In a different time and place in New York Knicks history, James Dolan detailed one of the more stressful parts of owning a dreadful NBA team.
The hecklers on the street. The fans who said hurtful things to him when he was shopping or out to dinner. Dolan said these strangers made it impossible for him to enjoy the nation’s largest and loudest market without a security person stationed nearby.
“They like to jump out, shout something horrible and run away,” Dolan said. “That happens all the time. … It’s not fun.”
In the middle of what would be a 17-65 season in 2018-19, Dolan sat with me for two hours to explain how and why he runs his sports and entertainment businesses the way he does. At times, the conversation revolved around the subject of fun.
Dolan made it clear he wasn’t having any while running his basketball team.
The Knicks were a staggering 182 games under .500 for the six seasons preceding the hiring of Tom Thibodeau, who immediately delivered the pandemic-stricken city an unforgettable gift — a playoff berth. Thibodeau followed a Year 2 setback with three consecutive trips to the Eastern Conference semifinals, including last year’s six-game conquest of the defending champion Celtics and the franchise’s first appearance in the conference finals in a quarter century.
Beyond that, Thibodeau benched all those people carrying pitchforks and torches for his boss. He silenced the constant references to Dolan as the worst owner in the league and allowed him to dream the impossible dream of winning the Knicks’ first NBA championship since 1973.
Thibodeau’s reward was a pink slip — even after the $30 million extension he was given in 2024 by his team president, friend and former agent Leon Rose. Dolan decided to fire one of the two men (along with Rose) most responsible for giving him cover, for allowing him to enjoy his winning basketball team in peace.
It was a major gamble that starts to play out Wednesday night in Madison Square Garden, where the Knicks and Cavaliers begin fighting for control of a conference left wide open by the Achilles injuries suffered by Boston’s Jayson Tatum and Indiana’s Tyrese Haliburton. Mike Brown, who carries himself as your agreeable next-door neighbor, will be standing in Thibodeau’s spot on the home sideline. He is an easy guy to root for, and an accomplished head coach with a career winning percentage (.599) 20 points better than his predecessor’s.
Thibodeau’s style wore thin on the Knicks. (Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
Through a spokesperson, Dolan “respectfully declined” to discuss the risk he took with this move. But he knows how one coaching or front-office change can dramatically alter an organization’s fortunes.
The Knicks had made the playoffs for 14 straight seasons when, on a December day in 2000, Jeff Van Gundy walked out of their practice facility to get a hot dog and never came back. In the years to come, Dolan kept swinging and missing on big-name saviors – Lenny Wilkens, Larry Brown, Isiah Thomas, Mike D’Antoni, Phil Jackson. It was a period of damning, on-and-off-the-court dysfunction, until the owner finally got it right with LeBron James’s former agent, Rose, and Rose’s former client, Thibs.
On a certain level, in firing a winning coach, Dolan could be credited for having the courage of his convictions. He could have played it safe after the Pacers ended the Knicks’ season two victories short of the NBA Finals. He could have taken the layup and stayed the course with Thibodeau, and very few people would have complained.
Though he is not the best coach on the planet, Thibs is one of the better coaches in the league. Given the Knicks’ postseason progress and the diminished state of the other contenders, there was reason to believe Thibodeau would win the franchise’s first conference title since 1999 next spring.
And yet the owner did a deep dive on the coach’s imperfections, invited himself to player and staff exit interviews, and decided the Knicks had crashed into their ceiling. Thibodeau was deeply wounded over the loss of the only job he ever really wanted.
“But he also had a sense of betrayal,” a source close to him said. “When you find out that people you helped either weren’t with you in the end or didn’t fight for you like you fought for them, that stings.”
Thibodeau helped a lot of players and assistants make a lot of money. What some of those people said in some of those meetings was likely influenced by Dolan’s presence. When you walk into a room to find your employer asking pointed questions about your manager, well, self-preservation instincts are hard to overcome.
The Garden’s position is that Rose decided with Dolan’s full support. The team president had protected the coach from the antsy owner a couple of times in past seasons, but when it was clear last spring that Dolan was moving back in that direction, Rose was done stepping in front of the bus. Ditto for another longtime Thibs ally, Jalen Brunson.
According to a second source, Thibodeau found himself philosophically misaligned with several other members of the front office who were too eager to overlook the coach’s strengths – the Celtics didn’t dethrone themselves in that 38-point Game 6 blowout – and to focus on his flaws.
“In their world,” the source said, “the players were 51-0 and Tom was 0-31.”
In fairness, the coach does have his share of flaws. Going back to 2015, when Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf fired him and roasted him for his refusal to entertain internal opinions at odds with his own, Thibodeau was never big on collaborating with the front office.
Now Knicks fans can rattle off the rest of last season’s laundry list of gripes.
• Thibs didn’t maximize the offensive potential of the starting lineup.
• Thibs didn’t develop the bench.
• Thibs didn’t get his team to launch enough 3-pointers.
• Thibs didn’t do enough to cover for the defensive inadequacies of Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns.
• Thibs didn’t put Mitchell Robinson into the lineup until the Knicks were down 2-0 in the Indiana series, and only at the urging of Josh Hart.
Dolan is a man of many interests but the Knicks are at the center of it all. (John Nacion / Variety via Getty Images)
As it turned out, the March signing of P.J. Tucker to serve as a de facto chief of locker room communications was a bad sign for anyone who thought Thibodeau was leading a harmonious group. Not every Knick was a fan of The Thibs Way, or of the influence given the coach’s longtime aide, Rick Brunson, father of the ball-dominant star.
“If they can’t get you on results,” Van Gundy once famously said of hostile internal and external voices, “they get you on relationships.”
Dolan might twist that line today and suggest, “If they can’t get you on results, they get you on facial recognition technology.”
With the Knicks a consistent winner, the critics have pivoted to Dolan’s practice of using that technology to boot from all Garden events lawyers who work for companies suing MSG. This is one team owner who will always have an expanding enemies list.
But Dolan can manage it as long as the Knicks do what he expects following this coaching change. A former employee with his New York Rangers, Wayne Gretzky, once told me that, if Dolan were forced to choose, he would take an NBA title over a Stanley Cup.
“It would make his life complete,” Gretzky said, “if he could win a Knicks championship.”
And it would make his Knicks ownership “a living hell,” as he once described it in a song for Deadspin, if the Thibodeau firing triggers a slow but steady descent back to the bad ol’ days.
Fact is, Mike Brown has enough of his own coaching flaws to have been fired four times. James Dolan had better hope four doesn’t become five within the next few years.