Selena Roberts does not care for Isiah Thomas, perhaps his conduct in the Anucha Browne Sanders sexual harassment case is relevant, maybe not. Regardless, Isiah Thomas should be suspended a game or two if the account of Thomas threatening opposing players is true. Isn't there a rule about coaches talking to the other teamj's players?
Selena Roberts: Look for a Mastermind in the Shadow of a Melee Commissioner David Stern should punish Isiah Thomas for a tacit and direct pattern of bounty-hunting. Thomas doesn't take hits; he orders them....There are no double-digit losses to Thomas. Just scores to settle.
“Hey, don’t go to the basket right now,” Thomas appears to say to Denver’s Carmelo Anthony with 1 minute 32 seconds left in another home-court rout of the Knicks.
Seventeen seconds later, Collins threw Smith down — as he drove through the paint. And a melee was on. In the mix of fists thrown by several players, including Anthony, and while Smith and Nate Robinson wrestled in the laps of first-row fans, Thomas remained unruffled in his Fifth Avenue threads, untouched by a fight that he all but instigated.
That’s the way it is with instigators. Others were bloodied for Thomas in Madison Square Garden’s twist on “The Sopranos.”
Tags: Basketball, /Knicks
It is testimony to Isiah Thomas’s narcissistic powers of manipulation to witness the Knicks blithely consume his vigilante coaching philosophy.As dupes of Thomas’s deliverance, the players believed they were fighting to save their face Saturday night, but they were fighting to save his.
It is proof of Thomas’s seductive communication skills that the Knicks still circle him like a campfire to hear him rationalize his childhood survivor tales from Chicago’s mean streets as an excuse to wrest revenge on Main Street.
In front of holiday-happy children at the World’s Most Famous Arena, the lemming in Mardy Collins didn’t viciously clothesline Nuggets guard J. R. Smith as payback for a fancy dunk that embarrassed the Knicks, but as retribution for a humiliating blowout of Thomas.
...
But as Commissioner David Stern reviews the footage of the Knicks-Nuggets brawl in the N.B.A.’s post-Palace disciplinary era, as he deliberates what may be understandably harsh penalties for player conduct, he should also punish Thomas for a tacit and direct pattern of bounty hunting.Thomas doesn’t take hits; he orders them.
He didn’t fault his inept preparedness or his players’ passive performance for the Knicks’ disastrous home opener against the Pacers in early November, but he did issue a vengeful warning to an opponent he felt had dunked on his team’s misery.
“We’ll have a long memory,” Thomas said. “And one day, we’ll be the team that’s on top, doing the kicking and the stepping.” He added, “We’ll be pretty unforgiving.”
Perhaps “the top” was a stretch to Thomas’s impatience. On Friday night at Indiana, with the Knicks searching for crawl space in the Eastern Conference, Collins — the same player who collared Smith — committed a flagrant foul against the Pacers.
The Knicks were down by 16 with less than two minutes left in the game. Where is the Knicks’ we’re-not-going-to-take-this spirit in the first quarter or the second or the third? To watch the Knicks in a blowout is to see a team strut without any feathers.
Is any team more defiant after 20-point defeats? Does any team have more practitioners of false bravado?
Collins isn’t the only takedown artist on the team, but he makes for an easy go-to ruffian for Thomas. He is a rookie and an educated enforcer. Collins played for Temple when Coach John Chaney once ordered a goon to take out the competition.
Ruthlessness is a quality Thomas embraces. He once set picks with devilish elbows as the championship ringleader of the Detroit Bad Boys. Yet, somehow, he didn’t appreciate the aggressive defense Bruce Bowen played while a guarding jump shot against the Knicks in a mid-November game.
In an unhinged moment, Thomas angrily confronted Bowen from the sideline, then urged his team to simply break the feet of Bowen, the Spurs’ fabled defender.
“Break his neck,” that’s what Bowen said he heard.
Why isn’t dirty turnabout fair play with Thomas? With his career at a fragile win-or-else pivot point, with his team mired in frustrating inconsistency, with his insecurity on alert, he absorbs every loss as a personal slight and perceives every slight as a personal affront.
Every defeat is a referendum on him. For Thomas to take the blame for a blowout is to be accountable for his failures. Every player’s miscue is a reflection on his roster assemblage. For Thomas to scold a star over a mistake is to question his own decisions. Every critic is a threat. For Thomas to be shown up by Gregg Popovich’s Spurs or George Karl’s Nuggets is to have Larry Brown’s pals rub the past in his face.
This is the paranoia of perception — and it’s a distraction. Thomas isn’t coaching a game as much as he is strategizing his image. How does he look in this win or that loss?
Thomas has gone into his West Side of Chicago mode — punch, fight, win — even though he left for the N.B.A. luxury life almost three decades ago. And he has fallen back on his street shtick — get them before they get you — even though he has been a self-saboteur at the Garden.
The Knicks’ 9-17 record is a product of Thomas. Not of the referees who are out to get Eddy Curry, as Thomas has said. Not of the hostile Garden fans who undercut the Knicks’ confidence, as Thomas has complained.
In less than three years, Thomas has spent more than $400 million for a team that has yet to validate him as the Knicks’ president and coach. Anyone who illuminates this math is to be crushed by Thomas.
He has the gullible hit men to do it. Only Stern can stop him.
Update: Isiah Thomas skates away, singing “la la la”. For probably the first time ever, I agree with something George Karl says:
N.B.A. Suspends Seven Players for Brawl - New York Times ... In Denver, Nuggets coach George Karl was irate with Thomas, who said Monday that Karl put his players in danger by leaving them on the floor too long. Karl accused Thomas of a ''premediated'' act, underscoring his disgust with the New York coach with expletives.''It was directed by Isiah,'' he said during a shootaround. ''I think his actions after the game were despicable. He made a bad situation worse. I'll swear on my children's life that I never thought about running up the score. I wanted to get a big win on the road.''
Well, perhaps James “Dorkweed” Dolan will suspend Isiah Thomas, if Dolan cares about his Knicks.
