Six-time Emmy winner Hank Azaria joined the chorus of critics who took issue with Taylor Swift sitting courtside at Madison Square Garden during Game 4 of the 2026 NBA Finals.
“I’ll tell you the one that bothered me was Taylor Swift. Come on,” Azaria, 62, said on the Thursday, June 11, broadcast of The Dan Le Batard Show. “I know she’s the hugest thing in the world, but we had to sit with her all through the NFL and now she’s at the Garden. Come on.”
Swift and her friends, Alana and Este Haim, took up four courtside seats for Game 4, which Azaria called “ridiculous.”
“Not that I question why she’d get the seat. I’m just tired of the whole Taylor Swift…” Azaria said, before getting cut off.
Azaria — best known for his voice work on The Simpsons and TV shows like Huff and Ray Donovan — said he had been attending Knicks games at the Garden since 1970 and gave an interesting peek into how celebrities find out they’ve been given free tickets to games.
“You don’t know from the Garden if you’re going to get in until that day,” he said. “If you’re Ben Stiller or Tracy Morgan, you know. I think Spike [Lee] actually pays for his tickets. So they don’t let you know until day-of because there’s such high demand. For Game 3 [of the NBA Finals], I didn’t make the cut. I decided I’m going to buy tickets for Game 4, which will be outrageously expensive. And then if the Knicks get me in, then I’ll sell those tickets on StubHub because they weren’t hard to sell.”
Azaria lucked out and received two tickets for Game 4, but ran into issues on the secondary market when trying to offload the tickets he had purchased.
“I find out that I’m in and I try to sell the tickets on StubHub, but for some reason they’re not going for the same price anymore,” he explained. “Maybe because the Knicks lost Game 3. I don’t know what it is. They’re very good seats. I’m holding them, holding them, holding them and I’m like, ‘You know, the Garden tickets they got us are free. I got two friends who are such big Knicks fans that we watch all the games together [with], let me just have them come and watch the game and they’ll sit in the other seats. It’s a very extravagant gift, but what the heck, right?”
Once inside the Garden, however, Azaria quickly realized his gesture backfired as he realized where his comped tickets were located.
“I know I’m not courtside, but I think they’ve gotten me good seats,” he continued, “But we’re way up in what they call the Cisco Suites, which are like the ceiling. But in this suite is me, Questlove, Rainn Wilson, Ed Burns and Christy Turlington, Jeremy Strong. Aaron Judge is right there. There’s so many folks that want in that they’ve stuck us all up in the rafters.”
Azaria continued, “My friends now are sitting in great seats now that I bought and I can’t switch with them.”
Despite watching the game from the boonies, Azaria was able to witness first-hand the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history as the Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs, 107-106.
“It’s cliche at this point to describe the pandemonium in there, but it was nuts, Azaria said, adding, “When they were making this strange, gradual, kind of limpy comeback all through the second half of the game, I was too nervous to commit to the reality that it might be happening to yell out loud about it. I just kind of stood there with my hands on my head with my mouth agape not wanting to breathe too much.”
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