I am not a basketball fan, nor am I enthralled by New York City (I live on the other side of the US). But some of the best Deadspin posts were about the Knicks and owner James Dolan, and someone needs to continue that tradition. Here goes.
The Knicks are currently 13-36. If you are also not a fan of basketball, or any sports, I should tell you that 13-36 is a bad record. There is one team below them in the 15-team Eastern Conference. This is normal for the Knicks. And the fans, as you can imagine, are sick of normal.
On Wednesday night, there was a fracas at the end of another Knicks loss, this one at the hands of the Vancouver Memphis Grizzlies. A Knicks player took exception to a Van- Grizzlies player running up the score and proceeded to deck that opponent. I’m going to try to embed a video here:
I think it worked! Anyway, Quote of the Year (thus far) at the end of the video: “This is embarrassing for the Knicks.”
And what was the fan reaction? Even better. They took the opportunity to lay into Dolan, chanting quite loudly, “Sell the team!” repeatedly. Can I embed a tweet?
Yes I can! Awesome. According to the NY Post:
As the unsportsmanlike scene unfolded, sickened Garden fans chanted “Sell the team’’ for about 20 seconds as Dolan left his seat.
According to that Post, uh, post, Dolan also pointed out a single teenage fan to security for allegedly being one of the chanters.
He has previously banned people from Madison Square Garden for life for hurting his tender feelings. I’ve not seen any response from his office on how he intends to ban all Knicks fans in attendance last night.
I was going to ask a snarky question about how many games a team made up of the best players from the Knicks, Hawks, and Cavs would win, but got distracted by the Knicks’ depth chart.
I legit had no idea Taj Gibson was still in the league, let alone starting and logging 16.5 min/gm. And I had completely forgotten the Knicks intentionally signed noted-teammate-puncher Bobby Portis to $31MM contract. Woof.
I know nothing about sprots but I know this guy plays in a jazz band, a la Duke Silver because of Deadspin. #RIP
First off, that was not even the worst part of this game, it was Marcus Morris comment after the game!
https://www.si.com/nba/2020/01/30/marcus-morris-knicks-grizzlies-fight-misogynistic-comments
I’m with you on the Knicks being a complete disaster & it will never change until Dolan is forced to sell the team. As for the above “snarky” question, if you combined those 3 teams best players they could be in the top 3 in the East as long as they were not combined into the Knicks. In fact, I would say the current Knicks would have at least 7 more wins if they were playing under any other team name & ownership.
Yeah, that whole game was a shit-show, and the tweet-storms after it are becoming their own stories. I didn’t bring the Morris angle in because I thought someone might want to do a separate post on that, and the tone would be different than mine, I would imagine.
Funny. The SI story about Morris spells “in lieu of” as “in lue of” in the header graphic. Darn French.
Yeah, that whole game and aftermath was a shit-show. I didn’t bring the Morris comments into it because I thought someone might want to do a separate post, and it would have a different tone than my post, I imagine.
EDIT: Gah, double-post. For some reason the first one did not show up on my Dashboard.
“, if you combined those 3 teams best players they could be in the top 3 in the East as long as they were not combined into the Knicks”
But also please note, that in most years in the NBA, this *also* does NOT mean the combined team would be a candidate to win the NBAfinals…
Because *Eastern,* with Western teams dominating much of the last couple decades.
Eta,and I KNOW this, because my poor Wolvies are a Western division squad, where we have OFTEN been trounced😉💖
That’s why I said top 3 in the East. Wouldn’t be in the top 10 in the West.
It’s from another Deadspin target and a former “loosely” employer of mine but it sums up the garbage Knicks.
Claim to fame: I had one of my articles plagiarized by the local hack.
So, you were an unnamed source?
Yes.