For Knicks’ Owner James Dolan, a Title Might Finally Stop Some Boos
Could all be forgiven, if not forgotten, by the basketball-crazed city?
“Everyone loves a winner, and Jim Dolan sure looks like a winner right now,” said Kathryn Wylde, a longtime New York power broker who has worked on behalf of the city’s top corporations. “I suspect we are ready to forgive his grudge matches.”
Well, maybe not everyone.
“He’s the owner representing icons of Manhattan and the city at large, and to be so unloved — people love to hate him,” said Brad Hoylman-Sigal, the Manhattan borough president and a staunch critic of Mr. Dolan’s. “I don’t think it applies more aptly to anyone else than Jim Dolan.”
The public criticism of Mr. Dolan, whose representatives did not respond to requests for comment, began from almost the moment he was handed control of the Knicks by his father, Charles Dolan, a cable TV titan who had used his company, Cablevision, to buy Madison Square Garden, including the Knicks and Rangers.
The years of jeers have done little to dent Mr. Dolan’s business empire, which includes numerous other New York City treasures: Radio City Music Hall, the Beacon theater and the Christmas Spectacular live production starring the Radio City Rockettes. And he spent $2.3 billion to build the high-tech Las Vegas Sphere, which opened three years ago to rave reviews. Last year, defying skeptics, the Sphere turned a profit.
But fans bemoaned his decisions on and off the court.
He once fired an employee after she reported being sexually harassed by Isiah Thomas, the team’s president of basketball operations from 2003 to 2008, under whose watch the Knicks remained rudderless. She sued and was paid millions in a settlement after a jury ruled that she was sexually harassed and improperly fired. He also extended Mr. Thomas’s contract not long after the suit became public, generating widespread criticism. Then, in 2015, he hired Mr. Thomas again as president of the New York Liberty, a team in the Women’s National Basketball Association.
