It was June 1999. Jennifer Lopez sat at No. 1 on the Billboard chart with her debut single. StarWars: EpisodeI had been in theaters for a month and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me was topping the box office.
The first season of TheSopranos had wrapped that spring and a New Jersey mobster with panic attacks was suddenly the most talked-about character on television.
Jalen Brunson was 3 years old and Madison Square Garden was buzzing. The New York Knicks were in the NBA Finals.
The San Antonio Spurs won the series in 1999; the Knicks haven’t been back until now.
Twenty-seven years later, the same two teams return to the NBA Finals in a completely different world.
Here are 10 things that did not exist the last time the Knicks made the NBA Finals:
The iPhone
Apple did not release the first iPhone until June 2007. In 1999, the cool phone was the Motorola StarTAC, the slim flip phone that fit in your pocket. Down on Wall Street, the shiny new toy was the BlackBerry, which had just launched that January as a two-way pager.
Neither had a camera. So nobody was snapping selfies at the Garden back in 1999.
Victor Wembanyama
The Spurs superstar was not born yet and the NBA had no idea what was coming. The tallest player in the league that June was 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, a Romanian center whose career was ending due to back problems and whose other claim to fame was a cameo in an Eminem video. The idea of a 7-foot-4 player who handles the ball, shoots 3s, blocks shots and switches onto guards was science fiction.
Social Media
No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, no TikTok. If you wanted to scream about a Patrick Ewing dunk or a blown call, you had to yell at whoever was in the room and wait until you got to work or school the next morning to get everybody’s take.
Streaming
Netflix was a website that mailed you DVDs in little red envelopes. YouTube didn’t exist. Neither did Spotify. The 1999 Finals played on NBC, and if you missed it, you missed it. Maybe you caught the highlights on SportsCenter at 11.
Las Vegas Golden Knights, Aces and Raiders
Las Vegas was known in sports for boxing and betting in 1999, not being a sports town. The Vegas Golden Knights, the city's first major professional franchise, is in its third Stanley Cup Final, so it's hard to remember that they didn't exist before 2017. The Raiders left Oakland in 2020 and headed to Vegas. The Aces moved from San Antonio in 2018 and won the city's first major league title in 2022.
DVR
If you weren’t home for tipoff in 1999, you set the VCR and prayed the tape didn’t run out before the fourth quarter. TiVo had launched that March, but almost nobody had it.
Alexa
Nobody was asking a tube on the kitchen counter to play the Knicks pregame show. Amazon’s Echo didn’t arrive until November 2014. In 1999, if you wanted to listen to Mike Breen call the game on WFAN, you turned up the boombox or the kitchen-counter clock radio.
Modern video games
Gaming in 1999 meant you and your buddies on a couch passing the PlayStation controller back and forth. There was no Twitch, no online multiplayer on consoles, no streaming, no voice chat. Players in NBA Live 99 looked like floating heads on geometric bodies and NBA 2K didn’t launch until that November.
DoorDash and UberEats
Hosting a watch party for the Knicks games in 1999 meant actually having to call and talk to a person at the local pizza place to place an order. You had to scrape up the cash to pay and tip the delivery guys, too. DoorDash launched in 2013 and UberEats the year after. The closest thing you had to a delivery app in 1999 was a stack of delivery menus in your kitchen draw.
Legal sports betting
In 1999, if you wanted action on Game 1, you either had to drive to Atlantic City, fly to Las Vegas or know a guy. The Supreme Court didn’t strike down the federal sports betting ban until May 2018. There were no apps. No same-game parlays. No prop bets on Allan Houston’s first quarter rebound total.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Knicks vs. Spurs NBA Finals 1999 vs. 2026: What has changed
