Thomas' title vision adds to Knicks' jokes

Coach Isiah Thomas walked into a room inside Madison Square Garden last week for his mandatory pre-game meeting/bloodletting with the media. He faced another round of reporters trying to come up with original ways to ask if he'd been standing too close to mind-altering fumes, and he said the New York Knicks would win a championship while he was still in charge. Then he added he understands that people will laugh at him even more for such a statement.

Point of clarification:

It's not possible for people to laugh at him more than they already do.

And ...

Laughing at the Knicks was seven or eight debacles ago, sometime after they went down in flames in the well-chronicled summer 2007 sexual harassment trial and sometime before Thomas so obviously lost the locker room. It has evolved after the last week all the way into a bad situation of historic proportions, now worthy of being linked with the L.A. Clippers of Donald Sterling's early years and the Cleveland Cavaliers of Ted Stepien for a blatant disregard of sensibilities and trying to put out a quality product.

Every team endures difficult years in the standings. But the Knicks of 2007-08 are set apart, inept as many others are but ruled by childish behavior and an arrogance that gets in the way of digging out. Sterling at least eventually caught up with the rest of the league and left his notorious cheapskate ways. Stepien thankfully sold the Cavaliers in the 1980s after trading away so many draft choices that the league instituted a rule to save teams from themselves, prohibiting any club from trading its No. 1 pick in consecutive years.

Moving into that special stratosphere, Knicks owner James Dolan appears determined not to confront his flaming pile of wreckage, apparently refusing to fire Thomas out of spite, just because it's the move most say he should make. Meanwhile, his club recently trailed by at least 20 points in three consecutive home games, a staggering statistic, and now stands at 9-25 after a home loss to Houston Wednesday night.

Opponents are noting how the coaching staff appears as disinterested as the players.

"Usually when a team is playing bad, you can watch them and figure out why," one rival executive said. "These guys, it's just that they don't give a (darn)."

If Thomas doesn't get fired with his team being routinely embarrassed, and as the president who put the roster together, and as one of the defendants found liable for sexual harassment, though without being personally required to pay damages, he might be a lifer.

The Sacramento Kings, after all, just showed up with Kevin Martin, Mike Bibby and Ron Artest in street clothes and ran through the team with the league's highest payroll as venom continued to build among fans.

That was the same night Thomas made his championship proclamation. One newspaper headline the next day called him "warped." Mitch Lawrence wrote in the New York Daily News that the coach and president "went on one of those loony tangents that left his listeners asking, What planet did he say he's from?" Most everyone used the Thomas quote about wanting to leave a legacy.

Not to worry. His legacy is secure.

(Contact Scott Howard-Cooper at showard-cooper@sacbee.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)