Lee makes a stand against his beloved Knicks
Film director falls out with NBA team mired in a 20-year slump, writes Daniel Schofield
Chants of ‘Sell the team! Sell the team!’ are a regular feature now
Film director Spike Lee estimates that he has spent around $10 million (£7.6 million) on New York Knicks tickets over the past 28 years. The return on his investment is questionable, to say the least.
The Knicks’ last title came in 1973. They have not had a winning season since 2012-13. Over the past 20 seasons their winning percentage is the worst in the NBA.
Their last great team were in the early 1990s, when Patrick Ewing went toe-to-toe with Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, albeit unsuccessfully.
Still, Lee did have a couple of perks for his outlay. One was being able to use the employee entrance to access his courtside seats at Madison Square Garden.
That was until last week, when the team decided he should use the VIP entrance like any other celebrity. A “he said, she said” version of events has taken place through the New York media with the result that Lee has vowed to stop attending Knicks games for the remainder of this season.
He is not the only one staying away from Madison Square Garden, which used to rival Broadway as the hottest ticket in town.
The Knicks recently drew their smallest home crowd with 3,200 empty seats for a 112-104 defeat by the Utah Jazz. Those who are sticking around are making displeasure known with chants of “Sell the team! Sell the team” becoming a regular feature of games, although participants are quickly ejected.
The target of those chants, owner James Dolan, is not listening. In a crowded marketplace, the Knicks are champions of being the most dysfunctional and underachieving franchise in American sports.
Maybe we could organise a proper World Series against Mike Ashley’s Newcastle United to determine the universal title for sporting incompetence.
Unlike Newcastle, the Knicks do have money to spend.
According to Forbes, the Knicks are the league’s most valuable franchise, worth an estimated $4.6 billion. Finishing near the bottom of the Eastern Conference season after season also means that they have had their pick of the best college players under the socialistic system American sports operate designed to prevent recurring failure.
Yet, for all that money, the pick of the best young players and with possession of the most iconic sporting venue in the Garden, the Knicks consistently find a way to fritter away those advantages. It is hard to identify where the nadir occurred in a 20-year slump, but recency bias leans towards their transfer dealing last year.
First of all, they traded their best player, Kristaps Porzingis, to the Dallas Mavericks in anticipation of landing a couple of whales in Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, two bona fide superstars.
In the end, Durant and Irving did head to the Big Apple, but to join the crosstown Brooklyn Nets rather than the Knicks. In a radio interview, Durant said: “The cool thing right now is not the Knicks. It’s just a thought. I didn’t really do any full analysis on the Knicks.”
With the money burning a hole in their pocket, the Knicks reacted to being spurned by spending all their superstar wages on players who were nowhere near superstar level. This season, their record stands at 20 victories against 44 defeats. They have fired their head coach, David Fizdale, and last month president Steve Mills, the man responsible for many of their hiring decisions, followed.
In the past 20 years, they have had 13 coaches and almost as many executives. Even those who arrived with impeccable CVS, such as Phil Jackson – who coached the Bulls during their glory days – have been unable to turn the tide. The one constant has been the presence of Dolan, an owner who displays all the patience of Donald Trump in a briefing by a microbiologist. Rather than accepting a rebuild process that could take three seasons, Dolan constantly throws good money after bad in search of the next quick fix.
But it has not worked, making all the Garden’s aura and all those millions in the bank practically worthless.