New York's professional basketball team, known popularly as the Knicks, has been a vital part of the city's sports land scape since 1946. Winners of two NBA titles, the Knicks are one of basketball's best-known and most prestigious franchises.

An original member of the Basketball Association of America—forerunner of the NBA—the club played its first game in Canada against the Toronto Huskies on November 1, 1946. The first home game took place ten days later at Manhattan's Madison Square Garden. In those early years the Knicks fielded a team of mostly white Jewish and Catholic players, drawn from the city's public university system. That began to change in 1950 with the signing of Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, one of the first black players in the NBA. The team enjoyed only mixed success through its first two decades, consistently making the playoffs but failing to capture...