By James Jackson
Publication Date: 2026-05-26 02:32:00
Remember 1999? The New York Knicks’ first NBA Finals berth since the turn of the millennium prompts the question.
The last time the Knicks represented the Eastern Conference for the NBA championship, Google was literally a few months old. The 11-installment “Fast & Furious” movie franchise was two years away from its first release. Tennis legend Serena Williams basked in the glow of winning her first Grand Slam, the U.S. Open. Eminem dropped his first major-label album, as “The Slim Shady LP” went multiplatinum. The Harry Potter books were up into the third of the series, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” The first iPhone wasn’t to be released until 2007.
For New Yorkers, the last Checker cab sold at the end of the year for six figures. And for New York basketball fans, some guy named Michael Jordan, whom many loved to hate every trip in and outside of Madison Square Garden, was in the middle of his second NBA retirement — only to come back two years…
