To Boo Or Not To Boo? That’s The Question, Knicks Fans

The Knicks are in the NBA Finals. The way the team’s been playing lately, that means fans have only a little time to make a big decision: Are they gonna cheer or jeer when James Dolan holds up the Larry O’Brien Trophy?

It’s been a long time since the Knicks have gotten this close to a ring. An awful long time. With an awful lot of awful teams. And Dolan, who has controlled day-to-day operations of the organization since the turn of the century, has been blamed for the last two-and-a-half decades of that awfulness. That means that John Madden’s alleged description of winning as a “great deodorant” could soon be put to a test. Because few owners in sports have stunk like Dolan.

There aren’t enough pixels to retell everything Dolan did along the way to becoming an enemy of his own team’s fans. But any list of his ungreatest hits would include:  

He stood by former Knicks general manager and head coach Isiah Thomas long after the 2007 trial in which a jury awarded Anucha Browne Sanders $11.6 million after finding that Thomas sexually harassed her and that Dolan’s organization retaliated by having her fired. “Testimony by witnesses made the inner workings of [Madison Square] Garden appear dysfunctional, hostile and lewd,” said the New York Times. Dolan said he would appeal, but instead settled with Browne Sanders for $11.5 million. 

In 2013, he was accused of making MSG employees eavesdrop mid-game on a Knick, Carmelo Anthony. In ESPN’s 2014 ranking of worst owners in the NBA, Dolan destroyed the competition as convincingly as the Knicks just beat the Cavs. “To nobody’s surprise, New York Knicks owner James Dolan came in at a distant 30th,” the network’s Kevin Arnovitz wrote. (Yes, that means Dolan was at the time deemed even worse than Donald Sterling.) 

Then there was the ugly public feud with Charles Oakley that broke out in the open in 2017, when Dolan had the former fan favorite forcibly removed from his courtside seat, escorted from the arena, and banned for life. Then Dolan, who has been open for years about his own alcoholism, went on New York sports radio to imply that Oakley had a drinking problem. Fans of another team Dolan owns, the New York Rangers, went viral for chanting, “Free Oakley” at the Garden. 

That same year, Dolan got in another spat with a Knicks fan for yelling, “Sell the team, Jim!” at him outside a game. The fan said Dolan called him an “asshole” while having security eject him and banned him from Knicks games for life. “I did call him an asshole,” Dolan told me at the time, “because he is an asshole.”

By then discussion of Dolan’s bad reputation had broken contain from sports reporters. Even The Progressive magazine wanted readers to know it had seen enough. “James Dolan, owner of the New York Knicks, is the most embarrassing chief executive in sports,” read the lede to the mag’s 2017 Dolan takedown, which was headlined, “The Pathologies of James Dolan.” 

But right around that time the anti-Dolan wave began to crest. This sea change started once he turned his focus toward another building in another city, what was originally called the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas. Dolan announced he’d launch the project in February 2018, and kept his eyes on the prize through some hiccups, if a pandemic and coming in $1 billion over budget on a $1.3 billion project can be called hiccups.

The buzz around the Sphere’s opening in 2023, with a 40-show residency by U2, was massive and overwhelmingly positive. Dolan then confessed to the New York Times, “I don’t really like owning teams.” 

“Basically every fan thinks of themselves as the owner/general manager,” Dolan told reporter Katherine Rosman, whose article was the most sympathetic press Dolan had gotten maybe ever. (He’d expressed the same sick-of-the-fans sentiment years earlier in “Fix the Knicks,” a song he wrote and recorded with his touring dad band, J.D. & The Straight Shot. Sample lyric: “Everyone’s an expert/So trade your draft picks/You gotta get this guy/To fix the Knicks.” Here he is doing the tune in 2011 as an opener for Aretha Franklin.)

Coincidentally or not, while Dolan was focused on the Sphere his basketball team got better. Dolan was given the keys to the kingdom by his father following the August 1999 death of MSG chairman Marc Lustgarten. By my count, that puts the Knicks record during Dolan’s reign up through the beginning of this season at 919-1171. That means the Knicks could go 82-0 the next three seasons and Dolan would still have a losing mark as an owner. 

But since 2020, when Dolan hired superagent Leon Rose as Knicks president and claimed he’d stay out of Rose’s way, the team’s been real good, with a 279-203 record, and four consecutive winning seasons for the first time in the 2000s.

There’ve been lots of indications throughout his team’s turnaround that Dolan is still Dolan. In April, for example, Wired and Pablo Torre Finds Out jointly reported that MSG’s use of electronic surveillance on arenagoers had gone well beyond what was previously known. The Garden security staff was, among many alleged malfeasances, caught “watching a fan enter the bathroom.” 

But the same ol, same ol’ conduct from Dolan didn’t draw the outrage from fans that past transgressions had. Maybe they’d grown tired of hating the guy. Or, more likely, the Knicks’ opening-round series against the Hawks was starting that week, with expectations higher than in living memory.

And these days Dolan gets nothing but praise from the press for the same quick trigger that used to inspire only Bronx cheers. 

Now comes an interesting test. Will the fans follow the media’s lead and let bygones be bygones with Dolan should their and his Knicks end the franchise’s ringless streak? Will the owner, in other words, be greeted like 2012 Joe Lacob, the Golden State boss whose relationship with fans was, for many Dolan-like reasons (his organization was sued for sexual harassment, for example, and was labeled meddlesome for firing Mark Jackson after a 51-win season) so toxic that they derailed a ceremony to retire beloved former player Chris Mullins’s jersey just to boo the owner? Or like 2015-and-beyond Lacob, who was suddenly hailed heroically by fans while the Warriors were on the way to winning their first title since the 1970s, and is now, after four rings, accepted as a local treasure?

I wanna know! As a fan of the Washington Football Team, I’d always hoped to live to see the franchise win a title under Dan Snyder, one of the few guys in the history of history who could body even Dolan in a “worst sports owner” competition. Not because I wanted anything good to come Snyder’s way, mind you. But I was intrigued as hell about how the despised D.C. owner, who also took over his team in 1999, would be greeted at a trophy ceremony. Alas, Snyder was so bad at his job I never came anywhere close to getting an answer. But, as Madden would want, I always assumed he’d be cheered. Dolan’s a damn good proxy for Snyder, so this year’s NBA Finals could give me a clue as to how that would have gone. If no “Sell the team!” chants ring out on Fifth Avenue when the owner’s victory parade float passes by, I’ll have my answer. In any case: Let’s go, Knicks! 

Disclosure: James Dolan wrote and recorded a fun, self-deprecating song at the author’s request about a decade ago and for a time would provide surprisingly great comments for stories the author wrote for another publication, but Dolan and the author have not spoken since a 2018 phone call that ended with Dolan claiming (possibly correctly) that the other publication had violated an agreement about how the fun, self-deprecating song could be used and Dolan yelling (surely correctly), “You’d never work for me!” at the author.