BOSTON — Knicks forward Josh Hart said he and podcast co-host Jalen Brunson did not have much involvement in the decision to allow Polymarket, a peer-to-peer trading app many consider to be a form of gambling, to sponsor The Roommates Show.
“To be honest, we really don’t have much of a say in terms of a lot of the sales and who they reach out to,” Hart said in the visitors’ locker room at the TD Garden on Friday. “I don’t wanna say we know nothing, but we don’t know much about all that stuff.
“I know they sit there and talk about, it’s trading; it’s not gambling.”
A sizable contingent of Knicks fans on social media were up in arms when The Roommates Show formally announced its season-long partnership with Polymarket on Wednesday. Hart said he was surprised by the uproar and said he might be naive for not understanding why people felt offended.
“Last year, we had BetMGM. I don’t really know too much around the controversy of it or whatever,” Hart said on Friday. “I saw some things on Twitter, and I was just like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know people felt that way.’
“I saw a little bit of it the last couple days, and I was shocked — and it might be a little ignorance on my part because I don’t know, but yeah.”
Hart suggested he was incentivized to give the OK so the podcast staff and producers could get a check.
“When it’s the pod and that, I kind of play ball a little bit because there’s other people depending on that,” he said. “So it gets brought to us at the very end and for me personally, I’m just like other people are depending on this. So I play ball with that.”
The deal with Polymarket is set to last the 2026-27 NBA season.