The final seven seconds may have been the hardest of all for James Dolan. There were all those missed free throws, Spurs and Knicks both. There was the surreal transfer, in real time, of Frost Bank Center converting from maybe 60-40 between the fans to 100 percent Knicks, as the locals departed and the invaders crawled lower and lower into the better seats.
There was one more missed free throw, of course.
“The game was still in doubt,” Dolan said, “right to the last seven seconds.”
And even as those last seven seconds played out, even as the clock slow-walked to 0:00 with the Knicks ahead 94-90, even with a world championship occurring in front of his eyes, in living color, Dolan still didn’t believe what he was seeing. Couldn’t believe.
Same as millions of his fellow Knicks fans.
“It was like when you’re in your car on a snowy day,” Dolan said. “When you start skidding down the road and you know you’re going to hit something, but there’s no impact yet, you can’t get out of the way, you can’t move the wheels and you’re just waiting for impact. That’s what it felt like. It was like an out-of-body experience.”
And then it hit. As it surely hit you.
“Oh, my God, this has actually happened!”
It happened, all right, and Thursday, Dolan and his family will be right in the middle of the Knicks parade, in the middle of the Canyon of Heroes. He will be Grandfather of the Year for his six grandchildren, all of whom will be in the procession.
“For a day, anyway,” he said, laughing.
For much longer than that, Dolan will enjoy what the old Mets broadcaster Bob Murphy used to say about baseball, now true about hoops: It’s a game of redeeming features. The same applies to high-profile owners who’ve absorbed their share of Kniocbarbs and slings and arrows through the years (full disclosure: many of them lobbed by your humble narrator).
But as Dolan spoke to The Post from his office on a half-hour Zoom call Wednesday afternoon, he really did seem transformed. So many images of him across the last quarter century have captured a man who looked less than pleased in the moment. Not now.
Now he looked like the owner of an NBA champion.
“How do you know?” Dolan asked, the smile so deep it couldn’t be chiseled off with sculptor’s tools. “Have you ever seen one before?”
We have now. It recalled a moment 14 years ago, after another conversation with Dolan in another Knicks era, one that was about to go wickedly sideways. He was beginning to hear anger oaths aimed at him from fans every time he stepped into the Garden, and he suggested no other owner had ever faced similar venom from his own fans.
“All due respect,” I told him. “Steinbrenner.”
“Steinbrenner? When he died it was like they were burying a king!”
By the end, yes. But Steinbrenner had also spent decades listening to his own fans boo him mercilessly, occasionally tossing a few vulgar chants into the mix. Then, at the end, the Yankees started winning and never stopped, although the booing did.
“Maybe they’ll love me when I’m dead!” Dolan roared.
Funny line. But the truth is: Dolan has followed the Steinbrenner blueprint to the letter, learning at age 71 the most basic rule in sports: Winning is the greatest of all deodorants for owners — for years of losing, and petty feuds, and all manner of disputes, for everything. People are happy to move on to Woody Johnson or Steve Cohen or Steve Bob Tisch. They hardly ever talk about you at all when times are good.
“Just the way I like it,” he said.
Besides: nobody ever really had to remind Dolan of the mistakes he’s made across his 27 years in that office. He was as aware of them as anyone. Face it: As easily as you can summon the names of forgotten Knicks like Kelvin Cato and Cleanthony Early and Noah Vonleh, even you spent time — had to — away from the team. When you own the team, you own the bad hires, bad drafts, bad trades. And you die a little with every loss.
“Owning the Knicks,” he said, “is a learning experience.”
He spent years looking for the right guy. And one day, he had him. One day he hired Leon Rose. Seven years later, here we are.
“My ideal operation, like a lot of my other businesses, it’s the same thing: Give me a plan, let’s put together a plan, let’s follow the plan, and I’ll support the plan,” he said. “It’s the same thing with the hockey team. And if you go off plan, come back to me and we’ll talk about it. Once Leon came, he told me in advance what he was going to do and I’d always ask, what can I do to help you? You plan it. I’ll fund it.”
Many of Rose’s deals, he simply nodded. Others, he had to be convinced — “Mostly,” he said, “I was always somewhere in the middle.” But he always landed on the side of trusting a GM who’d earned it unconditionally. It has made all the difference for the Knicks. And for Dolan.
“Did I make mistakes? Of course I did,” he said. “Did I trust people that maybe I shouldn’t have trusted? You go into it as a new owner and if you’re dumb enough, you think you actually know what you’re doing. Believe me, you don’t. And all along, you have everybody whispering in your ear: Do this, do that. You have you guys, the press, telling us where we’re going wrong at every step. And, you can start to feel like a pinball. But …”
He paused.
“The thing is, is to learn. Right? That might be the thing I feel best about is, I felt, I feel, that now after 25 freaking years of doing this, I might actually have learned something.”
Much of the time Rose was building the foundation of what the Knicks became, Dolan was hip deep in the finishing touches on the Sphere, the Las Vegas playpen that has become the must-see stop in the desert. But he and Rose still talked regularly. And a year ago, they made a difficult decision that was divisive in its aggressiveness. They fired Tom Thibodeau.
“We loved Thibs, we really did, I held him in high regard,” Dolan said. “It would not surprise me at all, by the way, if Thibs comes back and coaches a championship team because I think you could still win that way.”
Sometimes you can see the “but” coming a mile away.
“Thibs was kind of old style. Right? Like Red Holzman, right, everything comes through me, and I’ll guide us through. He’s very good at that, but that sort of obviated the need for all these other people. Mike Brown had a different view. He had a different approach. And you look at our team, in the Finals. Everyone was healthy.
There is little argument there. One of the little-discussed but essential parts of last Saturday was this: In Game 101 of the season, the Knicks had no injury report. This is a reality of which Dolan takes admitted pride since his son, Quentin, oversees the team’s health and wellness programs.
And also, indisputably, something Brown discussed at length in his interview last summer, and put into practice this season.
“Everybody was in top form for the Finals,” he said. “And that doesn’t happen overnight. That was very carefully orchestrated and monitored every week. And it really paid off. I mean, if you put it together, the year before, we went into the playoffs, we had a lot of injuries. The somewhat old style of relating to the players, and so on. I mean, I think, actually, that was a huge difference.”
It’s impossible to argue. As is the truth Dolan talked about that day 13 years ago: Winning makes owners bulletproof. If we needed further testimony, there was the video the other day of Dolan addressing his team just before the playoffs. Surely that would have been buried if the Knicks had lost to the Hawks. But they didn’t.
“I certainly didn’t want to screw anything up for them,” he said. “I didn’t want to throw them off kilter or to distract them. It was a bit of a risk, having the talk, but I thought it was worth it. You don’t come this close that often. Start now. Start right now. And so you saw what came out.”
In that moment — also when he appeared on stage Saturday night postgame, resplendent in a bright orange blazer, pumped his fist and said, “Sorry it took so long!” — an odd thing happened. James L. Dolan sounded like you, and every Knicks fan you know. When fans boo owners, as they’ve booed Dolan before, the boo-to-English translation is always this: “You don’t care as much as we care!”
The rest of his days, that’s one sling and one arrow James Dolan will never have to hear again.
