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Isiah Thomas Isn't All Bad, RevisitedLiking Isiah Thomas against my better judgment.

By Stephen MetcalfPosted Thursday, Oct. 4, 2007, at 10:40 AM ET

Isiah Thomas lost a federal civil suit Tuesday when a jury found that he did indeed sexually harass a former Madison Square Garden employee. Almost nothing I've written has generated as much (amicable) grief from friends and acquaintances as my 2006 semidefense of Thomas, whose much-vaunted "charisma" they find repulsive, the street-side face of a totally self-serving duplicity. Evidence for this, they say, goes back to Thomas' playing days, when Isiah set the gold standard for sore losing, and when the dirtiest player on an infamously dirty team hid behind an angelic smile. I tried to figure out why Thomas—only one of many hateful professional athletes who have been granted long afterlives in announcing, management, or business (or, in Isiah's case, all three)—is so uniquely reviled. I may have committed the commonplace think-piece sin of ascribing too much value to a counterintuitive thesis; but even if Isiah is a jerk, a harasser, and the worst executive in the history of pro sports (true, true, and true), his story may yet be more complex than our anger or disgust gives it credit for being. My article is reproduced below.—Stephen Metcalf

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Knicks fans don't want Isiah Thomas fired; they want him jailed. Thomas, the 45-year-old ex-NBA great, was brought in midway through the 2003-2004 season to help rescue the New York Knickerbockers, a once-storied franchise slowly being euthanized by bad management and incompetent ownership. Thomas' mandate was to make an old, slow, overpaid roster vital again. And what has he done instead? The team is, mirabile dictu, an even bigger disaster. Here a distinction needs to be made: There are bad players, and there are albatrosses. A bad player you can afford to bench or trade. An albatross is a bad player who is unbenchable, and untradeable, because he is too highly paid. But for a couple of plucky rookies, Isiah Thomas' Knicks are a team made up entirely of albatrosses. Together, they managed to earn the second-worst record in the league while being the highest-paid team in the history of the NBA. With a payroll of $126 million, the Knicks laid out $5,478,260 in player salaries for each of its 23 wins. In terms of sheer labor productivity—as economists would define it, victory output per dollar of wage input—the New York Knicks are the worst team in the history of pro basketball, and maybe all of pro sports. To further its torture of its fan base (and all common sense), last week the team fired Larry Brown, a surefire Hall of Famer, and installed Thomas as its new coach.

Isiah Thomas was supposed to be the greatest ex-jock of all time. He is shrewd, articulate, fiercely competitive and, at least superficially, very likable. Since retiring as a player, he has done everything an ex-jock can do: He's been an announcer, a coach, a general manager, and even, for a stretch, a kind of mini-mogul, owning the Continental Basketball Association, the minor leagues of basketball. He has done each, according to multiple reports, disastrously, though this may be a blushing understatement. Were it only a question of incompetence, of being yet another recyclable in the hermetic ecosystem of bad managerial talent that is pro sports, Isiah would not inspire anything like the enmity he does. For all his professional shortcomings, Thomas' biggest liability may be a perception problem, rooted in his trademark smile. Thomas is a sweet-faced and handsome man with doe eyes; a soft, thoughtful voice; and a fluorescent grin—he has carried his altar boy good looks well into middle age. Why this should serve as a liability was eloquently captured by a Chicago sportswriter who once played against Thomas in high school: "I was running around a screen. He grabbed me and pulled us both down to the floor, and I was called for charging. Dirty play? Sure. But a smart one, I guess, because it worked. As we got up, he whispered, 'Sucka.' "

This is Isiah in a nutshell, or so his enemies will tell you; and no one collects enemies quite like Isiah. He once infamously proclaimed that were Larry Bird black, "he'd be just another good guy." (Bird later fired him as coach of the Indiana Pacers.) He refused to pass Michael Jordan the ball at Jordan's first All-Star game. (Jordan later, it is widely speculated, made sure Isiah was left off the Olympic "Dream Team.") Calling upon decades of warm feelings, Thomas lured Larry Brown, one of his few remaining NBA allies, to New York, where the two quickly descended into backbiting and palace intrigue. Thomas and Brown are now, from all reports, the bitterest of enemies.