Bluesky

In my lifetime, no sports team has represented the city of New York quite like the 2025-2026 NBA champion New York Knicks. Even with a new season about to begin, the city is still buzzing from the euphoria of last June, when the squad secured its first title in 51 years. People still talk excitedly about the performances of Finals MVP Jalen Brunson, OG Anunoby, and the rest of this team of newly minted New York icons.

Now the Knicks are now faced with a choice—and how they decide to act will forever be a part of their legacy. Will they visit Trump’s White House? 

Doing so, at the behest of James Dolan, the team’s right-wing, nepo-billionaire owner, would make them the first NBA or WNBA champion to visit Trump while in office.

Knicks Coach Mike Brown said that the team needs to come together to decide whether they should go. But this shouldn’t even require a discussion. First, doing so would mean crossing a picket line established in 2017 by NBA and WNBA players who, at the time, made it clear that a president who traffics in racism and attacks politically outspoken players should not be graced with their presence. A decade later, with far fewer outspoken players, the Knicks crossing that line would symbolize the death of an era where players didn’t check their politics at the door and being a brand wasn’t more important than being principled.

That’s one reason. The other is that, given what Trump is doing to the city, showing up with a jersey and a ring for the regime leader would be hurtful to New Yorkers. ICE has been marauding through the five boroughs for the past two years; last week, an ICE officer shot and wounded 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in upper Manhattan while his 5-year-old son was in the back seat. In such a climate, to have this team visit the White House would be a gut punch to New Yorkers. It would look like the Knicks are more eager to please the people who paid the tens of thousands of dollars necessary to watch the team during the Finals at Madison Square Garden than the New Yorkers who watched in bars and from ad-hoc projectors splashing the game across the walls of buildings; the fans who flooded the streets to dance and climb light poles to celebrate the win; or the millions who feted them for their championship parade. 

Undoubtedly the team is facing pressure from ownership to smile for the NEWSMAX cameras. Dolan wants them at the White House, bending the knee to his dear friend Donald Trump, to consecrate a friendship rooted in every impropriety that comes with believing that your power and wealth allow you to live under a shield of impunity. Yet what they really have in common is being despised by the city of New York. 

The city’s hatred of Trump goes back decades, to his time as a crooked, racist landlord repped by Roy Cohn. Dolan, after years as one of the most detested owners in sports, initially benefited from a reservoir of public goodwill following the championship, but he’s done his damndest since then to fritter it away. He can’t help being unlikable. It’s his nature. 

It started even before the confetti fell, with an obnoxious speech that followed Mayor Mandani’s at the big parade, where Dolan said churlishly, “I don’t need your vote.” Since then—and this is far worse than him throwing a snit—he has cried poverty throughout the process of re-signing this beloved squad. First he refused to offer a fair contract to adored center Mitch Robinson who, after eight seasons with the Knicks, is now—of all damn things—a Celtic. At present Dolan is refusing to pay fair contracts to starters Karl-Anthony Towns and Josh Hart, breaking a promise Dolan made to Brunson during his last contract negotiation, in 2024, pledging that if the captain took less money, he would keep the team together.

But Dolan cannot in any way compel or force his team to go to the White House against their wishes. He has no leverage to make this happen. He holds no cards. And yet he is still demanding that the Knicks help rehabilitate Trump’s standing in New York, a city currently enraged over his existence. If the Knicks do go, the only reason that makes sense is that they want to go. That will sting. 

The 2025-2026 Knicks will always and forever be our team—the city’s team. Visiting the White House won’t change that. This team was ours before it was ever James Dolan’s or, as Dolan seems to want, Donald Trump’s. But it will say something about these players and this historical moment if they bend the knee to someone so roundly loathed by the people of the very city inscribed on their jerseys, a blaring sign that leaders in every cultural sphere—despite Trump’s hellaciously low popularity—are choosing compliance over resistance. 

Perhaps the powerful realize that under a fascistic regime, popularity matters far less than the ruthless exercise of power itself. But to paraphrase historian Howard Zinn, you can’t be neutral on a moving A Train. You are either on the side of the man who was shot in his car in front of his 5-year-old or the person that made the order to pull the trigger. Whichever the Knicks choose, it will become part of their story.