Go New York Go (away)

I’m done with the Knicks until Dolan and and Zeke go.

They were the first team I ever really closely followed beginning in the early 90s and to watch the franchise devolve from a hard-working team that scrapped and clawed for everything they earned in the league into a bunch of overpaid underachieving players has been extremely painful.

This whole Anucha Brown Sanders case is the final nail in the coffin though, it reveals how fucking completely amok the franchise is and that responsibility goes straight to the top at Dolan. This guy couldn’t lead people out of a fucking paper bag, let alone a franchise.

Stephon Marbury, the Knicks’ star guard, testified in federal court yesterday that he had sex with an intern for the team after a group outing to a strip club in 2005. The intern worked for Anucha Browne Sanders, who is suing Isiah Thomas, the team’s coach and president, for sexual harassment.

Asked to recall what he told Kathleen Decker, the intern, Marbury testified, “I said, ‘Are you going to get in the truck?’ ” She agreed, he said.

Earlier, Browne Sanders, a former senior vice president for marketing for the Knicks, testified that Decker was one of several employees who told her about abusive behavior by Hassan Gonsalves, a cousin of Marbury who worked for Browne Sanders in a low-level job. Gonsalves got the job through Marbury’s request to James L. Dolan, the chairman of Madison Square Garden.

Gonsalves was later fired for sexual harassment.

NY Times

I expect pro athletes participate in their share of sexual shenanigans, but this is about managing your workplace and it reveals how Dolan simply doesn’t have control of it. It seems he’d rather be liked then set limits, from giving Zeke free spending reign without demanding any accountability (and extending his contract early despite his own stated requirements), to letting Steph’s cousin be hired for some bull shit job (Starbury’s already on already on contract, you don’t have to hire a knucklehead from his entourage if you don’t want to).

What’s also been clear from the coverage of this case is that Sanders repeatedly had difficulty getting Thomas and the Knicks to participate in marketing for the team.

I remember thinking that the TV promos on MSG for the Knicks featuring local New Yorkers interacting comically with life-size cut outs of different Knicks were clever and endearing, but I wondered why none of the actual players were actually participating live. Apparently, because they had frozen Sanders out refusing to work with her, a movement led by Zeke. How the fuck do you allow this Dolan? You may not care about creating a hostile-free workplace for your female employees, but this affects your bottom line. I’m going to guess that all standard NBA contracts have clauses requiring participation in marketing and PR for the league and franchise. If I’m the team owner and my marketing director tells the players to be part of a campaign they better hop the fuck to it and play nice. At the end of the day, we’re all trying to get paid.

But, it seems like Dolan wants to be one of the boys so bad, that he didn’t intervene in that and other situations and which is why this whole shit has spiraled into the mess it is.

Duck Folan