According to the Star-Ledger, New York Knicks owner and talentless, flubby musician James Dolan has no qualms about creepily spying on his players during games. During Friday night's Bulls-Knicks game, Dolan ordered two MSG Network employees to keep tabs on Knicks star Carmelo Anthony.
Two audio technicians were stationed at two corners of the court - one a few feet just behind the Knicks bench, the other diagonally opposite - and they were holding those umbrella-shaped contraptions known as parabola microphones, which fed the audio into a DAT recorder on the truck on the loading dock.
These guys had one directive from Dolan: Record every syllable Carmelo Anthony utters and absorbs while he's on the court and on the bench, the Madison Square Garden CEO ordered them, and send the tape directly to me.
Dolan was presumably spying on Anthony for reasons related to last week's on- and off-court spat with Kevin Garnett, which ended with Anthony receiving a one-game suspension. But to what end? Is Dolan trying to create a record of the verbal abuse that Anthony receives each game, or is he trying to decide whether or not his star player needs to be ordered to clean his mouth out with soap?
Either way, this does much more harm to Anthony's reputation than the incident with Garnett ever could have. Garnett got under Anthony's skin and Anthony overreacted. Things happen. But this spying business only serves to throw a magnifying glass over a situation that should have been easily moved on from. Now, Anthony is either an oversensitive baby who needs to tattle about all of the mean things that get said to him, or he is a hothead who needs to be under the constant, direct supervision of his employer.
Anthony is neither of those things, of course, and the only real lesson to be taken from this report is that James Dolan is a weirdo and a schmuck. But we already knew that.