Dave D'Alessandro of the Sporting News does this pretty good, a Q and A with himself about the Knicks. He actually manages to make ALL things Knicks sound worst than you ever thought...and in a funny way.
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Knicks: The Evil Empire
By Dave D'Alessandro - SportingNews
There won't be any postseason awards for these teams. They're the worst of the worst. Their futures read something like this: coaching changes, personnel overhauls and fan unrest. Repeat based on level of ineptitude.
In this week's magazine cover story, Sporting News examines how four franchises ended up in their current mess.
I've been having a long talk with myself about the Knicks lately, and there's nothing you can do about it because I've had some of the best doctors in the East ...
Q: Wait a sec. They're not all that bad this year ... why are we including the Knicks in this pantheon of losers?
A: Well, let's look at the numbers. In 2001-02, they had an NBA-record payroll of $85.2 million -- double the cap of $42.5 million -- and won 30 games. In 2002-03, they had a payroll of $92.4 million and won 37 games. In 2003-04, they had a payroll of $94 mil and won 39 games. In 2004-05, they had a payroll of $103 mil and won 33 games. In 2005-06, they had a payroll of $125 million (more than Phoenix's and Miami's combined) and won 23 games -- and they paid their new coach $28 million just to go away after butchering their rebuilding "plan."
Q: So what's your point?
A: The point is, bad management always rips off the paying customer seated courtside or watching at home because that's how companies compensate when profit erodes. Cablevision, whose chairman is viperlike plutocrat James Dolan, owns the team, and the company's stock went from about $80 a share in the late 1990s to $10 a share a few years ago. Guess who paid the price? Subscribers, of course. Or consider the saps who've forked over as much as $2,500 per night over the past five years for a front-row seat. So, you ask why the Knicks are included in this salute to sports management folly? These guys have more than a half-decade of bad karma to burn off before we acknowledge that they're "not all that bad."
Q: But they've always overpaid guys. That's just endemic to the larger markets, isn't it?
A: Uh, if you're going to overpay in the NBA -- more than double the salary cap, in this case -- you had damn well better have a good team. Being over the cap constricts flexibility, and the only way to upgrade the roster is by taking on more bad contracts along with players you actually need. And sometimes, the spending is just senseless. Take Allan Houston: When general manager Scott Layden gave him $100 million in the summer of 2001, he was bidding against himself; no other team could have offered Houston more than $71 million. Houston was used up by the middle of 2003-04, and the Knicks still owed him $58 million over the next three years. This is the kind of astute foresight that defines this franchise.
Q: So it's all Layden's fault?
A: He had help. Things started going downhill in September 2000, when Garden prez Dave Checketts and coach Jeff Van Gundy prodded Layden into trading an unhappy Patrick Ewing. In return, the Knicks got Glen Rice, Travis Knight and Luc Longley, whose contracts totaled almost $80 million. If they had just let Ewing play out his final season, his $14 million could have been lifted off the cap, and they'd have been able to rebuild the right way. Instead, the explosion began, and it always followed the same stupid pattern, like trading Rice's $36 million deal and getting back Shandon Anderson ($42M) and Howard Eisley ($41M).
Q: Where was Dolan in all this?
A: Writing checks. Sometimes he wrote them just for the hell of it, such as the time he gave Don Chaney an extension when the team had an 11-27 record.
Q: And then Dolan hired Isiah Thomas.
A: Funny thing about that: The day he was hired, Thomas said, "I can't think of an organization that has been saddled with this kind of debt structure." He actually has made Layden look thrifty.
Q: But Isiah made some good moves.
A: In truth, the first big move he made -- two weeks after taking over -- set the franchise back years. The eight-player trade for Stephon Marbury in January '04 was audacious on an executive level, an economic level, a political level -- and pure hubris. He overreached, but that's the nature of the game when you're talking about audacity and hubris: Zeke tried to rebuild on the fly, and you know how that worked out. Everyone but Thomas knew Marbury was an All-Star talent with a 10-cent head whom nobody ever liked playing with.
