Donnie Walsh deserved better. A New York guy born and bred who came back home to resurrect a franchise from the depths of the NBA abyss. A franchise he cheered for growing up. A franchise that his Pacers went head on with for years in the playoffs during the Patrick Ewing-Reggie Miller years. Walsh came back home only to get slapped in the face by an ungrateful owner after three-plus years of excellent work.
Let us flashback to April of 2008. The New York Knicks were playing out the string of another highly unsuccesful season under Isiah Thomas. On the heels of firing Larry Brown and paying him a significant chunk of change to leave, Isiah Thomas was forced by James Dolan to become the head coach as well as GM. The New York Knicks were the laughing stock of the NBA. The team was filled with malcontents and selfish players who were taking away from the development of youngsters David Lee and Wilson Chandler. David Stern then meets with James Dolan and mysteriously within days, Knicks fans get their long awaited wish and Isiah Thomas is dismissed. It is now quite clear Donnie Walsh was never Dolan’s first choice.
With New York Knicks Owner James Dolan and GM Donnie Walsh unable to come to terms over the past few months on a new deal for Walsh, the New York Knicks have decided to turn the page once again. This time they release the man who quite possibly saved their franchise from another five to ten years of misery with an astute off-season signing of Amar’e Stoudemire who for the first half of the season played MVP-caliber ball and who immediately changed the culture around the team. The addition of Carmelo Anthony in midseason puts the Knicks in prime position for an incredible 2012 offseason where only Stoudemire, Anthony, Jerome Jordan (last years second round pick who played overseas this year), and this years first round pick will be under contract, possibly leaving the Knicks a significant amount of financial flexibility to mold this team around Stoudemire and Anthony as they see fit.
Walsh spent the first two years of his Knicks tenure unloading bad contract after bad contract, all brought in by the Isiah Thomas regime with Dolan’s blessing. Walsh did the unthinkable and unloaded those contracts, thereby creating enough cap space so that during the 2010 offseason the Knicks would be able to sign two stars if they had been able to successfully do so at that time. At the very least, Walsh created the salary cap flexibility that the Knicks now enjoy, which is a big portion of how you build your team in the NBA these days and going forward could be an even more important factor depending how the new Collective Bargaining Agreement shakes down.
It has come to light that Walsh and Dolan have been negotiating this contract since January of this year. Back in January, Dolan and Walsh had a verbal altercation over Walsh’s willingness to give an interview to New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica. Dolan apparently felt as though there should be a silence to the media while Walsh apparently wanted a more open door policy regarding interviews. One can only wonder why it is ok for Dolan to go over Walsh’s head and not allow the man he is paying to do the job Dolan is paying him to do but Walsh can’t give another run of the mill interview? Hipocrisy at its finest.
Walsh was also apparently upset over the meddling nature of Dolan during the Carmelo Anthony negotiations. Back when Walsh took the job as Knicks GM in April of 2008 he was given “full autonomy”. While the Knicks were not dealing from the position of strength myself and many others thought they were, Dolan’s continuous interference did not help matters. He went over Walsh’s head to meet with Nuggets owner Stan Kreonke thereby possibly submarining any leverage Walsh had on the situation. That idea of “full autonomy” proved to be a fallacy as Dolan also had previously meddled his way in to the Lebron James situation during the summer of 2010, sending not the highly respected, proven GM, Donnie Walsh but the villainized, outcast known as Isiah Thomas to meet with Lebron simply because Isiah is Dolan’s friend. Now given the way that situation went down, I am not sure that sending Walsh would have mattered, but whatever happened to putting your best foot forward?
Fast forward to May during the actual contract negotiations between Walsh and James Dolan and it has come to light that not only did Dolan as Walsh to put a media freeze in effect, not grant him full autonomy, and not promise to kick Isiah Thomas out of the Knicks affairs for good but oh by the way, he offered him somewhere between a 40 and 50 per cent pay cut. This, while asking for a title contender to boot. During the press conference that aired on MSG network, Walsh cited his deteriorating health and the fact that this is a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week job. Walsh has brought nothing but class to the Knicks organization for the last few years so why should this be any different? Clearly the classy Walsh who is still associated with the franchise in a consultant capacity did not wish to make a public spectacle of things.
Based on these facts above you could make a strong case for Donnie Walsh as the most underappreciated man in the four major North American sports.
Going forward, the New York Knicks could very well come out of this fine. There is still interim GM, Glen Grunwald, along with Mark Warkentian and Walsh protégé Allan Houston. That’s over thirty years of experience still there. And on the court, there is still Stoudemire, Anthony and at least for one more year, Chauncey Billups. But the stability that the front office had under Walsh is gone along with his twenty-plus years of actual GM experience. Thats a big hit to any franchise, even one with as bright an outlook as the Knicks have.
While it is clear that the next GM will not be Isiah Thomas (as all Knicks fans, including me, breathe a collective sigh of relief) one has to ask: What in the world are you thinking James Dolan? Your presence is like a black cloud over the heads of Knicks fans…even when there is no storm, we know its just a matter of time.