He Keeps Coming Back

Let me paint you a picture: let's say you worked at a company that had a very good reputation within its industry, but it had hit a bit of a rough patch. The company was doing alright, but not as well as it used to and not as well as everyone else in the industry seems to think it should have been doing. So, the owner of the company decides to hire a new executive. This executive is coming from another company that also isn't doing so great, but no one thinks it was that guy's fault. At the first meeting you discover that the new executive is extremely charming guy: everyone completely buys in to his ideas and thinks that this is the guy to get the company back on the right track. The problems start a couple months later when it becomes clear the new executive doesn't have any idea how to execute the plans he laid out. The executive tells you all the company needs is some new personnel to make his vision into a reality and starts hiring new salespeople from other companies; except all he seems to be hiring are the salespeople nobody else wanted and, to make matters worse, he's giving them huge bonuses. The company starts to slide even further away from its glory days and goes from doing alright to doing horribly. What's worse, the executive keeps mortgaging the future to try and make an immediate profit, only his moves keeps sending the situation from bad to worse. All the while he's firing bright, young salespeople so he can hire more overpriced salespeople no one else wanted.

Just when everyone thinks the situation can't get any worse, executive gets caught up in a horrible scandal. He's caught embezzling money and has to have a lengthy trial, during which a lot of unsavory and embarrassing details come out. He sends your company to a level lower than people thought you could ever fall to. At this point most of your loyal customers decided they have had enough and stop doing business with you. They want nothing to do with you as long as that executive is around. In a last-ditch effort to prove that he wasn't an idiot to hire the executive, the owner of the company puts the executive in charge of production. While he's not as much of a disaster at this position, he still can't even start to fulfill the promises he made when first hired. Also, it doesn't bring back your loyal customers; many of whom have started to do business with the company down the street who used to be a laughingstock in comparison to your company. Finally the owner can't hide his mistake anymore and fires the executive. This day is generally hailed as the best day your company has had in a long time. The owner then brings in a old, wise executive who has been doing this for a very long time and has a long-term plan, but his first couple of years mostly have to be spent undoing all the terrible work that last guy did. Still, everything appears to at least be heading back in the right direction. The problem is that the owner still has a soft spot for that terrible executive. So, after a couple of years have passed and things are starting to look up, he decides that people would probably not notice if that guy was brought back. So, even though the executive is now doing a piss-poor job at a much smaller company, the owner re-hires him as a consultant to evaluate and hire new salespeople (in other words, the jobs he was fired from just two years earlier). That bad executive now has two jobs, neither of which he is particularly good at.

Could you imagine that ever actually happening or a company being owned by someone that stupid? Well, this week it did. The bad executive was Isiah Thomas, the owner was James Dolan and the company was the New York Knicks. Just two years after being run out of town as the worst executive in history, Thomas was brought back as a consultant and talent evaluator. There can be only three reasons Dolan would even consider this move: either he was dropped on his head as a child, Thomas has incriminating photos of him, or Dolan literally hates his own fans. There can be no other reason. I have never been happier to not be a Knick fan than I am right now. For three years they were promised that they would be getting LeBron James and Chris Bosh in free agency. They ended up with Amare Stoudemire: a man with a bad knee, questionable defensive skills and who won't be playing with an elite point guard for the first time in his career (but at least they didn't give him $20 million a year... oh, wait, they totally did). And now Thomas, the man who ran the franchise into the ground, is back in the fold. He's supposedly being brought in to court players like Carmelo Anthony, which should pretty much guarantee Anthony never signs with the Knicks. I've said before that one of the reasons I love sports is that there is a reason behind everything: nothing happens without a cause. Well, if Knick fans want to know why you continue to sink as a franchise, it's because you are owned by a man like James Dolan. There is nothing worse than being stuck with a bad owner, because it's not like they can be fired. You're only hope is that he goes bankrupt before he puts Isiah in charge of Madison Square Garden, otherwise the Knicks are going to end up playing at some outdoor court by the river.