Dolan thus set his sights on Carmelo Anthony, the high-scoring star who was playing in the final season of his contract and wanted out of Denver and into his native New York. The problem was that the New Jersey Nets, heading to Brooklyn under the ownership of the massively wealthy Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, were also bidding for Anthony. Denver’s front office smartly played the two teams against each other, demanding a ransom of assets for a player who would be a free agent within months that summer. Walsh, who wasn’t opposed to acquiring Anthony, an immensely skilled but ball-hogging shot-maker with an aversion to hustling on defense, begged Dolan not to overreact. Dolan didn’t listen. As the trade deadline approached and Denver ramped up the pressure, he ordered Walsh to surrender a trove of players and draft picks.
When the deal was finalized on February 21, 2011, the Knicks were two games over .500—and that was exactly how they finished the regular season. They were swept in the first round of the playoffs by Boston. There were factors beyond Anthony’s obvious weaknesses as a so-called franchise player—Stoudemire’s injuries, for one—but that brief introductory period was a preview of the Anthony era: overhyped and underperforming.
It was all Michelle had to see to know that the Knicks had done it to her again, circumvented due diligence, opted for the sexy acquisition—the wrong one, it turned out—in a league trending toward its biggest names wanting to share the ball and the burden on superteams. Defenders of Anthony argued that the Knicks never provided him a companion star, that they had failed him in the same way they had failed Patrick Ewing. Anthony’s detractors, of which I was one, argued that his original sin—forcing the Knicks to surrender the precious assets that might have reeled in a James Harden or a Chris Paul in a trade instead of waiting a few months to sign as a free agent—had sunk his new franchise.
Worse, Anthony’s intransigence soon cost the Knicks D’Antoni, who quit when Dolan wouldn’t support him in a war of wills with the team’s supposed franchise player. Empowered by the owner, Anthony later assisted in snuffing out “Linsanity,” the brief Jeremy Lin phenomenon in 2012, when Lin, a little-known Chinese-American point guard out of Harvard, became an instant sensation over a three-week period while Anthony was sitting out with an injury. Lin became the pride of Ivy Leaguers and, more profoundly, Asians everywhere, especially after dominating Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers in one eye-opening, thirty-eight-point Friday night explosion at the Garden.
There was no question that Lin had taken the league by surprise, and opponents would soon prepare for him better. But upon returning from his injury, Anthony chafed over D’Antoni’s trust of Lin with the ball and clashed with the coach. In the inevitable showdown, Dolan sided with his premier acquisition at the expense of an out-of-nowhere marketing sensation. Long-suffering and implausibly loyal Knicks fans were stiffed again, a year after ponying up price increases that had averaged 49 percent. In July 2012, Dolan ordered his front office not to match an offer Lin had received from the Houston Rockets after some eleventh-hour bookkeeping elevated the stakes and guaranteed Lin a bigger score. Dolan, who had shelled out staggering sums for underwhelming players with no box office appeal, was furious. He had his minions portray Lin as an ingrate. One steaming-mad longtime ticket holder I quoted in my column didn’t see it that way:
After sitting there all those years and watching all that horrible basketball, we finally had such a feel-good story that felt like our own. How many times can they hurt me?
For the first time, Michelle refused to put her name on a quote. Whereas she had been a public voice of the beleaguered fan, eager to be heard in newspaper columns, she was now understandably fearful of losing her choice location, fully aware of how vindictive Dolan and his people could be with employees and fans, not just reporters. Bad basketball was hard enough to stomach, but Michelle was now having to go underground in complaining about it.
“So why do you continue going?” I asked her.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I always think, maybe there’ll be a miracle.”
Through the Anthony years, she hoped in vain. With the exception of a fifty-four-win season that produced one playoff series victory in the 2013 postseason, they were ordinary at best, unwatchable at worst, especially after Phil Jackson arrived in 2014 as general manager. The Hall of Fame coach was a rookie executive, pushing seventy, coaxed out of retirement by a $60 million haul and another pledge of noninterference from Dolan. Jackson soon handed Anthony a rich new contract that included a bewildering no-trade clause.
Michelle was beside herself. “Why?” she kept asking me. Even with a pipeline to Jackson based on knowing him since the late seventies, I had no rational explanation, other than it being his gesture of gratitude to Dolan for his own lucrative contract (which ultimately became a de facto golden parachute from the sport when Jackson was canned in 2017). Somewhat fittingly, the immediate result of Anthony’s new deal was the worst Knicks season in history, a descent so deep into the league’s basement that even the drafting of the promising Kristaps Porzingis couldn’t pull the team out.
Dolan’s subversion of Walsh and acquisition of Anthony set the team back a decade, and Jackson’s decision to slog on with him as a resident star only delayed and complicated the inevitable overhaul, blurring more seasons of competitive despair and wasting time that Michelle didn’t have.
Wynn Plaut couldn’t be expected to subsidize her forever. She never indulged herself with notions of a triumphant departure, the way the great athletes did. It was still sobering to have to acknowledge that her
