President Donald Trump is expected to attend Game 3 of the NBA championships at Madison Square Garden Monday night, and his anticipated arrival has already prompted the cancelation of an outdoor watch party and heightened other security measures so much that ticket holders are asked to arrive two hours early to ensure a timely tip off.
U.S. President Donald Trump following the FIFA Club World Cup 2025 final between Chelsea FC and Paris Saint-Germain at MetLife Stadium on July 13, 2025.
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Trump, a lifelong Knicks fan frequently spotted at games with his family in the 1990s and 2000s, said last month he planned to attend an NBA finals game in New York after he'd been invited by “multiple people,” including billionaire majority Knicks owner Jim Dolan.
The president has attended more major live sporting events than previous presidents—including the Super Bowl, U.S. Open tennis tournament and FIFA Club World Cup—and his appearances often causes logistical delays and inconveniences for other ticket holders.
The Knicks have asked attendees to arrive at Madison Square Garden two hours early Monday night to accommodate additional security measures for the president and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is also expected to attend.
A watch party planned for Monday outside the stadium has been canceled after a viewing party held there during Friday’s game led to more than a dozen arrests and the assault of a police officer (NBA watch parties at other locations in the city are expected to continue as planned).
Trump typically sits in a high-security private suite or in an owners box when attending major sporting events. It’s possible he shares a box with Dolan, chair of the Madison Square Garden Company, a longtime supporter who the president last month called a "great guy." And while Mamdani hasn't said exactly where he'll be sitting, he last week said he will be in a "very different section" than Trump and has previously sat in upper sections for games at MSG.
While there's no official list of celebrities expected for the game, director Spike Lee, and actors Ben Stiller, Timothée Chalamet (with girlfriend and reality star Kylie Jenner) and Tracy Morgan have been among the most visible celebrity Knicks fans during the team’s 2026 playoff run. Anne Hathaway, Jimmy Fallon, Adam Sandler, Chis Rock, 50 Cent, Tina Fey and Nick Jonas have also made appearances at Knicks playoff games.
Probably. The president is usually met with jeers to some extent at sporting events, and New York is not a city teeming with Trump fans (he only won 30% of the city's votes in the last presidential election). NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said he's "thrilled" Trump will attend a game, but others in sports, like writer Shea Serrano and ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith, have been less gushing.
"i need all my new york homies to boo this motherf****r so thunderously when they show him on the jumbotron that my TV vibrates off the wall,” Serrano wrote.
75%. That’s the chance Trump will hear more boos than cheers at the game, according to oddsmakers at BetOnline.ag, who have set the odds at -300 that Trump will be booed by New York fans and at +200 that he’ll get cheered.
Trump has attended dozens of sporting events in his two terms as president, most commonly the Army-Navy rivalry football game, which he’s been to six times (including twice as president elect). Trump received some of his loudest, most widely reported boos at Game 5 of the 2019 World Series in Washington D.C., where fans broke into a "lock him up" chant. In New York, he was also loudly booed by the crowd at MetLife stadium when he took the stage for the trophy presentation at the FIFA Club World Cup in 2025, and received both cheers and significant boos at the U.S. Open Tennis Championships in Queens. Enhanced security measures for his trip to the U.S. Open men's final caused a half-hour delay to the match's start and created severe entry backlogs for spectators, who waited in security lines for well over an hour to get to their seats.
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