James Dolan and Phil Jackson are already not getting along


There's tremendous irony to the picture I posted above. Phil Jackson standing, trying his best to smile with James Dolan right next to him, still holding to the basketball.

Jackson's signing came with one giant question, 'Can Jim Dolan stay away?' A question that surfaced because, well, everything in the past 20 years proving that he's absolutely can't. That was followed by about ten long days of ambiguity, and now, what appears to be a definitive answer:

via Frank Isola of the New York Daily News

Just one month into his role as Knicks president, Jackson has already clashed with Dolan, the chairman of Madison Square Garden, over personnel decisions, the Daily News has learned. According to a team source, Jackson is looking to remove several staff members, which is commonplace when a new administration takes over, but Dolan opposes removing certain employees.
According to the source, Dolan’s reaction to Jackson’s request was to tell the 11-time NBA championship coach to simply focus his attention on building a winning team. To say that “minor friction,” as one Garden source called it, can be classified as Jackson’s honeymoon with Dolan being over may be stretching it a bit.

But at the very least it proves that Dolan — surprise, surprise wasn’t being entirely truthful last month when he claimed he was “willingly and gratefully” giving up control of the basketball decisions to Jackson, the Hall of Fame coach.

What makes this newsworthy is how laughable it is. The Knicks paid 60 million dollars to an 11 time NBA Champion in effort to clean up their absolute wasteland of a team, and less than 4 weeks later Dolan can't help himself but get in the way of what you'd expect to be minor personnel decisions. Outside of a few years of them being commended for all but literally sitting on their hands and refusing to do anything until the chairs are off the deck, they've been a laughing stock of the league for 20 straight years. Now, with the all time winningest head coach in charge, the guy whose been the center of nearly every issue they've had in the past two decades is saying "Hey, that's not the way we do things around here."