“A man who can’t stay away from the game of basketball, even if that might be best for everyone.”
That is how Bryant Gumbel, host of HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, first describes Isiah Thomas in his piece on the maligned NBA legend turned WNBA executive and his boss, MSG chairman James Dolan.
The full profile, which is an absolute cannot miss, airs on Tuesday’s episode of Real Sports.
Gumbel is an expert interviewer, able to pull quotes out of Thomas and Dolan that are almost too hard to believe someone would say on camera. Both are, to this day, defiant that nothing happened between Thomas and Anucha Browne Sanders that led to more than $11 million in damages being awarded to the former MSG employee in a sexual harassment suit nearly ten years ago.
Gumbel’s singular focus in this entire piece seems clear: why in the hell is Thomas back with MSG—running a women’s team—after costing the company all that money and anguish and embarrassment? Why?
“Did she make it up,” Gumbel bluntly posed to Dolan early in the HBO piece.
“I think a bunch of it she did [make up], yes. I was running a business and she didn’t do very well in it and she was real unhappy about that and she decided to go get a lawyer.”
When asked why he fired her, Dolan didn’t hold back at all, giving a clear reason why, in his mind, he let Browne Sanders go.
“I fired her because while she was working for me she was coercing her own direct reports to come down to her lawyers office to help build her case against the company.”
And why, Gumbel asked, did Dolan not settle for a few hundred thousand dollars like he could, and should, have done?
“Because I actually believed in the truth.”
Dolan believes Thomas, still to this day, and Thomas defiantly told Gumbel on several occasions the harassment, “never happened.”
As Gumbel read from the official court report, Thomas smiled at him, hoping the look on his face might possibly erase the words on the page, defiantly declaring, “Never happened.”
More awful words about Thomas. More accusations—hell, more than accusations if they led to an eight-figure ruling against him—and more smiles, head shakes and defiant declarations. “Never happened.”
Thomas told Gumbel he is still hurt by the outcome of that suit—clearly playing the role of victim in the most graphic possible way.
“I felt like that was a drive by and someone just took a razor and sliced me, and I just couldn’t stop bleeding.
“I still bleed. I still feel sick to my stomach that I have to sit here…I think there’s a healing process that’s occurring right now.”
Have we mentioned how good Gumbel is yet?
To get that out of Thomas is just…wow. To get anything out of Dolan, who hasn’t talked about this suit on the record for nearly a decade, was just as noteworthy. So, too, were Dolan’s reasons for bringing Thomas back to MSG.
“I was just going to give the keys back. To the WNBA. ‘You know what, I’m not going to field a team anymore. You can have it back.’
“I didn’t think I would get a better person to do that job than him. He would draw attention to the team.”
Yes, that’s James Dolan, owner of the Knicks, MSG and everything around it telling HBO that giving back the Liberty to the WNBA and just quitting as owner of the team was the only viable alternative to letting Isiah Thomas try to fix them.
And so far he has! The Liberty had perhaps the best season in team history under Thomas, which might be the most incredible note of a profile full of incredible notes. Like, for example, the note when Gumbel asked Dolan why he believes in Thomas time and time again when nobody else will, and when his track record as an executive—and, frankly, as a human being—has been so spotty.
“I don’t know if I can explain it other than that there’s something inside both of us that’s really quite similar. The tenacity, the stubbornness. Isiah’s a guy who doesn’t believe in his limitations and I’m a guy who doesn’t believe in his limitations.”
The wonderfully-framed HBO piece seems to have a bit of a happy ending to it, highlighting not only the Liberty’s success this year, but Thomas’s redemption as well, showing the executive taking selfies outside MSG like the beloved basketball icon he strives each day to become.
“Isiah made mistakes,” Dolan told Gumbel. “Isiah is also the kind of guy who doesn’t sit there…and just pity himself.”
“For good and bad,” Gumbel replied, “you guys are joined at the hip in New York?”
“I think we’re going to be friends for a long time.”
Friends or not, in a bonus clip put online by HBO on Monday, Dolan told Gumbel he sees no way Thomas ever ends up back with the Knicks.
BRYANT GUMBEL: “So here is the $64 million question. Can you envision any scenario where Isiah makes his way back to the Knicks?”
JAMES DOLAN: “No.”
BRYANT GUMBEL: “Why so certain about that answer?”
JAMES DOLAN: “There’s 29 teams, right, out there in the N.B.A., any one of which would be an easier assignment than this one. I don’t think that the New York market would ever give him a fair chance at this. And I can’t imagine why that would be– what would make it worthwhile to go and try and get one.”
BRYANT GUMBEL: “So you’re telling me it would be a no as much for his sake as anybody’s?”
JAMES DOLAN: “Absolutely.”
BRYANT GUMBEL: “As a friend?”
JAMES DOLAN: “Yep.”
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