NY Knicks Origin

My journey for sports history knowledge continues as today I track down the origin s and meaning of the New York Knicks NBA basketball franchise.

Pondering minds want to know and this writer has one that often wanders into questions of the sort. In my quest to find out more on the history of sports, the question of the New York Knicks comes about. "Knick" is not a common word used in our Amercian version of the English language so I guess the first answer I need is...

What in the World is a Knick?

I dug into research mode on this one. Knick is an abbreviated nickname (no pun intended) for the word Knickerbockers, which is in fact the official formal name of the New York City NBA franchise. A knickerbocker is a style of pants that the original settlers of NYC, the Dutch wore when they founded the town in 1625 as New Amsterdam. It was commom for these Dutch men to wear a style of pants known as knickerbockers and was a very distinguishing trait for the group. We know these trousers too but we affectionatley call them "knickers" in the modern day.

According to the website CultureTrip.com:

"In 1809, famed author Washington Irving solidified the ties between the city, which was renamed New York City in 1664 by the English, and Knickerbockers by publishing the satirical A History of New York—later known as A Knickerbocker’s History of New York—under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker. Irving’s text introduced the word to represent any New York City resident who could trace his/her ties to the original Dutch settlers."

The term Knickerbocker after this famous reference was solidified as another name for anything New York City. In fact a character was created that was a very popular symbol in the Big Apple of a dude called Father Knickerbocker, who had the triangle hat, the buckles on his shoes (what no wooden loafers?) and a big old powdered wig. See the illlustration below:

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons from the cover of a 1905 Puck Magazine, titled: The municipal big stick  drawn by J.S. Pughe

Okay I get the reference, Knickerbocker is New York. So how does it translate to the name of the NBA franchise? The article on CultureTrip.com fills us in on this too.

"New York’s basketball franchise was awarded to owner Ned Irish in 1946 as a charter member of the 11-team Basketball Association of America (BAA), which would later merge with the National Basketball League (NBL) to form the NBA three years later."

Mr. Irish put together a group to name the team and they threw a buch of ideas into a hat. The most poular ones had refernce to the Knickerbocker pseudoname of the City.

Along came a famous local cartoonist of the New York World Telegram newspaper, Williard Mullin who took Father Knickerbocker and drew him bouncing a basketball. The team latched onto the idea and sported it as their logo all the way through 1964. A new logo of the "Classic Roundball" was adopted after another artist Bud Freeman from J.C. Bull Advertising pitched the idea to the Knicks brass in the mid-1960s.

The article also tells us that the traditional colors of orange, blue and white are also paying homae to the early Dutch settlers of NYC. These are the colors found on the flag of the Dutch Republic which also goes by the name of the Prince's Flag in respect to Prince William of Orange.

I thank the Culture Trip website for the great article as it really filled the bill for setting me straight on the origins of the New York Knicks!

Of course we also could not have done the above stat research without the assistance of Basketball-Reference.com and Stathead.com resources.

The banner photo is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and is a view of a "Goal!"  illustrated by Frank A. Nankivell on a 1908 Puck Magazine cover.