(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- On April 10 of this year, 19,872 humans of seemingly sound mind paid a not insignificant amount of money to fill Madison Square Garden from floor to rafters. This was, mercifully, the final game of a long, hopeless season for the New York Knicks, the worst team in the National Basketball Association. The absolute best case for the Knicks on this night was to win for just the 18th time in 82 games—thus saving these players from the ignominy of losing more games than any other group in franchise history.
Things were briefly promising. The Detroit Pistons scored first, to go up 2-0, but the Knicks roared back to tie it 2-2. Then Detroit hit a three-pointer—and never trailed again. At one point, the Pistons, playing without their star forward, Blake Griffin, led by 38.
Watching, as always, was team owner James Dolan, mostly slumped back with his arms crossed in a folding chair between a young guy with long hair and a vaguely familiar model. Former New York Times columnist Selena Roberts once wrote that you can tell how the Knicks are doing on a given night by the angle of Dolan’s slouch, and on this night—like most nights in the 2018-19 season—it was limited only by the chair, which didn’t recline.
You can criticize many things about Dolan and his ownership, but the man is accountable. He’s there every night, in the front row, along the baseline, watching his team play terrible basketball. “I can’t imagine any owner who’s lost more sleep over the last two decades regarding a sports team than Jim has,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said last year.
“I could hide,” Dolan said when ESPN Radio host Michael Kay asked him last year why he makes himself so present. (Dolan talks to Kay and almost no one else in the media; he declined to talk to me for this story and prohibited the entire Knicks organization from doing so.) He could sit in a luxury box. Or watch at home. But no. “A, I like the seats,” Dolan told Kay. “And B, I want the fans to know that I’m engaged, that ownership cares about what is happening.” Some NBA owners skip games; others, he observed, live in an entirely different state. Or, in the case of the Brooklyn Nets—majority-owned by Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov—another country.
Read more: What It’s Like to Get Kicked Out by James Dolan
“Jim loves the Garden. He loves the teams. It’s his way of letting the players and the fans know,” says Seth Abraham, a former president of MSG Entertainment, one of the entities Dolan controls as executive chairman and chief executive officer of Madison Square Garden Co. “But I would say he isn’t having fun. It’s a crucible for him.” Dolan’s father, Charles, set this trial in motion when he made James CEO of Cablevision Systems Corp. in 1995. The company owned half of MSG and its teams then (the Knicks and the Rangers, of the National Hockey League) and bought the rest three years later. In 2009, MSG was spun out, in large part to maximize the value of the sports and live music businesses. And Jim Dolan remains in charge of a highly profitable, publicly traded company that happens to include a historically terrible basketball team.
Charles once said he’d chosen Jim to run the family business mostly because “he was the only [child] who wanted it.” It wasn’t an obvious decision otherwise, especially when you consider that Charles had put Jim on a plane to Minnesota’s Hazelden rehab clinic just two years earlier to treat an addiction to alcohol and drugs. “Jim is a really complicated guy,” Abraham says.
In the locker room after that last game against the Pistons, the Knicks’ beleaguered first-year head coach, David Fizdale, addressed beat reporters and searched for ways, for the 65th and final time, to explain why a bunch of inexperienced players looked inexperienced and lost badly. “[The Pistons] didn’t take it light because they were playing the youngest and last-place team in the league,” he said.
By that point, Dolan was long gone. As soon as the final horn sounded, he was off, surrounded by a security detail en route to his car, which takes him to either his Manhattan apartment or his helicopter, which ferries him to Long Island’s Gold Coast, where he has a sprawling estate right by his father’s.
The NBA has a generous postseason; more than half the teams (16 out of 30) qualify for the playoffs. But the Knicks, for the sixth straight year, wouldn’t be among them. Dolan took full control of the team in 2000. That season the Knicks reached the Eastern Conference finals, marking the end of a golden era. From 1987 to 1999, they qualified for 13 consecutive playoffs. Then the wheels fell off.
In 19 seasons under Dolan’s watch, the team has advanced to the postseason just five times and won a playoff series only once, in 2013. For many of those seasons, the Knicks weren’t terrible; they were merely mediocre. Which, in the NBA, is arguably worse. Terrible teams get the best draft picks, which is the first step toward improving. But an average team gets only average draft picks, which means there’s much less chance of landing the kind of college star who can transform a franchise.
