<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">Time to do job on, not in, court We get it now with Isiah Thomas, okay? We get it. He thinks he's getting railroaded here, by Anucha Browne Sanders and in the newspapers, though not all of them. He says he has a right to defend himself, especially when his pricey outside PR firm thinks Browne Sanders has a better day in the papers. So he holds another press conference. No more press conferences now. It is time to stop talking about this and do his job for as long as he still has it. Or make his fans wonder if the trouble he is in has compromised his ability to do that job. One of these days, Thomas needs to do something to make some improvements to the Knicks' team that has only really filled the Garden with the kind of hope it was expecting this season for one six-game winning streak. Not make it a championship contender. Maybe not even make it a playoff contender right now. Just make it better for the second half of the season, maybe by using a couple of those expiring contracts we hear a lot about. Do his job, not read another statement. For the time being, Thomas has lost the support of his own fans, even as those fans are told his support is stronger than ever from James Dolan, the boss of the Garden whose only points on the scoreboard are the ones the Rangers are finally putting up this season. Someday, despite all of Thomas' bring-it-on talk about the lawsuit Browne Sanders has filed against him, he might lose big in a court of law the way the Knicks have been losing in basketball. Again: He is not guilty because she has done a far more persuasive and powerful job of telling her story. He is also not innocent of all charges because he has the big PR guns and the money of the Garden behind him, enough money to help sink a West Side stadium for the Jets and the 2012 Summer Games. Who knows? Maybe Dolan thinks he can do the same thing in the end he did with the opposition to that stadium: Outspend them. Even though you have to say that strategy hasn't exactly worked like gangbusters with the Knicks. Or for the Garden, which was told by the EEOC that it should settle with another sexual harassment complainant, Courtney Browne, for along the lines of $800,000. On Friday night Isiah Thomas said this at the Garden: "I look forward to my day in court when I am proven right and she is proven wrong." Then he left without taking questions the way he didn't take questions at his lawyers' office the day before. But at a time when, fairly or unfairly, Thomas has so little support outside of Penn Plaza, he ought to ask himself this question: At what point does he start losing the support of his basketball coach? Believe me, Larry Brown has been loyal to both Dolan and Thomas, the men who hired him, in both public and private. But here is another question: Does any reasonable person really think Brown signed on for a circus like this? There are four people who currently control the destiny of the Knicks, for different reasons: James Dolan. Isiah Thomas. Stephon Marbury. Larry Brown. Only one of them, the coach, has ever been a true success at his current job. Has Brown done the best job of his life this season? He would be the first to tell you that he hasn't, sometimes treating so many of his mismatched players like some sort of high-school chemistry experiment. But then, he has scuffled before as he has tried to rebuild other programs. It was different in other places. Even in his first season in San Antonio, what turned out to be a 21-61 season, he knew David Robinson was coming back from the Navy the next year. In Philadelphia, he had Allen Iverson. Now he has Marbury. He has young Eddy Curry, who shows flashes of brilliance when he stays on the court. He has Channing Frye, a rookie with his own flashes of brilliance. He has future young role players like Nate Robinson and David Lee. He has a lot of bad contracts on his bench. With all that, the weaknesses of the team, despite the promise of some of the kids, are visible from what you would call the cheap seats at the Garden, if there were any. Even up there they wonder why somebody didn't stop Isiah from offering $30 million to Jerome James - the Knicks competing against no one for him - and trading Kurt Thomas for Quentin Richardson, even if Robinson came with Richardson. Dolan, who has presided over the most dismal period in the history of the Garden, won't ever stop Thomas from doing anything. Neither will Steve Mills, who was never supposed to be president of the Garden. Nobody supported Thomas more in the early going than I did, but for two years, I also know Thomas hasn't had to listen to anybody at the Garden, including Anucha Browne Sanders. Maybe he should start listening to the Brown he still has on his side. This lawsuit, if it plays all the way out, could take years, and anybody who knows anything about suits like this knows what a bear they are, how invasive for an entire company. The lawyers don't care about silly anonymous quotes leaked by PR firms. They care about the facts of these cases, which go slowly, which can make the parties involved feel as if they may never go away. "I look forward to my day in court," Isiah keeps saying, like this is one more big game he can win, the way he did as a player. He needs to win some games on the court. The judgments there come faster, every couple of days. He needs to show his fans something there. He needs to do a better job there. You can't talk your way out of trouble there. </div>http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/basketba...4p-328189c.html
Yes, talk is cheap for Isiah now. The Knicks are losing, and are giving a pick to Chicago. As if that wasn’t enough, being accused of this reflects badly not only on himself, but the entire Knicks organization. Depending on what he does with our expiring contracts at the deadline will determine whether he stays or goes. I’d rather keep him as head of scouting, though.
