What a crap bull$**** Dolan thing to lay on. This is a well constructed move to deflect from Isiah and the team.

Blaming Brown for the rookies retardation is bull. Remember last year how in training camp they were all amazed how much they were learning?

Frye finished second in ROY voting, how is that retarding? DLee is a much improved player this year than last, when did that happen? Brown bashed Nate for being an idiot and Isiah has done the same. He has cut down his minutes after his showboat dunk attempt.

Granted, Im not saying Brown did a bang up job last year, but I can understand paying a dude 28 mil and using that to deflect the current squad, but I don't like it.

Its a cheap excuse to preserve todays situation.

What should he have done?

1. Talk up Currys improvement and give Isiah credit for this.

2. Talk up how well DLee is playing and how good it will be when Frye gets back.

3. Talk up how well francis was playing before he got hurt. Talk up how Marbury is trying to fit in better and "really trying".

4. Talk up how well Q is playing, and adding JJ2 to the mix will help the defense.

5. And empathize that "last year was frustrating but we have corrected some things and the team is really improving this year". That would be a classy way to bridge the new season from last year.

The bottom line is the team is improving in some ways but they are still the same bone head team as last year and not well coached in my opinion.

Face it, firing Isiah is not going to change anything for a while. Herb is your coach with is real no big improvement and our hands are very tied.

The moratorium on spending reminds me of the lock down Layden had after the dice deal went bust.

WE at least did not do anything stupid to exasporate that situation and actually collected some assets for Isiah.

The individual talent on our team has improved under Isiah but the some of thoes pieces just never seem to add up.

i'd like to see isiah gone. it's good to tie his hands about taking on any more long term crap contracts, but i'd rather have someone else come in who has some different ideas about building the franchise.

He's singing a song only heard by Piano Man

He is James Dolan, and Knick fans are stuck with him. He is Dolan of the Garden and he still believes everything Isiah Thomas tells him, still believes that everything that happens to the Knicks, who have more losses than anybody in their sport except the Memphis Grizzlies, is somebody else's fault. So it should have surprised no one yesterday when Dolan tried to blame this season on last season, which means he blamed Larry Brown.

If the Rangers go out in the first round of the playoffs again, maybe that will be Brown's fault, too. Before long Thomas will convince Dolan that it was Brown who wanted the Knicks to trade for Stephon Marbury, even though Brown was still coaching the Pistons at the time.

Here is what Dolan said when he sat down with the Knicks' beat reporters at the team's practice facility:

"(The Knicks' young players) could have been developed better. We could be farther along today than we are now."

That was before Dolan referred to Brown as "that coach" and apologized for hiring him. Of course this was before he went on television and radio with Mike Francesa and Chris Russo and said he wasn't allowed to talk about his former coach. So in addition to having no sense of the place he runs, what it meant once and what it has become, Dolan is a phony as well.

The Knicks have more empty seats now than they have had in 15 years, and Dolan talked yesterday about his concert business going great guns. He is the last guy in town to figure out that his fans don't like Isiah Thomas, that they don't want him running their basketball team anymore, that they feel sometimes as if they are rooting against themselves even if they do show up to root for the Knicks. Why? Because they are smart enough to know that if Dolan ultimately buys into Thomas' definition of progress and success for the Knicks, we could be stuck with the guy indefinitely. The problem isn't that Knicks fans don't know as much about basketball as Thomas thinks he does. It is they know too much.

It will never be a problem for the owner, who reveals himself every time he is out in public, no matter how much prep work he gets from his flacks.

Why does he think the 8-15 record is Brown's fault? Because Thomas tells him so, that's why. First everything here was Scott Layden's fault. Now it is Brown's fault. Dolan would rather talk tough about a coach no longer in the room than the one getting booed these days at the Garden, the one who has set spending records and is trying to match records for empty seats that goes back to Knicks teams coached by John MacLeod, teams that couldn't sell out playoff games even with Michael Jordan in town.

Somehow Thomas has convinced his owner that if the young players had developed more under Brown, the Knicks would have some kind of choke hold on first place. But how does logic like this work, at least for anybody besides the coach and the owner? Eddy Curry's not having a good year? David Lee's not having a good year? It's the young guys holding the Knicks back?

Or maybe, and more likely, the 8-15 record and the 3-8 home record have something to do with the fact that there isn't a single pass-first guard on Isiah's hand-picked roster, one who makes the people around him better. The guy's been here three years and the Knicks still don't have a point guard. Maybe Isiah blames that on Jeff Van Gundy.

When the Knicks play their worst half of the season against the Celtics - who have one less Garden victory than Isiah's Knicks this season - it is the players who were just God-awful, according to the owner. When they make a run in the second half, brother, that's coaching.

"Isiah did something at halftime," Dolan said to Francesa and Russo. "It's like he waved a magic wand over them."

Sure he did. It doesn't matter at all if you believe this line of con. All that's important to Isiah Thomas is that his owner believes it. Because by now Thomas has figured out that when it comes to basketball, his owner will believe anything.

"The Garden is still a great place," Dolan says, and you want to ask him, by whose standards other than your own? It's still a great place because the Rangers have a chance to win their first playoff game in what feels like a decade? If Dolan really knew anything about the place handed to him by his father, he would know that you never judge the Garden by Billy Joel concerts or where the Rangers are in relation to the Devils and the Islanders. You judge the Garden by the Knicks.

Isiah's Knicks: Who have the record they have and who are lucky to draw 16,000 now. That's only if you believe the people in charge and why would you?

It's the same with attandance as it is with everything else with the Knicks these days. They see what they want to see.

Maybe Dolan should stop talking about the coach he used to have and ask the one who replaced him to wave that magic wand of his and make the empty seats go away.

that's lupica.

i'm not sure what to believe but if dolan is being 100% truthful, then yesterday's media barrage further proves that dolan may be the worst owner in sports.