Q: But Isiah gave the team some panache.
A: Right, a few days into the job, he went on Letterman and yukked it up about Chaney's job status. Then he fired Chaney not long after. Class move, that was.
Q: Surely, there's something Isiah has done that has had a positive long-term effect.
A: Sure. In Phoenix. Bryan Colangelo was able to dump millions from his payroll thanks to Zeke's Marbury-Penny Hardaway gambit. The Suns got under the cap in the summer of 2004, they used that space to jump all over Steve Nash, and the rest is history.
Q: What about the other investments Thomas has made?
A: Our personal fave was giving $30 million over five years to Jerome James, a genial oaf who never has been in shape in his life -- hence the nickname Big Snacks. Since getting his stocking stuffed in the summer of '05, James has collected 113 rebounds in 512 minutes of work.
Q: But at least it's never dull in NYC.
A: Actually, it has become the place to leave. In February '04, with Cablevision tanking, Madison Square Garden laid off 80 employees. Since Zeke has taken over, he personally has run off three head coaches, Willis Reed, Marv Albert, a senior VP who sued Isiah for sexual harassment, a P.R. director, a dozen middle-management types and the dance team founder.
Q: That's not good.
A: Most of them refer to MSG as the Evil Empire.
Q: So it's a dysfunctional place, you're saying?
A: Every day, at least since Dolan fired Checketts in May 2001 and took over the Garden himself. Probably our favorite moment was in October 2002. That's when Latrell Sprewell filed a $40 million libel suit against the New York Post for reporting he had broken his hand during a fight aboard his yacht. Never mind that the source of that story probably was some online chat yahoo. The funny part was that the owner of the Post, Rupert Murdoch, had a 40 percent stake in Cablevision -- the company that owns MSG and its subsidiaries. Which means: Spree actually was suing his own employer. And: Doh
Q: Speaking of the media, where were they in all this?
A: It took about two years, but Zeke had everybody buffaloed for a while. After the Marbury deal, one national magazine -- not this one -- posed this question on its cover: "Can Steph and Isiah save the East?" By then, the Knicks were in so deep that making the playoffs with 39 wins in '04 (they were swept) started to look like a turnaround. But while the media were buying it, every G.M. in the league was laughing his head off.
Q: So how's it going this year?
A: Put it this way: The highlight of the Garden season has been a brawl, which began with a coach sending out a thug to rough up an opponent because said coach hasn't a clue about losing with class.
Q: Whoa, that's a little harsh.
A: Well, the season has been a farce. And we never even covered the Larry Brown fiasco, or the idiotic trades for Steve Francis and Jalen Rose, which many believe were Brown's attempts to set up Thomas as the fall guy. Actually, Thomas should have been whacked for persuading Dolan to throw $50 million at Brown in the first place.
Q: Then how much longer will the team stink?
A: The Knicks have a few things going for them. First, Zeke isn't nearly as bad a coach as some make him out to be -- just as he did with Indiana's kids, he has turned Eddy Curry into a player. Second, Thomas is a first-rate judge of college talent, as his draft record shows. But it's probably only 50-50 that he's going to be around to finish the job, which means Dolan will hire somebody else to manage and/or coach a good young nucleus this summer.
Q: What good will that do?
A: No clue. But it will appease Dolan because he's an image-obsessed simpleton, because his team has dropped from fifth to 15th in home attendance and because the number of anti-Dolan websites has mushroomed.
Q: So this debacle will continue for as long as Dolan is around?
A: Unfortunately, yes. Checketts, one of the shrewdest guys in the sports business world, said it best a few years ago: "My very strong feeling is that big companies should not own teams. It's a very different business than they're used to, and there's no way they can appreciate the culture and chemistry that has to be part of a team to succeed." Of course, Dolan couldn't understand the culture and chemistry of a tube sock.
