Bloomberg Businessweek July 29, 2019despite 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!”
Everyoneassumed that’s what the 2019 Knicks were up
to:playingasbadly as possible without overtly trying to lose
games TheNBA’s worst three teams each have a 14% chance
o. 1 pick in the next college draft, which became
ecially big deal after Zion Williamson arrived at
e in 2018 and was quickly heralded as the best
BAprospect of the past decade. Maybe since
Bron James.
It sure looked like the Knicks were tanking for
on.Ownership methodically rid the team of all vet-
erans with even moderately large contracts and
played only cheap, young guys. Of course, the
s’ front office denied tanking. “The mission was to
ngerby good drafting and establish a culture that
alentinstead of repelling it,” General Manager Scott
n a podcast last year. A respected basketball exec-
washired by Dolan in 2017 to help team President
ghtthe ship. He got a glimpse of how low things
hadsunkduringthe 2018 off-season, when several top college
playersflat-outrefused to even meet with the Knicks.
Onthenight 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 commenta-
tors 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 pri-
mary 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 accountabilityfor 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 bas-
ketball, 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 with-
out great ownership, a team really doesn’t have an oppor-
tunity 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 sea-
son wasn’t a total loss because the team had developed sev-
eral 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 pro-
vides 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 long-
time 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.
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