Timothee Chalamet and Kylie Jenner Get Bounced From Courtside at Knicks Game 4: Cavs Front Office Quietly Pulled the Plug
The Knicks completed their sweep of the Cavaliers in Cleveland on Monday night. The biggest Hollywood story of the game was about who was not sitting in the front row.
Timothee Chalamet and Kylie Jenner flew in expecting to watch from courtside, just like the Knicks faithful have come to expect from every postseason game in this run. Instead, the famous couple was bumped to the second row before the opening tip. The New York Post reported that at least 10 other Knicks supporters, celebrities and otherwise, were told by a Cavaliers front office representative that their courtside seats were not available for Game 4.
The Cavaliers reportedly leaned on a specific clause in the playoff courtside seating agreement that prohibits the resale or transfer of tickets without team approval. Translation: Cleveland did not want a sea of Knicks fans cheering its season ending from a few feet away.
Chalamet Found a Way Anyway
By the second half, Chalamet had somehow worked his way back to the prime seats. The 130-93 blowout did not seem to bother him at all. He celebrated with Knicks president Leon Rose at the final buzzer, dropping a now-viral “expletive Finals” reaction caught on TV.
Jenner watched in matching black with him for most of the night. Tracy Morgan, the most reliable Knicks fan in the celebrity rotation, was nearby. Spike Lee was unsurprisingly in the building. The Knicks fan section in Cleveland looked more famous than the Cleveland fan section did.
Why the Cavs Did It
Optically, this is a defensible move. No team wants the visiting team’s celebrity fan base to crash a closeout game on its home floor. The Cavaliers were facing elimination and tried to control the room.
It did not work. The Knicks fans inside Rocket Arena were louder than the Cleveland crowd by the second quarter. By the fourth, half the Cavaliers home base had cleared out. The only people still cheering were the Chalamet-Jenner-Tracy Morgan section, and they were cheering for the wrong team.
This Is the New Knicks Reality
The franchise has been bad for so long that having celebrities crash road playoff arenas is still novel. Get used to it. The Knicks are headed to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999, and the celebrity contingent that follows this team is going to be in every Game 1 through Game 7.
The Cavaliers can pull whatever ticketing trick they want. The Knicks brought their own building with them. Chalamet got his front-row view in the end. Cleveland got a 37-point loss and a season-ending video of Timothee yelling “Finals” on national TV.
If the Cavaliers had a better explanation than “we did not want them sitting there,” they would have said so by now. They did not. That tells you everything.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
