I like the last 3 paragraphs the best.


Marbury's exit could lead to Thomas' departure

By Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports
November 13, 2007


So, Stephon Marbury walked out on the New York Knicks. He just packed his bags and bailed on Tuesday, catching a flight out of Phoenix for Planet Starbury. This is what happens to a franchise when it’s turned over to knuckleheads and con men. From within, it implodes.

Today, Marbury.

Tomorrow, Isiah Thomas.

“I have one thing to say and that’s I got permission to leave,” Marbury countered in a text message Tuesday afternoon to the New York Post’s Marc Berman. “I would never leave my team on my own. What I’m telling you is that I got permission to leave from Isiah. He said I could go home.”

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Well, Thomas left the impression on Tuesday morning at a shootaround that Marbury had left on his own, and that he had hoped his point guard would return for tonight’s game with the Phoenix Suns, or perhaps re-join the team in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

Surprise, surprise: Someone with the Knicks isn’t telling the truth.

“No, I’m not coming to L.A. as of now,” Marbury said in the text to the Post.

Who knows who’s fibbing here, and frankly, who cares anymore? As much as ever, Thomas and Marbury deserve one another. Once, these two turned together on former coach Larry Brown and Anucha Browne Sanders, the former Knicks employee who sued the team for sexual harassment. It was just a matter of time until they turned on each other.

Clearly, Thomas has decided to go after Marbury, and you have to wonder how much his owner, Jim Dolan, is behind this move. Thomas knew he’d have the public support for benching Marbury, but probably didn’t expect Marbury would create this circus by leaving the team.

Just Tuesday morning, the New York Daily News reported Marbury had been angry over learning he wouldn’t start against the Suns tonight. For most of his five seasons in New York, Marbury had been at odds with Thomas over how he was expected to play the point. Thomas wanted defense, passing and leadership. Marbury wanted to be Starbury. The Daily News even reported that there had been some discussion within the Knicks about ending Marbury’s tenure with the franchise, presumably through a buyout even before Marbury returned to New York on Tuesday.

Just one week ago, Marbury had played beautifully in a victory over the Denver Nuggets, and the frontline of Zach Randolph and Eddy Curry looked tough, and you thought, maybe, just maybe, there was something still redeemable in this wreckage. Yet, that’s all the Knicks have been built for under Thomas. Just flashes, never staying power.

Through it all, Marbury has reminded everyone that his ultimate motivation is never winning, never leading – never anything but living in his own bizarre world.

“It seems like he and I go through this every November, then a couple of weeks go by and we kind of kiss and make up, then we go back to the business of trying to win basketball games,” Thomas said.

That’s a load of garbage. This time, it’s different. And Thomas knows it. Marbury has always been on the edge, but he pushed the limits of his own strange self this past summer. First, there was an appearance on a New York sports talk show, where his speech was slurred and his presence discombobulated. And then, after testifying in the Thomas sexual harassment trial to having sex with a Knicks intern in a parked truck, Marbury pranced merrily out of the courtroom, singing to himself. As usual, Marbury made a humiliating episode worse with his indifference.

They can’t go on this way with Marbury. Once more, Thomas will have to walk into his owner’s office and tell him: Eat another contract. He has to go to the Garden’s Richie Rich, Dolan, and ask him to reach into his pockets to fix another one of Thomas’ mistakes.

All that’ll cost Dolan is the balance of a buyout on the $42 million owed Marbury over this season and next.

The possibility of a trade is relatively remote, but not impossible. Even so, it’s hard to imagine there’s a franchise willing to let him pollute it for the rest of this season, never mind another. If Marbury was in the final year of his contract, yes, there would probably be takers in a deal that would allow them salary-cap relief once his contract expired in 2009. Nevertheless, there could be teams willing to make a move for Marbury with the idea of buying him out immediately.

There was always this idea that somehow Marbury could change, grow up and transform his selfish self into a leader. He would speak of studying old point guard footage of Bob Cousy, but end up playing like World B. Free. He would tell his old coach with the Nets, Byron Scott, that he wanted to know everything about how Magic Johnson ran the Showtime Lakers, but his miserable, rainy disposition alienated teammates and isolated himself.

From the day Thomas traded for Marbury in 2004, the Knicks enabled his sense of entitlement, the fantasyland he had concocted in his mind where he was forever the over-hyped prodigy out of Coney Island. All along, Marbury had been trained to believe that basketball was a business where you took and took, and never gave back. At the core, point guards need to be givers, and Marbury is the ultimate taker.

He has fantastic street smarts, real intelligence and always gave people what they wanted to hear to buy himself more time: regular revelations of epiphanies. Once, it was wearing an orange jump suit in a short prison sentence for a DUI in Phoenix, and then the trade to his hometown Knicks, the chance to learn to be a point guard under Thomas and Brown, and this summer, those embarrassing episodes had Marbury declaring that he had changed again by finding God.

