James Dolan hung a poster in his Manhattan office that gives a peek into his worldview. It spells out a motto he sometimes drops into conversation when the man behind one of America’s glitziest sports and entertainment empires doesn’t like the terms others have set for him.
If you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them.
The quote is as much a reflection of how Dolan operates as the man himself. Dolan is one of the most famous owners in professional sports, the longtime operator of the NBA’s New York Knicks and NHL’s Rangers and of Madison Square Garden. He has run those organizations for more than two decades — the Rangers as a model of mostly diligent success, the Knicks as a model of mostly tireless ineptitude — and become a lightning rod for controversy in the biggest city in the country.
Dolan is no stranger to conflict. He has taken on, in no particular order, New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, countless lawyers suing Madison Square Garden, his own fans, a beloved franchise icon and several New York City politicians. He has even battled with his own father, Charles Dolan, over the direction of the company that the elder Dolan built and the son took over as chief executive in 1995.
But lately, Dolan and his Knicks have taken issue, publicly and privately, with the NBA and its commissioner, Adam Silver. Over the last two years, the tension between the two sides has escalated to new heights, driven by Dolan against a league he seems to find persistently acting out of order. He has lodged complaints, sent letters and even filed a lawsuit against another NBA team. Every board of governors meeting is potentially an opportunity to lodge a complaint, and another is set for later this month.
Some who know Dolan, and have worked for him or in the NBA, believe it is a reflection of his longtime acrimony toward the league’s revenue sharing system — a construct meant to level the playing field between large- and small-market franchises. But his pique has also come as the league’s media infrastructure, nationally and locally, has undergone a great reshuffling, and as MSG Networks, another Dolan-run company, has come under duress.
A man who has run his properties with singular power is increasingly butting up against a league he believes is trying to scrape away his control of them. The question is whether this is as far as he goes, or a pretext to something more.
Last May, Dolan sent a letter to the NBA’s board of governors saying he intended to vote against a new WNBA team in Toronto. It was a four-paragraph rebuke to a mostly anodyne measure — the 29 other NBA teams eventually voted in favor of the franchise — but it served as a terse manifesto of his list of grievances with the league.
For months, Dolan wrote, he and the Knicks had asked the NBA for more details on its spending and how it accounted for its growing expenses. He voted against a new WNBA expansion team in San Francisco the previous year, he said, because the league had not given him any answers on his central question: How would the NBA, and his team, benefit from WNBA expansion?
Now, not only was he ready to vote against WNBA expansion again, but he made it known that he would continue to obstruct league business where and when he could.
“Until such disclosure is provided,” Dolan wrote to the other governors, “we will continue to question any actions that do not directly and transparently benefit the NBA teams.”
Dolan and the Knicks, who declined to comment for this story, have long had a frosty, if not combative, relationship with the league office. (“We are not going to comment on internal disputes between NBA teams,” league spokesman Mike Bass said in response to several questions for this story.)
The issues, however, are not between two teams, but the league and one of its most prominent franchises. Former Madison Square Garden and NBA employees recount Dolan’s irritation with the league and his frustration with Silver. People who know Dolan say he is a pugilist and, occasionally, he chooses the NBA as his sparring partner. That has put the league and the owner of one of its flagship franchises at odds, but never more so than over the past two years.
Dolan has sent at least four letters to the board of governors. He has voted against WNBA expansion twice. He voted no on the NBA’s 2024-25 budget and the election of its board chairman. The Knicks have publicly accused the league of harassment and retribution.
The organization even sued another team in 2023 — the Toronto Raptors — instead of taking its dispute through the league’s internal arbitration system (the Knicks alleged that a former employee stole confidential information when he left to take a job with the Raptors; a number of team staffers around the league say what he did is routine). The Knicks, in legal filings, claimed Silver would be unable to fairly resolve it because of his closeness to the Raptors’ chairman, Larry Tanenbaum, who is also the chairman of the NBA’s board of governors. The teams are now awaiting a resolution after a federal judge sent the argument back to the league for arbitration; a hearing is scheduled for late July.
One former MSG executive believed that the suit was used as a proxy fight against the league. While it was against the Raptors, it tried to undermine Silver’s authority and even his ability to govern. But that might have been just the start of Dolan’s battle.
“Jim is at his comfort level when it’s chaos and he’s fighting,” said one industry executive who has done business with both Dolan and Silver. “That’s when he’s safest.”
Dolan has run the Knicks, Madison Square Garden and the Rangers since 1999 when he took over as MSG chairman. The Knicks were one of the league’s most dysfunctional teams during that time and Dolan received a good portion of the blame, including pleas from fans to sell the team (one fan who shouted this at Dolan was banned from the arena at his direction).
