later refuted<\/a>, with team sources telling The Athletic that winning an NBA title was the focus. Dolan reiterated that on Monday.<\/p>\n\u201cI never had that thought. I would\u2019ve thrown it away,\u201d Dolan told Carton and McMonigle. \u201cWe want an NBA championship, we don\u2019t want the consolation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe felt good about the NBA Cup. \u2026 To get a chance at midseason to try out what you\u2019re going to be like at the end of the season, it was exciting. I was very proud of the guys that did a great job. We\u2019re proud to have the Emirates Cup, but we\u2019re going to hang a championship banner, a real banner.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dolan also briefly discussed the Tom Thibodeau firing, which came as a \u201cmild surprise\u201d to the ex-Knicks coach. Thibodeau, 67, coached the Knicks to their first Eastern Conference finals appearance in 30 years and to consecutive 50-win seasons, which hadn\u2019t happened since 1995. He also led the Knicks to three consecutive Eastern Conference semifinal appearances, which hadn\u2019t happened since 2000.<\/p>\n
\u201cI won\u2019t say you can\u2019t win a title with Tom Thibodeau,\u201d Dolan said. \u201cI don\u2019t necessarily know if that\u2019s true. It\u2019s just that if you want to build a long-term, competitive \u2026 you need somebody who\u2019s much more of a collaborator than Tom was.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s a great coach, so he had a reason to be surprised,\u201d Dolan said.<\/p>\n
Dolan wouldn\u2019t address the chatter and ongoing discussion around the league about load management and the total-game threshold. Yet, he said his players are willing to play, and praised coach Mike Brown\u2019s coaching style, aligning with playing most of a roster on a given night.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know all the players and they want to play,\u201d Dolan said. \u201cWhether we play 65 or 82 games, they want to play every game. One of the issues that Mike (Brown) has to deal with is that he has to bring guys up. \u2026 I expect that we\u2019re going to see more of the bench.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York Knicks owner James Dolan said in a rare radio interview Monday that he\u2019ll consider anything short…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":519357,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3768],"tags":[7,304,6,1136,191,3810,3806,10],"class_list":{"0":"post-519356","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-knicks","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-knicks","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-knicks","13":"tag-newyork","14":"tag-newyorkknicks","15":"tag-sports-business"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115845782920417048","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=519356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/519357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}