Well, it’s finally happened: I feel sorry for James Dolan. This is an unfashionable sentiment, since the owner of the company that owns the New York Knicks and Rangers and more has long been considered a failson bozo, a vituperative doofus, a villainous rumpled heir-turned-king who spends his time feuding with critics and falling asleep in meetings and fronting a vanity band. He’s worked hard, for many years, to earn this reputation.
But now? It’s like watching a bootleg sequel to “Succession”. As you delve into the Dolan-driven lawsuit the Knicks filed against the Toronto Raptors over video co-ordinator Ikechukwu Azotam, something is becoming clear. You have to hack through the grey area of intellectual property in the NBA, where video guys taking their info to new teams is standard practice; you have to temporarily set aside the history of the Raptors and New York; you even have to accept the idea that anybody in basketball would steal ideas from the Knicks, who have won two playoff series since 2000, the year after Dolan took over.
At the heart of the lawsuit the lesson seems to be that James Dolan has finally accepted that he is neither liked nor respected by his peers, or most anybody else. Maybe it is dawning on him, finally.
In the latest Knicks filing in New York court Dolan’s lawyers basically reject the current structure of the NBA. Disputes like this are usually settled with a few phone calls, and the commissioner is the judge.
But Dolan doesn’t want to play by those rules, because he thinks he’ll lose. The filing conceded that the NBA Constitution gives NBA commissioner Adam Silver “exclusive, full, complete, and final jurisdiction of any dispute involving two (2) or more Members of the Association,” without limitation, and then complains for a while before getting to the meat of it: that Silver can’t adjudicate this dispute because he likes Raptors part-owner and NBA board of governors chair Larry Tanenbaum more than he likes Dolan.
Which, other than people who are paid to like James Dolan, or perhaps those who have lived lives similar to James Dolan, is a designation that probably applies to almost everyone.
But that’s not all. ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that before filing the suit against the Raptors, Dolan resigned his position on the league’s influential advisory/finance and media committees, and wrote in a letter to Silver and the other 29 owners that he would no longer attend board meetings, though he would retain voting power. He’s been a reliable protest vote for years.
“Given all that has occurred lately, I have come to the conclusion that the NBA neither needs nor wants my opinion,” wrote Dolan, per a letter obtained by ESPN’s Baxter Holmes. True self-awareness, it should be said, is something we should all aspire to.
There is a vicious impotence to it all, from a man who could have had more influence had he simply been more. Dolan inherited a seat atop the apex sporting empire in the biggest city in North America, with billions of dollars and endless possibilities, and he’s managed to turn it into a pissing match with a team that kept suckering him, a poor underpaid video co-ordinator, and a league where the commissioner might have been his only remaining ally, and then only because it was New York.
Dolan has always been embarrassing, is the thing. Remember when the Knicks were the only team not to make a statement about Black Lives Matter, as the pain of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police swept not just over America but specifically through the Black community, and therefore the NBA? Dolan. Remember when he feuded with everyone from Knicks superfan Spike Lee to Knicks legend Charles Oakley to a random season ticket-holder who emailed him? In that last case, Dolan wrote back and said “the Knicks don’t want you,” and accused the man of perhaps being an alcoholic. Dolan, notably, struggled with substance abuse in his youth.
Remember when he implemented a facial recognition system at Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall to detect his enemies and deny them access, including lawyers at 90 different law firms who were involved in litigation with Dolan or his companies? One lawyer was denied access to Radio City Music Hall while taking her daughter’s Girl Guides troupe to see the Rockettes. A prominent Delaware judge called the venue ban, and I quote, “the stupidest thing I’ve ever read” and “totally crazy.” And that was the same judge who forced Elon Musk to go through with buying Twitter for $44-billion (U.S.). That’s a high, high bar.
If you ever wondered why every superstar, from Kevin Durant to LeBron James to Masai Ujiri didn’t go to the Knicks … well, guess.
But those were the predictable acts of a petty thin-skinned tyrant; now Dolan seems determined to become a karaoke Al Davis, the former Raiders owner who became the black sheep of the NFL. It feels like Dolan is causing problems because there’s not much else he can do.
So I feel sorry for James Dolan, I really do. Imagine searching your whole life for validation, whether on a stage or atop the empire your father built, only to realize you’re still the fool at the table, the joke in the room. It’s better to think it’s everyone else’s fault, I suppose. It won’t be surprising if some more Dolan skeletons rise from their graves in the coming weeks and months; maybe something could even force him to sell, though that’s hard to imagine now. Who knows: maybe he even gets some satisfaction out of this suit.
But no matter how much he has, James Dolan won’t get what he really wants, and it’s a tragedy of sports and business and what might have been. And he might even, at long last, know it.