But the franchise has enjoyed a rebirth since 2020, after Dolan personally called Leon Rose, then a basketball power agent at Creative Artists Agency, and asked him to run the team. Under Rose, the Knicks have become one of the shrewdest organizations in the league and an Eastern Conference contender. Dolan has mostly stayed out of the spotlight, tending to his latest big project, The Sphere in Las Vegas, while watching games from his usual baseline seat at The Garden.
The newfound success, however, hasn’t led to a détente with the NBA.
Dolan’s biggest gripe with the league, according to several sources around the NBA and familiar with Dolan, has been with the league’s revenue sharing system. The NBA allocates money from the teams in its biggest markets and gives to those in the smallest as a way of trying to create an even financial playing field. Ultimately, that puts the financial burden on just a handful of franchises, with the Knicks chief among them. “Dolan hates the idea of giving money on revenue sharing,” one former NBA owner said. “He’s been totally against it from the beginning.”
Dolan has never been shy about trying to chip away at a league’s control of team operations, especially on the business side.
The Garden, multiple team and league sources say, is the hardest building to access in the NBA. It is the only NBA arena where the league’s distributed credentials don’t work; team, league and union employees must apply for new ones every time they visit. One opposing team official said he has requested extras just out of spite.
The Knicks submitted a presentation to the board of governors about the league’s media rules in recent years, multiple people with knowledge of the presentation said, and tried to get them to adopt a code of conduct for the reporters who cover teams that could potentially revoke their credentials if they did not follow it. Another person said, he has pushed employees to create amendments to the league’s operations manual.
Dolan bristled when the NBA tried to interfere with his decision to hire Isiah Thomas to run the New York Liberty in 2015, when MSG still owned the WNBA team. Thomas was found by a federal jury to have sexually discriminated against a former MSG executive a decade earlier; MSG and Dolan were forced to pay $11.6 million as damages. Dolan told an NBA official that he would rather shut the franchise down than remove Thomas as team president, a person briefed on the conversation said. Thomas remained in that role for four years until after Dolan sold the Liberty to Joe Tsai in 2019.
This season, the Knicks said the NBA was investigating the promotion of assistant coach Rick Brunson as a possible circumvention of the salary cap. The team said the NBA reached out for a copy of Brunson’s contract. The NBA never acknowledged that it was investigating the Knicks and refused to comment. The league previously punished the Knicks in 2022, when it stripped them of a 2025 second-round pick for negotiating too early with Jalen Brunson, Rick’s son, when he was a free agent in 2022.
The NBA reaches out to teams annually to file coaches’ contracts with the league for their records, multiple league sources said, and follows up with an early-season reminder later on for any contracts that they don’t have. MSG Sports, in a statement, claimed this was “more harassment of the Knicks due to our opposition to certain NBA matters.”
The list of such matters Dolan has shown a resistance to, or been inquisitive about, has grown long. He has taken issue with the league for taking 8 percent of the national media deal — up from 0.5 percent this season in the last year of the current contracts. In September, he said that the NBA’s 2024-25 budget was “concerning” because it continued to increase the league’s operating expenses. Dolan wrote that the NBA was set to increase its budget by $151 million from the previous season and that expenses for the WNBA, G League and Basketball Africa League would cost another $225 million while projecting to lose $8 million.
He has also disagreed with what he calls a lack of transparency for these decisions. In his July letter, he asked how the league would use its new revenue, while mentioning that the NBA has doubled its operating costs from $1 billion a decade ago to $2 billion during the 2022-23 season. He bemoaned, in September, that the league refused to disclose the details for its budgets to each franchise. And that it was asking teams to vote on its board chair without telling them the names of candidates.
Dolan proposed several changes to the NBA and asked that they go up for a vote in front of the board of governors. He wanted changes to the league’s operations manual to be subject to at least a 30-day review period, that a team advisory committee have the opportunity to review the manual to look for ways to limit the NBA’s role in team business, and for the league office to offer a full disclosure into its proposed budget every September.
It might be no coincidence that he has amplified his fight with the NBA at a time when the league is trying to centralize its media ecosystem. The media deal, those who know Dolan said, combines two of his pet peeves: a further erosion of team control and another way that smaller-market teams benefit from large-market franchises. That has been part of a central thesis to his concerns, repeatedly lodged to the board of governors since he resigned from its finance and media committees in the summer of 2023.
“The NBA has made the move to an NFL model — deemphasizing and depowering the local market,” he wrote in a letter to the board of governors in July. “Soon, your only revenue concern will be the sale of tickets and what color next year’s jersey will be. Don’t worry, because due to revenue pooling, you are guaranteed to be neither a success nor a failure.”
While RSNs and local broadcasts across sports are in a stage of upheaval, MSG Networks still makes money, even as subscribers dwindle. It made $33.7 million in adjusted operating income last quarter, according to financial disclosures made with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The Knicks and Rangers receive roughly $180 million annually in rights fees.
