“The only thing worse than being a bad team is being a boring team,” Frank Isola of The New York Daily News told me in a phone interview. We were discussing the 2014-15 New York Knicks; not only are they tied for the worst record in the Eastern Conference, they are so boring that The New York Times sent its beat writer to cover more compelling topics, like a girls’ basketball team that is dominating a fifth-grade boys’ league in Illinois.
While it may be true that the current roster is unusually void of intrigue, it hasn’t helped that, for a generation of Knicks players and coaches, there have been strict restrictions placed by the team on interactions with the media. Though some people already established in the NBA, like current star Carmelo Anthony and former head coach Larry Brown, have managed to conduct honest relationships with the press regardless, for the most part, the team’s public relations staff closely monitor players and coaches while they talk to reporters, cutting media sessions short, being stingy in granting one-on-one interviews, and creating an atmosphere in which it is exceedingly difficult to forge the personal relationships that comprise the foundation of much good sports journalism.
The Knicks first implemented the current restrictions in 2001, two years after owner James Dolan acquired the team. Though it’s unclear whether they exist as a specific, codified set of rules–Vice President of Public Relations Jonathan Supranowitz declined to comment for this story–the existence of a strict, widely followed protocol seems obvious to reporters. “That PR guy is on such a power trip,” Isola said, referring to Supranowitz, with whom he’s had an especially fraught relationship. “It’s off the charts. It’s ridiculous.”
The public relations staff appears to even inhibit reporting that will likely result in positive coverage. In 2012, Steve Popper of the Bergen Record was writing a feel-good story on 28-year-old rookie Chris Copeland finally spending the holidays with his family. Copeland had spent five seasons playing in Europe before becoming a solid bench scorer in a rare winning season for the Knicks. Even though, as usual, a team representative had been standing by during his conversation with Copeland and knew that the story was not going to be subversive, Popper told me that the team “would not make [General Manager] Glen [Grunwald] available to speak about how they came to sign Chris or what they saw from him in Europe.” With many other teams, Popper explained, the GM “will be on the court before the game and you walk up and talk to them. You can get guys on the phone.”
On the other hand, for an interlude between 2008 and 2010, the rules were loosened and the result was an atmosphere of congeniality that had been absent from the Garden for years. At the start of their tenures, the team’s president at the time, veteran NBA executive Donnie Walsh, and then-head coach Mike D’antoni spoke their minds. “I called it ‘Glasnost,'” said Howard Beck, who covered the Knicks for the Times for nine years before moving to Bleacher Report in 2013. “It was like, ‘Oh my gosh, we can actually talk to these guys.'”
Isola said that Walsh used to arrive early on game days and, upon seeing him, reporters would “gravitate towards him and, before you know it, there’s a crowd of guys around Donnie and he’s talking.” Walsh’s graciousness helped him win journalists’ respect.
Nonetheless, Isola told me that he thinks Walsh’s style with the media bothered Dolan and the public relations department. And as Walsh lost power in the organization, its public relations staff returned to their old, draconian ways.
That reversion to obstructiveness continued into this year. While reports that Phil Jackson would have complete autonomy to run the team, along with his vow in his initial press conference to have an “open relationship” with the media, raised hopes, those wishes have largely not come true. In fact, another quote from that press conference seems to have proved more prescient. “There are going to be some closed walls as far as the media,” Jackson said. “I think we’re going to have to accept that.”
Since then, Jackson himself has seemed candid when he talks to the press, but he does so very rarely. Meanwhile, current head coach Derek Fisher has to talk to the press almost daily, but his comments offer little substance. His monotonous persona as coach of the Knicks runs contrary to how he acted as a player for the Los Angeles Lakers. “He was one of the most engaging and most media-friendly players on the team,” said Beck, who covered the Lakers for the Los Angeles Daily News.
