On a scale of one to basketball: James Dolan finds a coach with time travel

New York, NY – It’s weird a thing. Weird things happen in New York. I feel sorry for some people over there. Most of those people aren’t employed by the Knicks, but one of them is, and he is David Fizdale. I feel sorry for David Fizdale.

A coaching search usually goes something like this: make a list of candidates, figure out the qualities you’re looking for in candidates, interview candidates, figure out which candidate best matches your desired qualities, hire candidate.

Hooray! You avoided hiring Isiah Thomas again!

Not the Knicks though. Definitely not the Knicks. They have their own methods. If the crowd-sourcing surrounding the Kyle Lowry trade revealed anything, it’s that the Dolan Management Group have always been at a different point on the curve as it relates to personnel decisions. They’re on the outside of the pack on a segway while the horses in the horse race have silly horse fights.

But, this time the “creativity” has bled into the world of the “weird” or “freaky-deaky.” An anonymous source who recently parted ways with the Knicks organization recently sent me this email:

I’ve redacted the sensitive parts, and I’ve also graded it. I think he did quite well for an message sent under considerable duress, and I hope you agree. Unfortunately, he forgot the attachment. He included it on the next email, but also sent along a frowny face emoji. It’s been a rough few months for him. Please send the man (who we’ll refer to as Anonymous Jeff for security purposes) some kind thoughts and words.

But the attachment. To describe its contents in a word: travel. In two words: time travel.

What James Dolan lacks in self-awareness, clear-thinking, decision-making, priorities, and tact he makes up for in having lots of money. People with lots of money and no moderation often put their money into strange, fanciful schemes (pyramid-shaped and otherwise). We know Dolan has a history of this sort of conduct with his self-funded, promoted, and staged musical career. There have also been rumors of attempts to breed cows with bacon, making gravity go to the left instead of down, and attaching wheels to skyscrapers to avoid property tax.

We hear little about these things because they haven’t worked. But his latest investment is different. The signs have been there for years. There’s a strange current that runs through the Dolan hole. What else can explain the following things?

Trading for Joakim Noah
Trading everything for Carmelo Anthony
Not paying Jeremy Lin
Phil Jackson
Kyle O’Quinn’s twitter account
Phil Jackson
Trying to start a fight with Charles. F*****g. Oakley.
Phil Jackson

None of those things make sense for the timeline in which we live, but what if our timeline isn’t the only one?

Basketball writers love throwing out hypotheticals. What if Durant had stayed with the Thunder? What if David Kahn was running a bakery instead of a basketball team? How many mouths is Quin Snyder actually supposed to have? It’s all in good fun, right? Thought exercises are how we distract ourselves from the glistening roadkill of our daily lives.

But if what Anonymous Jeff sent to me is true (which it is), these hypotheticals mean so much more.

The internet takes a lot of power. Think of how much power it takes to supply the mail system, carrier pigeons, and the most powerful cell phone that you’re personally aware of. The internet takes more than that.

Despite Edison frying elephant after elephant, things these days are mostly powered by alternating current. That means when something takes in power, they have to give something back. For most people that’s a bit of a paycheck, but since the internet is unemployed they have to reply with something else. The internet gives back content.

All of your tweets, your facebook private messages, your credit card transactions — the internet gives those away to receive the energy it needs to run. And since the internet is so powerful, your content’s footprint grows exponentially. Your purchase of a stapler on Amazon gets magnified by the order of 23 tons. That’s during midday traffic on a typical East Coast weekday. The numbers vary, and typically taper off during the western hemisphere night, but on days like Cyber Monday you’re looking at something in the range of 165 tons for an act as simple as changing your shipping address.

You following so far? Good.

So where does it all go? For me to grab your head and wrap it around the entire potato of truth would probably take a few thousand words, and we don’t have time for that. What I can tell you is that Internet Content Parachuting is starting to leak into the private sector.

