“HELL NO, WE WON'T GO!”
MAGA Jim Dolan seeks to make the Knicks players say, “Yessuh, Massa Dolan” and become the first NBA Champions to visit the Trump-occupied White House. The above slogan should be their answer.
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Jim Dolan, the billionaire owner of our beloved New York Knicks, spent decades making stupid player personnel decisions that never got the team to a championship and rarely even to the playoffs. Finally, he hired Leon Rose to become team president and make those decisions. The result is the amazing, unselfish, one-for-all Knickerbocker team that we just witnessed have the most extraordinary playoff run in NBA history.
It likely would have been even more extraordinary had Dolan not invited Donald Trump to come to the third game of the finals and first in MSG so the “president” could chomp on junk food and take a nap in the luxury box. The trump visit messed up the vibe and the Knicks lost, breaking a 13-game playoff winning streak, the second longest in NBA history. No Trump probably would have meant a Knicks 4-0 Finals sweep and a 15-game playoff winning streak that would have tied the 2017 Golden State Warriors for the longest playoff winning streak ever.
But the unflappable Knicks team won game 4 in the Garden and then went to San Antonio and won the championship in five games.
Then Dolan, obviously without consulting the players, publicly announced that the team had accepted his friend Trump’s invitation to visit the White House. No NBA Champion team has visited the White House when Trump has been the president.
In 2017, Trump invited the Golden State Warriors and Steph Curry announced that he had no interest in attending. Surely the same was the case with coach Steve Kerr. Trump then withdrew the invitation. When the Warriors won again in 2018, Trump gave no invite. In 2019, the champion Toronto Raptors players said they were a “hard no” on going to meet with Trump. In 2020, the Lakers won and Trump said he would not invite LeBron James. In 2025, the Oklahoma City Thunder won the championship and both the team and the White House used the fig leaf of “scheduling conflicts” to cover the obvious fact that most players in the sport want nothing to do with a man who is blatant racist, created a Supreme Court majority that has eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, and is trying to end American democracy.
Now Jim Dolan wants to force “his” players to become the first NBA champions to visit Trump’s All-White House. Maybe they can shuffle and bow and call him “Sir.” Dolan wants the players to say, “Yessuh, Massa Dolan.”
It is an outrage and the Knicks players should adopt a slogan used by anti-Vietnam War protestors:
“HELL NO, WE WON’T GO!”
Prominent Democrats should put out a joint statement that the team or individual players should refuse the invitation for these reasons: 1, 2, 3.... And when a Democrat returns to the White House in 2029, the players will then be invited for real.