Every winter, the pulse of the city can be unearthed through the familiar quirks of the high school hoops circuit. The soundtrack is defined by sneakers squeaking against the hardwood, by the buzz emanating from an overstuffed gym in any of the five boroughs on any given night, by the same coaches at the same schools screaming themselves hoarse at the same referees.
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Just not this year. Not in New York. The city’s game, the unofficial backdrop for all the myths that circulate throughout the sport, was largely sidelined due to a once-in-a-century pandemic. That this happened amid arguably the best concurrent stretch that the area’s two NBA teams have ever had is an irony not lost on anyone.
“Even though we’re in COVID and there’s been less basketball from that perspective, there’s just also more ways to be excited about it,” says John Hartofilis, a junior at Baruch College who doubles as an assistant coach at Xavier High School. “The city took a hit by not having a high school season. That’s a big part of it. Guys like R.J. Davis and Cole Anthony are usually the buzz of the city for a few months, but now it’s kind of been replaced by a good Knicks team, and I think that’s refreshing for a lot of people.”
The Knicks are but one part of the equation. Especially within this bizarre calendar in this bizarre year — a year in which one of the league’s most dysfunctional franchises somehow hosted a playoff game on opening weekend and managed to not even be the best basketball team in its own city, or even be the craziest basketball story in Manhattan.
New York is not the birthplace of the sport; it just often seems that way. And never before has the city’s basketball soul kicked into overdrive quite as it has right now.
When it comes to the business of illustrating current events, there is The New Yorker, and there is everyone else. The magazine’s colorful covers have a way of synthesizing exactly what is happening in the world while leaving just enough to the reader’s imagination. Its last three covers have, understandably, focused on different aspects of the pandemic. Its cover three weeks ago, however, featured a painting of Kevin Durant, James Harden, Kyrie Irving, RJ Barrett and Julius Randle.
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“Hoop Dreams in New York” was the work of San Francisco-based artist Mark Ulriksen. The magazine’s editors had told him they were seeking a piece that reflected the emergence of the Nets and Knicks. Ulriksen carefully crafted a design that he feels speaks to the city’s current basketball environment. The Nets, the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference, have three players, while the fourth-seeded Knicks have two. Brooklyn’s guys are leading the charge, with the two players from the resurgent Knicks following. The background image of the Manhattan skyline shows the group is indeed heading toward Brooklyn, which Vegas has deemed the favorite to bring home the title in July.
“My rationale was, it’s basketball, there are five guys, and of course there are the three super-duper stars of the Nets, and they should be the ones that stand out the most because in a way, they’re more household names and more recognizable than Knicks players,” Ulriksen says.
And yet …
“I’m actually gonna be pulling for the Knicks myself as opposed to the Nets,” he says, “because I remember 1970 with Willis (Reed) and Clyde (Frazier).”
To most consummate New Yorkers, there’s nothing remotely controversial about that statement. But Harden decided to have some fun upon the magazine’s release, tweeting a picture that cropped out Barrett and Randle. To Ulriksen, this reinforced a favorite old soccer line of his: Sports are the most important of the unimportant things in life.
“It’s been bigger than usual because sports fans are loyal,” he says of the reaction to his work. “Sports fans care. They’re passionate, and you have a team you root for. If I do a cover with a dog, and it has a lab on it, I’m not gonna hear from poodle owners getting pissed. But then I do a cover like this, and Nets fans are dissing Knicks fans and vice versa.”
— James Harden (@JHarden13) May 4, 2021
Ulriksen has a newsletter that takes readers behind the scenes of his work. On May 3, he detailed the process of this cover. Among his challenges was identifying which sneakers each player wears. Irving, he learned, wears a different pair every game, so Ulriksen painted them red since he thought that was a color that would complement the rest of the cover.
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“The New Yorker is famous for their fastidious fact-checking,” he wrote in his newsletter, “so I always try to get the visual facts right.”
That he did, even if the voices on the ground have their own way of viewing matters.
At Baruch, Hartofilis serves as the college’s brand ambassador for The Boardroom, Durant’s multimedia platform. The 20-year-old Astoria native recently amassed the most newsletter signups of any ambassador. His reward was a signed Durant Nets jersey.
Six years ago, while his family was on vacation in Arizona, Hartofilis signed up for the James Harden Basketball ProCamp. Hartofilis embraced his role as the designated hustle kid, and the coaches rewarded him by assigning him to guard Harden during a drill. When the two-day clinic was over, he was presented with the camp’s Long Distance Award, having traveled 2,500 miles from Queens.
And yet…
Despite those connections to two of the Nets’ headliners, nothing can undo what Hartofilis experienced during Thanksgiving weekend in 2015.
That Sunday night, his father took him to his first Knicks game. The Knicks lost to the Rockets in overtime, but that wasn’t what stuck with him. After the court cleared, the lights stayed on. Hartofilis walked down to the first row of his section at center court and just sat there, staring out at the hardwood. Forget that the home team was amid its 12th losing season in the 15-year-old’s lifetime; he was mesmerized. He had always heard about the mystique of the Garden, the Mecca, and for reasons that are hard to explain, it all started to make sense to him.
“Seeing it with my own eyes, I was taken away,” he says. “Like, wow, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. This is what I want to be around. It was one of the things that made me fall in love with basketball.”
