Sadat stood near a vendor cart outside Madison Square Garden at 3 p.m. on Wednesday as several New Yorkers burned copal and sage to “cleanse the air” before Game 4 — and he did not mince words about the other change that has him worried: the perimeter. Sadat said the barricades "absolutely" hurt business for both independent sellers and brick-and-mortar shops.
The cleansing was led in part by a woman who shouted, "We’re saging the Madison!" as smoke curled into the late-afternoon sky. Fans told reporters they were trying to scrub a recent, unwanted feeling from the arena after Monday night, when President Donald Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to attend the NBA Finals and thousands of fans booed him on the Jumbotron during the National Anthem.
Some of those who burned sage pointed at that visit as the source of the club’s bad fortune. "We had really bad energy in this space on Monday. MAGA Mussolini was here — and we gotta get rid of that energy!" the same woman said. Others made the link explicit and comic: "He’s a curse to every team that he picks," Avery said. "He picked the Chiefs to win. They lost. He went to a Mets game. They lost. He went to the Knicks game, picked them to win. We lost."
The sequence on Monday included videos circulating online that appeared to show Trump dozing off while seated next to Knicks owner James Dolan and his granddaughter, Kai Trump — a line of footage that drew a sharp denial from a White House spokesperson, who said, "Anyone ridiculously claiming the President was asleep is either lying or has severe brain damage."
The atmosphere outside MSG has been reshaped before: Games 1 and 2 featured a sprawling 12-block barrier, enforced by hundreds of NYPD officers and security personnel, that blocked entry to anyone without a game ticket or business specific to the area. That heavy perimeter is the practical change Sadat and other vendors pointed to when they spoke about sales and foot traffic this week.
Inside that secured zone on Wednesday, a DJ stood near a modest crowd; one hip-hop artist operating a DJ stand inside the perimeter said young fans were looking to be part of something bigger. Still, the immediate echo of Monday — boos, debate and the odd internet clip — pushed some fans toward ritual. The saging was small and local, an attempt by bystanders to change the tone they blamed for Game 3, the Knicks’ first loss after a 2-0 start to the series.
Complicating the picture: Madison Square Garden had requested a permit for a watch party of 500 to 999 fans, and the city approved a permit for 999 people. Mayor Zohran Mamdani then wrote on X, "Mr. Dolan has now decided to cancel the watch party," and added, "I know this is breaking hearts across our city, but if there’s one thing Knicks fans don’t need permission for, it’s showing up for our team wherever we may be — no matter the block or the borough. Knicks in five." The watch-party approval and the owner’s cancellation sit alongside the barricades as immediate facts — but they do not neatly explain one another.
That gap is the story’s friction: fans blamed a presidential visit for bad energy and pointed to heightened security and a canceled watch party, yet the city had explicitly approved a 999-person gathering before the owner withdrew it. The reporting on the sidewalk captured both belief and administrative fact — ritual and paperwork — and offered no direct line tying the perimeter, the permit and the president’s appearance into a single decision.
Game 4 was the next public moment. For vendors such as Sadat and for the small clusters of fans burning sage, the question most people wanted answered was not about chants or chants’ origins but about access and livelihoods: were those barriers and the sudden cancellation of a nearly thousand-person watch party a reaction to a presidential visit, or the product of separate security and venue decisions? That is the central unresolved question heading into the next tipoff, one that Knicks fans and neighborhood sellers alike will watch closely as the series moves on. For context on celebrity crowds and arenas earlier in the postseason, see how David Robinson drew fans at Frost Bank Center for Game 1 (
