Isiah Thomas on Thin Ice After Knicks Brawl?
Late last month, controversial online gambling website BetUS.com (see website here) released odds on the first NBA head coach to get canned and not surprisingly Isiah Thomas' name was at the top of this list with odds of 2 to 1.
“Call us morbid, but we see at least three major coaching shake-ups by season’s end,” said BetUS.com spokesman Reed Richards. “The smartest money is on Isiah Thomas.”
"If we end up the season where we are now, in terms of this development, I think we would all be disappointed," Madison Square Garden chairman James Dolan said Tuesday. "I don't mean in terms of the record, just, I mean, in terms of the execution of the team, the performance of the team."
Dolan spoke to the media for the first time since June, when he gave Thomas one season as coach to show evident progress with the players he assembled as team president or be out of both jobs.
But Saturday night's Knicks-Nuggets brawl can't particularly help matters.
The cheap shot New York Knicks rookie Mardy Collins took at Denver Nuggets youngster on-the-rise J.R. Smith as he drove to the basket in the waning seconds of Saturday's Nuggets 23-point blowout of the Knicks escalated into a full-blown nightmare for the league, writes Mike Kahn of Fox Sports.
"Everyone on the floor was ejected. It produced another big, black eye for professional sports in general and the NBA in particular, if not quite to the extent that the Indiana Pacers-Detroit Pistons brawl at the Palace of Auburn Hills in 2004 did. Nonetheless, it left a mess for commissioner David Stern to clean up, and the consequences won't be pretty."
Thomas didn't help matters as he has justified the incident by suggesting the Nuggets had an insurmountable 19-point lead with 75 seconds left, and the Nuggets still had starters in the game.
"We had surrendered, those guys shouldn't even be in the game at that point in time," Thomas said. "They were having their way with us. I think J.R. Smith had just made one dunk when he reversed and spun in the air. And I think Mardy didn't want our home crowd to see that again. So he fouled him."
Denver Coach George Karl and Isiah Thomas reportedly have little love for one another either.
What's next for the Knicks players, the organization and its President/Coach Isiah Thomas remain to be seen. But one thing is certainly clear, the Knicks cannot continue down their current path and Thomas appears to be the biggest road block.
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Tyrone Black, www.sports911.com
Originally published December 17, 2006 3:58 pm ET
