Down 29
My mayor’s Muslim, my bagel’s Jewish, my Christians’ Dior
TLDR: New York spent the week down big in every game and won the title anyway. The comeback, not the deficit, is the story.
Down 29.
That was the Knicks midway through Game 4, staring at the largest deficit any team has ever erased in Finals history.
Then we erased it. And kept doing it. The Knicks climbed out of a double-digit hole in all five games of the series and won four of them. Saturday night, Jalen Brunson scored 45 and the Knicks took Game 5, 94 to 90.
It was magical to be in the middle of it all. A title we waited 53 years for. Mobs of people gathered in the streets, watching the game projected on the sides of buildings, living and dying on every play and call. And with the final buzzer, infinite droves of fans marched chanting and celebrating in what felt like a pilgrimage toward Madison Square Garden.
On Thursday, the team rides up the Canyon of Heroes, a stretch of lower Broadway where New York has showered its heroes in ticker tape for a century, from returning astronauts to championship teams. This will be the Knicks’ first.
Zoom out and the whole week looks like that game. SpaceX rang the bell on Friday in the largest IPO ever printed, and Elon Musk became the first person on Earth worth a trillion dollars. LinkedIn turned into a wall of confetti as if lock-ups were over and we were all showered in victory. Our entire feeds all seemed to be in a good mood at the same time, which almost never happens. Instagram too.
My Mayor’s Muslim, my bagel’s Jewish, my Christian’s Dior, Knicks in four!
A silly little rhyme went viral, but it might also be the most New York sentence imaginable.
This is the same city that took COVID on the chin, then the protests, then a wave of antisemitism, then years of people insisting the place was finished. This week, once again, it put all of that down and willed its way back like it always does, like the comebacks of every game in the series.
I can’t help but be reminded that this is also, more or less, my job. Early-stage investing is the professional practice of believing the future beats the present. We write checks into companies that do not work yet, run by founders nobody has heard of, against a scoreboard that says it cannot be done. The cynics have the easier job. They are usually right in the moment and wrong over the decade.
The world didn’t fix itself Saturday night, but you don’t come back from a 29-point deficit simply by studying the scoreboard. You come back by refusing to believe the halftime score is the final one. New York just reminded a few million people in the streets, and countless more watching at home, that comebacks are real and the deficit doesn’t have to be the ending.
Whatever you are down by this Monday, that is the lesson.
The deficits and down seasons aren’t the story.
It’s the resilience. It’s the comeback. It’s the victory over the long-term.
LGK.
See you Monday.