Middling drafts is only one problem. There’s also instability: The Knicks have had 13 coaches in 18 seasons. And financial mismanagement: The team is notorious for overspending on aging, injury-prone stars, which is especially bad because NBA contracts are guaranteed and the league encourages parity through a rigid cap on total team salaries. So giving big contracts to players who don’t work out, in combination with poor draft picks, is a recipe for misery. Or the Knicks.
But when Dolan walked out of the Garden after that miserable loss to the Pistons, he had, for the first time in a decade, real hope that things could change. The Knicks would get a top draft pick, maybe the first pick. They finally had salary cap room to spend on top players. And true superstars—including Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and Kawhi Leonard—would be available as free agents.
“In some ways this season is a blessing, even though it doesn’t feel like it,” Dolan told Kay near the season’s end. “We have a shot at really breaking through.”
The facts are what the facts are. The Knicks—who occupy the world’s most famous arena and are, according to Forbes, the most valuable NBA franchise, worth an estimated $4 billion—have the league’s worst record in the 21st century. Since 2000 they have a win percentage of .416, despite paying more luxury tax for exceeding the salary cap than any other franchise. In short, Dolan’s New York Knicks have spent the most to perform the worst.
Wins were so rare last season that, in the middle of the Academy Awards, Samuel L. Jackson announced from the stage to Spike Lee that the Knicks had actually won a game that night. Lee, the team’s most famous fan, looked unhappy. He shook his head and shouted back, “We’re trying to tank!”
Everyone assumed that’s what the 2019 Knicks were up to: playing as badly as possible without overtly trying to lose games. The NBA’s worst three teams each have a 14% chance at the No. 1 pick in the next college draft, which became an especially big deal after Zion Williamson arrived at Duke in 2018 and was quickly heralded as the best NBA prospect of the past decade. Maybe since LeBron James.
It sure looked like the Knicks were tanking for Zion. Ownership methodically rid the team of all veterans with even moderately large contracts and played only cheap, young guys. Of course, the Knicks’ front office denied tanking. “The mission was to get younger by good drafting and establish a culture that attracted talent instead of repelling it,” General Manager Scott Perry said on a podcast last year. A respected basketball executive, Perry was hired by Dolan in 2017 to help team President Steve Mills right the ship. He got a glimpse of how low things had sunk during the 2018 off-season, when several top college players flat-out refused to even meet with the Knicks.
On the night of the 2019 NBA Draft Lottery, broadcast live on May 14, the crowd in the room groaned when the Knicks missed out on the top pick and landed at No. 3. TV commentators laughed. Social media erupted. The account for the sports website the Ringer summed it up best, with an image from the last episode of Game of Thrones of an entire city in flames. The caption: “Live look at Knicks Twitter.” (And yet, the third pick was hardly a disaster. On draft night, June 20, the Knicks selected RJ Barrett, an athletic forward who was rated even more highly than Williamson before they both arrived at Duke.)
This wasn’t how Knicks fans hoped a much-anticipated off-season would start, but there was always free agency. The 2019 class was perhaps the best ever—so loaded that the Knicks appeared to have set up their books specifically to sign two stars and pay them the maximum allowable salaries. Dolan had promised Knicks fans better times and big stars. It was the primary reason the team traded Kristaps Porzingis, easily the most popular Knick of the past decade, in January 2019. In particular, Dolan and the Knicks coveted Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving.
Then, on June 30, the free agency period opened and Knicks fans were crushed all over again. Durant and Irving announced they were signing with the Brooklyn Nets. The other New York City team.
So much has changed over the Knicks’ epoch of mediocrity. But one thing has remained constant: Dolan as owner. “Jim obviously has to take accountability for that,” says Frank Isola, a sportswriter who’s covered the team since 1995. “Look at teams that are consistently good—the Patriots, Spurs, Red Sox. They all have stable owner and front office situations, which tends to result in good coaches and happy players.”
“Part of the problem is that Jimmy isn’t responsible to anybody,” says Bob Gutkowski, a former MSG president who helped start the MSG Network for Charles Dolan. “When you don’t have any accountability, and you get to do whatever you want, there is a good chance you will do it poorly.”
The Golden State Warriors are arguably the model for how an NBA franchise should be run. They play good basketball, win, and make smart decisions. Coach Steve Kerr is free and loose with the press. The principal owner, venture capitalist Joe Lacob, mostly sits back in support. “I think the best owners always are the ones who understand that they really don’t own the team,” Warriors Chief Operating Officer Rick Welts told ESPN this year. “The fans own the team. For a period of time, you are a steward, and you’ll be judged on how well you manage that. … I really believe that without great ownership, a team really doesn’t have an opportunity to succeed.”
