NBA fans savage Broadway icon's national anthem before finals Game 7 between Thunder and Pacers

Tony Award winner Kristin Chenoweth was slammed by NBA fans for her performance of the national anthem before Game 7 between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers.
Chenoweth, an Oklahoma native and passionate Thunder fan, took center stage live on ABC in the moments before tip off at the first Game 7 in the finals for nine years.
But her rendition of 'The Star-Spangled Banner', in which she delivered one particularly long high note, did not go down well.
It was described by one ABC viewer on social media as 'the worst national anthem I ever heard'.
Another viewer posted: 'Geeze these national anthem singers are getting worse every time'.
A third commented: 'I just witnessed another trashing of a national anthem.'
Other fans described it as 'horrible' and 'rough'.
Referring to the high note Chenoweth hit, one brutal fan posted: 'The end of that anthem made my dog uncomfortable'.
Chenoweth's Thunder fandom has been no secret since the franchise's early years, though she also has professed at times to liking the Los Angeles Lakers and New York Knicks as well.
That said, the Thunder are clearly her top choice - so much so that she once told the Tulsa World she spent three hours bedazzling a Thunder hat.
She went to Oklahoma City University after growing up in Broken Arrow, about 115 miles northeast of where the Thunder play. And her 8-year-old dog's name is Thunder. She even dressed the pup up once in a Thunder outfit.
'I never miss a game unless I'm on stage,' Chenoweth said. 'I was a cheerleader in high school in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and I loved football, but my favorite was basketball.
'I like how much of a team player you've got to be and this is my team.'
Chenoweth has sung the anthem at a few Thunder games in the past, sometimes alone and at least once with children from her Chenoweth Broadway Bootcamp.
That camp is part of the arts and education fund that she founded to cultivate 'young artistic expression by enriching children´s lives through the power of education, entertainment and experience.'
Chenoweth won a Tony Award in 1999 for best leading actress in a musical for her role in 'You´re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.'
She received two other Tony nominations for best leading actress in a musical, one in 2004 for playing Glinda in 'Wicked' - she lost to co-star Idina Menzel - and the other in 2015 for playing 1930s Hollywood diva Lily Garland in 'On the Twentieth Century.'
And in 2009, she won an Emmy for best supporting actress in a comedy series for her work on ABC's 'Pushing Daisies.' She returns to Broadway this fall, playing Jackie Siegel in 'The Queen of Versailles.'

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On another episode, she says, they discuss ageing and unrealistic beauty standards: 'I talk about my love for Botox when I'm not filming, because, you know, you need to make facial expressions when you're shooting.' She laughs. 'But, right now, there's not a ton I can do with my forehead. But the idea that someone would look at me and be, like: 'I should be capable of that forehead.' No, you shouldn't! I'm not better than you because I have no wrinkles there, I just paid to put chemicals in my face. Let's be real about this.' I always think it's quite an achievement for famous people to hang on to pre-fame friends, once acclaim and money start getting in the way. Is it important to have 'normal' friends? 'I don't walk the world and feel like a celebrity,' says Williams. 'I think I did in my 20s, shooting and living in New York. But that isn't how I feel dropping our son off at preschool; I feel like a person among people. 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'I'm grateful that my parents didn't cave and that I didn't make my way into this business any sooner than I did, because already, at 23, when Girls came out, that was a lot to process.' In a way, Williams had the reverse experience – her parent was famous. At a time before media was so fragmented, being an NBC news anchor meant Brian Williams reached millions of people. His reputation took a battering in 2015, when it was revealed he had embellished – mistakenly, he said – a story about being shot down in a helicopter while covering the Iraq war. He was suspended for six months and left NBC shortly after. What was that like to go through as a family? 'Anything that feels loud, like people are talking about you and all of that, is horrible,' says Williams. 'I think it's the underbelly of the media – it happens all the time, they eat their own. Everything just goes back to its fundamental priorities – family, friends, people who matter.' In the recent criticism of nepo babies, Williams has always been admirably upfront and unguarded about her advantages. 'Aside from all the many layers of privilege, high on the list is the fact that I could pursue a career in acting without being worried that I wasn't going to be able to feed myself. I had been surrounded by people who did what I wanted to do.' It didn't seem like an unreachable dream when Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, were family friends. When she was still at high school, she got a summer job as a production assistant on Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion and got to be around its starry ensemble cast, which included Meryl Streep. 'Having had that experience gives you a leg-up when finally it's your turn and you have to know how to be on a set and how it all works.' Gratitude seems to be a defining theme in Williams' life. She is happy she is not starting out now. There was huge hype around Girls during its six-year run, which ended in 2017, but she can't imagine what that would be like with social media now. (Williams came off Instagram in 2020 – a time, she felt, when the platform was becoming more cynical and toxic.) It was, she says, as if there were 'a gazillion think pieces about every episode that we did – and most thought we all took ourselves too seriously. We were all pretty privileged people who were the leads of this HBO show that was definitely skewering our own, but we weren't given credit for that, or for being in on it.' Some of the criticism was valid – it was set in New York, yet was overwhelmingly white – but much of it was misogynistic and more. 'The shame is that, when it is coupled with misogyny and fatphobia and everything, the valid criticism gets lost.' Some of the coverage was so mean, she says with a laugh, especially on Gawker, which didn't describe the lead characters by their names, but as the daughters of the famous parent each actor had. 'We were easy targets, I get it.' For a while, Williams struggled with people assuming she was inseparable from her character, Marnie, a narcissist verging on sociopathy. 'I really desired to put distance between us, because I thought that was the kind of acting everybody respected – like, I'm wearing a prosthetic nose and I gained 40lbs, or whatever. And here [our characters] were, who looked basically like we looked and sounded like we sounded, but crucially said and did things that we would never do. It always felt weird that, since we didn't transform ourselves in some way, people weren't buying us playing characters.' Mostly though, she says, it was an amazing experience. Will there be a reunion? 'I would love it,' says Williams. 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