Oakley declines MSG invite
Knicks legend won’t step foot in old arena with legal battle ongoing
Former New York Knicks player Charles Oakley says no thanks, he won’t step foot in Madison Square Garden.
Not during these NBA playoffs, and certainly not as long as he has an ongoing lawsuit against Madison Square Garden and team owner James Dolan over a tussle with security at a 2017 game that got Oakley ejected from the arena.
“I guess their lawyer called my lawyer saying it’s a good time for you to come back to the Garden,” Oakley told The Associated Press on Friday.
Oakley, the former NBA enforcer and rebounding machine with the 1990s Knicks, said he has no interest — though he continued to root for the team — in coming back as long as he remained in a dispute with Dolan. The animosity dates to 2017 when Oakley was arrested after an altercation with MSG security officials after they told him to leave his seat at the arena near Dolan. Oakley was cleared of misdemeanour assault charges in 2018.
So what would it take for Oakley to sit courtside at the Garden?
“They’ve got to apologize,” he said. “We’ll go from there. Can (Dolan) be man enough to say mistakes happen? And he made one.”
Oakley brought assault and battery claims against Dolan and an amended lawsuit was filed just last month. An order Thursday assigned it to Magistrate Judge Stewart D. Aaron to handle going forward.
“Just be honest,” Oakley said. “Just be transparent over what you put someone through and how you changed their life. This definitely changed my life. My daughter Googled me, they show them pulling me out of the Garden, that’s bad. That’s hell for a kid to see that.” MSG has denied all claims. “There’s no kind of agreement.
There’s no kind of, ‘Let’s make this go away,’ ” Oakley said. “They’re not being transparent about what happened.”
Behind Jalen Brunson, the Knicks are enjoying a renaissance and took a 2-0 series lead in the Eastern Conference semifinals into Game 3 Friday night against the Indiana Pacers.
The 60-year-old Oakley played for the Knicks from 1988-98, helping them reach the NBA Finals, but has a splintered relationship with the team because of his past criticism of Dolan. “It’s been a struggle the last seven years,” Oakley said. “There have been things said that weren’t true. The league didn’t step in. The commissioner is pretty soft. He didn’t do nothing. The city got behind me and I’m always behind the fans. I love that.”
As for the current Knicks? “I don’t want to get in their way, they’re playing great,” Oakley said.