Making a profit parachuting is akin to metal scrapping just on a tremendous virtual scale. Fractional bits and pieces of content blocks are determined at a glance to be be of value, and those bits are scraped off. The bits are then documented and traded in a manner akin to virtual currency except this is legitimate and real.

The bulk of 1’s and 0’s that are not extracted are compacted, split, and rearranged to be sent back out and re-used. If done well, no one notices. The internet carries on, and you get your 46,000 lb. picture of a cat.

So what does this have to do with The Knicks? Dolan is rich. He’s not elite, but he thinks he is. He is one of the early adopters of Internet Content Parachuting (from here on out referred to as ICP). Certainly not an unintelligent investment and definitely one strange enough to befit the Knicks’ eccentric owner, but he appears to be doing it not to turn a profit. He has something else in mind.

If your happy birthday wish on Facebook has such a big massive effect on the world, what do you think something that reaches as many people as a Zach Lowe article does? Picture the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey and you’re getting close. Not the one with the monkeys, but the one in space. Whoa.

This is what James Dolan has been purchasing. It’s not just Zach Lowe either. Kevin Arnovitz, Howard Beck, all the blogs on FanSided, all of these filter through to Dolan. The pieces about how the Knicks can improve, who they can sign, and the analysis of their management culture are entirely dismissed.

However, the hypotheticals are retained in full. This on its own is a breach of international regulation, but goes even a step further. Tons and tons of virtual mass from a hypothetical is contained and compressed. And compressed. And squished, and a squashed, and smashed until it fits into a eight-foot high tubular container with a volume of about 100 ft^3. One of these units is pictured below:

Excuse the photo quality. Anonymous Jeff took it in haste.

Picture each of these tubes containing a small-scale big bang. The sheer pressure of the hypothetical pushing, and stretching, and splintering back upon itself creates a fusion reaction. If specific conditions can be maintained a momentary, fractured universe will be born — an alternate timeline.

Chances are if you’ve ever written a blog post wondering “What would the Knicks look like with LeBron James?” James Dolan has acquired it. Your wordthoughts now tangibly exist in a enclosed reality contained in a sterile lab beneath Madison Square Garden.

However, they are not impenetrable. With just an Oculus Rift and a feeding tube, one can exist within them for as long as they care to. Access to these realities is restricted to Dolan, Senior Vice Presidents, and Ron Baker, but they can enter and leave at will.

According to Hornecek’s report, time passes in these chambers at an exceedingly slow rate. You can live a year within an alternate but only about two and a half days pass in our common reality. One emerges from their excursion with a bit of lightheadedness, but in all but one case the employee has returned to work the same day.

So think what this means. In just two months, a team employee can live out 24 years worth of theoretical team decisions. This isn’t a statistically driven projection model or a gut-feeling, eye-test thing. Knicks employees are capable of literally experiencing decades of any reality born of a “what if?” They have seen what happens if they re-sign Michael Beasley for $3,000,000 (it’s not good). They have seen what happens if they re-sign Michael Beasley for the max (oddly enough, it’s significantly better).

No other team has this technology. It’s safe to assume no other team has even considered its existence. It is not outlawed by the rules committee, but that’s only the case because the entire concept of it is so baffling. It would not be out of line to say that the New York Knicks are operating with an unfair competitive advantage.

Next: No NBA coaches should have total control of their roster

Unfortunately for Knicks fans, this advantage is only theoretical. In our common reality the Knicks are still owned by James Dolan. Apparently he has spent every day since the All-Star break living out personal fantasies inside of worlds in which J.D. and the Straight Shot are a successful band somehow. Any attempt by team employees to interrupt his reveries with bulleted rundowns of their own outworld experience are met with “Scram. I’m jamming,” and threats of termination. As of May 5, the closest Dolan came to communicating any sort of direction was scraping the letter “F,” into his exposed right thigh with a guitar pick.

On May 7, 2018 the New York Knicks named David Fizdale as their new head coach.

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