If crowd noise and on-court performance really determined the direction of NBA franchises, the fate of the Knicks would have been overwhelmingly decided: Isiah Thomas would get fired, and the blood-letting wouldn`t stop until Stephon Marbury, Eddy Curry and Jamal Crawford all had new addresses - not to mention Jerome James, Jared Jeffries, Malik Rose and anyone else wearing bull`s-eyes for your boos.
Garden chairman James Dolan, whose scowling presence wasn`t missed for the third straight home game Friday night, has thus far not been moved by the noise. It is one of the few great things that lives on in his basketball place, the fact that the Knicks cannot escape verbal punishment from a 45-point loss simply because it was on the road. Twenty-four hours later, they heard about it against the Bucks - loud and often - until they erased a 17-point deficit and won, 91-88.
As for the other part of the equation, people say all the time that the NBA is a "performance-based business." It is and it isn`t. Just because the current performance of the coach and his players warrants their dismissal, that doesn`t make it feasible - or even the right thing to do. (...)
