The Knicks have accepted an invitation to visit the White House and celebrate their first championship in more than 50 years, James Dolan, the team’s owner, said in a radio interview on Wednesday.
The Knicks would become the first N.B.A. team to visit the White House in President Trump’s tenure. During his first term, Mr. Trump publicly sparred with the league’s top players, who refused to go to the White House. But Mr. Dolan, a longtime friend of Mr. Trump’s, said during an interview on WFAN, a sports radio station, that the team would be visiting Washington.
“I’ve known him for 30 years, and I’m very proud to bring the team to the White House,” Mr. Dolan said.
A White House official said that the administration had been in communication with the Knicks, and that officials expect to host the team in the near future. A date has not been determined, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private planning conversations.
Mr. Trump attended Game 3 of the finals at Madison Square Garden last week and sat with Mr. Dolan in a suite. The president was raucously booed when he was shown on the arena’s video board. It was the only game that the Knicks lost during the series, which they won in five games against the San Antonio Spurs.
Championship teams across professional and amateur sports have visited the White House for decades, but the practice grew less common and strongly politicized after Mr. Trump became president. That shift was perhaps most pronounced in the N.B.A., with many professional basketball players and coaches who supported Democrats denouncing Mr. Trump’s policies and rhetoric, particularly regarding social justice issues.
In 2017, during his first term, Mr. Trump publicly sparred with players such as Stephen Curry and LeBron James. Mr. Curry, who helped lead the Golden State Warriors to an N.B.A. championship, said that he would not accept an invitation to visit the White House. In response, Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Twitter that the invitation was withdrawn.
The next year, the commissioner of the N.B.A., Adam Silver, told ESPN that he found a disparaging remark the president had made about immigration to be “discouraging.” In 2024, Mr. Silver donated thousands of dollars to Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump’s opponent in the general election, as well as to other Democrats. He also donated a few thousand dollars to Nikki Haley’s Republican presidential primary campaign.
Mr. Dolan got married at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, he told ESPN in 2018, and defended the president in an interview last week with WFAN, calling him “a Knicks fan.” In that same interview, he attacked Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Jessica S. Tisch, the police commissioner, as fake Knicks fans and novices.
Mr. Trump often attended games at Madison Square Garden during the 1990s, when the team developed a reputation as a physical, tough-minded group and made the finals twice. He has praised the current team, including its star players Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns, as it tore through the playoffs this spring.
During an interview on “Inside the NBA” on the Madison Square Garden court after Game 3, Mr. Silver described Mr. Trump’s visit as a unifying event. He touted Mr. Trump’s bona fides as a Knicks supporter.
“He was a fixture at Madison Square Garden,” Mr. Silver said. “He’s a genuine Knicks fan.”
Tania Ganguli contributed reporting.
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