After adding the potent Zach Randolph, the Knicks were pegged for 35 or so victories and a shot at the playoffs in a weak-sister Eastern Conference.
Instead, the Knicks bottomed. They cowered and caved. As ofthis week, they sat 35 games below. A rout in Boston led one New York fan to fling his blue-and-orange jersey onto the playing floor in self-loathing. Untold others sat in numb despair. More often than not this season, Knicks games were an exercise in agony. Now that the Thomas era is dead, the obituary can be written. The temptation in these moments is to gloss over the faults of the deceased—to remember through a lens, brightly.
The Knicks have made that impossible. The storied brand of McGuire and Frazier and Ewing has been rendered unlovable. Like most man-made disasters, the latter-day Knicks were a complex compound of error and hubris, tradition and pathology. In actuality, his heedless spending set off the chain reaction that would do the Knicks in.
Freed from fiscal constraints, Thomas bet the farm just two weeks into his tenure on native son Stephon Marbury a. Starbury , a player in his own image. As pointed out by David Berri, an economist at Cal State—Bakersfield and preeminent basketball-stat geek, both Isiah and Marbury were supremely skilled point guards—and also turnover-prone, low-percentage, high-volume shooters.
Marbury was his fatal attraction. And so the die was struck. He kept binging on overvalued gunners with cap-killing contracts, splashy names with no postseason bona fides: Jamal Crawford, Eddy Curry, Steve Francis, Zach Randolph.
Before injury and melodrama intervened, the Knicks were starting five stone scorers this season—five players who saw each shot as rightfully their own. In jock argot, this is known as lousy chemistry. Not surprisingly, the current edition leads the league in forced shots, blown assignments, sideline spats, mini-mutinies, and wholesale mockery.
You wish once in a while that his tie was not up so tight. Mills knew just how to please a boss who fronts a vanity blues band: big names.
Preparing to oust Scott Layden as team president, he first approached Magic Johnson, who already had a full-time job as Magic Johnson but recommended a dear old friend. Despite a checkered executive history, Thomas was hired within days. After exposing the Garden as an overaged frat house where Ranger execs allegedly kept a Kama Sutra wish list for various cheerleaders , the trial torpedoed the defendants in a pair of video depositions.
There was Dolan in his best black T-shirt, rolling his shaggy head like a caged grizzly, haughty and dismissive but creepy most of all. The truth had set him free. When she learned that Gonsalves was sexually harassing several women in her office, Browne Sanders drew the line. The stage was set for a fall guy—and who better than a compulsive ball hog with satanic eyebrows and a perpetually pissed-off vibe?
Who better than Marbury? After splitting their first four games, the Knicks failed by three against a dreary Miami team on November Though Marbury suffered a typical late-game meltdown, he was hardly the lone offender. He marched into the locker room after that game—he made a beeline. You have no idea what I know. He was a serial coach-killer: Stephon Rex. Nobody puts Starbury in the corner. He skipped the Suns game in a snit to fly home, and New York lost by eleven. By the time the Knicks captain rejoined his mates in Los Angeles, the other core players had voted against letting him play that night.
Jordan has had, in the documentary he controls, the chance to say what he will say about his former rival. So in this space, today, let's largely allow Thomas to respond. There are two sides to every story, and here's the other. Thomas became a national trending topic this week when on one of Sunday's episodes Jordan refused to even watch a video of Isiah talking, saying, "You can show me anything you want.
There's no way you're not going to convince me he wasn't an asshole. We were even at dinner a couple times and he was always pleasant. Always good to my kids. Always good to my son. He even gave my son a pair of gym shoes. Only it wasn't. Michael Jordan is an international icon -- albeit one famous for grudges -- whose words matter. And his words are clear. He does not like Isiah Thomas one bit. I don't have anything against him and I definitely admire him as a basketball player," Thomas says.
I haven't had an interaction with him that's been unkind. It's not just Jordan. Magic Johnson had a long, long feud with him. Others, on and off the record, will lay out a point-by-point case for why they dislike the man so thoroughly. Yet the truth is more complicated. From his botched run with the Knicks , all the way back to his playing days as the star of the Bad Boys of basketball, Thomas has garnered many, many enemies.
Winston Churchill could tell you that's a sign you've stood for something, at some time in your life. But a lot of others will just say that's the price of being, well, an asshole. Yet the basketball era Thomas came up in wasn't like today's.
You weren't friends. The Bulls won to force a Game 7 in the Eastern Conference finals. The Bulls would fall to the Pistons in the conference finals in , but before long, they had mastered the triangle offense. During the season, the Bulls won 61 games and were clearly the best team in the East. A sweep of the New York Knicks in the first round and an easy series win over the Philadelphia 76ers in the second round set up another anticipated matchup against Detroit in the conference finals.
So the Bulls put the Pistons in unfavorable matchups: Scottie Pippen defended Laimbeer, which put him on the perimeter defensively. Cartwright switched from Laimbeer to Dennis Rodman. After two years, we were better. It was the experience of going through what they had gone through. Guys have their roles down. We were just ready to win. With four episodes of the series having aired, Cartwright, Sellers and Hopson are eagerly awaiting to see how The Last Dance plays out.
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