The new media rights deal infringes on that business model, and of individual teams. It eats into the number of games on a team’s local broadcast home and, Dolan said, potentially diminishes arena sponsorship deals.
Next season, when the new $75 billion media deal kicks in, the NBA will shift games to its national broadcast partners. ESPN, ABC, NBC and Amazon will all have their own exclusive windows each night of the week by midseason. The number of games a team could lose to exclusive national broadcasts will go from 12 to 15.
That might seem like a small number but it is an acute issue at a time when RSNs are in a period of flux. MSG Networks reported an 11.5 percent drop in subscribers last quarter compared to the year prior, even including its streaming app. While it’s still profitable, it is also in debt. A $829.5 million loan repayment was due in October, according to the company’s SEC filings. The company has only been able to pay off $25 million and is currently in a forbearance period as it tries to renegotiate terms with its creditors. If it can’t, the company warned in a SEC filing this month that it “believes it is probable that MSG Networks and/or its subsidiaries would seek bankruptcy protection or the lenders would foreclose on the MSG Networks collateral securing the credit facilities.”
Financial analysts have already started wondering if MSG Networks will have to file for bankruptcy or merge with the YES Network, which broadcasts Yankees and Nets games and is already a partner on a new streaming service. If the company were to go into bankruptcy, that could impact the amount of revenue the Knicks receive. Even if it doesn’t, there could still be some issue; MSG Sports COO Jamaal Lesane said recently on an earnings call that MSG Networks had approached the Knicks and Rangers about taking a reduction in its rights fees from the company.
“If your regional sports business… is going to have a larger hill to climb and (it is) nationalized and that revenue is then distributed to the 30 clubs, it’s even more revenue sharing,” the former MSG executive said.
Dolan, in his July letter, warned that the new media deal could make “the entire RSN model unviable,” and that the NBA offered no protection for them as it allowed national broadcasters to take more games, a complaint filed even though the incoming contracts will give each team a precipitous increase in national media rights revenue.
Silver has conceded that the new media deal will impact local media, but he believes that it will ultimately benefit NBA teams. The league has dealt with tumult in the RSN industry for the last few years as Diamond Sports Group, which broadcasts 13 of the league’s 30 teams, filed for bankruptcy — from which it reemerged this winter — and a general uncertainty in the marketplace as cable providers moved RSNs to more expensive tiers. Some teams, such as the Utah Jazz and Dallas Mavericks, even left cable altogether for over-the-air broadcast channels and their own streaming apps.
There are some in the sports media industry who believe that Dolan has a point. The more national games the NBA creates, the fewer games there are for local broadcasts, which further erodes their value as cable operators push them into more expansive tiers and some customers just cut the cord altogether.
But others see a rising tide lifting all teams across the league, that as local TV money dwindles, national media revenue explodes. The new media deal will pay the NBA an average of $6.8 billion per season for 11 years — more than two-and-a-half times what the current deal distributes. The deal is the second-largest rights deal across all of North American professional sports and a boon to the franchises who will benefit from it.
The Knicks and Dolan, however, have interests on both sides, which can create conflict. Only a few team owners, including Ted Leonsis of the Washington Wizards and Stan Kroenke of the Denver Nuggets, also own a RSN. The Houston Rockets launched a new network last year for their games in a joint partnership with MLB’s Astros, and the Chicago Bulls did it this season with the White Sox and Blackhawks.
“Right now, he’s choosing to blame the NBA for the secular changes in the media environment that are putting RSNs out of business,” said a source who has done business with both MSG and the league. “The NBA, they followed a media playbook from the NFL in making their media deal and they rightfully saw where the puck was going in terms of the media landscape and they made the best deal they could possibly make and they executed it well. Jim is choosing to say that they’re putting the RSNs out of business. It’s not the NBA, it’s consumer behavior. But he’s in a really tough spot.”
Dolan must now navigate choppy waters, and how this ends is uncertain. One person who knows both sides well wonders if the NBA might risk a lawsuit if Dolan is not appeased in some way, or if MSG Networks goes bankrupt. It would not be unprecedented. In 2007, he sued the NHL for an antitrust law violation when it tried to bring all team websites in-house. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman threatened to take away the Rangers in response.
The NBA has avoided any public rebuttal to Dolan’s saber-rattling. But that might not be a balm to the situation.
Among former MSG employees, Dolan is known and feared for his temper and his demanding style. His Tuesday meetings with top executives are infamous at the company, as are his responses to answers he does not like. An unfulfilling showing by an employee can sometimes lead to a quick exit.
No one expects Dolan to relent here, either. The fate of MSG Networks is uncertain. The NBA has not acceded to any of the demands he set out in his letters. And the league’s local broadcast situation remains unsettled.
“Jim is not afraid of a fight, is not someone who feels compelled to get along to go along,” the former executive said. “I don’t think this is over.”
(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Brad Penner, Cary Edmondson / Imagn Images)
