Stick to the Knicks
James Dolan vs Steve Ballmer vs The Daily News
Good Morning,
During the summer, we will publish every Thursday instead of our typical Monday-Friday frequency. Before we get into our in-depth topic of the week, let’s catch up on some key news items.
After signing a renegotiated two-year deal with the Knicks, Reggie Bullock underwent successful surgery at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York for a cervical disc herniation. Bullock is expected to miss at least one month of the regular season, per SNY.
Contract Details: Bullock was signed to a two-year, $8.2M ($4M and $4.1M) contract on Tuesday. The Knicks used their room exception to complete the signing. The second-year has $1M guaranteed with the balance fully protected on June 28, 2020 if he is not waived. [Bobby Marks]
Original deal: Of course, the Knicks re-worked their original two-year, $21 million deal after learning about his health issue.
Damyean Dotson’s 2019-20 salary of $1.6 million is now fully guaranteed. The Knicks would have needed to waive him before July 15th to erase his contract, something it didn’t make any sense to do.
Marcus Morris officially signed with the Knicks, after breaking off his deal with the Spurs. Marc Berman reports that his agent Rich Paul preferred Morris stick to his original agreement [with the Spurs] and the two are headed toward a breakup over the incident.
Marcus Morris denies Rich Paul prevented him from being a Clipper:
RJ Barrett has been invited to Canada’s national team training camp ahead of this summer’s FIBA World Cup in China, per TSN Sports.
The Knicks never had interest in trading for Russell Westbrook, according to USA Today. “They remained true to their word and were focused on their rebuild without giving up assets.”
Congrats to Mitchell Robinson on making the 2019 NBA Summer League First Team:
James Dolan vs Steve Ballmer vs The Daily News
The New York Daily News published an article yesterday titled: James Dolan and MSG are waging a war on Inglewood over new Clippers arena project. While the article cites revelations obtained from a legal deposition and background information that has been reported by other news organizations, the language and tone of the report is quite harsh against James Dolan.
This caused MSG to respond using the Knicks PR account as such:
What is this all about?
The Clippers are proposing to build an arena in Inglewood, only a few blocks away from the MSG-owned Forum. The LA Times sums it up:
The Clippers wanted to use 22 acres of vacant, city-owned land across West Century Boulevard from the NFL stadium development — parcels that had been leased to the Madison Square Garden Co., the New York-based sports and entertainment giant that owns the nearby Forum, for overflow parking.
A year and a half later, the land is the subject of a bitter legal fight pitting Inglewood and Ballmer, the former Microsoft chief executive estimated by Forbes to be worth more than $42 billion, against MSG, whose holdings include the NBA’s New York Knicks, the NHL’s New York Rangers, esports teams and entertainment venues across the country, along with a stake in the Tribeca Film Festival.
[…]
MSG sued Butts and Inglewood last year, claiming the mayor tricked the company into terminating its lease so the city could make way for a technology park. The mayor repeatedly has denied the allegation. Murphy’s Bowl LLC, the Clippers-controlled company, countersued MSG in December.
Their dispute is about more than parking spaces.
MSG, once a staunch ally of Butts, doesn’t want a competing arena placed about a mile from the Forum after having invested $100 million to renovate the venue used for concerts, award shows and other events. The Clippers’ lease at Staples Center, which they share with the Lakers and Kings, expires in 2024.
Why should we care?
Well, that’s the question Knicks fans are asking themselves, and the reason why we decided to comment about it at all. Whether or not The Daily News is fair in their reporting on the Knicks is besides the point in this case. Why MSG would use the Knicks PR account to contradict a story that has nothing to do with the Knicks is what doesn’t make sense.
Besides the terrible optics of using the Knicks PR account to air their grievances, MSG’s statement comes up short in explaining their stance.
The fact is, there is widespread concern across the Inglewood community about the proposed Clippers arena – with thousands of Inglewood residents actively voicing their opposition since the day the project was announced. Residents have raised several, serious concerns – about the project’s “backroom” dealings, its devastating environmental impacts, and the way it would overwhelm the surrounding neighborhood with traffic and force out residents.
MSG readily supports efforts to give voice to residents who are otherwise being ignored and shut out of the public review and approval process for this project. We continue to stand with local residents and organizations working to protect their neighborhood.
MSG is in a legal battle over an arena deal that would impact their entertainment business at The Forum (which MSG owns). It’s pretty straight-forward. James Dolan doesn’t care about the residents of Inglewood anymore than he cares about a fan telling him to “sell the team.”
The fact that MSG would refute the Daily News story by citing concern for the residents of Inglewood is disingenuous. This is a business issue. MSG might have a legitimate legal complaint against the proposed arena. But when they spin it to be about the residents of Inglewood and use the Knicks PR account to make their point, they make themselves look small.
