Will Warriors Visit the White House? First, They Have to Be Invited

The Warriors celebrated their second N.B.A. championship in three years on Monday night, beating the Cavaliers in five games.

The confetti had hardly stopped falling before the speculation began about the next big move of the Golden State Warriors: Would they visit President Trump at the White House?

Coach Steve Kerr has been a vocal critic of the president, calling him “a blowhard,” and plenty of other N.B.A. players have expressed doubt as to whether they would attend a White House ceremony with Trump in office.

Soon after the Warriors clinched the N.B.A. championship with a Game 5 victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers in Oakland, Calif., on Monday night, unattributed reports surfaced on Twitter saying that the team had decided it would not go.

On Tuesday, the team said that no decisions had been made.

“We have not been invited to the White House,” Raymond Ridder, a team spokesman, said in an email. “Today is all about celebrating our championship. We will make those decisions when and if necessary.”

Championship teams visiting the White House for a quick ceremony and plenty of photographs is a tradition that stretches back decades. For N.B.A. teams, White House visits rarely happen immediately, but usually occur during the next season when the schedule takes them to Washington, or close to it. After the Warriors won the title in June 2015, they were honored at the White House in February 2016.

The Cavaliers, last year’s champions, visited President Barack Obama in November, during a road trip to play the Washington Wizards, two days after the election of Trump. There was already a sense that future visits would be fraught with political anxiety.

“Words cannot express the honor I feel being the last team to visit the White House tomorrow,” the Cleveland player Richard Jefferson wrote on Snapchat. His teammate LeBron James publicly supported Hillary Clinton for president in 2016.

When the New England Patriots visited the White House in April, 34 players attended, according to the team. Two years earlier, when Obama was president, about 50 players made the visit, the Patriots said.

The Clemson football team was honored at the White House on Monday for its national championship in January.

Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, anticipated the possibility of White House boycotts shortly after the election.

“To me, if a player were to choose not to go to the White House, whether they were choosing not to go to the current White House or a future White House, my response would be: That’s a lost opportunity,” Silver told The Undefeated. “Because that’s an opportunity that most citizens who have a political point of view would kill for — the opportunity to directly tell the president of the United States how they feel about an issue.”

For the Warriors, the decision to attend a White House ceremony, presuming the invitation comes, would appear to be most complex for Kerr. Kerr’s father, Malcolm, was president of the American University of Beirut when he was assassinated outside his office in 1984. A group calling itself Islamic Holy War claimed responsibility later that day. Courts later found that Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah was behind the killing.

Kerr has been critical of American foreign policy in the Middle East, and he called Trump’s proposed travel ban from several Muslim-majority countries “a horrible idea.”

“We’re really going against the principles of what our country’s about,” Kerr told reporters in January. “And creating fear, it’s the wrong way to go about it.”

Kerr, much like his mentor Gregg Popovich, coach of the San Antonio Spurs, has become a strong voice on social and political issues, especially over the past two years. Kerr used the opportunity to thank Obama for pushing for tighter gun control regulations.

Trump has been the target of some of his toughest criticism.

“The modern coach has to be much more communicative, flexible, aware, conscientious, all those things,” Kerr told Sports Illustrated this spring. “Frankly, I think it’s why Trump couldn’t be more ill-suited to be president, because he’s a blowhard.”