By all accounts, the city of New York is still abuzz from its first NBA Championship in five decades. I’m not a local, but friends and basketball media alike recount stories of New Yorkers in Knicks gear fist-bumping on sidewalks as late as August, and “Knicks in five” has become a kind of shorthand between fans in this summer of celebration.
The street parties and champagne may have dried up, but you can bet that “Ring Night” at MSG will be a hot ticket come October, when the 2026-27 NBA season kicks off, and the Knicks’ title defense starts.
Truly, these are salad days for Knicks fans. A world removed (save for their mentions in a moving speech by the mayor) from the last, almost-great team that captured the city’s collective heart. That 1999 squad – forever known for Houston’s 0.8-second shot, LJ’s 4-point play, and Ewing’s Achilles tear – was about as beloved as a runner-up can be. And in a fascinating twist, it was memorialized by a commemorative Movado, given to players and team personnel, that time almost forgot.
The ’90s Knicks Were Out in Five
Throughout the 1990s, the New York Knicks were about as good, and consistently good, as a non-championship team can be. Led by one of the sport’s all-time greats in Patrick Ewing, the decade saw the Knicks lose to the eventual NBA champion five times, including coming up short in two finals runs against the ’94 Houston Rockets and the ’99 San Antonio Spurs.
The incredible, almost-there run was largely presided over by Knicks executive Dave Checketts. Hired on as the team president in 1991 and elevated to run the totality of the Madison Square Garden organization in 1994, Checketts was a guiding force behind the team for a decade.
In 1994, after a brutally contested NBA Finals against the Houston Rockets came up short, Checketts suggested that the team be honored for its incredible effort. But then coach Pat Riley – he of the five-time champion of the Los Angeles Lakers – wasn’t on board.
Riley wasn’t having it, Checketts told me in a recent interview, “No celebration, no party, no rings, no hats. Unless you won the title, your season was a failure.”
Blood in The Garden
The Riley decree seemed tough but fair. While Super Bowl and World Series runners-up get rings that aren’t often talked about, second-place finishers in the NBA do not. And with the ’94 experience as prologue, Checketts was committed to doing something for the ’99 Finals team that was never supposed to be competing for a chip in the first place.
In his excellent history of the 1990s Knicks, Blood in the Garden, best-selling author Chris Herring wrote that with the ’94 team’s efforts in his mind, Checketts “…had already made up his mind to commemorate the 1999 Finals run somehow.”
The “somehow” turned out to be a watch. Still hesitant to craft a ring, Checketts arrived upon the idea of giving out customized watches to memorialize another tantalizingly close call with the top prize.
Dave Checketts, 1997
“It was a devastating loss,” said Checketts, “and I was convinced we were the better team.” With that, the knowledge that his superstar in Ewing was in his mid-30s and coming off a major injury, and a vague notion that he, “didn’t think I’d be there much longer,” the executive set a plan in motion to commission some bespoke Movado timepieces for everyone involved in the season’s success.
A Watch, But Which One?
The mention of the watches is a small detail at the end of Blood in the Garden. For most readers of the book, ostensibly huge Knicks or NBA heads like me, it would have been Checketts’ fondness for the team, not the watch itself, that registered. But for readers who qualify as watch nerds (also me), questions about the timepiece itself immediately surfaced.
What kind of Movado, a Museum Watch? Did it have a custom dial or was it engraved on the back? How many of them were there, and what do they go for on the secondary market?
Weirdly, in the summer of 2025 when I first read the book, a quick search of all the usual online watch markets revealed nothing. Plenty of Movado models from the late 1990s were changing hands on Chrono24, eBay, Reddit, and the rest, but none revealed themselves as Knicks-related.
I dug a little deeper, using Herring’s exact description of the watches in the book: “a silver-band, blue-faced Movado watch that was engraved, ‘New York Knicks: 1999 NBA Eastern Conference Champions’” and found… nothing.
