I never had a real choice regarding which professional sports teams I rooted for; I was handed them the same way I was my last name and my religion. I’m a third generation fan of the New York Yankees, Giants, Rangers, and (to a lesser degree) Knicks. I know how remarkably lucky I have been to be born into rooting for those specific teams, especially the Yankees and Giants, who have each won the most championships in their respective sports (5 World Championships for the Yankees and 4 Super Bowl wins for the Giants) during my lifetime. I was lucky be able to watch the Rangers end a 54-year-drought and win the Stanley Cup in 1994. Things have not gone perfectly for the teams that play in the metro area of the world’s premier city, but from 1968 through 2011 the longest period the city went without one of its (now 9) teams winning a championship was the relatively small gap between the Knicks winning their last championship in 1973 and the Yankees winning the 1977 World Series. Today there have been 3-years since the Giants won Super Bowl XLVI, but there doesn’t appear to be any championships on the horizon, and New York sports seems to be headed for a serious decline.

There has been another side to New York sports too besides the consistent success of the Yankees and Giants (and let’s not forget that the Devils had a dynasty of their own, winning the Stanley Cup 3 times between 1995 and 2003). As I mentioned above the Knicks haven’t won the NBA Championship since 1973 and haven’t even returned to the Finals since 1999 during the Patrick Ewing era. The Mets have only won the World Series once in my lifetime, and that was 28-years ago; the Islanders won the Stanley Cup 4-straight times from 1980 to ‘83 but they’ve not made it back to the Finals since 1984 and haven’t even won a playoff series since 1993; the Jets haven’t made it back to the Super Bowl since they shocked the world after the 1968 season by beating the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. The now Brooklyn Nets haven’t won a championship since moving to the NBA from the ABA and haven’t made the Finals since they won the Eastern Conference in 2002 and 2003 during Jason Kidd’s prime.

Perhaps the most troubling thing about NY sports at the moment is no ‘sure-thing’ anymore. Between 1995 and 2012 the Yankees made the playoffs every season except for 2008, but Derek Jeter, the face of the franchise and pretty much New York Sports as a whole for almost 20-years, just retired and the team’s success as it moves into a new era is very much up in the air. The Giants have won two recent Super Bowls with Tom Coughlin and Eli Manning, but they’re almost certain to miss the playoffs this year for the third straight season and for the fifth time in the six-seasons since 2009, and the organization appears to be far too comfortable with the lack of results the team has seen from Coughlin and GM Jerry Reese. The Rangers played in the Stanley Cup Finals last season for the first time since 1994, but it is hard to have faith in the long-term success of the team when one remembers that they’re owned by Cablevision’s James Dolan and that Glen Sather (who may not quite deserve as much credit for helping to build the 1980s Oilers into a dynasty when the team had Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, and other hall of famers all playing together in their primes) remains GM. Dolan also owns the Knicks and, since he appears to be a more hands-on owner with them, it is even harder to see sustained greatness for the team. There is some excitement with the franchise now that Phil Jackson has been hired to run the team, but no one knows if the experiment will be successful and it’s hard to trust that Dolan will be able to keep his word and give Jackson real autonomy to make decisions. Sadly, as atrocious a team owner as Dolan has been, he has lots of company among New York’s worst team owners: to the disgust of the team’s fans, the Mets are still owned by the Wilpon family; Woody Johnson continues to mismanage the Jets, who are now a laughingstock; no one really knows how invested Hank and Hal Steinbrenner are in running the Yankees; and Mikhail Prokhorov has been a joke of an owner who sacrificed most of the Nets’ draft picks for the rest of this decade in a weak attempt to win in the present.

I have been spoiled as a sports fan, but it is hard to see a New York team being a favorite to win a championship in the next few years, let alone one being able to build a foundation to be contenders for years to come like the Yankees were during the Derek Jeter era. Where can New York sports fans look to find stability and consistent excellence? New York may have 3 more franchises than any other city (Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Washington-Baltimore metro all have 6 pro teams) but there is no obviously great team in the bunch and not one of them is even favored to win its conference/league in 2014-15, let alone to win it all. There are many superstars who play in NYC, and a good number of young, exciting players who seem to have greatness in front of them, but when you look around sports and see some of the consistently great, stable franchises like the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA, the New England Patriots in the NFL, the Chicago Blackhawks in the NHL, and St. Louis Cardinals in MLB, you don’t see any New York franchise on that list anymore. It is incredibly rare to build a strong enough organization to win and/or compete for multiple championships – we were lucky to get to watch the Yankees do it, and there is no guarantee that we’ll ever get to see it again