Close observers think it’s true what Dolan says, that he isn’t micromanaging basketball operations. It was evident in a radio interview in March, when he tried to argue that the season wasn’t a total loss because the team had developed several young players to be excited about. He required notes on a piece of paper to be specific about who he meant.
“He loves to say he’s not involved,” Isola says. This provides distance and deniability. But when the Knicks traded four players and two draft picks in 2011 for Carmelo Anthony—at Dolan’s behest—he was there on the dais to introduce the guy he probably could have had anyway, via free agency, if he’d just waited until the end of the season.
And in 2014 he was on an MSG stage again, to introduce his most famous hire yet: Hall of Fame coach Phil Jackson, his new team president. This, for Dolan, was a triumph. He finally had the guy he wanted—the guru everyone told him he needed—to restore the Knicks to greatness.
“When you have a chance to get Phil Jackson, you do it,” Dolan said. “This is someone who knows about winning, about the importance of a clear vision and how to instill a culture that ensures a team wins. Today, that clear vision and culture have come back to New York.”
The team only got worse. Jackson lasted three years.
“There’s some bad luck involved,” says Filip Bondy, a longtime New York sportswriter who’s now a columnist for the Daily News. “There are some misdealings that other people have done on his behalf. But I think the one thing you can blame him for is just creating the kind of paranoid atmosphere that is not attractive to free agents.”
The Knicks pay well, but money isn’t enough. The culture, says Abraham, just isn’t attractive to the kinds of creative, independent minds who run today’s best professional teams. “You have to have, hold on to, and encourage good, smart people who feel they have a vested interest in the success of the company, even though it’s not their company,” he says. “It’s Jim’s company.”
Abraham says that Dave Checketts, who was running MSG and the Knicks when Dolan took control of the team, gave him some good advice. “When you need to disagree with Jim, it’s better to do it in public”— say, at a restaurant—to get around “the volcanic nature” of his temper.
Checketts had hired Abraham, and once Checketts left there was no buffer between himself and Dolan. The relationship, Abraham says, was cordial: “He owned the company, so I had respect for that.” Once, during a disagreement, Abraham tried to make a point. He told his boss to imagine that the two of them were in a car that Dolan owned. “‘ I want to make a left turn, you want to make a right turn,’ ” he recalls saying. “‘It’s your car. We know we’re going to make a right turn. All I’m asking is for you to explain to me why you want to make a right turn so I understand your thinking.’ ” Dolan, he recalls, said nothing. “He looked at me as if I was speaking Martian. He absolutely could not fathom what I was trying to ask him. And I think people like that, they can’t see how to build an organization or how to build a spirit in an organization. They just don’t have the acumen and the perspective to do it.”
Arguably, Dolan’s most infamous quality is his dislike of the media, especially the beat writers who cover his team. Almost from the moment he took over, reporters say, the atmosphere changed. Free access to players and coaches was cut off. Media training—which as practiced by the Knicks means learning how not to answer questions—was mandated. Every conversation between a team employee and a reporter, no matter how short or innocuous, was recorded by a team flack. “It all goes back to his paranoia,” Roberts says. “He can fire employees, but he has a hell of a time firing the media. That’s probably the one thing that frustrates him the most.”
No outlet has irritated Dolan more than the Daily News. It dates to the paper’s harsh coverage during one of the team’s biggest off-court debacles, a lawsuit filed in 2006 by a former MSG executive, Anucha Browne Sanders, who alleged that team president Isiah Thomas had created a hostile work environment. She sued him, MSG, and Dolan personally. The trial was ugly and embarrassing for the company and the league. A jury ruled against MSG, which settled for $11.6 million before punitive damages could be assigned. When asked how the case reflected on the Knicks, then-NBA Commissioner David Stern wasn’t subtle: “It demonstrates that they’re not a model of intelligent management.”
Ever since the suit, Isola says, it’s been “an all-out offensive.” (Isola worked at the Daily News for 12 years; since last year he’s written for the Athletic website.) At one point, Dolan threatened to buy the paper and fold it.
