Punking the Knicks

Two recent articles have blown the cover off the media treatment of the Knicks.

The first is an innocent enough flash bio of a Knicks fan who tore off his Knicks jersey in Boston during the Celtics blowout.

The key thoughts;

Barnes drove up to Boston on Wednesday night with his nephew Larry Betro to celebrate Betro's 24th birthday. The pair had $300 seats - four rows behind the basket and not far from Craig Sager, a TNT sideline reporter.

With the Knicks trailing big in the first quarter, Barnes made a bet with Sager that if his team went down by 50 points he would give up his coveted jersey.

Word of the bet spread through the crowd with lightning speed. By the time the fourth quarter came around and the Knicks were losing by 40, the fans were in a frenzy.

"Throw it! Throw it!" they yelled.

And when Boston's lead reached 50 points with three minutes left in the game, Barnes did just that. The game stopped. The fans erupted.

"The whole crowd was behind it," he said. "I had to protect my honor."

The event was not spontaneous as TNT led the television audience to believe - but contrived - the by-product of Sager, the crowd and a frustrated fan given an opportunity for national exposure.

The second is a New York Observer article called Life in Knicks Hell that documents the festering media relationship with the Knicks organization.

Of note is Isola's quote,

After the Nov. 24 win against the Bulls, Mr. Isola sat in the stands with me at the Garden while the Knicks basketball court was in the process of being converted into a hockey rink.

“It’s really sad now,” he said. “There are very few nights where you can feel a buzz in the arena. The thrill is gone.”

He spoke about a colleague, Johnny Ludden, who recently stopped reporting on the Spurs. “He was covering the Spurs for nine years and when he left, ha-ha, they threw him a going-away party,” Mr. Isola said. “I leave the Garden sometimes and think, ‘Should I look under my car before I turn the ignition?’”

“You can get stale on the beat,” he continued. “I shouldn’t be doing it anymore after 12 years. If everything was status quo and if everything was great, I probably would be the wrong guy to have on it. But now I’m the right guy to have on it because they’re trying to screw me over, and by trying to screw me over, it kind of lights a fire in you a little bit. It makes you more motivated to find stuff out and expose what’s going on here.”

I told him it sounded as if he was sticking around out of spite.

“Absolutely,” he said.

“They thought it would be the opposite—they thought they’d beat me down and run me off. I thank them for it.”

Isola is no longer objective about his role. He's honest about it and that's fine. There are more writers sick of the organization with good and bad reason. But Isola should move on to some other beat for his own mental health.

And at the end of the day, the media's professional requirement is to remain objective. That's profoundly questionable and often absent in Knicks reporting.

The NBA needs to regulate media access to ensure there is no Knicks hell and the media is obligated to assign people who report the news and aren't instead advocating the demonization of players or the organization.

I will state what is being unsaid elsewhere. Was Don Maybury's heart attack a by-product of the manufactured animus toward Marbury and the Knicks that the NY media has honed to a fine art?

Respect can only be earned in a workplace that is not at war with the media. Stern needs to hold a peace summit and the large media outlets need to look in the mirror and ask themselves WTF they're doing.