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    Serena Williams Fans Flock to the First Match of Her Final US Open

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    A star-studded crowd inside Arthur Ashe Stadium was joined by throngs of fans outside during Williams’s first-round U.S. Open match.The public address system went quiet, and a pause ensued as people strained toward the player tunnel to get their first peek of the champion everyone had been waiting for.Serena Williams, dressed in a sparkling jacket with a cape flowing from her waist, walked out to ear-shattering applause as her daughter, Olympia, joined thousands of fans pointing cameras at her mom in the middle of Arthur Ashe Stadium.An announcer introduced her as “the greatest of all time,” and a record-setting U.S. Open crowd of 29,402 roared in agreement.Williams, despite the shattering noise, maintained her focus as she walked purposefully to her seat and began preparing for the spectacle ahead — the first match in what is expected to be Williams’s last U.S. Open, her last major tournament.“The crowd was crazy,” Williams said in an on-court ceremony to honor her afterward. “It really helped pull me through.”The night had the same kind of electric feel to it as so many other highly anticipated and buzzworthy tennis events before it, from Billie Jean King’s bedazzling grudge match with Bobby Riggs to Pete Sampras’s U.S. Open final against Andre Agassi. But even those may not have been quite as deafening.“I think when I walked out, the reception was really overwhelming,” Williams said. “It was loud, and I could feel it in my chest. It was a really good feeling. It’s a feeling I’ll never forget … Yeah, that meant a lot to me.”A host of celebrities — including a former president of the United States, a one-time heavyweight boxing champion of the world and many former tennis greats, like King and Martina Navratilova — watched along with thousands of tennis fans inside the stadium and out, all hoping Williams would win Monday’s match and continue playing.Bill Clinton sat next to Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Mike Tyson sat alongside Navratilova. Gladys Knight was there, Queen Latifah read a poem in homage of Williams, Spike Lee helped conduct the pregame coin toss, and Oprah Winfrey narrated a video played after the match for Williams.Williams certainly did her part, too, overcoming some early nerves to defeat Danka Kovinic of Montenegro, 6-3, 6-3, under the lights to reach the second round — meaning it all happens again on Wednesday against No. 2 Anett Kontaveit of Estonia.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesOn Monday, Williams looked far better than she had in previous matches this summer and seemed energized by the moment, and the crowd. Kovinic, ranked No. 80, said it was so loud, not only could she not hear the ball coming off Williams’s racket, she couldn’t hear it coming off her own strings at times.“On the outside courts we don’t have this experience,” she said. But Kovinic, who smiled amiably during the unusually long prematch introductions, handled her part with aplomb.Even as fans focused on Williams, many were also captivated by Olympia, her 4-year-old daughter, who wore a similar black outfit with sparkles. Olympia had beads in her hair, evoking when her mother wore beads as a player.“She asks to wear beads a lot,” Williams said. “It actually wasn’t my idea, but I was so happy when she had them on. It’s perfect on her.”After the match, a ceremony was held to honor Williams, an unusual departure for the first-round match. Williams had announced earlier this month that she intends to retire from tennis to concentrate on her family, her spiritual life and other ventures. But as King said during the ceremony, “You are just beginning.” It could have referred to both Williams’s future outside of tennis and her journey in this tournament, which has already been defined with her imprint.“I’m just not even thinking about that,” she said. “I’m just thinking about this moment. I think it’s good for me just to live in the moment now.”While inside the stadium the two players hammered balls from the baseline in front of a nervous but expectant crowd, the grounds outside the arena walls were crowded with an overflow audience of people unable to find tickets to get in.Instead, they watched on the big video screen overlooking the fountains in the main plaza, and cheered along with roughly 25,000 on the inside, as long as they could see the images from where they stood.“The screen needs to be bigger,” said Zandra Bucheli, an architect from San Francisco. Her brother, Jorge Hernandez, from Long Beach, N.Y. — and an architect, as well — said that despite not getting inside the stadium, his family members were still enjoying the scene in the plaza.“It’s just over the wall,” he said. “And the atmosphere out here is good. You get a feel for it.”The Gray family, from Bowie, Md., drove four hours to watch Monday’s matches and planned to drive back home after it was all over.“I’m extremely excited,” said Anita Gray, whose two sons, Cody, 12, and Coy, 14, play competitive tennis and train at the Tennis Center in College Park, Md., where the 26th-ranked Frances Tiafoe first honed his game. The boys’ father, Rory V. Gray, has been coming to the U.S. Open since 1993 and said he would watch Williams and her sister Venus working out on the back courts at the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center with their father, Richard Williams. They were both schoolgirls at the time, and virtually no one else was there watching with him.It was a far different scene on Monday when Serena Williams practiced before the night match. Hundreds of fans waited patiently for her to appear at about 6:15 p.m. for a half-hour warm up. As soon as she emerged into view, the fans began to scream and cheer while a dozen cameras followed Williams to the door of the courts.Fans outside of Arthur Ashe Stadium as Serena Williams’s match was about to begin.Peter Foley/EPA, via ShutterstockWhen her practice session ended, the fans applauded again, and Williams lifted her racket to acknowledge their cheers as she walked off with Rennae Stubbs, her coach. Not long after, she was making her grand entrance into Ashe Stadium.“I don’t know if she can win it all,” said Shayla Veasley, a certified athletic trainer from Harlem. “But I’m hoping for at least a run to the semis. We just want to see more of her.”Menuarn Burns, 74, a retiree from Shreveport, La., said she felt lucky to have tickets for the match, which she had been anticipating for days. She admires and respects Williams, but she said she would not be sad when the great champion is finally gone from the tennis tour.“Everyone has to grow old,” she said. “She’s earned a chance to move on to something else.” More