Bondy’s son Stefan now covers the Knicks for the Daily News. Toward the end of a disappointing 2017-18 season, he approached the team’s then-public-relations rep, Jonathan Supranowitz, to propose a story about player development. “His response was, ‘If anybody does an interview with the Daily News, they’re gonna get fired,’ ” Bondy recalls. NBA rules forbid the Knicks from restricting access to games or to the locker room, but the league can’t force Dolan to invite specific reporters or newspapers to MSG press conferences or media calls. He does, however, push the boundaries. In June, the NBA fined the Knicks $50,000 for keeping the Daily News from a post-draft press conference.
“I don’t worry about how I look,” Dolan said last year. “I don’t make my decisions by PR. I make them based on what I think is right and wrong and what’s best for the organization.” He was tired, he said, of “years and years of these guys pounding” on his team. These reporters want to “cause trouble and be antagonistic.” They “hate the team,” he said. “By the way, the team doesn’t really love them, either. Why do they come?”
“I cover a team that is the worst in the NBA, and they’ve been the worst team for the last 18 years,” Stefan Bondy says. “The coverage reflects that. He seemed to indicate that we have an ax to grind, but that’s certainly not how I feel. I grew up a Knicks fan. I would love for them to do well. It would be good for business. It would be good for my career. But they just can’t seem to get out of their own way.”
The logical reaction to feeling unfairly treated by the media is to try to correct that injury. Talk more often, more freely. Dolan, a notorious bearer of grudges, won’t do it. He seems to want to control the message without ever explaining it.
“He seemed very troubled by not getting the respect he deserved. I kept thinking to myself, The guy is having a hard time with this. It made him sympathetic, a little”
In 2007, Sports Illustrated assigned S.L. Price to profile Dolan. Price was granted generous access, including a long sit-down in Dolan’s office. The resulting story was fair, but harsh.
Shortly after publication, John Huey, then Time Inc.’s editor in chief, got a call from Time Warner’s CEO at the time, Richard Parsons, asking if Huey and then-Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonnell would meet with Dolan and his PR rep. The Dolans had a seat on the Time Warner board, but as Huey recalls, Parsons asked for no favors other than a meeting. “Just listen to him,” Huey was told.
Dolan and his rep met the two editors in a small conference room in Time’s midtown tower. Dolan came with a stack of materials, plus a marked-up copy of the piece. “He starts reading from the article, which is never a good sign,” Huey recalls. “I’m thinking this will be 15 minutes of ranting, but it goes on and on and on.” Dolan wasn’t questioning particular facts; he was upset with the overall tone.
“What struck me about it was how much he cared,” McDonnell says. “He seemed very troubled by not getting the respect he deserved. I kept thinking to myself, The guy is having a hard time with this. It made him sympathetic, a little.”
The PR rep, McDonnell says, barely spoke. “Jim was angry and upset and determined for us to see his point of view,” he says. At times he was almost shouting. “At one point my assistant came and opened the door and asked if everything was all right,” Huey recalls.
“The way I came to view him is exactly the way he is reflected in the story,” McDonnell says. “Sympathetic, in the sense that he came through very tough trails and made it. But at the same time, he’s bedeviled by his own behavior. It’s really easy to pile on him. But he’s a victim of circumstance. He’s a tragic figure. Which of course he will hate.”
The Knicks’ misery clearly weighs on Dolan, as does the idea that it’s his fault and can only be fixed if he sells the team. Almost every one of his outbursts in public of late pertains to the increasingly pervasive sentiment among fans and sports media personalities in New York that he should just give up and sell. Dolan clearly can’t abide that, and he’s taken to what Selena Roberts calls firing the fans. He bans people—regular paying customers and the celebrities he otherwise enjoys having at courtside—from the Garden. Actors Ethan Hawke and Michael Rapaport are among the unwelcome.
In March a fan intercepted Dolan on his way out of MSG and yelled at him to sell the team. Dolan stopped, told the fan to “enjoy watching on TV,” and then summoned security to toss the guy out. The whole thing was caught on video and sold to TMZ. Of course, it blew up in his face. Dolan was roasted in the media and even drew the ire of New York state Senator Brad Hoylman, who pointed out that Madison Square Garden gets more than $40 million a year in property tax breaks. “If James Dolan wants to treat it as his private stadium & ban fans for merely suggesting he sell a team,” he wrote on Twitter, “then perhaps Albany should … redirect those public dollars to Penn Station’s MTA facilities.”