Reporters say that they had no trouble building relationships with the Knicks as recently as the late 1990s. Popper recalls how, on one of the days surrounding the 1997 All-Star Game in Cleveland, he visited the home of Knicks power forward Charles Oakley’s mother along with a few other writers. There, he said, Oakley’s Mom showed them photos and fed them “awesome Southern cooking” while Oakley sat in the next room playing cards.
This probably wouldn’t happen today, in part because of how the Knicks restrict access and in part because, over the past few decades, the amount of time all basketball writers are allowed to spend around teams has diminished considerably. Reporters used to ride on team buses and fly on the same commercial planes as players. “They would see you as people and you would see them in a different light,” said Fred Kerber, who has covered the NBA for 28 years between the Daily News and the New York Post. “They were just regular guys sitting at the airport waiting for a two-hour delay just like you. And they kind of realized that you went through the same things they went through.” Nowadays, teams take charter flights.
Still, while there are a few other teams that show a hostility to the media that approaches that of the Knicks (the Oklahoma City Thunder being one name I heard multiple times reporting this story), many others display a desire to cooperate that Knicks writers can only imagine.
“Everything’s always very civil,” Ryan Wolstat, who covers the Raptors for the Toronto Sun, said of interactions between the press and the team’s PR staff. “In terms of availability, if you need a guy, you can generally get him unless he’s talked a couple of days in a row.” He says that a team representative will cut off a reporter’s question only if it involves “a family matter or personal matter or something like that.” Pieces like this Grantland profile of the Golden State Warriors’ backcourt or this Sports Illustrated story on Lakers guard Nick Young (colloquially known as “Swaggy P”), are packed with details and anecdotes from the players’ lives off the court. They convey an understanding of their subjects that could not have been acquired amid what Bleacher Report’s Beck calls the “general paranoia” of Madison Square Garden.
Michael Lee, who writes about the Wizards and the NBA for The Washington Post, has a story that perfectly encapsulates this point. Lee said that, after one player with whom he’d been friendly went to the Knicks, he asked the player for his updated contact information. “He kind of looked at me and paused and looked around to see if there were staffers standing around and was like, ‘You still got my old number?’ And he looked around to make sure that nobody was around to hear him just confirm that his number was still the same.”
With the players in a state of constant vigilance, journalists are forced to scale back their ambitions. “You stop thinking in terms of interviews,” Filip Bondy, a sports columnist for the Daily News, says. “When I’m covering the Nets, it’s a whole different story. I think, I’ll go get Billy King, the GM. Or I’ll think, I can get this guy or that guy at a practice by myself.”
And sometimes, the Knicks regime of petty censorship stoops to absurd lows. In 2007, as the New York Observer reported at the time, the Knicks stopped sending Isola the routine updates about practices and injuries it sends to other reporters, perhaps to punish him for criticizing the team. In the summer of 2012, after power forward Kurt Thomas, friendly with Isola, was re-acquired by the Knicks, Supranowitz allegedly called to warn him against talking. This sub-plot culminated after Thomas played what would be the last game of his 19-year NBA career against the Utah Jazz in March 2013. The team released him a few weeks later, partially because, in that game, he had aggravated a broken foot. “The PR guy was giving him shit for talking to me and confirming that it was a broken foot,” Isola said. “He wasn’t an employee of the team anymore!”
The latest snub came at Jackson’s press conference last March, when the media relations official (this time, someone other than Supranowitz), did not call on Isola or any of the three other Daily News reporters present to ask questions.
But as annoying as these frivolous jabs must be, readers are the biggest losers. Despite a year of losing unprecedented in the history of the franchise, Knicks fans are so loyal that they have continued to sell out every home game. In return for their endurance, they deserve to be fed more than the occasional morsel of pleasurable reporting (like this brief profile of gap-toothed center Cole Aldrich, written by the Times‘ Billy Witz last month).
As Lee of The Washington Post said, “Sports are supposed to be fun.” Maybe, if he’d let anyone talk to him, somebody could remind James Dolan.
Christopher Massie is a CJR contributing editor.