The James Dolan glare is a signature look of supreme disappointment. During bleak moments, he’ll sit slumped in a chair along the baseline at Madison Square Garden, the arena he owns, disapprovingly watching the New York Knicks, the team he owns. The bearded face, scowling and sullen-eyed — the glare is imposing enough in a sprawling arena but must be downright menacing in close quarters.

Several key Knicks players and staff members got a glimpse last spring as Dolan and team president Leon Rose summoned them to deliver opinions on what had gone wrong this time, the 52nd consecutive season that the Knicks had failed to win a championship. Many pro teams conduct postmortems; it’s rare, though, that the team’s owner leads the autopsy. But the 2024–25 Knicks season had ended frustratingly and abruptly, one step short of the NBA Finals. What Dolan heard led him to make a startling gamble: He fired demanding head coach Tom Thibodeau, who, in five seasons, had resurrected an awful franchise — and who was owed $30 million on his contract — and replaced him with Mike Brown, a more anodyne presence who had been fired from three previous NBA head-coaching jobs.

Whether Dolan or Rose deserves more credit for the move is unclear, but the owner has publicly staked his reputation on the strategy, telling WFAN’s Craig Carton in January that “we want to get to the Finals and we should win the Finals.” The decision to replace Thibodeau now looks like a stroke of genius. Not simply because this week the Knicks return to the NBA Finals for the first time in 27 years but because it could provide some level of vindication to Dolan, long one of the most vilified team owners in professional sports. The Knicks’ success comes at a particular low point for several New York franchises with the Jets and Giants coming off dismal seasons, the Mets struggling once again, and the Yankees’ last ticker-tape parade way back in 2009. “One might argue that right now, today, the best owner in New York City: Jim Dolan,” Carton recently declared.

One might. Plenty of others might not. Yes, the team’s magical run is earning Dolan, 71, some warmer words from critics and long-suffering fans. In 2020, Spike Lee accused Dolan of “harassing” him after security guards impeded the director’s regular use of an employee entrance at the Garden. “The Knicks are the laughingstock of the league,” Lee said amid the public spat. Now Lee gives Dolan credit for hiring Brown, Rose, and special adviser William Wesley — better known as “World Wide Wes” — to engineer this moment. “It’s all orange-and-blue skies,” Lee tells me. “Me and Mr. Dolan are Kool & the Gang.”

But Dolan’s history of vindictive and petty behavior is wide and deep — and not all fences have been mended. While Charles Oakley has gushed about the team dominating in the playoffs, and has attended games on the road, he apparently hasn’t been to the Garden since 2017, when Dolan had security remove the ’90s Knicks great from the stands, claiming he had been belligerent. Oakley was handcuffed and charged with assault, an accusation that was eventually dismissed.........

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