The James Dolan Paradox

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Whether you're watching your favorite NBA team at the arena, the bar, or hanging at home, grab an ice cold Michelob Ultra and enjoy every moment of the NBA season. Stock up today and watch your team drop buckets with a bucket full of ice cold Ultra. Michelob Ultra, Superior Light Beer. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright, 2026, Anheuser-Busch, Michelob Ultra. Registered Light Beer, St. Louis, Missouri. Must be 21 plus to order alcohol. Alcohol available only in select markets.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
Are all batteries the same?
That's like asking if all soccer players are the same. Take Messi, the most decorated player ever. Is there any other player who has achieved that? No, just him. Now take Duracell. Is there any other battery with power boost ingredients inside? No, just Duracell. Remember, goats only trust goats, because they're built different, and Messi only trusts Duracell.

**John O'Ran** (1:04)
Congratulations, you made the Varsity, the podcast. My name is John O'Ran and I'm Puck's sports correspondent and the host of this pod. And today, we're gonna do something a little bit different.
In honor of the Knicks winning their first NBA title since 1973, we're gonna do a deep dive to see just how they got there. First, I asked Brian Windhorst to join us. Brian, of course, is a senior NBA writer at ESPN and knows so much about the business. And I just want to ask Brian about the culture change that occurred at the Knicks. Because the Knicks really are the type of franchise that you thought would never climb the mountain or reach the peak. And somehow, they figured out what was going wrong and how to fix it. And then, the voice of the Knicks, the voice of the NBA. We're gonna have Mike Breen show up and he's gonna really get into what it was like to call the Knicks the championship game. The final seconds ticking down and what he sees moving forward. So we're not gonna do what I'm looking for today. We're gonna get right into these interviews and I think you're gonna like them. Brian Windhorst, always great to have you on the pod. Thank you very much for joining us. But I really wanted to get you on this week, right after the NBA Finals. Because the Knicks, as everybody knows, won their first NBA Finals since 1973 And if I'm being honest, I really thought that it would be a good decade or more before they actually won. Because I'm a big believer in, you know, culture. And I think that the culture comes from the owner. And here in DC, we saw, you know, Dan Snyder, the Redskins slash commanders, were never close to, you know, being a consistent winning team. I think you're seeing that with the Cowboys, Jerry Jones.
They win, but not, they don't win enough. Jim Dolan, in my mind, really kind of fell into that bucket.
What happened? I mean, it's more, I'm looking for more than like, yeah, he decided to step away and let Leon Rose, you know, make the decisions. Like, what caused him to make that decision? Because most owners that I know, they still believe, despite all the evidence, that they can make the decisions to win.

**Brian Windhorst** (3:27)
Yeah. So maybe a Knicks fan would disagree with this statement, but I think in 2019, the Knicks pretty much hit rock bottom because they thought that they were going to get Kevin Durant in Free Agency.
Everybody can write their own books later on about what may have been winked, winked and promised or whatever, but let's just say they thought they were getting him. And not only did they clear out a whole bunch of cap space to try to sign him and Kyrie Irving, but then they also got unlucky in the lottery that year as well. And so they had this sort of situation where they thought they were going to get them. And they instead they chose, I actually don't think he thought he was going to get Kyrie. They just had enough room for Durant. But Dean said that he went with Kyrie over to Brooklyn. And at some point, he gave an interview where he basically said that Knicks were uncool.
And not that the Knicks ever had a cool mentality, but the idea that it would be more fashionable to be a net than a Nick was, like I said, probably rock bottom. And so during that season, he replaced his, I don't know who, the titles are all loose and whatever, but he replaced Steve Mills as his franchise leader of basketball operations. And he looked for, I mean, I wouldn't say he was trying to find somebody cool, but he obviously was trying to find somebody who could deliver players, that the Nick flag was not going to get it done. And so he settled on the duo of Leon Rose and Wes Wesley. Wes Wesley was this, is this, for decades has been this behind the scenes operative who's very close to players, known as a relationship guy, and his business partner at CAA at the time was Leon Rose. They essentially built CAA basketball together. And so he hired them together and he basically said, fix this problem that nobody wants to be a Nick. And what Leon Rose did was basically start to recruit his clients. And at first it looked like favoritism. But what now has become clear is that it wasn't favoritism, it was intelligence. Because, you know, Leon Rose was from South Jersey, Philadelphia area. He has recruited players for decades. But he had a front row seat to Villanova's championships that they won with Jalen Brunson. He recruited a number of those players. He was able to get Jalen, who is his godfather. I hope he would get him. And he got some other Villanova players. But basically he had a knowledge of who these guys were. And he valued them more than the rest of the league, quite frankly. I mean, nobody valued Jalen Brunson at $100 million when they signed him.