Commish uses power for good
WAIT … so a commissioner can actually take a sad song and make it better? A man like Adam Silver can walk into a room armed mostly with common sense and common decency, and he can act like a grown-up, and he can actually solve a problem rather than turn it into a recurring two-year calamity? That’s allowed? Really? Are you paying attention Roger Goodell?
“It is beyond disheartening to see situations involving members of the NBA family like the one that occurred at Madison Square Garden this past week,” Silver said in a statement released early Monday evening.
“In an effort to find a path forward, New York Knicks owner Jim Dolan, Charles Oakley, and I met today at the league office, along with Michael Jordan, who participated by phone.”
Silver’s powers of persuasion are well known. In an uglier situation a few years ago, he somehow managed to do what David Stern never could in all his years on the job: made Donald Stirling and his smallminded, small-time ways disappear. That negotiation was far more complicated, and far more delicate.
This one? This was something that needed to be confronted exactly the way it was, with Silver gathering the major principles in a room, placing a call to North Carolina to get Jordan involved in the case of his best friend, Oakley. And talk it out. Talk it through. “Both Mr. Oakley and Mr. Dolan were apologetic about the incident and subsequent comments, and their nega
tive impact on the Knicks organization and the NBA,” Silver said in his statement. “Mr. Dolan expressed his hope that Mr. Oakley would return to MSG as his guest in the near future.”
You can expect that to happen shortly after the All-Star break, assuming Oakley and Dolan took their commissioner’s part of this to heart — and they’d better. Nobody came across in a good light this week, not Oakley, laying hands on Garden security personnel; not Dolan, choosing the nuclear-winter path of retaliation which included not only banning Oakley from the Garden but outing him as a drunk.
In its own small way, this hearkens back to another smart commissioner who possessed splendid powers of persuasion, Pete Rozelle. Thirty-eight years ago the Giants were a mess, they had just finished a 15th straight year outside the playoffs, they had season ticket holders renting airplanes to get their message across.
Fundamentally, the Giants’ mess cam down to Wellington Mara’s untenable relationship with his nephew, Tim. Business couldn’t get done because the two Maras wouldn’t speak to each other. So Rozelle asked George Young if he’d dive into that mess, then persuaded both Maras it would be in their best interest to listen. They did. And it was. “And the whole course of our franchise was altered,” Wellington Mara said 20 years later.
Getting an owner and a prominent alumnus back together won’t — can’t — have the same deep impact on the Knicks. But it does make it pretty clear that both Dolan and Oakley understood this couldn’t go on this way — terrible PR for the franchise, and a wasted asset in the ultra-popular Oakley. Silver could see that from 6 miles away.
Somehow, he got this rectified without having to dial up an arbiter.
“I appreciate the efforts of Mr. Dolan, Mr. Oakley and Mr. Jordan to work toward a resolution of this matter,” Silver said, and while the press release didn’t indicate that he dropped a microphone when that was done, we can safely assume he did. Good. The Knicks needed this reconciliation. They needed a grown-up in the room.
Thankfully, they had one on speed dial.