How Much Would it Cost to Stream the Knicks at Every Bar in NYC?
What a Knicks takeover of Manhattan nightlife could cost a Mayor's office looking for ways to safely host fans.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we discuss the intersection of sports and money—with humor and opinion. Today we’re talking about a radical proposal for New York. 🗽
“Exceptions are made if you’re the greatest.” That’s a quote from an article in 1999 that I saw this past Monday, before the Knicks completed their sweep in the Eastern Conference Finals. That quote on a Knicks t-shirt would sell out. It was from the VP of public relations for the Knicks, the one who got to decide who sat in the most coveted seats in New York, and he was speaking about Muhammad Ali wanting to come to Game 4 at MSG. At the time, New York’s finest only had to fork over like $2,500 to sit on the hardwood during the Finals; now those seats are reselling for over $100,000.
The full snippet from the article is here:
Get-in prices at MSG are at an all-time high so I texted my friend—it’s his dad quoted in the article—to ask if his father could still get us tickets. Then the Knicks won and made it to the the Finals for the first time in 27 years. The timeline was about to erupt with Knicks content.
There’s immediately a flood of man-on-the-street Knicks fan videos: Sidetalk, videos from the watch parties outside the arena, and most recently the watch party at Radio City. (Side note, I need to hear more from Alex Monaco after that electric clip blessed my timeline). After the outdoor watch party crowd around MSG exceeded 6,000 people and caused a safety issue, NYPD said they would no longer support them but would look for alternative places to host fans. They added more barricades around the Garden to try and break up the crowds after Game 4, but it didn’t slow the fans too much.
NYPD arrested 6 people climbing on light posts, subway entrances and seemingly anything taller than Jalen Brunson. Last year, another friend of mine was among the Knicks faithful who took to elevated surfaces to celebrate the Knicks returning to the Eastern Conference Finals. He sent a great video standing above the crowd screaming GO NEW YORK GO NEW YORK GO at the top of his lungs. A lot of non-Knicks fans may think these antics are obnoxious, unnecessary and straight up annoying. They’re right, but they also just don’t get it.
I was sent another 1999 Knicks flashback on Memorial Day before Game 4 from the guy who was doing his best Spider-Man impression last year. It was of his dad, on the news reporting about the Knicks heading to the Finals in 1999. I tried to get the full clip but it may be lost to the archives. The point is that a lot of us Knicks fans on social media now are finally seeing what it’s like for the Knicks to be good. It’s the one unifying New York sports team, making it to the biggest stage at the world’s greatest arena. It’s a special excitement that requires special circumstances. After all, “Exceptions are made if you’re the greatest.”
The city needs to find ways to safely host fans looking to celebrate together, and the sports bars are overflowing. There are plenty of bars in New York that don’t have TV’s, so this week I endeavored to see how much it would cost to get Knicks finals games on everywhere. Since Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been outspoken in his support and fandom, maybe he’d be willing to foot the bill?
I’m not proposing that we get an 80-inch flat screen on a rolling stand in the middle of Carbone (unless…?). I don’t think the patrons who booked that 8 o’clock Wednesday night reservation six months ago want to hear Deuce chants while trying to enjoy their spicy rigatoni, but it would be a lot cooler if they did.
This is a breakdown of how much it would cost to stream the Knicks NBA Finals games at every bar or restaurant in Manhattan with an active on-premise beer, wine or liquor license. Disclaimer: The numbers used here are just estimates based on data from public NYS databases.
Using the NYS Liquor Authority Mapping Project (LAMP) online database, I was able to pull together a dataset of:
5,717 bars and restaurants
Located on Manhattan island
With ACTIVE on-premises beer, wine or liquor licenses
This sparked a great water-cooler order-of-magnitude conversation in the Sportico office, with a wide array of guesses about how many such venues exist in the city. A lot of people guessed 10,000+. The actual number, or as close as I could get from LAMP, is 5,717 places with active licenses (487 pending) that classify themselves as bars, restaurants, taverns/pubs or lounges/clubs. This is roughly how they plot onto a map of Manhattan1:
To continue the rough calculation, we’ll use an educated guess on what percentage of these locations are your typical sports bar, with multiple TVs and active streaming licenses.
