Isaiah

Adrian Wojnarowski on Isaiah Thomas and the New York Knicks

As the jury watched one Garden official after another trash a well-decorated, well-compensated employee, they could see for themselves what everyone understood about this dysfunctional, failed organization: Beyond its basketball futility, the Knicks organization is an out of control embarrassment that needs to be punched in the mouth.

The Knicks and Thomas lost the case, which isn’t surprising because they lose everything. In the recent past, they wrote tens of millions of dollars in checks to make a long list of underperforming, overpaid players and coaches go away. That’s the way of Daddy Boy Jim Dolan’s Cablevision empire, just throwing money at problems to get them out of the Garden’s path.

Browne Sanders would’ve been the biggest bargain in franchise history. She wouldn’t go away. She wouldn’t back down, the way everyone does to Thomas and the Garden. She stayed, she fought and she’s going to walk away with millions in damages and perhaps part of her good name again.

For speaking up about sexual harassment at the Garden, she ended up with a job at the University of Buffalo. She paid a price. Browne Sanders deserves this, all the way. Whatever she gets paid, she lost a fast-track career in the pros.

There’s a passive-aggressive way to how Thomas bullies people – that charming, radiant smile that turns into something far different behind closed doors, where for too long his motives have forever left people distrustful, even fearful, of him. Between his professional competency and his workplace behavior, it says so much about the Knicks that they’re still the one franchise in basketball that would even employ him to scout Siberia – never mind run and coach the Knicks.