Dolan admitted to Michael Kay that he probably should have just walked past the guy, but he couldn’t. “It’s very discouraging to hear somebody say quit,” he said. “I am not a quitter. For the record, I am not selling the team.” Also, he said, the whole thing was an ambush, set up for TV.
Almost the same thing happened in 2017 when another fan, a young lawyer named Mike Hamersky, shouted at Dolan outside the Garden to sell the team. “How would you like it if I came to your office, stood outside, and told all clients that you’re an asshole,” Dolan yelled, according to Hamersky. “Because that’s what you are!”
Hamersky told the story to a reporter for Deadspin, who worried that the lack of video evidence would basically pit Hamersky’s word against a billionaire’s. But when Deadspin reached out for comment, Dolan didn’t deny it. “He confirmed everything and escalated it tenfold,” Hamersky says. The story went viral. “He just kind of came off as a petty jerk, which I think he kind of relishes.”
What’s confusing about Dolan’s anger is that he put the idea of selling the team out there himself, in a 2018 interview with ESPN’s Ian O’Connor. Dolan said that as CEO of a public company, he owed it to the shareholders to do what was best, and if the right offer came along, he’d have to listen. He also said that neither he nor his family wants to sell the team.
BTIG analyst Brandon Ross, who covers MSG, says that if the Knicks were ever put up for sale, the team would “fetch a much higher value” than the Forbes estimate of $4 billion. There’s still additional value to be unlocked, he adds. For instance, they could get better players. Or win games. Either of those things would likely increase attendance from last year’s 98% capacity to 100% and would lead to highly profitable playoff rounds. “Can you imagine if they were good?” Ross asks.
The Dolans own less than 10% of MSG’s stock, but they control the voting shares. No one can force Jim to do anything. “I can’t even sue them in Delaware court if I don’t like the deal,” says Mario Gabelli, whose Gamco Investors is one of the company’s largest shareholders. And MSG is thriving. Renovations to the Garden have created more revenue streams, and Dolan has greatly expanded MSG’s entertainment portfolio, adding Radio City Music Hall, the Beacon Theatre, and Los Angeles’s Forum, among other venues. Live entertainment venues are extremely valuable right now, Gabelli says, because “millennials and Gen Z love live entertainment.”
But what if the fans are right? What if the Knicks’ culture can’t—or won’t—change until Dolan is gone? “A lot of times in life, change is necessary,” former Knick Chris Childs says. “And maybe that’s something they gotta think about. Twenty years of unhappy ballplayers and unhappy fans … something has to be done.”
The thing is … no, something doesn’t have to be done. When people tell Dolan he’s not wanted, he looks around his filled arena and sees thousands of reasons this is wrong. “Take a look at our record and take a look at our attendance,” he told Kay. Results don’t actually matter. “Win or lose, we’re going to make roughly the same amount of money.”
MSG is Gabelli’s single largest holding. The shares are up more than 50% over the past three years—and that’s including what Gabelli calls “a discount for the Dolan perception,” for the Knicks’ poor performance and bad publicity. The Knicks couldn’t be worse. “Independent of that, the valuation has gone up,” he says. “It’s more a function of how unique this is.”
For the second quarter of 2019, MSG revenue was $632 million, up 18% from 2018; the sports group earned $315 million in the same period, a 19% improvement. The earnings were announced just days after the latest unpopular personnel move, when the Knicks traded the injured but extremely popular Porzingis to the Dallas Mavericks.
Dolan may not be selling, but he’s preparing to spin off the sports group into another publicly traded entity. Last fall, MSG’s board announced plans to split into a “pure play” sports company and a live entertainment company. Dolan and his family would retain control of voting shares in both; the main point of the spinoff seems to be to sell more common stock to generate capital for growth. Gabelli thinks Dolan’s primary motivation is to raise money for his two enormous MSG Sphere entertainment venue projects, in Las Vegas and London.
Could the sports group be put up for sale down the road? Dolan has assured everyone in recent months that he has no interest in selling either of his sports teams. “The whole organization is geared toward winning,” he said a few months ago. “We want our teams to be successful.” And while the Rangers have won quite a bit, “we don’t have that with the Knicks,” he said. “We’ve had mistakes and missteps. The kinds of things that set the team back.”