Eventually I gave up on the hunt, and a full year passed. The 2026 iteration of the Knicks won a title, and I remembered the watches a few days later. Surely now some superfan or former player would have surfaced with this rare artifact on a watch marketplace or sports auction site. Nothing doing.
The only path left was to get ahold of Checketts himself and ask about the story of the watch.
Let’s Talk To Dave
Checketts left the Knicks and MSG in 2001, and transitioned to an impressive second act in sports consulting, investment management, and more. For a busy man, and the only inductee of the Utah Hall of Fame I’ve ever interviewed, he was remarkably easy to pin down for a quick Zoom and some watch talk.
The youthful-looking exec – I quickly remembered he was only 35 when hired by the Knicks – breezed through the story from the book, lingering on the sting of the ’99 loss with palpable pain. “It was a devastating loss.” Then he brought out his watch from somewhere off-camera.
It is not, as you can see, the classic Movado Museum Watch. Based on Herring’s description, I was assuming a round case, spare dial in Knicks blue, with the signature Museum Dot at the 12 o’clock position and all of the text inscribed somewhere on the caseback. The Museum Watch, after all, was very popular in the late 90s and early 00s, with an especially strong foothold in and around New York, where the marketing had been hot and heavy.
Instead, I saw what I’d later discover to be Movado’s Eliro model, with a rectangular, tank-style steel case and integrated bracelet just barely narrower than the case sides. On the dial, which to my eye and in all descriptions is black, not blue, “1999 / NBA / Eastern Conference / Champions” is stacked in printed text above and below the faceted dauphine hands. The Movado logo is in the expected spot at the top of the dial, just under the Museum dot. And, flanking the dial on the upper surfaces of the blocky case sides, “New York” and “Knick” appear to be engraved. Checketts’ example is so clearly well worn that the engravings are only just visible in a photo he shared after our call.
A Watch, When A Ring Won’t Do
The Eliro is an interesting watch, especially if you think about it spending any time at all on the oak-like wrists of men like Ewing, Larry Johnson, or Marcus Camby. A slim, rectangular, quartz-powered steel watch doesn’t jibe with the image of NBA player fashion that we have today, nor meet up with the hip-hop ethos of the late 90s. But it’s easy to see how the demure styling and modest levels of luxury might have felt right for this as a commemorative piece.
Checketts isn’t sure exactly who received the watches, but he remembers instructing his staff to be as inclusive as possible. “It wasn’t just players and coaches,” he recalled. “People like the scoring crew… I think if you worked for the Knicks in any capacity.” So while it’s difficult to say how many were produced, it’s clear that the choice of model and execution of the build was made in part to support an organization-wide gift.
And yet, all the evidence points to people holding on to these artifacts, rather than cashing in. It’s remarkable.
Remember, the ’99 Knicks won just 27 games in that strike-shortened season. They were an eight seed, and should’ve been cannon fodder in the early playoff rounds, not a team that made it so close to the top. It’s a story worth remembering and a watch, it seems, that became a trophy worth holding on to.
Timing Is Everything
A confluence of events seems to be favoring the fortunes of this Knicks watch, however.
Over the last few years I’ve read a steady stream of articles about the collectability of early (pre-quartz) Movado watches, with in-house movements, attention to detail, and simmering auction prices. The brand even appears to be on the cusp of a mini renaissance, with new products hewing more closely to that golden age.
Simultaneously, we’re all just obsessed with the culture of the nineties and the early aughts – I’ve seen more cool 25-year-olds wearing neo-vintage pieces than Apple watches in recent months. (I like the quirky quartz pieces better than I do the resurgence of jorts.)
And, of course, the Knicks are champions again. Knicks in Five Summer is threatening to become Knicks in Five Fall, and god only knows what’ll happen if Jalen Brunson leads the city on another deep playoff run. Get your tickets now, I’d say.
Keep an eye on sideline wrists, too. You might even catch Checketts somewhere close to the action, as he was a few times in recent playoff runs. If you’re lucky, you might even catch a glimpse of a well-worn Movado on his arm.
