 27 years since they were last in the finals. Maybe even worse, unlike some other teams, they’re not reliably bad. In many years, they lifted up our hopes only to dash them. This will be the year, we believe, and then it isn’t.

Which is why this is such an emotionally insane moment. Delight, glee, exuberance — and yet, the quasi-traumatized knowledge (or dread) that we’ve been here before, that it’s too soon to celebrate. Yes, the greatest comeback in NBA history is a good omen. So is a 3-1 lead in a best-of-7 series. But….

Because the stakes of sports are actually not that high — even though to some fans they are — it can be fun to take a ride on this emotional roller-coaster. Like an actual roller coaster, it offers thrills without any actual danger. Without being too pedantic about it, it can be fun to check in with a little mindful meta-cognition on what these emotions feel like, especially in the body. Anxiety, despair, glee, relief, hope, fear — it’s a freaking carnival in here. And absurd as well, since, you know, it’s about tall men putting a ball through a hoop.

Ultimately, contemplative practice isn’t about smoothing out the ocean so that you never feel any waves of emotion. It’s about learning to surf. And these moments of wild, tsunami-like waves offer a low-stakes opportunity to watch the heart, the mind, and the body — which comes in extremely handy when the stakes are higher. Enjoy the ride, and notice the ride. That’s the ticket.

Image by Gemini; my prompt

5. Impermanence and Unpredictability

Finally, if Game 4 teaches us anything, it is that life is unpredictable even when it seems to be predictable. As we schlep along through yet more Donald Trump corruption, machination, and vulgarity, I find that to be a source of comfort. I’m amazed at the resilience of the Knicks team that didn’t succumb despair even when they were down by 25 points (or if they did, they played their hardest anyway). Who knows what the outcome will be; the work ahead is the same regardless.

In contrast to that resilience, I was thinking recently about some of the many forgotten bit-players in the Trump cavalcade: Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi used to dominate the news, and now they are nowhere. They thought they were there to stay — Noem with her ridiculous (and corrupt) advertisements, her various lackeys with their contempt for law and fairness. And now where are they? (By the way, former ICE kapo Greg Bovino is running for president, if you hadn’t heard.) Maybe this will happen to the entire regime someday. Maybe, if we can have fair elections, they’ll be reined in this November.

I also thought back to folks from his first term who I wrote about incessantly when I was at the Daily Beast: Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, EPA Director Scott Pruitt. These guys are now mostly forgotten — even though Zinke is now in Congress, no one talks about him. Their clout was borrowed from Trump, who picked and then mostly discarded them. People in power are often out of power. It’s impossible to know who or what will last. Can I have some of that combination of Who-Knows and Grit that the Knicks displayed?

It’s not that things always work out for the best — I obviously don’t believe that. But they do usually work out differently from how we expected, both for better and for worse. And so, as this meme says in Hebrew, one can never really give up completely. If that isn’t a spiritual lesson, I don’t know what is.

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Alright, that was enough levity. Now back to the horrible news:

• As readers know, AI’s impact on society is one of the core interests of this newsletter. The Times magazine just did an excellent piece on the range of possibilities, and how to prepare for them. Though I think Ben Todd still said it better.

• The Manosphere/Masculinity Crisis is another subject I’ve written on many times. Helen Lewis at The Atlantic wrote a fantastic essay on the ‘elite’ side of the phenomenon — conservative misogyny — while at the New Yorker, Heidi Blake has produced the most definitive account of the unlawful, immoral acts of Andrew Tate. Here on Substack, The Big Picture did a great, nausea-inducing piece on weaponized misogyny in the Texas Senatorial election.

• I’ve been sounding the alarm about the 2026 elections for a year now. This week Jay Kuo did an excellent assessment of how nearly the entire GOP is now lying about non-existent rigging and fraud — while committing actual rigging and fraud.

• Tyler Jagt’s disturbing piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education has gone viral among academics and it’s easy to see why. It’s the best encapsulation of what we see in the classroom every day: the loss of capacity among our students for sustained reading and attention.

• For several years, I covered the Supreme Court at the Daily Beast, and June was always crunch time. This year is no exception. Steve Vladeck wrote a great roundup of the major cases to be decided in the next few weeks.

• Finally, Happy Pride! Here’s Michelangelo Signorile on what the GOP is doing nationwide to counteract Pride Month and eviscerate LGBTQ rights, including marriage equality.