New York vs. Philadelphia: When all your sports teams hate each other . . . except in basketball
The curious case of two ornery east coast metropolises who hate oh so many things about one another . . . except the other’s NBA team
“We’ve waited 35 years for the Knicks and Sixers to play in the playoffs again,” Mike Breen said in welcoming viewers to Game 1 of the first postseason meeting between the teams since 1989. One game in, the storylines are already hitting: Is Goliath still Goliath if he’s only 60% Goliath? How good’s David with that slingshot with two or three Philistines always hanging and banging on him? These are just two of the questions Joel Embiid, Jalen Brunson and friends will answer the next two weeks. Breen was lying, though. In all of New York/Philadelphia sports, Knicks/Sixers is a rivalry like no other. That’s because there is none.
Philly teams don’t angry up New Yorkers’ blood the way Boston teams do, but there’s no shortage of bad blood. If the NFL were Game of Thrones, the Dallas Cowboys would be the white walkers that everyone else puts aside their grudges to join forces against, but the Giants and Eagles would be the Starks and the Lannisters, ancient rivals with no use and infinite hate for each other. In 1990 the Eagles knocked off the 10-0 Giants a week before they were to face the 10-0 49ers on Monday Night Football. Graceful and deadly Oberyn Martell may be, but even he’s got nothing on prime Randall Cunningham.
(And yeah, this clip came against Buffalo, which is not New York City, but I’m stretching the boundaries just because anything I can do to raise awareness of Cunningham is a mitzvah.)
Despite playing in the same division for nearly the entirety of the Mets’ existence, the Phillies and Amazins were never really good at the same time. After the Seaver/Koosman Mets tailed off post-’73, the Carlton/Schmidt Phils were NL East kings. By the mid-’80s the Mets were the powerhouse and the Phillies a ghost. The only time I ever remember Philadelphia earning my childhood ire was late in 1986, when the Mets’ magic number to clinch their first postseason in 13 years was one over the second-place Phils entering a three-game series at Veterans Stadium. Despite being hopelessly out of the race, the Phillies swept the series, though even that cloud offered the silver lining of the Mets clinching at home, giving us the last instance of the fans of that team rightly and materially sharing in the celebration.
Rangers vs. Flyers is one of the Metropolitan area’s most molten matchups, meeting in the playoff cauldron 11 times. These teams hate each other so much, their most famous blow-up was a regular-season game – the penultimate of the 1978 season, when a full-out brawl between them – yes, including the goalies – resulted in 88 penalty minutes, five game misconducts and Ranger general manager John Ferguson fighting fans in the stands behind New York’s bench.
Compared to these histories, the Knicks and 76ers don’t really have one. Behind Joe Fulks, the Philadelphia Warriors knocked off the Knickerbockers in 1947’s penultimate playoff round before winning the first-ever NBA* title over the Chicago Stags. The asterisk is ‘cuz at that time the teams played in the Basketball Association of America, which merged a few years later with the National Basketball League to form the NBA. In the first official NBA season, 1949-50, the Knicks again lost in the playoffs’ penultimate round, this time to the Syracuse Nationals, who became the Philadelphia 76ers when the Warriors left for the Bay Area.