However, having noted a couple times some exceedingly nasty mentions of Isiah Thomas, I am vrey curious as to what he actually did. People apprently think he’s killed whole teams as even a league single-handedly. Since I remember him as a good player with an attitute problem (but that’s not unusual), I apparently missed out of this.
And provide details, please! No popping up, tossing a couple vague lines, and closing with " 'nuff said"! Give me the dirty details and public airing of the laundy!
When I knew him he was a very pleasant pudgy high schooler playing ball in the near west suburbs of Chicago.
Not sure what happened to him after that, but I blame the Pistons!
Isiah was a superb player in college AND in the NBA. He helped bring championships to both the Indiana Hoosiers and the Detroit Pistons.
As a player, he always seemed like a smart, telegenic, eloquent, charismatic guy. Perhaps just a bit smarmy, but overall, he came across as a highly intelligent and capable person, one who’d been a leader on the floor, and had always been successful at every level of play.
For that reason, it’s no surprise that people in high places have respected him, and given him plenty of chances to prove himself as a basketball coach and.or executive.
Unfortunately, he’s proven inept at every step since retiring as a player. He took over the Continental Basketball League, and it collapsed under his leadership (in fairness, the CBA looked to me like a shaky proposition even before he got involved). Later, the Knicks made him their GM. Npt only did he do a terrible job, he left the Knicks in a major financial hole. He kept signing bad and/or over-the-hill players to hefty contracts. That meant that, not only were the Knicks bad, they were likely to STAY bad a long time after he left, because they couldn’t afford to get better players.
That was bad enough. Fans were BOUND to dislike him intensely after that. But what made it worse, what made fans LOATHE him, was that Knicks management kept him around for so long, even after it was obvious he couldn’t do the job well. THAT led people to suspect that his main talent was as a charming BS artist, the kind who could repeatedly snooker businesspeople into thinking he was a genius.
The first thing I remember about him being jerkish is when he said (years back when they were both still active) that Larry Bird was just a mediocre player and the only reason he was famous/respected was because he was white.
Additional allegations of making racial comments were leveled at him by Browne Sanders when she sued Isiah and Madison Square Gardens for his alleged sexual harassment. That suit cost MSG 11.6 mil.
He had a terrible run as GM for the Knicks, making a lot of awful trades that saddled the team with huge contracts for disappointing players like Eddy Curry, Zach Randolph and Jerome James. The Knicks ended up with one of the highest payrolls in the league and some the worst records in team history.
I don’t know much about the CBA deal, but it sounds like he turned down an offer to sell the league to the NBA when it was having problems, then accepted an offer to coach the Indiana Pacers while still running the CBA, which obligated him to sell the league. But he couldn’t, so it ran out of money and folded.
The allegation about killing a league is literal. He bought the CBA, then bankrupted it. He was offered a deal by the NBA to make it an official minor league, but turned it down.
Aside from being a generally (to put it kindly) unsuccessful executive and coach, Thomas has also had a laundry list of personal scandals and controversies, the worst being a major sexual harrassment suit against him and the Knicks that ended with a jury award of over $11 million to the plaintiff.
Some other controversies include a long-running pattern of resntment and disrespect towards Michael Jordan while he was a player (e.g. freezing Jordan out in his first NBA All-Star game, walking off the court early and refusing to shake Jordan’s hand after the Bulls beat the Pistons in the NBA Finals), saying that Larry Bird was overrated by the sports media because he was white (“if he was black, he’d be just another good player”), and overdosing on drugs, then trying to cover for the ambulances at his house by saying it wa his teenaged daughter who’d OD’d instead of him.
His general suckage as an exec and a coach is another laundry list.
He’s an all-timer as a player, but an all-time bad as a GM.
First, the CBA. A group of investors lead by Isiah bought the CBA, which had existed for 50-some years, and had a niche as the NBA’s developmental league. His first move is to cut salaries. The NBA then offers to buy the CBA from him as an official developmental league. Isiah refuses. A few months later, Isiah is offered the HC job for the Indiana Pacers. As a league owner, he can’t coach in the NBA, so the league is placed into a blind trust. This blind trust means there is no money to pay players or pay for teams operations. End result - bankruptcy. All this happens in less than 2 years. There are also reports of out of control spending and such to the point that many people think the crashing of the CBA was intentional on his part.
His tenure as GM of the Knicks was marked by head-scratching trades and signings that left the team noncompetitive and locked into contracts with players that couldn’t play together, were malcontents, were hurt, or some combination thereof. Then there was his embarrassing and expensive sexual harassment trial.
He does seem to have an eye for talent though, and has made some good draft picks. He just can’t handle the business/management side.
For better and funnier reports on this, turn to ESPN’s sports guy, who is one the better basketball writers out there, and seems to enjoy slamming Isiah whenever he can.
When he retired ,he thought he would move into the front office at the Pistons. Davidson did not really trust him and went with Joe Dumars instead. There are stories about Thomas and gambling but I do not know how bad it was. Nor do I know how big it was in Davidson’s mind but he was the heir apparent who was suddenly gone.
A timeline of his sexual harassment trial while GM of the Knicks. Note, this has nothing to do with his separate idiocy around the actual basketball operations of the team.
And, just how much did Isiah Thomas cost the Knicks? Rough estimates put it at $187 million..
He is a fantastically magnificent failure as an executive/leader when not wearing an actual basketball uniform. As long as he isn’t involved with a team you care about, you should actually root for him to be employed simply for the sheer comical carnage he causes with every move seemingly piling more dirt on some poor team’s coffin. It’s to the point that if he tried to run a lemonade stand, it would likely end with the United States declaring bankruptcy, lemons spontaneously deciding to all die off at once so no one could ever abuse them again, and widespread zombie attacks.
