The most decorated player on the newly crowned NBA champions spent part of his postgame celebration on Saturday night defending a television analyst against the wrath of a pop star’s fan base.
“I just want to say something to the Swifties,” Jalen Brunson said after the Knicks closed out the Spurs in San Antonio to win their first championship since 1973. “She’s a really good one. Cut her some slack. It’s all good. I promise.”
The “she” Brunson was vouching for was Monica McNutt.
jalen got a message to all the swifties pic.twitter.com/izMcwQ6UHt
— sports live tweeter yadira (@jonmoxIeys) June 14, 2026
On MSG Networks’ radio simulcast before Game 4, McNutt playfully suggested Swift should “get out of here” while the pop star settled courtside alongside the Haim sisters and Law & Order star Mariska Hargitay. Swift then became one of the central focuses of ESPN and ABC’s broadcast of New York’s historic comeback win, and by the following morning, the Swifties had descended on McNutt. By Thursday, McNutt told TMZ she stood corrected on Swift’s Knicks loyalties, having learned about the musician’s decade-long relationship with former Knick Amar’e Stoudemire, but she did not abandon the underlying point.
“The internet don’t care about context, but context: One, hot mic, first of all,” McNutt said during an appearance on The Breakfast Club on Friday. “I may have misspoke on her loyalties, but I have not seen her all season or last season. We saw her in Cleveland with her fiancé. When I dated a Cowboys fan, and I was a Commanders fan, we wore our stuff — and she didn’t have on any Knicks gear in Cleveland.”
Swift grew up outside of Reading, Pennsylvania, before moving to Nashville, and is due to marry Travis Kelce in New York this summer, a city she has written about extensively in her music. McNutt acknowledged all of that. What she could not reconcile was the nature of the reaction, specifically, how quickly a hot mic joke to her broadcast partner was characterized by MSG Networks PR as a “ruthless comment” and how rapidly fans and media reached for racism as the explanation.
“Being super peace of mind, I’m just making an observation, quickly it’s, ‘Oh, you’re racist, da-da-da,'” she said. “If I was in a different body, it would be nothing.”
The Swifties are not a fan base known for standing down. They are, as McNutt herself acknowledged, one of the most relentlessly organized communities on the internet, a constituency capable of transforming a hot-mic quip before a basketball game into a days-long debate about who holds the authority to question someone’s fandom and who bears the consequences for doing so.
Brunson, for his part, seemed to understand that the person who needed defending in this situation was not the woman who had been courtside at Madison Square Garden.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.