{"id":760709,"date":"2026-07-13T16:58:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T16:58:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/760709\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T16:58:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T16:58:15","slug":"josh-hart-talks-nba-finals-fifa-world-cup-wine-obsession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/760709\/","title":{"rendered":"Josh Hart Talks NBA Finals, FIFA World Cup & Wine Obsession"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\"JoshSHIRT: Dsquared2
TROUSERS: ISAIA
JEWELRY: London Jewelers and Josh\u2019s personal collection<\/p>\n

Photo Credit: Ben Draper <\/p>\n

STORY LAURA SCHREFFLER<\/p>\n

PHOTOGRAPHY BEN DRAPER <\/p>\n

STYLING ERIN MCSHERRY<\/p>\n

GROOMING VALISSA YOE<\/p>\n

SHOT ON LOCATION IN NEW YORK<\/p>\n

\"JoshSHIRT: Dsquared2
BLAZER & TROUSERS: ISAIA
JEWELRY: London Jewelers and Josh\u2019s personal collection<\/p>\n

Photo Credit: Ben Draper<\/p>\n

The only thing Josh Hart loves more than Chelsea is watching Arsenal lose.<\/p>\n

Not glancing at a score. Not half-listening to a broadcast somewhere in the periphery. Actively, unapologetically, spiritually invested in Arsenal\u2019s potential humiliation \u2014 tracking every minute of the UEFA Champions League final the way a man watches a rival get exactly what\u2019s coming to him. He\u2019s muttering \u201cplease, please\u201d at the screen, half in the interview and half somewhere over north London, and for a moment it feels less like a conversation than eavesdropping on someone\u2019s private ritual. His team, the New York Knicks, are in their first Finals since 1999 (and will go on to win their first championship since 1973, against the San Antonio Spurs). New York is currently losing its collective mind.\u00a0 And Josh Hart \u2014 FIFA World Cup ambassador, franchise cornerstone, the man who just helped end a quarter-century of misery \u2014 is very focused on Arsenal not just being defeated, but being destroyed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t have a dog in the race,\u201d he finally admits, not very sheepishly about it. \u201cI\u2019m just hate-watching because I don\u2019t want Arsenal to win.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is a Chelsea man. Has been for years. It started, the way most football obsessions start in America, sideways \u2014 following an England tournament run, stumbling into John Terry and Frank Lampard, and then falling through a door that never quite closed again. \u201cNo. Full-on obsession,\u201d he says when I ask whether his Chelsea support is casual. He means it the way people mean things when they\u2019ve already proved it beyond any reasonable doubt \u2014 Chelsea, Washington Commanders, New York Yankees, none of it performative, none of it content. \u201cI\u2019m all in on the things I like,\u201d he says, his attention drifting briefly back toward the screen. \u201cEspecially my sports teams.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not a man who does anything by halves. He will tell you this himself, unprompted, with no apparent self-consciousness about it.<\/p>\n

Which is, incidentally, the exact reason FIFA wanted him in the first place.<\/p>\n

\"JoshSHIRT: Dsquared2
BLAZER & TROUSERS: ISAIA
SHOES: Christian Louboutin
JEWELRY: London Jewelers and Josh\u2019s personal collection<\/p>\n

Photo Credit: Ben Draper<\/p>\n

Hart was named a 2026 World Cup ambassador, and the decision makes more sense the longer you talk to him. A lot of American athletes will perform enthusiasm for football when a camera\u2019s around \u2014 they know the marquee names, they\u2019ve seen the viral moments, and they can hold a conversation long enough for a photo op. Hart knows that Chelsea had a miserable year marked by a manager change and player turnover that had him screaming at his timeline on match days. He watches live, always, because going on Twitter after missing a match is a form of punishment he has no interest in inflicting on himself. \u201cIf I go on Twitter and I miss the match, it\u2019s over,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m gonna know everything that happened in the first five tweets on my timeline. The good, the bad, and the ugly.\u201d This year has provided plenty of all three. \u201cIt definitely messes the mood up for a while,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019re just like, bro \u2014 what is my club doing?\u201d<\/p>\n

