Talk About an Awkward Seating Chart: Taylor Swift and Scooter Braun Sat Rows Apart at the NBA Finals
Rumors are swirling that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will use Madison Square Garden to host their upcoming wedding. For now, though, the arena is playing host to a slew of celebrities interested in basketball. The New York Knicks’ historic championship run is drawing all sorts of famous faces to Midtown Manhattan. Taylor Swift was one of them; her archnemesis, Scooter Braun, was another. While the Garden is a pretty massive arena, the celebrities on hand for Game 4 were concentrated in a very small area, making for a few awkward shots with both Braun and Swift in the same photo.
Scooter Braun and Taylor Swift were sitting just rows apart at the NBA Finals
Talk about an awkward seating chart. During Game 4 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night, Taylor Swift and Scooter Braun, two of the central figures in one of music’s most bitter public feuds, ended up just a few rows apart, and you could feel the tension through the TV screen.
Swift was seated courtside with Este and Alana Haim, and Mariska Hargitay. Her prime seating was befitting pop’s reigning queen. A few rows back sat Scooter Braun. The 44-year-old music producer and his partner, Sydney Sweeney, were seated behind a barricade just off the main floor. Their seats were good, but not nearly as good as Swift’s.
Braun and Swift being spotted near each other is making headlines because they’ve worked so hard to actively avoid each other. It might be one of just a few times they’ve been physically in the same space since their feud kicked off. Their appearance at the same event is headline news, but the actual story is pretty anticlimactic. Though they were seated within throwing distance of each other, no words were exchanged between them, it seems. In fact, Braun and Swift acted as if the other didn’t exist. Still, we imagine things were a bit awkward.
Wait, why are they feuding again?
Taylor Swift and Scooter Braun’s longstanding feud is one of the most intense in the music industry. It all went public in 2019. That year, Braun’s company acquired Swift’s former label, Big Machine, gaining control of the master recordings for her first six albums in a deal reportedly worth around $330 million. Swift publicly objected to the sale, heartbroken that Braun, whom she said had bullied her through his clients for years, now owned her music.
In an act of defiance, Swift re-recorded several of her early albums as “Taylor’s Version” releases, encouraging her fans to stream her new offerings instead of the originals owned by Braun. She also began setting cash aside to buy back her master recordings. The purchase was finalized in 2025, the same year she announced her engagement to Travis Kelce.
Braun has long insisted there is no bad blood on his end of things. During a chat on the Second Thought podcast, Braun contended that he did not have an ongoing feud with Swift and that he didn’t even know her. He claims to have only spoken to her once, briefly, years earlier. Still, fans think the look on his face at the NBA Finals tells a different story.
