James Dolan Could Complicate the Knicks’ Promising Next Season

The Knicks enter the 2026 season this week as defending NBA champions, as any New Yorker in your life would be happy to remind you. They tore through last season’s playoffs, thanks to their cohesion, their tenacity, and the right hand of God. It also helped that the team’s sometimes combative owner, James Dolan, was on his best behavior. He backed his front office when it made the controversial decision to replace the team’s head coach. He gave an inspiring, if a little wacky, speech at the start of the postseason about the need to “eliminate all the distractions” if they wanted to succeed at the very highest level. (“Maybe you should give up sex for the next 10 weeks. You don’t have to,” he noted.)

The players responded with an almost obsessive level of focus. Toward the end of the Knicks’ magical title run, however, a number of potential distractions arose—thanks to Dolan himself. He invited President Trump to Madison Square Garden for Game 3, forcing fans to wait through hours of security procedures to get into the arena and undercutting the energy inside. He picked fights with police commissioner Jessica Tisch and Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He “micromanaged” the championship parade, one source with direct knowledge of the matter previously told me, “like it was his own sweet sixteen.”

Days later, Dolan shocked fans by saying there were hard limits to how much he’d pay his players, even if sticking to those limits meant risking the break-up of his first-ever championship squad. He blamed the league’s collective bargaining agreement, and its restrictions on big spenders. But this is a man who spent years paying top dollar for players who weren’t even close to worth it. Now he was suddenly choosing austerity?

The team’s all-star center, Karl-Anthony Towns, was reportedly offered a four-year contract extension worth about $76 million less than the maximum. Asked by reporters if he deserved a better deal, the heart-on-his-starter-jacket Towns did not hold back: “No shit, Sherlock,” he said. “I just won a championship.” (The team now says it will pause all contract extension talks until later in the season, a highly unusual stance.) The players have vowed not to let the arguments over money impact their play in the new season. It won’t be easy. “There will be days where it's top of the mind,” Josh Hart admitted. “We’re humans." The Knicks went 1–4 in their five preseason games.

In the middle of all of this, Madison Square Garden—the Knicks’ home, Dolan has a controlling interest in that, too—briefly raised its prices so high that the worst ticket in the arena would go for more than $1,000. (Unlike these other moves, the Garden quickly labeled that one “a mistake.”)

Most concerning of all was Dolan’s installation of his longtime crony, Isaiah Thomas, on the board of a new corporate entity that controlled the Knicks. Thomas was a disaster when he served as the team’s head coach and general manager in the mid-2000s. Sexual harassment accusations against him led to a lawsuit that ultimately cost Madison Square Garden more than $11 million in punitive damages. (Thomas denied the accusations when they were first leveled.) He was responsible for some of the team’s lowest moments. Bringing him back now was an example of “exactly why fans and investors have such a negative view of Dolan,” one shareholder told the trade publication Front Office Sports.

Lawyers for Kellye Croft, a Tennessee massage therapist, are also planning to refile her lawsuit against Dolan for sexual battery before the end of the year. Originally filed in federal court in California in early 2024, the suit also alleged that Dolan played a role in her assault by Dolan’s one-time friend, Harvey Weinstein. It was dismissed by a judge there. Dolan’s spokesperson has repeatedly denied the accusations, saying there is “absolutely no merit” to the claims.

In a separate lawsuit, former MSG security officer Donald Ingrasselino alleges that he was ordered to “find methods to secretly tape conversations over cellular phones and find the ability to eavesdrop on the complainant/victim” when Croft’s accusations surfaced. A judge is currently reviewing motions filed by Dolan’s lawyers to dismiss Ingrasselino’s suit. A spokesperson called Ingrasselino’s charges “baseless.”

Dolan was right that distractions can trip up a team, sowing just enough discord among its players to derail their chances at another title, and cut short their fans' chances at another joyous summer.

In that way, maybe the Knicks are like the rest of us: at the mercy of their erratic boss.

This particular boss installed an array of surveillance cameras running facial recognition algorithms at his workplace, engaged in a years-long fight with one of his highest-profile former employees, and has a track record of targeting people who are critical of the job he’s done.

That’s a little more erratic than most. But, as a group, America’s cohort of pro sports owners has not exactly been doing a bang-up job of late. Take the Los Angeles Clippers’ owner Steve Ballmer. He and his top executives just hobbled their team for years to come through under-the-table dealings with their star player. They’re now reportedly under an ongoing Justice Department investigation. Or look at Mark Walter, who abruptly sold his controlling interest in the Lakers this summer. He’s been accused in a class action lawsuit of insurance fraud and hiding a federal probe of his own. Walter’s holding company, TWG Global, denied any wrongdoing.

Through that lens, Dolan’s choice to go to war with New York’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul might not seem so bad. As a private citizen, he is entitled to exercise his political preferences. But he’s turning the Knicks into political props for Bruce Blakeman, the governor’s pro-ICE, pro-Trump, pro-surveillance opponent, hosting a fundraiser, starting at $10,000 per ticket, during a preseason game at the Garden. That’s on top of the $3 million Dolan’s businesses donated to an outfit supporting Blakeman’s campaign in a single day. Dolan also suggested in a letter to a group of New York City business leaders that they might want to put their political donations into an organization “that I control” if they wanted to really steer local politics in their direction. (In response to a detailed list of questions, a Madison Square Garden Entertainment spokesperson said she had no comment for this story.)

None of this is normal. Sports owners and local officials usually work together, especially when the streets are packed with cheering fans. Railing against the mayor, the police commissioner and the governor threatens to divide the team from its home town—all while Dolan’s operation is benefitting from an array of publicly-funded projects and services, as well as close to a billion dollars in property tax breaks.

Then there’s Dolan’s decision to sue this writer, among others, for reporting in WIRED magazine that a Madison Square Garden database classifies some celebrity fans according to their sexual orientation, and gives others a “risk” score. (WIRED and Vanity Fair are both Conde Nast publications.) To feed my NBA fix, I was reduced to buying Brooklyn Nets tickets, because Dolan bans people even tangentially involved in litigation with him from his venues, which include Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan and The Sphere in Las Vegas. I didn’t want to risk being turned away, like the attorney whose law firm happened to be in a dispute with one of Dolan’s companies and was rejected when she tried to take her daughter to see the Rockettes.

The Knicks’ status as cultural heroes is set. The immacculate-vibes summer they brought to New York City is now a historical fact. Hopefully—and I say this both as a Knicks fan and a Dolan defendant—these new dramas will be mere dips on the road to another title. Hopefully, the New York City rapper (and Knicks super fan) Jadakiss was wrong when he observed that Dolan “seems like he’s always happier when the team sucks.” Hopefully, the Knicks’ billionaire owner will get back out of his players’ way, and let his team bring him even more success and riches.