But to understand Hart\u2019s singular focus in this moment, you have to go back to when it all started. \u201cI think it was the 2012 World Cup,\u201d he says. \u201cI was just kind of supporting England, and obviously John Terry and Frank Lampard were huge on that squad. I just kind of followed them along to Chelsea, and that just kind of grew my love of Chelsea.\u201d He pauses. Something happens on screen. \u201cCome on. Come on. Put it in the back of the net.\u201d<\/p>\n

He understands that for much of the planet, football isn\u2019t entertainment \u2014 it\u2019s the architecture of identity. \u201cIt\u2019s a lifestyle,\u201d he says. \u201cEverything revolves around it.\u201d He describes match days near Stamford Bridge the way someone describes a place they have been, not a place they\u2019ve imagined \u2014 shops closed, the whole neighborhood funneling toward the ground, everything organized around a single ninety minutes. He represented Team USA at the 2023 FIBA Basketball World Cup, played Spain in M\u00e1laga with the noise crashing down from every tier, and came home understanding international competition in a way that most American athletes never quite access. He led Team USA in rebounding, averaged 5.3 per game, and filed away what it felt like to play in front of a country rather than a city. \u201cIt\u2019s totally different,\u201d he says. \u201cObviously for basketball, we\u2019re the US \u2014 we\u2019re the top dogs. So everybody wants to play you, everybody wants that miracle story. It\u2019s not quite like that for us.\u201d He pauses. \u201cBut I get a little bit more appreciation for the culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now that energy is coming to American soil, and Hart has thoughts about why it hasn\u2019t arrived sooner. He lives in Miami in the off-season and has watched Messi\u2019s presence at Inter Miami CF move the needle locally without yet translating nationally \u2014 and he has a theory about why. \u201cThey got a contract distribution with Apple TV, and I think that kind of went to the highest bidder,\u201d he says. \u201cIf it went with something like ESPN, the reach is more.\u201d The World Cup, he believes, is the correction. Not just exposure \u2014 conversion. \u201cThese younger kids are going to see the passion, the love, the excitement \u2014 everything around it,\u201d he says. \u201cI hope this World Cup changes the way Americans look at football. So we can really build and be known in ten, fifteen years as a football power \u2014 and not just, okay, cool, they\u2019re here.\u201d He grins. \u201cThey\u2019re going to get a glimpse of what true diehard supporters look like.\u201d<\/p>\n

His NBA teammates are already a preview of that. Jeremy Sohan is a die-hard Arsenal supporter. There are Frenchmen in the locker room \u2014 Pacome Diawara among them \u2014 who are, at this very moment, watching the Champions League final together somewhere in the city. Hart made a unilateral decision not to join them. \u201cIf I\u2019m playing someone, I don\u2019t want to watch the game with them,\u201d he says. \u201cEspecially if we lose \u2014 I don\u2019t want to see you celebrating in my face.\u201d The locker room banter around football gets, as he puts it, \u201cfun, but definitely competitive\u201d \u2014 a line that applies pretty accurately to most things involving Josh Hart. He is watching alone. Hate-watching, specifically. Perfectly content.<\/p>\n

\"JoshTOP: Herm\u00e8s
PANT: Rag & Bone
SHOES: Christian Louboutin
JEWELRY: London Jewelers and Josh\u2019s personal collection<\/p>\n

Photo Credit: Ben Draper<\/p>\n

\"JoshTOP: Herm\u00e8s
PANT: Rag & Bone
SHOES: Christian Louboutin
JEWELRY: London Jewelers and Josh\u2019s personal collection<\/p>\n

Photo Credit: Ben Draper<\/p>\n

\u201cI always look at myself as just a regular person,\u201d he says. \u201cI just happen to hoop.\u201d It is, of all the things he says today, perhaps the most revealing \u2014 because it explains everything about how a professional athlete maintains the full emotional infrastructure of a civilian sports fan, complete with ruined afternoons and Twitter-induced existential spirals about his club\u2019s transfer strategy. He never separated himself from fandom. He just added a job on top of it.<\/p>\n

That job, in the current moment, happens to be extraordinary. At the time of our conversation, the Knicks just secured their first NBA Finals berth since 1999 \u2014 a quarter-century of frustration, false starts, and heartbreak finally giving way to a truly momentous win. Hart arrived from Portland in 2023, walked into this particular crucible and didn\u2019t just survive it. He became its embodiment. The player who chases every loose ball, who finished the season averaging 37.6 minutes per game (the NBA\u2019s leader, per the minutes award he took home this year), who logged 9.6 rebounds and 5.9 assists and set a franchise record with nine triple-doubles and made all of it look like sheer will dressed up in basketball clothes. On March 8, he pulled down 20 rebounds against the Clippers \u2014 a career high, filed apparently under routine.<\/p>\n

