President Donald Trump is used to cheers at his highly curated rallies and events. But on Monday night he’s widely expected to be showered with boos when he becomes the first sitting president to attend an NBA Finals game.
Trump said he will watch Game 3 of the best-of-seven series between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs as the guest of Knicks owner James Dolan. Some sports fans and analysts have urged Trump not to attend the game — commentator Stephen A. Smith said it would create an unnecessary spectacle — or pledged to jeer the president.
Online betting services also predict Trump will be booed in his visit to deep-blue New York City and the Knicks’ arena, Madison Square Garden. The team’s fans are famously unforgiving — quick to taunt rival players, the team’s own stars and recent New York mayor Eric Adams just days after his inauguration.
As an added frustration, Trump’s presence will create logistical hurdles for the roughly 20,000 other attendees, who have been told to arrive at least two hours before tip-off because of the enhanced security measures that follow the president. City officials have also said there will be no watch parties outside the arena for the thousands of fans who can’t get inside, breaking with recent practice.
The White House declined to comment on some fans’ frustrations and whether Trump was prepared to be booed. Olivia Wales, a spokeswoman, said Trump was a “lifelong fan” who wanted to watch the Knicks compete at the highest level.
“President Trump is the greatest champion for sports of any president in American history,” Wales said in a statement.
Trump has also faced constant threats, including an attempted shooting in April that prompted the White House to reassess its security protocols for protecting the president and how exposed he should be in public.
The tickets to this week’s two NBA Finals games in New York are among the most expensive in modern sports history, as the city’s celebrities and wealthy residents help drive up the price. Some courtside seats have been auctioned off for several hundred thousand dollars apiece; even seats in the building’s rafters, with obstructed views, are selling for more than $10,000.
The pricey entrance cost may change the complexion of the crowd, said Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to President Barack Obama and a longtime NBA fan.
A “typical Madison Square Garden crowd would boo the daylights out of Trump, but he might benefit from a crowd willing to spend $10,000 to sit in the rafters,” Pfeiffer told The Washington Post.
Trump, a longtime New Yorker, has said he’s excited to take in the game, as the Knicks seek their first NBA championship in 53 years.
“I’ve been a Knicks fan for a long time,” Trump said in the Oval Office last week, subsequently offering thoughts on Spurs star Victor Wembanyama (“How do you guard this guy, he’s seven foot five?”) and the Knicks’ best players (“[Jalen] Brunson is fantastic. [Karl-Anthony] Towns is fantastic.”) in conversations with reporters.
It is less clear whether the Knicks and Spurs players are fans of Trump. Just 10 percent of NBA players are registered Republicans, while 43 percent are Democrats and 46 percent are independent, according to an analysis of publicly accessible voter registration data, and many of the league’s stars have panned Trump and his policies.
But Trump’s allies cheer the president’s plan to venture into a city where he received only 30 percent of the vote in his 2024 presidential campaign.
“Game-day Trump is hard not to like, and it’s a venue that suits him well,” said Harrison Fields, who served as White House principal deputy press secretary last year. “New York City and an NBA audience might be considered hostile territory, but when has that ever stopped the president?”
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has also said he is “thrilled” that Trump will attend the game. But some of the sport’s loudest voices have said they wish he was going anywhere else.
Shea Serrano, a popular sportswriter and Spurs fan, urged New Yorkers to boo Trump so loudly “that my TV vibrates off the wall,” he wrote in a widely shared post on social media.
“His decision to attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals will do for the game what his participation in seemingly everything does: make it actively worse, in one way or another, for everyone else involved,” Serrano wrote in an email to The Washington Post.
No modern president has intermingled sports and politics as Trump has in his second term.
As the nation’s most powerful politician, he has sought to broker peace between rival professional golf leagues, issued several executive orders attempting to “fix” college sports and announced plans to renovate several Washington-area golf courses.
Other moves have come in his capacity as a fan. Trump has become the first president to attend the Super Bowl, take the presidential limousine on a pace lap at the Daytona 500 and schedule a UFC fight on the White House grounds, with that event slated for Sunday. He also attended the final rounds of two golf tournaments hosted at Trump-owned courses this year.
When Trump has put himself in front of crowds of sports fans, they usually cheer him. Fans of auto racing, golf and football skew Republican, while basketball fans are more liberal, according to surveys conducted by The Washington Post and the University of Maryland across 2022 and 2023.
And while some of the most prominent football players, racecar drivers and golfers are public Trump supporters, many of the NBA’s stars, such as LeBron James, have criticized Trump and his policies.
Basketball also has been closely linked with Obama, Trump’s predecessor, who hosted NBA players for games at the White House and issued predictions for the NCAA college basketball tournament each year. When Obama attended a 2019 NBA Finals game in Toronto, the former president received sustained cheers and a standing ovation.
Knicks fans have warned Trump to expect a hostile reception on Monday night.
“Trump Is Not Welcome At MSG” read one post on Reddit, as hundreds of users mocked him and speculated on how badly he would be booed.
Some of the Knicks’ celebrity fans expected to attend the game — including actors Ben Stiller and Timothée Chalamet and director Spike Lee — have previously criticized Trump and his policies.
Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip. We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie. https://t.co/dMQqRxxVCa
— Ben Stiller (@BenStiller) March 6, 2026
Representatives for Chalamet, Stiller and Lee did not respond to questions about whether they would welcome Trump’s presence at Monday night’s game.
Knicks fans have warmly received other politicians. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is also expected to attend Monday night’s game, has been embraced by some fans for his willingness to join them in the rafters.
Trump also has a long history of attending Knicks games, frequently flanked by celebrities such as John F. Kennedy Jr., radio personality Howard Stern and New York Mets outfielder Darryl Strawberry, although he does not appear to have watched the team in person since launching his presidential run a decade ago.
His most recent visit to Madison Square Garden came in the waning days of his 2024 presidential campaign, hosting a rally that prompted days of fallout and rebukes, particularly over one comedian’s insults of Puerto Rico.
On Monday the presidents will arrive in a city that has become a cauldron of Knicks fever, with Wall Street brokers, prisoners at Rikers Island and generations of die-hard fans all clamoring for the team to win.
Even Elmo from “Sesame Street” — the longtime children’s TV show that is set in a fictional corner of Manhattan — suffered days of backlash after wishing “both teams” luck. Some Knicks fans called the red puppet a traitor to the city.
Fields said that championship-starved New Yorkers likely had bigger things on their mind than politics.
“Their feelings about the president are probably the last thing Knicks fans are thinking about,” he said. “For one night, New Yorkers and the president can agree on one thing: Go Knicks.”
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