Actor and Knicks superfan Ben Stiller said he didn’t know much about Pat McAfee before Game 4 on Tuesday night.
He’s since become a bit more acquainted with what he’s all about after the ESPN personality dropped a WWE-style promo on Stiller, Timothée Chalamet and Spike Lee late in the Pacers’ win over the Knicks from inside Gainbridge Fieldhouse.
In the viral moment, McAfee called the trio “bigwigs from the big city” before naming each one of them to elicit boos.
He then told the Pacers fans to “send these sons of bitches back to New York with their ears ringing.”
Stiller, who has starred in hit movies like “Meet the Parents” and “Dodgeball” and served as the executive producer of “Severance,” discussed the whole thing during an appearance on SNY’s “The Putback with Ian Begley” on Wednesday morning.
The actor admitted to being “not familiar with his game” before asking if he had been a field goal kicker or a place kicker.
Begley informed Stiller that McAfee was a punter with the Colts and later added that he is also a color commentator for WWE’s “Monday Night Raw” in addition to hosting his popular sports talk show on the Worldwide Leader.
“I wasn’t aware of that,” Stiller said. “I did know that Timothée had been on his show. And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s your boy. That’s your guy.’ So when that happened, I was a little bit like, ‘Whoa.’ But the WWE aspect of it, I get it. It’s just not the way it happens in New York. He should come to the Garden for Game 5.”
The celeb then suggested that McAfee wouldn’t be booed if he had shown up in New York and would receive a cheer from the Madison Square Garden crowd.
Though it does seem unlikely after McAfee’s Game 4 attempt to hype up the crowd.
“They’ll put him up on the screen and they’ll show him punting the ball and everybody will give him a nice cheer,” Stiller said. “That’s how we do it in New York. But I get it, it was fun. He was just trying to get the crowd riled up. It was a little bit out of the blue. It’s also like, are we really doing the narrative of ‘Hicks versus Knicks’? Like the bigwigs from New York? It just seems a little cartoonish. But then again, it goes with the WWE.”
The “Hicks versus Knicks” narrative that Stiller was referring to was popularized during the battles between the Knicks and Pacers in the 1990s.
While the renewed rivalry between the Pacers has been plenty of fun on the court and inside the building, it has led to some darker moments outside the arenas.
Knicks fans were seen throwing trash at a Pacers fan following the Game 6 win in the second round over the Celtics, and a different Pacers supporter was charged with stabbing two Knicks fans at a brewery in Indiana during Game 2.