iStockphoto / Bill Streicher-Imagn Images
Jalen Brunson in front of the White House
No NBA team traveled to the White House to meet with Donald Trump after winning a title during his first term, and that has remained the case during his second. It appeared the Knicks decided to bring that drought to an end, but Jalen Brunson hinted it’s far from a sure thing after James Dolan said his team would be showing up.
In 1865, an amateur baseball team known as the Brooklyn Athletics became the first squad to celebrate a championship with a visit to the White House after Andrew Jackson hosted them at the president’s residence in Washington, D.C.
Other teams were sporadically invited by the sitting Commander in Chief in the century or so that followed, but it didn’t really become the tradition it’s become in recent decades until Ronald Reagan began to open up his doors to various champions on a regular basis in the 1980s.
While those visits historically transcended politics, that is no longer the case. In 2011, Boston Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas caused a bit of a stir when he cited Barack Obama’s policies for his refusal to show up after winning the Stanley Cup, and that trend kicked into high gear when Donald Trump took office in 2017.
James Dolan recently asserted the Knicks would become the first team to meet with him at the White House during his time as the president, but it seems like that’s still very much up in the air based on what the man who led them to the first championship in 53 years had to say about the topic.
Jalen Brunson says the Knicks have not decided if they’ll visit the White House after James Dolan asserted they would
In 2017, the men’s basketball team at the University of North Carolina became the first championship squad to outright reject a visit to the White House due to Roy Williams’ disagreements with Trump, although a number of players who won a Super Bowl with the Patriots that year opted to sit things out for the same reason.
The following year, the president revoked the invitation he extended to the Eagles after their Super Bowl victory after they floated a boycott, and three members of the Capitals rejected his after they won the Stanley Cup that summer.
Joe Biden also got the same treatment from some teams. Georgia’s football team turned him down in 2023 while pointing to logistical reasons, and the Nuggets said scheduling issues prevented them from meeting after winning a title that year.
Denver was the only team that did not meet with Biden during his term, as the Bucks, Warriors, and Celtics all made the trip. Milwaukee became the first team to show up at the White House since the Obama administration, as Golden State forcefully shunned Trump in back-to-back years, the Raptors opted to celebrate with Canada’s prime minister, and the Lakers saw a potential visit derailed by the pandemic.
Last week, Knicks owner James Dolan said his team would be snapping the Trump-related streak during a radio interview where he said he’d accepted the invitation the White House extended after this year’s champs dispatched the Spurs in the NBA Finals.
However, based on what Jalen Brunson had to say during an interview with New York Magazine, he may have failed to consult the locker room before making that declaration, as the Finals MVP had this to say about the subject:
“We haven’t discussed it. But as a team, we’ll discuss it and we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”
In 2020, Josh Hart sent out a tweet that made it pretty clear he is not a huge fan of Trump, and Mitchell Robinson recently expressed similar sentiments in the wake of some comments that seemed to suggest he was a fan of the president.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see how things pan out.