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      Among Pro Athletes, Bill Russell Was a Pioneering Activist

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      Russell marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., spoke out against segregation in Boston public schools and backed Muhammad Ali in his opposition to the Vietnam War.It’s easy to remember the shots that Bill Russell blocked or the N.B.A. championships he won. After all, there were so many of each that he is considered one of the greatest basketball players in history, and in some corners, the greatest, period.But after his nearly nine decades of life, his most consequential legacy has less to do with the sport he dominated than his work off the court. From the time he was a young man to his death at age 88 on Sunday, Russell was a civil rights activist who consistently used his platform as a celebrity athlete to confront racism, no matter whom it alienated or what it did to his public popularity. And he was one of the first to do so.Now, it is common for athletes across many sports to be outspoken, no doubt inspired by Russell. The N.B.A. players’ union encourages its members to be passionate about their politics, especially around social justice. Without Russell’s risking his own livelihood and enduring the cruelties he did as a Black player in the segregated Boston of the 1950s and 1960s, athlete activism would look much different today, if it existed at all.“The blueprint was written by Russell,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said in an interview on Sunday. He continued: “It is now trendy on social media to take a stand. He did it when it was not trendy. He set the trend.”Spike Lee, the director and longtime N.B.A. fan, said in a text message, “We are losing so many greats my head is spinning.”Lee said Russell “is right up there with Jackie Robinson as changing the game in sports and activism in the United States of America, and we are all better because of these champions.”Russell, a native of West Monroe, La., was a trailblazer from the moment he set foot on an N.B.A. court.“My rookie year, in the championship series, I was the only Black player for both teams,” Russell once quipped to an audience while accepting an award in Boston. “And see what we did, we showed them diversity works.”Russell marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 in the prime of his playing career (he played for the Celtics from 1956 to 1969). He was invited to sit onstage behind King, but he declined. That same year, Russell offered his public support for demonstrations against segregation in Boston public schools, and addressed Black students taking part in a sit-in.When the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated, also in 1963, Russell contacted Evers’s older brother, Charles, in Jackson, Miss., and offered his assistance. The elder Evers suggested that Russell run an integrated basketball camp in the Deep South, something that would have been a significant safety risk for Russell. He said yes, and despite the death threats, went through with the camp.Russell, with Kenneth Guscott, left, and Marvin Gilmore, right, spoke at NAACP headquarters in 1964. Hal Sweeney/The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesFour years later, when the boxer Muhammad Ali was faced with a torrent of criticism for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War, Russell, the N.F.L. star Jim Brown and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor and still playing at U.C.L.A.) gathered in Cleveland and decided to support Ali. This was not a popular stance, not that Russell cared.Russell wrote immediately afterward that he was envious of Ali.“He has absolute and sincere faith,” Russell wrote for Sports Illustrated. “I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali. He is better equipped than anyone I know to withstand the trials in store for him. What I’m worried about is the rest of us.”Russell’s activism made an impact on generations of athletes. That included Spencer Haywood, who played for Russell as a member of the Seattle SuperSonics, whom Russell coached for four seasons. (In 1966, Russell became the first Black coach in the N.B.A.)Haywood said in an interview on Sunday that he and Russell would often dine at a Seattle restaurant called 13 Coins after road trips, and Russell would regale him with stories about the civil rights movement. During these dinners, Russell lauded the young player’s willingness to sue the N.B.A. in 1971 for not allowing players to enter the league until four years after their high school graduation — a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court and was eventually decided in Haywood’s favor.