Born Joshua Aaron Hart on March 6, 1995, he came up at Villanova, where the r\u00e9sum\u00e9 is almost absurdly decorated: Big East Tournament Most Outstanding Player as a sophomore, national champion in 2016, and consensus First-Team All-American senior. He was selected 30th overall in the 2017 Draft \u2014 last pick of the first round, by Utah \u2014 before landing with the Lakers, then moving to New Orleans, then Portland, then finally New York. Each stop refined the same thing: a player built entirely around doing whatever the team needed, at whatever cost, however unglamorous. The Knicks looked at what that journey had produced and decided it was exactly what they were missing.<\/p>\n

They were right.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got coached up on that toughness,\u201d he says when I ask whether the hustle is nature or nurture. \u201cMy dad, coach Keith Stevens, my travel team coach \u2014 those guys really helped groom that competitiveness.\u201d But the part that tends to get lost in the hustle narrative is that Hart genuinely enjoys it. \u201cOnce I\u2019m on the court, I feel like I\u2019m just a little kid,\u201d he says. \u201cI just go out there and play the game the way I know how, and have fun the way I know how. That\u2019s all that really matters.\u201d He has never, not once, lost sight of what the job actually is. \u201cI\u2019m blessed to be in a position where my profession is playing a game for a living, and I get compensated well, and I can put my family in good positions I didn\u2019t think were possible,\u201d he says. \u201cI never try to lose that perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet \u2014 even now, at the center of the most significant moment in New York basketball in a generation \u2014 Hart refuses to let himself feel it.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d he says flatly when I ask whether he\u2019s been savoring the moment. \u201cJust more locked in.\u201d Before I can push back: \u201cOnce you allow yourself to relax even for a second, you get complacent. You don\u2019t have that edge, that chip on your shoulder.\u201d He says it without irony, without any apparent awareness that this is a man who plays 37-plus minutes a night and still finds time to hate-watch Arsenal. \u201cAfter the season, no matter what happens, I\u2019ll have time to sit there and be like \u2014 okay, that was a run. That was dope.\u201d But not yet. Not while there\u2019s still something to win.<\/p>\n

\u201cA willingness to win,\u201d he says, \u201calso means a willingness to sacrifice.\u201d<\/p>\n

On screen, Paris Saint-Germain wins on penalties. Back-to-back Champions League titles. Arsenal\u2019s epic season ends in heartbreak.<\/p>\n

Josh Hart got exactly what he wanted.<\/p>\n

\"JoshTOP: Herm\u00e8s
PANT: Rag & Bone
JEWELRY: London Jewelers and Josh\u2019s personal collection<\/p>\n

Photo Credit: Ben Draper<\/p>\n

A few days before we spoke, Josh Hart walked into the press conference after the Knicks eliminated Oklahoma City carrying a bottle of 2008 Le Pin.<\/p>\n

Not a magnum of something bubbly someone handed him in the tunnel. Not a sponsor product placed for the cameras. A bottle of Le Pin \u2014 one of Bordeaux\u2019s great cult wines, a Pomerol produced in such small quantities that bottles go for thousands at auction, the kind of wine you drink when something genuinely worth drinking it for has happened \u2014 that Hart had personally arranged to have brought in, in advance, because he had decided that if they won, the moment deserved something real.<\/p>\n

They won. He sat down. He poured a glass. The internet briefly went insane.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah,\u201d he says with a laugh that suggests he still finds the reaction a little baffling. \u201cI had a friend bring it. I was like, if we win, I gotta have something good.\u201d<\/p>\n

