New York Knicks: Welcome Back Isiah

For those who do not know, the NBA salary cap is just over fifty-three million dollars this season. It is likely that teams with a salary roll of over sixty million dollars will pay the ever-so unwanted luxury tax. Why? Two reasons:

� Team owners have to pay the difference between their salary roll and the luxury tax to the league. Lets take the New York Knicks for example, as we will be talking about them in full detail later on. Last year they had a payroll of over 120 million. This means they paid over 60 million in taxes in addition to paying 60 million dollars extra to their players than other teams.

� Teams who follow the rules and do not break the salary cap are given this tax money, evenly distributed, as a bonus.

Now as a NBA owner, you would think that James Dolan would be in the business to make money and win games. With his choice of general manager and team president, Isiah Thomas, Dolan has done neither very well. Isiah has traded for overrated high-priced players one by one until the Knicks were in such a cap disaster that they likely won't be under the salary cap until the 2009/10 season. Take a minute to think about how much money is coming out of Dolan's pocket now. It is fair to assume that, when all is said and done, Thomas would have cost him near four-hundred million dollars more than a manager who obeyed the cap rules would.

And maybe money doesn't matter to Dolan. Perhaps he is fine with paying everything he has as long as the Knicks win a championship or two. We certainly have seen this attitude with other owners such as George Steinbrenner. But in his last two seasons with the Knicks, his only full seasons so far, Isiah has only won 56 games. And this with a roster has no one left behind before the Thomas regime.

So he is paying insane amounts of money and is not winning games. Yet Thomas pulls together a 29-34 record with by far the highest payroll in the league and he gets an extension? Maybe finishing eighth in the unbelievably weak Eastern Conference is good enough for James Dolan? It wasn't long ago the begrudged owner of the Knicks said that his team would have to show significant improvement for Thomas to keep his job. Now that Thomas has exceeded last year's win total by SIX games, Dolan has decided the team has significantly improved?

Now I may just be an undergraduate student studying business, but even I can see an easy decision when I see it. Letting Isiah try to coach his team was fine for one season, but anything other than a fifty win team with the payroll the Knicks have is unacceptable. Even though it won't happen, Isiah Thomas should have been fired after this season and he should have the opportunity to hold another general manager position in the NBA.

Enjoy the losing and mediocrity New York fans, it will be around for a while.