This is the rare case where the uniforms feel more untouchable and iconic than the actual logo. It doesn't really say anything about New York (unless you count the skyscraper-inspired letters) or what a Knickerbocker is.
There are a number of interesting moments throughout the Knicks' logo history; we gravitated toward two: the first logo, a poorly drawn knickerbocker dribbling a basketball, and a secondary logo from the last re-design of the word mark inside a "side" view of a basketball. Silly as it may be, we thought it would be neat to put those together. We re-drew their original Knickerbocker and replaced his ball with a version of the old secondary logo. The only brand new update was some new custom lettering, still inspired by sky scrapers but less reliant on being dimensional.
The premise of the new type is, make the letters as grid-like and boxy as possible with very tiny counter forms. Same with the numbers. We wanted everything to feel big and tight. The blue and orange are the official colors of New York, the most iconic thing about the Knicks, so no touching that; just get rid of the black. We did extract the basketball from our hooping Dutchman as a secondary mark.