The New York Knicks’ latest NBA championship has found a new place in the city’s collective memory. The team’s 2025–26 Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy will go on display at the American Museum of Natural History as part of For the Win: Objects of Sports Excellence, an exhibition dedicated to the objects that have come to embody athletic achievement.
Created by Tiffany & Co., the Larry O’Brien Trophy is made from sterling silver with gold vermeil, weighs approximately 30 pounds and depicts a regulation-size basketball passing through a net. Its surface carries the names of every NBA champion since 1947, transforming the object into a physical record of the league’s history.
For New York, however, the trophy carries a more personal significance. When For the Win opened in May, one of its most resonant objects was a basketball-shaped fob presented to former Knicks head coach Red Holzman following the team’s 1973 championship, the franchise’s last NBA title before its latest victory.
The arrival of the new trophy creates an unexpected conversation between those two moments. The 1973 championship survives in the exhibition as a small personal object; the 2025–26 title now enters the same space in the form of the league’s most recognisable prize.
“When we opened ‘For the Win,’ Red Holzman’s 1973 Knicks championship fob was the piece that connected this city to its basketball past,” guest curator Vikki Tobak said. “Now the NBA’s Larry O’Brien Trophy arrives with the Knicks’ names freshly engraved on it, and that circle closes in a way we never could have planned.”
The exhibition brings together approximately 70 objects spanning 15 sports and nearly 150 years of sporting history. Among them are one of Jesse Owens’s gold medals from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the NFL’s Vince Lombardi Trophy and the New York Liberty’s 2024 WNBA championship trophy.
Curated by Vikki Tobak in partnership with Boardroom CEO Rich Kleiman and Kate Kiseeva, associate curator in the Museum’s Division of Physical Sciences, For the Win considers the objects that remain after the noise of competition has faded; medals, trophies and fragments of sporting history that continue to carry the weight of the moments that created them.
The Knicks’ trophy now joins that history. Its place inside the museum is more than a celebration of a recent championship. It is an encounter between two versions of New York: the city that remembers its last title, and the city finally holding a new one.
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