This is as close as he’s come to admitting fault, personally or as a franchise. Dolan, President Mills, and General Manager Perry all declined to comment for this story, specifically or generally. I had asked if they might want to be a little reflective, to look back on those mistakes and missteps during this pivotal off-season, when people have so much hope that a corner will be turned. Dolan had no interest in the past, I was told. He was looking forward.
Joe Favorito, who ran communications for the Knicks from 2000 to 2006, says Dolan doesn’t get enough credit for the things he does right. He prioritizes the hiring of women and minorities. He’s committed to the Garden of Dreams Foundation, which provides programs and scholarships for thousands of disadvantaged kids. Dolan was instrumental in organizing the massive Concert for New York City one month after the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as a fundraiser last year for Puerto Rico. When his close friend and former MSG executive Mark Lustgarten died of pancreatic cancer in 1999, Dolan started a foundation in his name that’s now the single largest fundraiser for pancreatic cancer research in the world. Many, many former players sing his praises and laud his generosity.
It can be difficult to square this portrait with Dolan’s prickly public presence, his combative and beleaguered stance, his general vibe of misery in the role of Knicks owner. But it begins to make sense when you see him in his other element, as rock ’n’ roll frontman. His side project, as lead singer of the blues-rock band JD & the Straight Shot, makes for an easy target. He is, after all, a billionaire who pays a group of accomplished Nashville musicians enough to call themselves his band. They tour the world. In 2014 they opened for the Eagles … at Madison Square Garden.
But that version of Jim Dolan? He seems happy. To see him onstage with his band is to almost forget the angry guy slumped in a folding chair. It’s like he puts on a fedora and becomes a different man.
That’s the guy that Deadspin writer Dave McKenna met in 2016. McKenna writes about music, too, and it was in that role that he arranged to interview the lead singer of JD & the Straight Shot on the band’s stop in Washington, D.C.
McKenna asserted in his story that Dolan is the richest touring musician in the world, with twice the net worth of No. 2, Paul McCartney. And that he looks comfortable onstage. “He’s a very good frontman,” McKenna says. “He told jokes. He has fun, and that comes through. I could tell he would rather be onstage with his band than do anything with the Knicks or Madison Square Garden. Clearly he was born into those roles, but the musical role he chose. He’s in a tough spot, because he’s in such a great spot. How can you root for a billionaire? He’s not putting anything on the line except his pride. But that’s a risk that he doesn’t have to take.”
Dolan and McKenna stayed in touch for a while after the story. “I am honestly fond of him,” McKenna says, and whenever Deadspin wrote a story about the Knicks, he’d call or write Dolan for comment. For instance, after the infamous 2017 argument with Hamersky, Dolan “didn’t try to say, ‘I should’ve acted better,’ ” McKenna recalls. “He said, ‘That guy’s a dick.’ It was hilarious to hear. Thinking of a billionaire as a human being is hard to do.”
Last year, on a lark, McKenna asked Dolan to write a song for the 2018 Deadspin Awards. Without ever confirming that he was going to, Dolan delivered a funny, self-deprecating song—plus accompanying video—a few days before the show. “He put an incredible amount of effort into it,” McKenna says. “He wants to be liked.”
Not long after, a Deadspin writer wrote a critical post, and Dolan called. “He was very, very angry,” McKenna says. It was the last time they spoke. Dolan seemed to feel betrayed. “He didn’t understand that I couldn’t get people at Deadspin to stop writing what they wanted to write about him. I can’t control what other people think about him.”
Still, McKenna says, he misses the friendship, or whatever it was. “I miss him because he’s fascinating. I felt genuine sympathy for a guy trapped in an existence that isn’t the one he would’ve chosen for himself. He would rather be busking on the subway than in the owner’s box.” As one longtime MSG follower said: “Maybe if Jim were just allowed to do his music all his life, this could have been avoided.”
Team executives aren’t permitted to communicate with free agents, or even comment publicly about them, during the NBA season. To do so is known as tampering and can result in fines. But in March, Dolan tiptoed right up to that line on Michael Kay’s show. He wasn’t just confident that top free agents were coming his way in the summer of 2019; he seemed certain of it. “I can tell you,” he said, “from what we’ve heard, I think we’re gonna have a very successful off-season when it comes to free agents.”
Then Irving and Durant went to the Nets. Three days later, Kawhi Leonard committed to the L.A. Clippers. The Knicks spent $134 million for six lesser players on short contracts.