For now, anyway, Marbury will be Thomas’ scapegoat. This isn’t his fault, the way that the blame for Brown didn’t fall on him. The Knicks are just five games into the season, and they’re in chaos, full crisis mode. Marbury has walked out the door, and probably played his final game with the Knicks.

Today, Marbury.

Tomorrow, Thomas.


Adrian Wojnarowski is the NBA columnist for Yahoo! Sports. Send Adrian a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.

Updated on Tuesday, Nov 13, 2007 7:34 pm, EST

It would be nice if we had ownership that was smart enough to realize that Marbury is being made a scapegoat by Zeke. Unfortunately, there have been enough things written that make it seem like Dolan is more than happy to blame the Anucha trial on Marbury, too. Not that Marbury is blameless at all, but this is just getting silly. If Marbury needs to go, so do Zeke and Dolan.

SOS, David Stern!

Posted by TMS:

please, enough w/the scapegoat nonsense... everyone knows the joke this franchise has become isn't all Marbury's fault... this is an isolated case where Marbury is completely in the wrong... i don't see how anyone could possibly attempt to deflect any blame in this case to anyone other than Stephon Marbury.

What has Marbury done wrong in the first 5 games, that Curry and Crawford haven't done as well, to warrant being benched?

Posted by FireIsiah:

I cant wait for isiah to get canned, i have a bottle of moet on ice already. Im hoping he doesnt survive this west coast trip. I love how he complains about defense but he never brought in any defensive players. LOL

Isiah is a politician. He's not a coach.

I guarantee after this Phx loss he'll say something to the effect of "Well we weren't supposed to beat the Suns".

Real coaches teach, and don't ever make excuses for losses.

Isiah spins 24/7.

Posted by islesfan:

Posted by TMS:

please, enough w/the scapegoat nonsense... everyone knows the joke this franchise has become isn't all Marbury's fault... this is an isolated case where Marbury is completely in the wrong... i don't see how anyone could possibly attempt to deflect any blame in this case to anyone other than Stephon Marbury.

What has Marbury done wrong in the first 5 games, that Curry and Crawford haven't done as well, to warrant being benched?

Isiah put everyone on notice that their jobs were on the line, not just Marbs... do u honestly think that implosions down the stretch late in games is something new w/Steph? he is looked upon to be the leader of this team... he obviously wasn't getting the job done... why is it so wrong for the coach to look for another option when his PG clearly isn't doing what he wants him to do? w/great salary comes great expectations... Marbury acted like a little baby here & proved how much of a selfish & immature person he really is... i have zero doubt that neither Curry nor Jamal would have reacted in this fashion if they'd have been benched, & neither would anyone else on this team (not so sure about Zach).

no kidding Isiah doesn't have a clue... who's debating that here? i'm dealing w/this incident only for the sake of this argument... Marbury was completely in the wrong here for reacting this way to his benching... instead of looking at it as a motivator to come back & show his coach that he was wrong in benching him, he chose the opposite route & left the team & his teammates in the lurch going into a very tough game vs 1 of the best teams in the league... basically he gave the middle finger to his coach, his teammates & the franchise that pays his damn $20 million dollar salary all in 1 fell swoop.

what lost the game was a crappy no show by the entire team.

they had the lead w/40 seconds left & Marbury committed 2 boneheaded possessions in a row on offense along w/a defensive lapse on the other end leaving Jason Williams wide open for the killer 3 that cost them the game... whether or not the team showed up, they had a chance to win the game bottomline & Marbury's boneheaded decisions in that 40 second stretch resulted in them losing it... that falls on him in my eyes, i'm sorry... when ur supposed to be the guy running the point, knowing what to do w/the ball in crunchtime, & making the right decisions, & you don't do it, then u deserve to get called out on the carpet for it... he didn't seem to have a problem accepting blame for the loss in his postgame comments, but obviously those words were worthless just like most of the stuff that comes out of his mouth judging by his reaction to his benching.

he's not responsible for how his team plays, but he damn sure is responsible for how HE plays... that 40 second stretch was a microcosm of every thing that Knick fans have been complaining about when it comes to Steph ever since he got here... no head, no leadership, no defense, no basketball IQ... i think Isiah did a great thing by benching him here & trying to light a fire under him... it had the opposite effect, but IMO this is the best thing that could have happened to the Knicks if it opens the door to finally go in another direction & admit that the entire Marbury experiment was an unmitigated disaster in every way imaginable.

i agree w/u

Posted by FireIsiah:

I cant wait for isiah to get canned, i have a bottle of moet on ice already. Im hoping he doesnt survive this west coast trip. I love how he complains about defense but he never brought in any defensive players. LOL

collins, balkman, fred jones, jeffries and sometimes lee and qrich.

You know, as much as I want to see Marbury gone, if I were Dolan, I'd say, "F you, Isiah. FIX IT!"