The Knicks Couldn’t Actually Be Considering Isiah Thomas As GM, Could They?

Imagine you are the CEO of a corporation that has fallen on lean times. Years of diminishing performance and dwindling consumer confidence can be traced back to your deposed COO, who mismanaged everything he touched and had a highly embarrassing personal scandal to boot. Then, things started turning around, slowly: You couldn’t pull the merger you really wanted, but you absorbed a company with established value and analysts are bullish on your future.

Would you, for a second, consider bringing back the incompetent COO? If you said no, congratulations, you are smarter than Donnie Walsh. From the New York Daily News:

⇥Donnie Walsh would consider Isiah Thomas as a candidate for the Knicks’ general manager job, but Walsh quickly added that he has no immediate plans on hiring anyone for the position.⇥⇥“I wouldn’t rule it out, but I wouldn’t rule anybody out,” Walsh said Saturday. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves because I’m not even thinking about hiring a general manager.”⇥

In fairness, the Knicks and Walsh don’t seem particularly eager to bring Thomas back. But, really: The organization brought to shameful lows that induced despair and delusion in its absurdly loyal fan base won’t rule out bringing back the guy who engineered that plummet.Fans in Cleveland torched LeBron James jerseys this week because he had the audacity to sign a contract it was well within his rights to sign. (And, yeah, he handled the process a bit smarmily.) If Walsh continues to entertain Thomas as a candidate for Knicks general manager, Knicks fans should call to cancel their season tickets, or get some kerosene and lighters for old memorabilia.

It would show that they care about the past and future of the Knicks, and want the failures of the past to remain only cautionary tales. And perhaps it would convince Donnie Walsh that letting Isiah Thomas anywhere near a general manager’s job in 2010 is as bad an idea as anything in the last decade in sports.

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