President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he expects he will attend a New York Knicks game when the team plays either the Oklahoma City Thunder or San Antonio Spurs next week in a bid for the NBA Championship.
President Donald Trump attends Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Roc Nation
When asked if he planned to attend a game, Trump said he’d been invited by “multiple people,” including Madison Square Garden Company chair and majority Knicks owner Jim Dolan, and “I think I’ll be going.”
Trump also called Dolan, a big supporter of Trump’s whose family was last valued by Forbes at $5.5 billion in 2015, a "great guy.”
Trump is a longtime supporter of the New York Knicks, being frequently spotted at games with his family in the 1990s and 2000s, and while he hasn’t attended a game since 2014, he has said he’s still a fan who follows the team.
The president didn’t say which game he was planning to attend, but the Knicks will play games 3 and 4 of the series at Madison Square Garden, which is less than two miles from Trump Tower in Manhattan, on Monday, June 8 and Wednesday, June 10.
If he goes, Trump will be the first sitting U.S. president to ever attend an NBA Finals game and will add the championship series to a growing list of sporting events he’s attended as president, including the Ryder Cup, U.S. Open tennis tournament, FIFA Club World Cup final and Super Bowl LIX.
How Trump is received at the game. The president has been met with loud boos—alongside some cheers—at several high-profile games, most notably at a Washington Commanders game in November and a World Series Game in 2019. Madison Square Garden during an NBA Finals game will likely be the most packed and intimate sporting venue he’s attended as president.
The Knicks are in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999 after beating the Atlanta Hawks, Philadelphia 76ers and Cleveland Cavaliers in the playoffs, and enter the championship series on a dominant 11-game win streak. They’ll play the winner of the Western Conference Finals between the San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder, which the Thunder lead 3-2. The teams will play again Thursday at 8:30 p.m. EDT. The Thunder are favorites on sportsbooks and prediction markets to win the NBA Finals .
Trump has a longstanding friendship with Dolan that included multiple donations from the Knicks owner to Trump's presidential campaigns. He donated $300,000 to a pro-Trump fundraising committee in 2016 and gave $125,000 to his 2020 election campaign. Federal Election Commission records don’t show any direct donations from Dolan to Trump in 2024, but he did allow Trump to host a major rally at Madison Square Garden in October 2024, though the MSG corporation maintained it was politically neutral. Dolan married his second wife, Kristin Reynolds, at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, of which he is a member. "I support him as a friend,” Dolan told the New York Times. “And you don’t have to agree with everything that he’s doing in order to support him. And he’s, by the way, our president, and I don’t understand people who wish our president to do badly."
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