Garden faces a seat-uation

Wednesday, December 6th, 2006

This is the way it always works in sports: You do the job, especially in New York, and you get your props. So credit must be given to Knicks fans still showing up at the Garden for finally doing their part for Isiah Thomas and his players and being the kind of home crowd Isiah expects these people to be.

Forget that Monday night's game was against the Grizzlies, the worst team in the league right now with three starters - Pau Gasol, Eddie Jones, Damon Stoudamire - out of Mike Fratello's lineup. Forget that this was one of those nights at the Garden, formerly the world's most famous arena, when there were thousands of empty seats, the most the Knicks have had since before Pat Riley.

This is a results town and a results business and even will be for Isiah Thomas eventually. The fans produced some results Monday night. They finally got the job done and got the Knicks their second home victory of the season, even if Isiah's Knicks - and they sure aren't anybody else's - were hanging on for dear life at the end and might have been saved by a Malik Rose offensive rebound in the last minute.

For one night the people with the most expensive tickets in town - to anything - didn't make the most expensive basketball team in this world so afraid that the players couldn't do their job properly.

Now we'll see how the fans come back tonight against the Wizards.

"I think what needs to happen is (the Knicks) need to be a little more afraid of me than the crowd," Isiah Thomas said after the Knicks hung on to beat the Grizzlies and bring their home record to 2-7 and their record for the whole season to 7-13. "They need to be more afraid of what I'll do as opposed to what the crowd will do or worrying whether they will get booed or not."

Isiah says a lot of things. He has a lot of theories. Not only is he the world's expert on growing up on the West Side of Chicago now, he loves to explain New York to everybody, not just the West Side, but the East Side, and the Bronx and the Battery, too. What he seems to be saying here is that he wants his players to be as afraid of him as his fans are.

Again: There is no more expensive top ticket in town than the Knicks. Make any list you want. A premium ticket for The Nutcracker goes for $200. The Metropolitan Opera is $375. "A Chorus Line" is $251 for a weekend show. "Jersey Boys" - not the Nets - is $351 for a weekend show. The Knicks go as high as $2,500 at courtside. A ticket in the second row behind the basket is $240.

Soon Isiah will celebrate his third anniversary having the run of the Garden and unlimited use of James Dolan's credit cards. And while he has yet to produce a single playoff victory despite spending more money than any other executive in the NBA during his time in New York, he has started to produce a rather impressive number of empty seats for Dolan in a place that had a decade's worth of sellouts not so long ago.

Once a Knicks playoff ticket, against Riley's Heat, was as hot as a ticket to Yankee Stadium to watch Torre's Yankees in October. Now it seems there are good seats available almost every night.

"We've got to start winning at home," Thomas said. "We've got to get to the point where we make our arena uncomfortable."

Actually, he's already done that.

But if you listen closely to what he has been saying for the past couple of weeks, the Knicks' poor play at home is somehow the building's fault. He even gets people in the building to buy into this line of happy horsefeathers. There was Al Trautwig of the happy-talk MSG network talking to Kenny Smith after the Knicks lost to Toronto Saturday night and talking about how there was a bad "vibe" in the building from the start. As if that had anything to do with Chris Bosh abusing people left and right.

Here is a bulletin for all of them over there:

They are lucky they are getting the kinds of crowds they're getting. But since everything bad that happens to the Knicks has to be the fault of anybody or anything besides Isiah, including the sexual harassment suit against him that keeps plodding through the court system, it was inevitable that somehow it would be somebody else's fault that other teams were feeling "comfortable" at the Garden and Isiah's kids were "uncomfortable."

"Our guys have been knocked around pretty tough at home," Isiah said a couple of weeks ago. This was a day when he talked about the Knicks needing some love from the home crowd.

They get it when they earn it. Knicks fans don't want this guy explaining to them what the Garden is and isn't. They are paying more than they would for Broadway or the opera or the Yankees or the Giants for the best seat in the house and they want some results, and not just against the Memphis Grizzlies.

Maybe Isiah's problem is this: Maybe he thinks everybody in town knows as little about basketball as his owner does, an owner who has earned a brand new nickname because of the guy in charge of his basketball operation:

Good Seats Available Dolan!

See, the problem for Isiah isn't the people in their fancy seats. It's the ones who aren't.