Knicks' Fans Are Angry, But Also Here To Stay

At this point, the amazing thing is not that the Knicks fans are chanting "Fire Isiah," but that anyone still bothers to show up at Madison Square Garden to chant it.

The oft-heard mantra about the Knicks is that every time you think they've hit rock bottom, they manage to sink a little lower. So it is with this week's latest batch of news — that the team has given up and settled its lawsuit with Anucha Browne Sanders, that bumbling owner James Dolan has given Thomas another completely unmerited vote of confidence, and that Thomas took a few minutes away from coaching during Monday's loss to the Mavericks in order to castigate courtside fans.

One fan, Mara Altschuler, said Thomas criticized the denizens of Madison Square Garden for being a "poor sixth man" and that their boos were the reason Quentin Richardson airballed a jump shot. (Actually, Richardson's bad back was the reason he misfired, and it's the same reason the Suns decided to sucker Isiah into taking him on two years ago when the Knicks traded Kurt Thomas to Phoenix, just like they suckered him on the Stephon Marbury trade. Now they're one of the best teams in the league. But I digress …)

Thomas was evasive about his actions afterward, saying, "I don't recall being combative. I think everything I've tried to say here has been pretty positive about what the fans want, what we want to give them."

But he did say, "We can win our fans back. Last year we had a difficult time at home winning our fans, and eventually we won them back, and I believe we can do it this year."

I seriously doubt it, as the Knicks seem to have quit on their coach, and the fans are apoplectic about what's happened to this onceproud franchise.

The latter part is the one that's so strange. Normally, when a team bottoms out like the Knicks have, the fans react by staying away in droves. This is especially true when the team's president allegedly insults the season ticket-holders (his alleged "I don't give a f— about those white people" comment from the Browne Sanders trial), and when the team routinely affronts the basketball gods with its selfish play, poor shot selection, and inattention to defense.

I've seen this play out in person when I lived in Portland during the tail end of the Jail Blazer era. As the Blazers became increasingly unlikable, both on and off the court, the fans' response wasn't to scream louder for the coach's dismissal, or to lustily boo the miscast collection of talent.

Instead, they stayed away. The Blazers stopped drawing as many fans, stopped selling as much merchandise, and stopped being a topic of local conversation. Even as the only pro team in town, fans' interests wandered off to the local college teams, or to the nearby Mariners and Seahawks, or to whatever home improvement project they'd been blowing off the past few years.

That's the standard Alienated Fan Process, one that's been repeated in the past decade in places like Boston, Minnesota, Philadelphia, and Charlotte.

But not in New York. Somehow Knicks fans, despite having more cause for alienation than the rest of the league's 29 fan bases put together, still show up. Still sell out MSG on most nights. And still cheer, lustily, on those rare moments the Knicks show the teamwork and intensity necessary to beat another professional basketball team.

This is an incredible story, and one that hasn't received nearly enough attention. Instead of turning away and focusing on the Yankees, Giants, Rangers, or even, God forbid, the Jets, New York's sports fans keep coming into the hallowed Garden and registering their dissatisfaction.

It's heartwarming in a bizarre way — these people don't want to pursue another entertainment option. They want to see Knicks basketball, dammit, the kind that was played by Frazier, De-Busschere, Ewing, Oakley, and Houston. And if instead they get a bunch of selfish guards chucking up contested jumpers early in the shot clock, they're going to make their discontent heard.

So, in a roundabout way, those "Fire Isiah" chants are the best thing the Knicks have going. As the saying goes, the opposite of love isn't hate — it's apathy. These fans still love the idea of a team called the Knicks that plays NBA basketball. They just hate what it's become.

And that's the other amazing part of this story. Has there ever been a fan base that hates its team more than New Yorkers hate the Knicks right now? Maybe there's something to rival it in English soccer, but I can't think of a precedent in North American team sports.

Knicks' fans hate almost everything about the squad they pay to see every night. They hate Isiah because he's ruined the team with his trades and signings and insists on pretending everything's fine. They hate Dolan because he keeps employing this man despite reams of evidence that he's totally overmatched as both a coach and a general manager. They hate Stephon Marbury, minus a brief respite while he grieves for his lost father, because he represents individual basketball over the team game that thrived here for so long. They hate Eddy Curry because he doesn't play defense, and if there's one thing the Knicks have always done, it's play defense. And so on down the line.

In fact, if you were to come up with a list of players the fans genuinely like, it would be shorter than one of Isiah's press conferences. David Lee. Renaldo Balkman. Richardson on the rare nights his shot is falling — at least he plays hard. Malik Rose, for the same reason. And that about does it for our list.

But they keep coming. Even after this mismatched batch of individually talented pieces continues underachieving — now at 6–14 on the season, with the league's worst point differential and the worst rank in Defensive Efficiency (points allowed per opponent possession) entering Tuesday's games — Knicks fans still care enough that they boo, they jeer, and they keep reminding everyone, loudly, that this is unacceptable.

The Knicks have responded to the "Fire Isiah" chants by turning up the organ music, but they'll need a nuclear detonation to drown out these fans. If they were smart, though, the Knicks would celebrate this. It is rare for a team to have fans so passionate that they'll stay engaged even when the team is totally, irredeemably unlikable. What we've learned this year is that the Knicks are among the few franchises that have them.

jhollinger@nysun.com