Speaking candidly, we don’t much care for Philadelphia. We tolerate some things: Rocky Balboa, for instance. Most of us take grade-school road trips there and tour Independence Hall, and see the Liberty Bell, and those moments stay with us. And, honestly, who doesn’t like a good cheesesteak?
Speaking candidly, Philly doesn’t much care for New York, either. They tolerate some things. Broadway, for instance. Just about everyone who comes here who’s not from here seeks out the Empire State building or the Statue of Liberty. And even the most Philly of Philly folks generally concede: our pizza is the best pizza.
Everything else, that’s fair game.
Certainly sports.
But you know, it’s funny: we can go pretty deep into the weeds talking about the New York-Boston sports rivalry, because there are dozens of examples in all four of the major sports of high-level collisions and confrontations when playoff money was on the table.
Philly-New York?
Put is this way: unless you want to go back to the start of the last century, when the Giants and the Athletics were the Athens and Sparta of baseball, when they were ruled with iron fists by John McGraw and Connie Mack … well, baseball has been kind of barren (and those two teams don’t even play in those cities any more, and haven’t since the mid-’50s).
The Yankees and Phillies have played twice in the World Series and the Yankees won twice, in both 1950 and 2009. But Yankees fans and Phillies fans have spent more than a century engaged in benign indifference toward each other. The Phillies and old Brooklyn Dodgers had emotional late-season tangles in both 1950 and ’51 — the Phillies outlasting the Bums in ’50, then beating them on the last day of the season in ’51 to force the Bobby Thomson playoff series.
And while things between the Phillies and Mets often grew testy from 2005-2009, they’ve rarely since 1962 been good at the same time. They’ve never met in a playoff series. In both 2007 and ’08 the Phillies made up late ground on the Mets but that never happened while they were playing each other.
The Rangers and Flyers met in one of the bloodiest series in NHL history, in the semifinals of the 1974 NHL Stanley Cup playoffs. That was the dying-gasp year for the Gilbert/Ratelle/Hadfield/Giacomin Blueshirts, and the coming-of-age year for the Broad Street Bullies. There was also a memorable seven-game battle 10 years ago, the Rangers knocking out the Flyers in Game 7 in their first step on the way to the Cup Finals.
In truth, both the Devils (memorably Game 7 of the ECF in 2000 when Scott Stevens nearly murdered Eric Lindros) and Islanders (who actually beat the Flyers to win their first Cup) have legit claims to have the deeper rivalry with the Flyers than the Rangers do.
The Eagles and Giants have met in the playoffs five times, each since 1981, and the Eagles have won three times, most recently at the end of the 2022 season when they thrashed the Giants 38-7 on the way to the Super Bowl. They’ve never met in an NFC Championship game; until they do the enmity between them is symbolized by two regular-season moments: Chuck Bednarik nearly beheading Frank Gifford in 1960, and DeSean Jackson’s punt return in 2009.
Which brings us to the Sixers and the Knicks, meeting for only the fifth time since the Syracuse Nats became the 76ers in 1963. The first three times the Knicks fell to the three most powerful assemblages of the Sixers: losing in six to the ’66-’67 Sixers (who went 68-13); getting swept by the ’78 Sixers (55-27, a year after taking the Blazers to Game 7) and getting the 1983 Sixers (65-17), the first leg of their “Fo, fo, fo” quest.
The Knicks’ lone win? The three-game sweep in 1989 when at the end of Game 3 a group including Mark Jackson, Sidney Green, Trent Tucker and Charles Oakley dragged a push broom around the old Spectrum, infuriating Philly fans (and, quite possibly, inspiring the anti-Knicks jihad that Knicks fans believe Charles Barkley has been on for decades).
And now this: seven games for a berth in the second round. Let’s go. Let’s GO.
