In addition to threatening to bomb U.S. ally Oman and declaring that he doesn’t “care about the midterms,” President Donald Trump made a very different sort of surprise announcement at his Cabinet meeting Wednesday: “I think I’ll be going to one of the [NBA Finals] games.”
Specifically, the president said he had been invited by “numerous people,” including New York Knicks owner James Dolan, to attend the team’s first finals home game since 1999, the same year Dolan took majority ownership over the franchise.
Although presidents have sporadically attended MLB’s World Series since the early 20th century, no president has appeared at the NBA finals — not even Barack Obama, who famously added a basketball court to the tennis grounds on the White House South Lawn. Trump would be the first to do so, just as he was the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl in 2025.
The news has, unsurprisingly, provoked strong reactions — most of them missing the point.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul stepped on a metaphorical rake when she implied to reporters Thursday that Trump probably couldn’t name “the starting lineup of the 1993 Championship team” (the last Knicks title was in 1973). MAGA commentariat quickly seized the opportunity, mocking Hochul and amplifying a clip of Trump attending the Knicks’ Game 3 loss in the 1994 NBA Finals. Indeed, New York magazine found Trump has appeared in the “celebrity row” at Madison Square Garden numerous times over the decades, in keeping with his lifelong efforts at social climbing among the city’s elites.
But that’s all this is to Trump: A chance to be the ultimate celebrity in a room packed with them, at the Garden’s hottest ticket in decades.
To Knicks fans like myself, the team’s first Finals appearance in 27 years is a priceless and fleeting moment. It’s for us. To root happily after the mostly miserable decades of Dolan’s ownership, which The New York Times described as “so consistently and convincingly lifeless that perma-despair seemed utterly normal.” To wax nostalgic for the great Patrick Ewing-led teams of the 1990s, who came oh-so-close to hoisting the Larry O’Brien trophy during the decade when Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls won six titles. To allow ourselves to believe the impossible dream could happen: watching Jalen Brunson and his teammates parading down the Canyon of Heroes among cascading ticker tape in mid-June.
That’s all this is to Trump: A chance to be the ultimate celebrity in a room packed with them, at the Garden’s hottest ticket in decades.
And while there are surely Trump supporters among the Knickerbockers’ fanbase, I can’t imagine even they’re clamoring to see the president peacocking at the Garden. Knicks fans understand what a precious instant this is and why it should not be drawn into Trump’s toxic orbit for the time it takes to play one best-of-seven series.
The joy surrounding the Knicks’ improbable run has vibes in this city running so high that native New Yorkers in blue and orange are being friendly to one another and making idle chitchat on the streets. It’s weird.
Even The Ringer’s Bill Simmons — typically a New York sports team hater — has cheered on the Knicks’ run as an unambiguously feel-good story for the league and has seemed genuinely happy on his podcast about the giddiness and anticipation among New York’s long-suffering basketball die-hards.
New York City is historically a basketball town. It has produced a disproportionate number of Hall of Famers and a culture of street and playground basketball often emulated but never duplicated. And in a region with almost a dozen major professional sports franchises (some, like the Yankees, are passionately hated by millions of New Yorkers), the Knicks are the only team that unites pretty much everyone. (Sorry, Brooklyn Nets, it just never really caught on.)
Israel Daramola aptly elucidated loyal Knicks fans’ predicament in the Defector: “In between those various eras was a lot of executive mismanagement, beefs, suffering, the worst contracts you’ve ever seen, an arena that has showcased the powers of the surveillance state, and an owner who takes joy in being awful, because no one likes his blues band or whatever. All of which is to say: I know people find the Knicks annoying and New York City insufferable, but dammit, they deserve this moment.”
Win or lose, we know this feeling isn’t meant to last.
Is it too much to ask for the historically unpopular president — who regularly disparages this city, made a big show of departing it and will never forgive it because it never loved him back — to not divert the spotlight, just this one time?
It ultimately won’t change the results on the court either way, and a Secret Service-locked-down Madison Square Garden for one night won’t spoil the party. But the Trumpness in the air would be an unwelcome energy in an atmosphere in which even the most cynical New Yorkers have briefly become wide-eyed, joyful fanatics.
This doesn’t need to be a morality play. Just do us a solid and stay away, Florida Man.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW.