Just about everyone in the NBA seems ready to move forward with expansion — everyone except James Dolan.
The Knicks owner has taken on the role of contrarian for contrarian’s sake. According to The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, Dolan’s relationship with NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is “angrier and weirder” than most media outlets are willing to admit. Earlier this year, Simmons pointed out that the Knicks no longer cooperate with the league on basic matters, such as ticket giveaways, which is essentially a petty byproduct of a deeper rift with Silver and the league office.
That was the appetizer.
The main course? Simmons recently reported that Dolan is leading a “little cabal of anti-expansion owners” because he doesn’t want to dilute the league’s media rights money by slicing it two or three more ways.
And yet, Bill Simmons — a guy who’s built not one but two massively influential media companies — was casually dismissed as just a “podcaster” by longtime NBA insider David Aldridge. Aldridge, writing for The Athletic, pushed back on the idea that Dolan is acting alone, citing league sources who insisted this resistance goes beyond Madison Square Garden.
“It’s more than JD,” one senior team official told The Athletic.
Simmons didn’t eviscerate Aldridge — much to the dismay of The Bill Simmons subreddit — but he made sure to correct the record. Aldridge, a respected NBA voice who has logged time at The Washington Post, ESPN, and Turner before landing at The Athletic, referred to Simmons’ reporting as something “the podcaster claimed.”
That framing didn’t sit well with Simmons..
Simmons’ track record speaks for itself. Sure, he’s whiffed on a few trade predictions and recently insisted Naz Reid was on the move, right before Reid signed a big extension with the Timberwolves. But when Simmons is right, he’s usually ahead of everyone.
He’s nailed plenty of surface-level stuff like role players going off and Rafael Devers getting traded, but he’s also gotten the big things right. He was the first to signal that the NBA’s new media rights deal was done, with NBC set to beat out TNT. And now, he seems to have been on top of the expansion resistance, not just from Dolan, but from a real bloc of owners.
So you can call him a podcaster. You can knock the mailbags, the Celtics bias, or the Dad Movie rankings. But at the end of the day, Simmons still breaks real NBA news, and there are quite a few instances where he beats the people who are paid to do it.