This is what the Nets are up against, even if they end up doing what so few teams around these parts have done: actually deliver on championship expectations. Hartofilis says he’s been to 10 Knicks games this year and just one Nets game. Nationally, Brooklyn’s following has ballooned, with a fanbase that has increased 98 percent year over year, according to internal research conducted by YouGov. Some would deem this an identity crisis for the city.
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But locally for the Nets?
“It’s definitely been tough for them,” Hartofilis says.
On opening night, Tricia Trozzi took in the regular rhythms of a live arena and acquainted herself with her new surroundings. Just 1,130 fans were admitted to the New York Liberty’s first game at Barclays Center, but Trozzi recognized a sizable number of those faces behind their masks as she walked the Brooklyn concourse for the first time.
Trozzi has been a Liberty season-ticket holder since 2007, through a handful of promising years and many more lean ones. As the 2019 season cratered, the talk about landing the new face of women’s basketball made the closing stretch worthwhile. The Liberty drafted Sabrina Ionescu first overall in 2020, but she suffered a season-ending ankle injury three games into the WNBA bubble. New York went 2-20, another deflating season for the weathered fan base.
But on May 14, some 392 days after she was drafted, Ionescu delivered on all the hype in her home debut, sinking a game-winning 3-pointer. Four days later, n her next home game, she posted the first triple-double in team history.
“If it was a movie and you wrote that, no one would believe you,” Trozzi says. “And then to see history in the second game, a triple-double? Same thing. Unbelievable. Just please keep it going.”
Trozzi is a basketball fan’s basketball fan, with a closet full of jerseys and a memory bank that rivals anyone. She hasn’t missed a home game since falling in love with the franchise 14 years ago, despite all of its relocations. The Liberty have moved from Madison Square Garden to Newark’s Prudential Center and back, then to Westchester County in 2018, then to Brooklyn in 2020 (a move that was delayed because of the pandemic).
Her new commute is rough even by Tri-State standards. Trozzi, a West Caldwell, N.J., native, now has to drive to a train station, take NJ Transit to Penn Station, then switch to the No. 2 or No. 3 subway line to take her to Barclays. When the game ends, she does it in reverse. Each way can take up to two and a half hours, “which is actually longer than the game itself,” she quips.
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And yet …
The story of Tricia Trozzi, the Liberty fan, is not all that different from the story of John Hartofilis, the Knicks fan. Or of Mark Ulriksen, the basketball fan, for that matter. This sport will make folks go the extra mile to see their favorite team — literally, in Trozzi’s case — or to capture the spirit of the city. That goes for the NBA, the WNBA, college ball or even high schools.
Pick a player at any level. Read up a little bit on him or her. At some point, sure as you’re born, you’ll find the well-worn anecdote about how that player would wake up early every morning and get a personalized key to the school gym, all in the name of getting in a few extra jumpers before dawn.
The pandemic, in this case, was one more hurdle for ballplayers and wannabe ballplayers alike. In New York, that was taken to the extreme. For several months, city schools could only work out under heavy restrictions. There was no passing, because there was a ball for every player. There were no rebounds, because players had to grab their own misses. Masks were worn throughout. Everyone was spaced out. Nobody had ever done so many stationary dribbling drills in their lives. By the time the city announced that sports could resume in April, it was borderline impossible for high schools to fill all of their teams, and so basketball, which was already out of season in the traditional timeline, became a casualty.
This led to some creativity. Xavier, a Jesuit institution in lower Manhattan, opted to play in the LES Skills and Drills tournament at Nathan Straus Playground on the Lower East Side. Games are outdoors, yes, and there have already been doubleheaders due to rainouts. But playoffs start the first weekend of June, and something is better than nothing, especially when it comes to the city game, which has taken on a new meaning this year. (Again, quite literally.)
Up in White Plains, meanwhile, 22 of the area’s Catholic schools assembled their own six-week informal boys’ season outside the city limits at Stepinac High. Championship play is Thursday, the day after the Knicks host the Hawks in Game 2 at the Garden; which is the day after the Nets beat the Celtics in Game 2 at Barclays; which was the day after the Liberty improved to 5-1 by beating the Wings at Barclays in a game that was moved up a day because of the Nets’ playoff conflict; which was the day after the Knicks lost to the Hawks in their playoff opener at the Garden; which was the day after the Nets beat the Celtics in Game 1 … and, well, you get the point.
There is basketball — honest, meaningful basketball — every single day in New York right now. On Saturday morning, Hartofilis coached a squad made up of Xavier underclassmen to an eight-point loss. On Sunday, he ventured less than three miles north to 33rd and 7th, took his seat in section 102 and joined more than 15,000 fans just like him in the religious awakening that was playoff basketball at the world’s most famous arena for the first time in eight years.
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A villain was born in Trae Young, whose game-winning shot silenced these success-starved fans, but the frustration was refreshing.
“The highest of highs,” Hartofilis said of the atmosphere, “and the one sole lowest of lows.
“But the highs were insane.”
Basketball, at last, was the most important of unimportant things in the city.
Related Reading
Kavitha A. Davidson: New Yorkers and the healing power of Madison Square Garden
Chantel Jennings: New-look Liberty are building around Ionescu
(Top photo of Madison Square Garden: Seth Wenig / USA Today)
