For the life of James Dolan, he couldn’t remember Vince Carter’s name.
But the New York Knicks owner did recall (jokingly) rooting for Carter’s Achilles to rupture. That part he remembered.
It’s not as nefarious as it sounds — OK, maybe a little bit. During a recent episode of the Roommates Show with Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart, Dolan was trying to recall a “great scorer” who ended up with the then-New Jersey Nets (not Grant Hill, mind you).
Brunson had asked Dolan about a trade or signing he regretted missing out on.
And Dolan definitely had one in mind.
He indicated that the Knicks wanted to trade for what’s his name a long time ago, but team doctors put the kibosh on the deal.
“Yeah, a long time ago,” Dolan replied to Brunson’s inquiry. “A long time ago. I gotta remember. It was — he ended up playing for the Nets. Alright, um. Oh, shoot. Great scorer. [It] wasn’t Grant Hill. It was a guy out of Toronto.”
That’s when Josh Hart — who was in fifth or sixth grade when Vince Carter was traded to the Nets — stepped in to help Dolan out.
The trade in question involved sending Alonzo Mourning, Aaron Williams, Eric Williams, and two first-round picks to the Toronto Raptors. In exchange, the Nets received Carter, and Dolan, well, waited for Carter’s Achilles to pop.
Josh Hart, who was in fifth or sixth grade when Carter was traded to the Nets, helped Dolan out.
“Vince Carter is a great example, right? We were gonna do the trade,” Dolan recalls. “This is all — and the medical team came back and told us that he had a 90 percent severed Achilles tendon and that it would never hold up. Once it ruptured, he’d never be the same player. And for that reason, we didn’t do the trade.”
Seems fair, right?
“Vince Carter went on to have five, six, seven [great] years… I kept waiting for his Achilles tendon to break; it never broke,” said Dolan, still a little sour.
James Dolan says that the Knicks were on the verge of trading for prime Vince Carter, but his medical team said that Carter’s achilles was “90% severed.”
“Vince Carter went on to have five, six, seven [great] years… [jokingly] I kept waiting for his achilles tendon to break, it… pic.twitter.com/zq9tnXRwbL
— KnicksMuse (@KnicksMuse) March 13, 2025
James Dolan should’ve been waiting for a different kind of breakthrough — like the Knicks finally playing meaningful basketball again.
