Anywhere else this would be instantly dismissed as ridiculous, but with James Dolan owning the Knicks — an organization that can be incredibly secretive — it seems plausible.
Dave D’Alessandro of the Star-Ledger reports that Dolan had Knicks employees spying on everything Carmelo Anthony said and had said to him during the Knicks home loss Friday night to the Bulls.
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.
Why?
Obviously this stems out of last week, when Kevin Garnett said something on the court to Anthony (reportedly something kind of amusing about ‘Melo’s wife) that got under his skin, they both got technical fouls, and then Anthony tried to continue the “conversation” near the team bus. Which led to Anthony being suspended for a game.
But still, why?
You really think you’re going to learn anything from listening to a recording of what is said in the trenches of an NBA game? You’re going to learn that guys say really nasty things to each other in the heat of competition, things said so a player might lose his focus and not play as well. If you send a recording of that to the league office, they can send you one back of any other game that night where similar things are said.
What matters is it worked. Anthony got thrown off his game and was suspended because of it. That’s on Anthony, not KG. Anthony is the Knicks leader and he needs to act like it. It sounds like he got the message, but we’ll see. You know every other team is going at this now.