The blowback was swift. On Twitter it was a rehash of draft night, and the famously quiet executive team felt stung enough to release a brief statement by Mills, the president. “While we understand that some Knicks fans could be disappointed with tonight’s news,” he wrote, “we continue to be upbeat and confident in our plans to rebuild the Knicks to compete for championships in the future, through both the draft and targeted free agents.”
MSG’s stock dropped 3.4% overnight, erasing more than $200 million in value, and for days the prevailing narrative in sports media and among fans was that the team is cursed. “The Knicks ran unopposed in NYC until 7 years ago, a team came to Brooklyn,” ESPN personality Max Kellerman wrote on Twitter. “For the first time, the Knicks had to compete for NYC’s NBA fans. Today that competition is over. The Knicks are finished as the #1 basketball team in town. The Nets own NYC. It’s Jim Dolan’s fault.”
This idea in particular had to sting. It might never have occurred to Dolan that the Nets threatened him in any way. But here was Brooklyn, under General Manager Sean Marks and head coach Kenny Atkinson, being held up as a model for how you turn around a broken franchise—with smart drafting, crafty trades, and good management. You build a culture that people want to be a part of.
“He seemed very troubled by not getting the respect he deserved. I kept thinking to myself, The guy is having a hard time with this. It made him sympathetic, a little”
Sometime after the news of Irving and Durant broke, someone uncovered a recent photo of Durant on the Instagram feed of former Knick Charles Oakley. This was thought to be loaded with meaning. Everything about Oakley and the Knicks is. If there’s a low point of Dolan’s tenure as Knicks owner, it was almost certainly Feb. 8, 2017. That’s the night he threw Oakley out of the Garden and then banned one of the most popular players in Knicks history, saying he’d been drunk and abusive.
To humiliate Oakley in that manner was beyond the pale for fans, and also for players: Several, including LeBron James, posted messages of support on social media.
Oakley told me that the Instagram post with Durant was just a coincidence; the two ran into each other one night in the city. He denied knowing about Durant’s decision ahead of time but said that some agents he’d spoken to told him some players “weren’t comfortable” coming to the Knicks. He also wondered if D’Andre Jordan, a close friend of Durant’s who spent part of the past season with the Knicks, might have played a role. “Once they’re in the house, they see how messy it is,” Oakley says.
The fans, Oakley says, have cause to be upset. They were told repeatedly by the organization, and by Dolan himself, that this was the year. “This might be the only time in the next 10 years when this many marquee free agents come on the market at the same time,” Oakley says. “And you don’t even get a sniff of one.”
Oakley filed suit against Dolan after the MSG incident, and until that’s settled or the Knicks owner repairs their relationship in some other way, Oakley won’t be setting foot in the Garden. He might go to some away games. “I’ll definitely be at some Nets games,” he says.
Notably absent for most of the off-season excitement was Jim Dolan. He issued no comment after the draft or free agency. His one public appearance as Knicks owner was for an NBA Summer League game in Las Vegas that was cut short by an earthquake. Mostly, he’s been out on tour with his band in support of his latest album, The Great Divide, inspired by Trump’s America. “It does seem that there is more anger and hate than there has been in recent times,” Dolan wrote in a blog post about the title track, “and I hope this song will inspire folks to try a little harder to be tolerant of a different opinion than their own.”
Not even two weeks after the Nets signed his top targets and stole the city’s tabloid covers, Dolan and the band were at a small theater on Long Island for the 11th stop of the SiriusXM Coffee House tour.
I couldn’t make it, but a Bloomberg reporter went in my place. She was waiting for the show to start in a largely empty room when she spotted Dolan, alone. She walked over and handed him a business card.
What Dolan could have done at this point—what a man with a history of embarrassing public spats probably should have done—was decline comment and walk away.
Instead, he squared up. He told her he hadn’t authorized an interview and flipped her notebook closed. He insisted the night was about music, not him, and had no place in a profile, even though he owns arguably the most famous music venue on Earth and has played there.
Mostly, Dolan just wanted this reporter gone. He kept telling her that she shouldn’t be there. He insisted that she wasn’t allowed to be there, despite its being a concert organized by an international broadcasting company that sold tickets through Ticketmaster. Eventually, he walked away and summoned security. The reporter was escorted out. Later, an MSG rep called to complain about the encounter. She hoped we wouldn’t include it in the story. —With Polly Mosendz
To contact the author of this story: Josh Dean in New York at
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Daniel Ferrara at dferrara5@bloomberg.net, Jim Aley
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