James Dolan is over the moon that his Knicks are the NBA champions.
He just wants Knicks fans to know he feels bad it took this long to get back to the top of the basketball mountain.
The team owner took center stage at Frost Bank Center with the Larry O’Brien Trophy after the Knicks won 94-90 in Game 5 over the Spurs on Saturday to clinch their first NBA Finals win since 1973.
Dolan, while talking with ESPN host Ernie Johnson, made clear that he felt bad the Knicks hadn’t won in over five decades.
“Hey, New York, I’m sorry it took so long, but here we are, and hopefully it won’t take that long again,” Dolan said. “Yeah!”
Earlier in the week on WFAN, Dolan was confident the Knicks, who had lost Game 3 on home court in their first Finals home game in 27 years, would not only win Game 4 but take the whole series
“I expect to win tonight, being as [when] I make predictions here they come true,” he said, referring to the WFAN studio. “We’ll win tonight and we’ll win the Finals.”
With a miracle 29-point comeback in Game 4 and another rally in Game 5, the Knicks did indeed fulfill each part of his prediction.
Dolan then came in during Josh Hart’s postgame press conference to tell New Yorkers to be safe in their celebrations and confirmed that the championship parade will be held Thursday,
Dolan took over the Knicks in 1999, the year they last made the finals before this epic run. They fell into a few doldrums in the 2000s and the late 2010s, but with the hiring of Leon Rose as team president in 2020 and the infusion of Jalen Brunson in 2022, the Knicks turned things around with playoff appearances in 2021, ’23, ’24 and ’25.
Now, they have their third-ever title that their fans have long dreamed about.