To outsiders, it read as a flex. To Hart, it was completely normal \u2014 because wine has become far more than a hobby. It is a passion, an education, a ritual, a refuge. He was already deep into Bordeaux when we first spoke, already moving past entry-level reverence for famous labels into something more considered and genuinely knowledgeable. That was then. Now he\u2019s planning a trip to Bordeaux this summer specifically to visit Mouton Rothschild, Ch\u00e2teau P\u00e9trus, and a handful of others he\u2019s been quietly working toward \u2014 and simultaneously falling hard for Italian producers most casual wine drinkers have never encountered. \u201cRight now I\u2019m loving a lot of Italians \u2014 Quintarelli, from Veneto, Amarone, stuff like that,\u201d he says. \u201cAs you go along and learn about wine more, you start to have more appreciation. And you start to learn about some of these wines that are amazing that aren\u2019t mainstream.\u201d He\u2019s planning the Veneto trip too, eventually. Shannon, his wife, is a willing travel companion up to a point \u2014 \u201cafter we go to a couple of wineries a day for three days, she\u2019s like, all right, I\u2019m done\u201d \u2014 but he\u2019ll get there. He always gets there.<\/p>\n

\"JoshTOP: Lacoste
PANTS: Todd Snyder
SHOES: Christian Louboutin
JEWELRY: London Jewelers and Josh\u2019s personal collection<\/p>\n

Photo Credit: Ben Draper<\/p>\n

\"JoshTOP: Lacoste
PANTS: Todd Snyder
SHOES: Christian Louboutin
JEWELRY: London Jewelers and Josh\u2019s personal collection<\/p>\n

Photo Credit: Ben Draper<\/p>\n

\u201cThe coolest thing about wine is there\u2019s always more to learn,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can never know too much. And you can consistently learn about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says this the way someone says a thing they have genuinely thought about \u2014 not as a charming quote for a magazine profile, but as an actual belief that has organized the way he approaches an entire corner of his life. It tracks. Hart is constitutionally incapable of caring about something at half-measure. When something earns his attention, it gets all of it. And wine, it turns out, is bottomless in the way that suits him perfectly: the more you understand, the more interesting it becomes, and there is always, always more to understand. Going to wineries is part of it \u2014 not as a social occasion but as research, as education. \u201cIt\u2019s peaceful,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s totally opposite from the court \u2014 it\u2019s not chaotic. It\u2019s calm, it\u2019s quiet, and you get to see the beauty of it. And kind of just slow down and not be going a hundred miles an hour.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s become, whether he invited the title or not, the wine guy in the Knicks locker room. His teammates don\u2019t pretend to know what he knows \u2014 \u201cthey don\u2019t try to stunt like they know,\u201d he says, with what sounds like genuine respect for their honesty \u2014 and instead ask questions. What\u2019s Amarone? Where\u2019s it from? How do they make it? How much does it cost? \u201cI think they\u2019re starting to grow more of an appreciation,\u201d he says. He\u2019s become, in other words, a one-man conversion program. There are worse things to be.<\/p>\n

The most revealing moment in our conversation arrives when he describes cleaning his wine glasses. Not drinking from them. Cleaning them \u2014 his prized Josephine stemware, which gets steam and careful polish and unhurried inspection, not because anyone is watching but because the glasses deserve it. (The Josephines run about $90 a stem, a fact he discovered the hard way. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how many glasses I broke,\u201d he says. \u201cI was just like, damn, I\u2019m wasting all this money.\u201d) His 23-year-old self would not have recognized the scene. \u201cI couldn\u2019t see my 23-year-old self doing that,\u201d he says. \u201cHe probably would have looked at me like, yo, what the heck?\u201d<\/p>\n

Now he finds it necessary. Therapeutic. He catalogs his cellar the same way \u2014 pulling bottles, checking what he has, deciding where to put things, moving slowly and deliberately through a space that demands exactly that. \u201cIt\u2019s like my second form of peace,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can\u2019t be mad while you\u2019re doing it because you\u2019re going to break it.\u201d It is an odd thing to say, and also a perfect thing to say \u2014 because Hart\u2019s game has always been controlled chaos, and off the court he has quietly built a life organized around its opposite. The controlled chaos of basketball has taught him to crave quiet, deliberation, and things that cannot be rushed.<\/p>\n

He and Shannon have twin sons, Haze and Hendrix, who turned three in May. Fatherhood has done what fatherhood reliably does to people who take it seriously: reorganized the hierarchy, sharpened the priorities, and made the moments matter more. \u201cYou want to have as much time with them as you can, especially when they\u2019re small,\u201d he says. It has also reshaped his understanding of luxury in ways that a younger version of himself \u2014 the one who measured luxury by price tags and brand recognition \u2014 would find almost unrecognizable.<\/p>\n

