James Dolan Once Complained to Adam Silver About ‘Game of Zones’ Joke
Lighten up, Jim
Few people in America are as worthy of scorn and ridicule as Knicks owner James Dolan, who has done little in his life except use the power bestowed to him by his father’s monopolistic business to run a beloved NBA franchise into the ground. What Dolan hates more than anything is having these failures pointed out to him. When a fan yelled at Dolan in 2019 to “sell the team,” Dolan responded by banning the guy from Madison Square Garden for life. When a robust “sell the team” chant broke out during a particularly embarrassing Knicks loss last season, Dolan reportedly instructed Garden security to remove a teenager who joined in on the chant.
So it should come as no surprise to hear that Dolan once whined to the commissioner of the NBA about a four-minute YouTube video that took a few mild jabs at him.
Adam Malamut, the cocreator of the Bleacher Report series Game of Zones, appeared on the Rejecting the Screen podcast this week and told hosts Adam Stanco and Noah Coslov about Dolan’s response to the May 2018 episode titled “Poorzingis.” (Thanks to the New York Daily News for digging up the anecdote.)
Bleacher Report is owned by Turner, which is one of the NBA’s most important business partners. But still, people in the league office didn’t have a problem with the long-running NBA-themed Game of Thrones spoof. Well, “with the exception of one particular owner of the Knicks,” Malamut said.
In the Knicks-themed episode, Walt Frazier sits beside a bed-ridden Kristaps Porziņģis (who was recovering from a torn ACL at the time the video was released).
“Oh, my sweet Latvian child, what do you know about fair?” Frazier says. “Fair is for the elders, who’ve suffered through the entire reign of James Dolan. Fans are born and live and die, all without seeing a playoff win or decent draft pick.”
Dolan later enters the room to cheer up Porziņģis with a song—a medieval version of “Better Find a Church,” by Dolan’s band, JD & the Straight Shot—that makes a few references to Dolan’s predilection for handing out poor contracts. It’s nothing too offensive.
And yet Dolan was apparently ticked off enough that he went straight to Adam Silver to complain. Malamut said he didn’t feel comfortable telling the whole story, but he gave an abbreviated version.
“He wasn’t thrilled with it. He let Adam Silver know, who let the president of all of Turner know,” Malamut said. “To us that was pretty cool. What we know is that Adam Silver himself, he’s super cool. They like Game of Zones there. ... The league is cool with it, but technically they work for the owners and when [Dolan] complains they have to technically let us know that he wasn’t cool with it. Everyone else was like, ‘Meh, that’s just this particular guy. He’s a little fussy.’”
Now, Malamut is relaying a complaint that was filtered down from the president of Turner to whoever his bosses were, years after the fact. But there’s no reason to doubt the veracity of this story. Why? Because everything we know about Dolan tells us that this is exactly the kind of thing he would do. Somebody had the gall to make a few wisecracks about him and so he tried to get them in trouble. He’s so pathetic.
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