Un-fucking-believable. No wonder no one wants to play basketball in this town. I hope some nut climbs a bell tower and takes a shot at Dolan .

Hey Lilo, do us a favor, and take this piece of trash back to Detroit where people seem to understand him .

Even now, New York Knicks owner James Dolan and Isiah Thomas deserve each other

Mike Lupica, NY Daily News

Here is what happened the last time Isiah Thomas was an employee of Madison Square Garden: A jury decided he sexually harassed Anucha Browne Sanders in the workplace and that when Browne Sanders complained, James Dolan - owner of the Knicks and the Garden - fired her.

Thomas and Dolan still blame that on everybody except themselves. BP is more accountable than they are.

Now Thomas, the worst sports executive in Garden history, is back on the payroll as a "consultant." In a time of runaway unemployment, Thomas not only gets to keep his job as basketball coach at Florida International - where he was 7-25 last season - but gets to draw a check from his old boss as well.

So after everything he did to the Knicks, Thomas gets to come back.

The small-timers at the Garden make this announcement on a summer Friday, trying to somehow soften the blow with Saturday papers. As if people really wouldn't notice.

When NBA Commissioner David Stern, who must be awfully proud to have Thomas back in the league, forced Dolan to pay Anucha Browne Sanders her $11.6 million, Dolan sounded as if his leg were caught in some kind of trap, making the whole thing sound like some tragic miscarriage of justice.

But then he has never accepted any blame for what he did to Sanders. Neither has Thomas.

Ever since that famous smile of Thomas' didn't work with the jury - "I guess I was a pretty good basketball player," he said in an aw-shucks way - Thomas has told anybody who cares to listen that it wasn't the merits of the case that produced the most shameful day the Garden has ever had, it was newspapers, the Daily News in particular, that did him in.

Now he has somehow convinced Dolan he is some sort of invaluable "recruiter" of young basketball talent. Dolan even forced Donnie Walsh, who has spent two years trying to clean up the truly Gulf-like mess Thomas left him, to thank Thomas for helping the Knicks sign Amar'e Stoudemire.

Good grief.

Here's what enabled the Knicks to sign Stoudemire: More money and more years than anybody else in their sport was going to offer this guy.

They gave him $100 million when nobody else was going to and he took it. The idea that Thomas was some sort of central figure in this is just one more lie, as if all of them at the Garden now just lie to stay in practice.

The difference with the suit about sexual harassment that Anucha Browne Sanders brought against them was that they got called out on that in open court.

Despite all of that, despite that Thomas' creepy behavior cost Dolan $11.6 million on top of the fortune Thomas had already wasted on bad basketball players, Dolan treats him like some sort of genius, one who apparently will have a job for life on 33rd St.

Through it all, these incredible lumps wonder why the Knicks have become something worse than a punching bag, become one of the great punchlines in the sport. At least the Knicks are still great at something.

When it was announced yesterday that the Knicks had brought back Thomas as a consultant and recruiter, I called Kevin Mintzer. He was one of the lawyers representing Anucha Browne Sanders, which means one of the lawyers who did to the Garden's lawyers, and their case, what other NBA teams always did to Thomas' Knicks.

Mintzer laughed at the whole idea of Thomas getting any kind of job back at the Garden. He doesn't have to take Thomas seriously anymore, even though Knicks fans do.

"It's like they're still clinging to this notion that it didn't happen [with Browne Sanders] the way the jury clearly decided that it had," Mintzer said. "That it was the media's fault, and not their conduct. It's kind of amazing, actually."

Even after Dolan had to pay for what Thomas had done, they acted like a couple of weasels. They deserved each other then, and they still deserve each other.



Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/basket...l#ixzz0vvsU6ZPD