Can you believe that it's already been a year and a half since the Knicks finally -- mercifully -- ended the Isiah Thomas era? It seems like just yesterday that he was stalking the sidelines, trading for faded stars and signing overrated centers to contracts that crippled the franchise. You'd think that now that Isiah is out of sight, he'd also be out of mind for a Knicks franchise that's much better off without him.
According to the Daily News, you'd think wrong.
The paper reported Wednesday that Magic Johnson's request for comp tickets to the Knicks' game against the Blazers in December was rejected because Magic spoke ill of Thomas in a recent book. Thomas and Knicks owner James Dolan remain good friends, which is sort of like remaining good friends with the guy who stole your wife, burnt down your house and killed your dog.
A person close to the team says that when the Knicks didn't respond to Johnson's request immediately, the Hall of Famer later called the club to let it know that he had made other plans.
A league source, however, contends that the club was reluctant to give Johnson a ticket because the Knicks were upset with the former Laker and didn't want to create a media firestorm at the Garden in the wake of his controversial comments relating to Thomas.
Those darned media firestorms! Outside of Dolan and Thomas himself, how many people are there who look at Magic and think, before anything else, that he's a guy who said some mean stuff about Isiah Thomas? You'd have better luck finding people who believe that Eddy Curry is going to have his number hanging from the rafters of Madison Square Garden.
The funny thing about this is that there's a perfectly good reason for the Knicks to ban Magic from the Garden in perpetuity. Magic has long claimed that the Knicks tried to hire him to run the franchise, but when he declined he suggested that they should hire Isiah. Unless you want a guy running around to tell vendors that they should poison the hot dogs, that's all the reason you need to ban him for life.