Let’s say ⅓ of those dots on the maps could qualify as “sports bars.” The loose rubric for qualification here is just assuming that these places 1) have televisions and 2) have the ability and permission to stream sporting events through DirectTV For Business or other commercial cable packages. That leaves us with the remaining ⅔ as non-sports bars: cocktail bars, wine bars, lounges, restaurants, taquerias, dive bars and everything else.
We could imagine all of these places would have to start from scratch in terms of sports streaming, but there are likely a large number of locations that are somewhere in between meeting the requirements to stream the games. The Mayor’s office could buy them TVs.
Both of the No TV Options are the types of places that sparked this entire concept, so we’re going to assume every bar needs the full set up costing between $1,300 and $1,400. Every sports bar on Monday night was spilling out onto the street. All of the trendy cocktail bars, dive bars and wine bars were mostly empty though, save for a few regulars or anti-sports fans. It’s true it was a holiday weekend where most of New York City is out east or down the shore grilling hot dogs to kick off summer. It’s also worth mentioning that these types of places aren’t necessarily looking to fill their space with a crowd of Knicks fans packed wall to wall like sardines (which is what every sports bar is like starting an hour before tip-off). I am willing to bet, however, that all of these places do like money. With the cost of rent seemingly shutting down a bar or restaurant on every block on a monthly basis, I think owners might be interested in cashing in on the Knicks success. I mean, the last time the Knicks were in The Finals, [insert an early 2000’s thing that is no longer around here]2.
To try and sweeten up the “we wouldn’t want sports fans in here” crowd, I asked around to a few different sports bars across several neighborhoods in Manhattan to see what kind of money they’re making on game nights. All of which declined to comment, save for one, which told me just that they were “delighted the Knicks are in the Finals.” One bartender in the Upper West Side, a neighborhood not known for its rowdy night life, gave me a peek at the books.
“I’d do about $2,500 in sales on Friday night. When the Knicks are playing that goes up to around $3,500 -$4,000. Two bartenders, two servers here all producing similar numbers.”
Fortunately this was exactly what I was looking for, a nice confirmation bias. It doesn’t take a mathematician to crunch the numbers here. One solid night of ‘tending for Knicks fans could cover the set-up costs in this scenario.
All in, if the 3,773 non-sports bar establishments all needed brand new set-ups it would run up a tab of just over $5 million.
I don’t think we need $5 million to pull this off, however. I just wanted to see how much it would cost. But a $500,000 discretionary fund that bars and restaurants could apply for up to $1,500 to set up watching the Knicks during the NBA Finals might be interesting to explore. With that fund, 10% of those TV-less bars could now host watch parties. If those places have a capacity of 75, that could be 25,000+ Knicks fans with somewhere to be other than in between 31st and 33rd street. That’s 4x as many people that sparked the NYPD watch party crackdown. It could save the overtime hours, paperwork and maybe help with the general chaos near the Garden.
Some of the cocktail bars that opt in might be worried about ruining the vibe they’ve curated, but they would definitely sell a few more $20 drinks and build some of that Knicks community that everyone loves. They could agree to donate some of the extra revenue to a charity of Mayor Mamdani’s choice as part of the application to get money from this fund.
It’s really a ‘if we build it, they will come’ situation for fans. The Radio City watch party during the Finals will be packed and if there’s another at Summer Stage I have no doubt the atmosphere will be similar. But how cool would it be if every bar in New York had the game on??
We can call it the “Knicks Everywhere” initiative and ask Spike Lee to help us with the commercial. Maybe James Dolan will put up $250K to split it with the city. We can make merch for all the bars that opt in to attract fans, maybe via Fanatics. If there’s some budget lying around to make this happen, there’s no shortage of Knicks fans who are loyal with their support that might love this plan and whoever executed it. Sometimes, exceptions have to be made if you’re the greatest.
Does Central Park need more bars?? Embrace debate.
For starters, the internet was still dial-up, Clinton was president, Britney Spears was sane and Bill Belichick’s girlfriend wasn’t born yet.