Overtime | Farewell Isaiah and good riddance

Kyle Nelson Columnist

The shame that is the New York Knicks cannot easily be described. Better times may come, though, after the hiring of Donnie Walsh as the team’s General Manager. That at least is something to look forward to.

Beginning in 2000, owner James Dolan’s tenure has been an exercise in incompetence and mismanagement. This is the James Dolan whose father is Charles Dolan, founder of the Cablevision empire, and the same James Dolan that almost killed himself with a combination of a wild lifestyle, binge drinking and drug abuse in the mid-’90s. This is the James Dolan who is emotionally unstable and abusive in the way he runs his job and blamed his mistreatment of Madison Square Garden staff members as a result of quitting smoking.

But, perhaps more importantly to Knicks fans, this is the James Dolan who sunk one of the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) premier franchises, exacerbated a sexual harassment scandal in which Madison Square Garden was one of the defendants and turned “The World’s Most Famous Arena” into the world’s most heinous arena.

Before Dolan took over, the Knicks were one of the most legendary teams in the NBA, with eight conference titles, eight division titles and two championships to their name. In fact, during the 1999-2000 season, which was shortened because of a lockout, the Knicks made a Cinderella run to the playoffs as an eighth seed, becoming the first team ever to do so in NBA history. Then, Dolan arrived, and despite a run to the conference finals during his first season in charge, as Knicks fans will surely tell you, it all went downhill.

Their record since? 214-350. That is just under 38 percent. Dolan’s tenure signaled an end to
14 consecutive playoff appearances, and the team is currently in the franchise’s worst playoff drought in over 20 years.

Accusations of mismanagement are not just confined to winning percentage. In 2000, Dolan organized the trade of franchise icon Patrick Ewing, and in the following year, coach Jeff Van Gundy, who had led the Knicks to the NBA Finals only two years before, resigned and the team failed to make the playoffs for the first time in 15 seasons. In 2003, hope seemed to return with the hiring of General Manager Isiah Thomas, Head Coach Lenny Wilkins and the homecoming of local hero Stephon Marbury. But after two first-round playoff exits and a combined 2-7 postseason record, Wilkins resigned, and the Knicks entered one of the worst stretches in franchise history.

The franchise racked up a $130 million dollar payroll (a figure higher than both São

Tomé and Príncipe’s and Kiribati’s respective gross domestic products), which includes paying players’ salaries long after they have retired, giving a guy$ 5 million annually to sit on the bench and paying a $18.5 million settlement to a coach that led the team to a 23-59 record! The Knicks’ payroll has resulted in four consecutive seasons of abysmal performances and a lot of boos from the cheap seats at Madison Square Garden.

The most significant black eye in the Dolan years, however, resulted when the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Operations Anucha Browne Sanders filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against General Manager and Coach Isaiah Thomas, as well as Madison Square Garden. Not only were Dolan and Thomas arrogant enough to take the case to trial, but, after Thomas was found guilty, Dolan maintained his innocence and allowed him to remain as both head coach and general manager. The Knicks proved that they were wildly incompetent on and off the court, and the organization proved itself sexist and misogynistic, creating an atmosphere that was uninviting and demeaning to women.

Then, Marbury took his surprise visit away from the team and further fractured the fragile roster, setting the Knicks up for one of the worst seasons in franchise history, one that can be best summed up by the chants of “Fire Isaiah” that rang down from the cheap seats. Good news, however, came when Dolan finally claimed to have had enough and signed Pacers godsend Donnie Walsh as his new general manager. Walsh has proven to be deaf to the whims of incompetent and out-of-touch owners and brought respectability back to a Pacers franchise that had been all but written off. Most importantly, however, Walsh’s signing signifies the end of a Knicks team that was just as embarrassing on the court as it was off and was a team that mirrored perfectly its owner’s self destructive and disturbed mind-set.

It is a new morning at Madison Square Garden. Citizens of New York, the NBA, and basketball fans around the world are breathing a collective sigh of relief.

—Kyle Nelson ’09 is an English and Africana Studies double-major. This semester he is editorializing on issues in national athletics.