Jonathan Macri with more…
We couldn't just go quietly into that cold night, could we?
The NBA season, for all intents and purposes, is over. Summer League is complete. There are no stars left to be dealt because they've all been traded already. Kenneth freaking Faried is arguably the best free agent left on the market. The FIBA World Cup is seven weeks away. The offseason that always seems to get shorter and shorter has finally arrived.
And yet, here we are, talking about another silly, pointless thing done by Knicks owner James Dolan.
Yesterday, the Madison Square Garden Company released a statement in which MSG took aim at its regular sandbox nemesis, the New York Daily News, over its refusal to run a statement about - wait for it - the News' alleged vendetta against MSG. All of this stems from issues MSG has with the Clippers' proposed new arena and a subsequent lawsuit over whether MSG was “tricked” into terminating their lease for land critical to the construction of this proposed arena.
I barely made it through that paragraph without falling asleep. If you're like me, money wars between various parties who have more of it than I could possibly fathom don't exactly peak my interest.
What does matter to me, however, is the team I root for, and choose to continue rooting for despite the fact that most everyone who writes about the NBA at large routinely describes this pursuit as a fool's errand.
So when the Twitter account for that team pushes out the aforementioned statement, I take notice. I take notice because I have had to read tweet after tweet and article after article over the last 18 days, not only calling the Knicks' summer an utter disaster, but one of their own making.
I take notice of these things not because they are true, but because they exist, and if I see them, so do agents, players and fans in New York and around the league. True or not, a storyline is perpetuated. And as usual, I start to wonder how interrelated all this stuff really is.
For starters, members of the media write these articles. I don't believe, like some do, that every member of the media has a grudge against the Knicks. If anything, there's a very small number that do, and even those few are smart enough to be subtle about it. But every time I see one of these articles, I think back to something Mike Vorkunov said to me on a podcast months ago: the Knicks will be considered the Knicks until they aren't.
It's 2019. We're five months away from the third decade of the new millennium. Perception has never been more powerful, and narratives never more prevalent. There's as much room for nuance in sports-talk parlance as there is for me kicking back and relaxing with a glass of wine while I'm home for the summer watching my soon to be 3-year-old daughter wreck havoc on all she encounters. It ain't happening.
Stories painting the Knicks as buffoons are easy to write because they are the Knicks, and not the Spurs or Nets or Clippers or Thunder or one of 20 other teams that get the benefit of the doubt. Their Twitter account pushing an MSG PR statement has nothing to do with this fact and everything to do with this fact all at once.
Some might read that and say it's a bridge too far; that the Knicks will always be targets because they play in the world's largest market and have lost more games than any franchise in the league over the past 20 years. To a certain extent that is true. But to pretend that a presumption of ignorance doesn't exist, irrespective of record, is ignorant in and of itself, as is thinking that stunts like yesterday's PR push have no effect on said presumption. Again: they are who they are until they aren't.
Does the presumption exist simply because Dolan exists? Is it because acts like yesterday further the thinking that pettiness reigns supreme within the Garden, preventing it from being the kind of "excited to come to work today" environment that had everyone with a voice recorder and a credential climbing over each other to write stories about in Brooklyn this year? Is it simply because media people generally stick together, and if an argument can be made against the team, more often than not, it will be?
My guess is that it's vaguely equal parts all of the above. The real shame is that, by and large, players seem to enjoy their time playing for the Knicks. With two very notable exceptions, former players have good things to say not only about the franchise, but about Dolan himself.
Whether or not the coverage is fair is irrelevant. The concept of "fair" stops mattering sometime in grade school. If two of my 8th graders are squabbling over who owns a pen and I snap at them both equally, that sucks for whoever had rights to the pen. Neither has my sympathy, nor does Dolan or the Daily News. As a fan, I don't really care. If it affects my team's ability to sign prominent free agents, "fairness" goes out the window. Get your shit together and grow up.
Does it actually matter? When Woj says on his pod that playing for a Dolan-owned team has a way of beating you down, much like the question of fairness, the truth doesn't matter. If Woj says it, that goes further than the truth. Regardless, the longer I have to hear whispers insinuating that at least some star players don't want to play for the Knicks, the more I'm forced to ask myself that question.
As a fan, I don't want to ask it. As someone who writes in this newsletter and appeared on MSG network a few months ago (and would love to do so again), I really don't want to ask it. I'd much rather say "screw anyone who doesn't want this burden; if it's too much, we didn't want you anyway." I'd love nothing more than to blame the fact that Plan B became Plan A this July on a misbegotten decision by a medical staff 3000 miles away and the whims of a point guard who may or may not be all there. I enjoy asking these questions as much as I enjoy writing articles like this, which is to say: not much.
Thanks for reading, talk to you next Thursday!