The 1970 and 1973 Knicks Did Not Get Parades. An Ex-Knick Is Partly to Blame.

Though this is the Knicks’ third N.B.A. championship, Thursday’s ticker-tape parade is the first in the team’s 80-year history. The 1970 and 1973 Knicks were not honored with parades, and a former Knick named John Shove “Bud” Palmer had a lot to do with that. How can that be? Here’s how: Palmer was an original member of the Knicks and led the team in scoring their first year, 1946-47. He is credited with being one of several players who pioneered the jump shot. But in 1966, after stints as an advice columnist, a sportscaster and a children’s show host, he had a new job as commissioner of the city’s Department of Public Events under Mayor John Lindsay. By Lindsay’s day, ticker-tape parades had become routine and rather rote. In the decade before he took office, there were 82 of them, for everyone from the president of Tunisia to the Shah of Iran to the Little League World Series champions from Staten Island. Palmer, the mayor’s official greeter, had a different vision. He told Lindsay he wanted to change how the Public Events Department received and honored dignitaries and celebrities. Such duties, he wrote in a letter to Lindsay, “have been singularly burdened with a monotonous similarity and lack of imagination.”