\"JoshTOP: Corridor available at Saks Fifth Avenue
PANT: Herm\u00e8s
SHOES: Christian Louboutin
JEWELRY: London Jewelers and Josh\u2019s personal collection<\/p>\n

Photo Credit: Ben Draper<\/p>\n

\u201cGrowing up, especially getting money for the first time, you go after name brand things,\u201d he says. \u201cYou see guys with outfits that are just trash, but they\u2019re like, yo, I got a Balenciaga t-shirt, I got Amiri jeans, Dolce Gabbana \u2014 and they\u2019re naming their brands. And it\u2019s like, that\u2019s not it.\u201d He pauses. \u201cNow, luxury is just what brings me joy and what I like. It\u2019s not about names anymore.\u201d He wears Rothy\u2019s daily. UGG slippers around the house. Things that make him feel good rather than things that signal something to other people. \u201cPeople aren\u2019t going to look at that like, oh, that\u2019s so cool,\u201d he says. \u201cBut it\u2019s comfortable. It makes me feel good. That\u2019s more so what luxury is now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is, in the end, what the Le Pin was really about. Not the price. Not the label. Not the social media moment that followed. Hart had thought about what winning meant, had decided it deserved a specific quality of attention, and had made arrangements accordingly \u2014 before the game was played, before the outcome was known, because that is how he operates. He goes all in on the things he loves: Chelsea, the Knicks, and a bottle hidden away for exactly the right moment. But he goes all in deliberately, with judgment, with the understanding that the things worth committing to require a certain quality of presence.<\/p>\n

As we speak, he is heading to the NBA Finals. It is the team\u2019s first time since 1999. The city is holding its breath, and Hart is locked in, which means he won\u2019t let himself feel it yet \u2014 won\u2019t allow the satisfaction to arrive before it\u2019s fully earned. But he sees the future, and he knows that somewhere, there is a very good bottle with his name on it, already arranged, already waiting. He\u2019s been thinking about the moment since before the Oklahoma City series started. He knows what it will taste like. He knows where he\u2019ll drink it. He knows who will be there.<\/p>\n

He\u2019ll know when.<\/p>\n

\"JoshTOP: Herm\u00e8s
JEWELRY: London Jewelers
and Josh\u2019s personal collection<\/p>\n

Photo Credit: Ben Draper<\/p>\n

Looking for accommodations, ground transportation, or a curated travel experience? Haute Black, our luxury travel division, can handle every detail. Contact [email\u00a0protected]<\/a> or visit www.hauteblack.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SHIRT: Dsquared2TROUSERS: ISAIAJEWELRY: London Jewelers and Josh\u2019s personal collection Photo Credit: Ben Draper STORY LAURA SCHREFFLER PHOTOGRAPHY BEN…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":760710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[325639,325640,463,325641,65961,325642,325643,1216,85047,325644,325645,122828,325646,399,325647,325648,325649,325650,61628,325651,325652,13407,325653,355,294545,325654,2005,325655,361,1088,325656,325657,403,325658,99,63698,53659,3289],"class_list":["post-760709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-amarone","tag-amarone-malaga","tag-arsenal","tag-arsenal-bordeaux","tag-bordeaux","tag-champions-league-2026","tag-chateau-montrose-veneto","tag-chelsea-fc","tag-cover-story","tag-england-chelsea-fc","tag-fiba-world-cup-2023","tag-fifa-world-cup-2026","tag-florida-harts-off-season-base-villanova","tag-football","tag-france-le-pin","tag-haute-living","tag-hungary-champions-league-final-location-london","tag-italy-quintarelli","tag-josh-hart","tag-laura-schreffler","tag-le-pin","tag-luxury","tag-mouton-rothschild","tag-nba","tag-nba-finals-2026","tag-nba-finals-budapest","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-primary-knicks","tag-new-york-knicks","tag-paris-saint-germain","tag-pennsylvania-college-career","tag-quintarelli","tag-soccer","tag-spain-2023-fiba-world-cup-miami","tag-sports","tag-stamford-bridge","tag-villanova-wildcats","tag-wine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=760709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/760710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=760709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=760709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=760709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}