“He was teaching me because he knew what I had stood up for with my Supreme Court ruling,” Haywood said. “And he admired that in me. And I was so overwhelmed by him knowing.”Haywood said his teammates would jokingly refer to Russell as Haywood’s “daddy” because of how close they were. Sometimes, Haywood’s late-night talks with Russell came with surprising advice about activism.“He always used to tell me about not getting too carried away because we were in the ’70s,” Haywood recalled. “He was kind of guiding me, saying: ‘Don’t go out too far right now because you are a player and you need to play the game. But you’ve made one stand and you did great in that, but don’t go too far.’ He was, like, giving me a guardrail.”Russell never feared going too far as a player activist himself. He wasn’t deterred by the racist taunts he absorbed at games, or when vandals broke into his home, spray-painted epithets on the wall and left feces on the bed after he moved his family to Reading, Mass. When he tried to move his family to a different house nearby, some residents of the mostly white neighborhood started a petition to keep him out.“I said then that I wasn’t scared of the kind of men who come in the dark of night,” Russell wrote for Slam magazine in 2020. “The fact is, I’ve never found fear to be useful.”He didn’t always have the support of his teammates. In 1961, for example, the Celtics traveled to Lexington, Ky., for an exhibition game against the St. Louis Hawks. When the restaurant at the hotel would not serve the team’s Black players, Russell led a strike of the game. His white teammates played the game. Bob Cousy, one of Russell’s white teammates, told the writer Gary M. Pomerantz decades later for the 2018 book “The Last Pass: Cousy, the Celtics and What Matters in the End” that he was “ashamed” at having taken part in the game. President Barack Obama cited the 1961 story in giving Russell the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.“For decades, Bill endured insults and vandalism, but never let it stop him from speaking up for what’s right,” Obama said in a statement Sunday. “I learned so much from the way he played, the way he coached, and the way he lived his life.”Russell addressed a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee in Boston in 2011.Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe activism didn’t stop as Russell got older. In recent years, Russell has been a public supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement and Colin Kaepernick, the former N.F.L. quarterback who began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality in 2016.“Bill Russell was a pioneer,” Etan Thomas, a former N.B.A. player and political activist, said in a text message Sunday. Thomas said Russell was “an athlete who used his position and platform to stand up for a bigger cause.” He added that “he was the type of athlete I wanted to be like when I grew up.”Russell’s influence in leading the 1961 strike could be felt in 2020, when the Milwaukee Bucks refused to play a playoff game as a protest of police brutality. On Twitter, Russell wrote that he was “moved by all the N.B.A. players for standing up for what is right.” In a piece for The Players’ Tribune weeks later, Russell wrote, “Black and Brown people are still fighting for justice, racists still hold the highest offices in the land.”Sharpton pointed to those actions as Russell’s legacy.“He did it before some of these guys were born,” Sharpton said. “And I think that what they need to understand is every time a basketball player or athlete puts a T-shirt on saying something about Trayvon or ‘I Am Trayvon’ or ‘Black Lives Matter’ or whatever they want to do — ‘Get your knee off my neck!’ — they may not know it, but they are doing the Bill Russell.” More

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      Malcolm D. Lee on ‘Space Jam: A New Legacy’ and Directing LeBron James

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      The filmmaker recalls the “organized chaos” that went into making the new film and the studio pickup games with Chris Paul and other pros.The making of “Space Jam: A New Legacy” was a head-spinning exercise in the unfamiliar for the director Malcolm D. Lee.For one thing, the film went into production less than a week after he officially signed on to direct the film. Lee was a late addition in summer 2019, taking over directing duties from Terence Nance. The script was still in development. Lee, the veteran director of comedies like “Girls Trip” (2017) and “The Best Man” (1999), had never worked with animation before and had never seen the original “Space Jam,” the 1996 basketball-Looney Tunes crossover starring Michael Jordan.On top of all that, Lee was charged with taking care of a movie built around LeBron James, one of the most popular athletes in the world. James had appeared on the big screen before (most notably in a supporting role in the 2015 romantic comedy “Trainwreck”) but had never anchored a feature.“It was organized chaos,” Lee, 51, said in an interview this week.The director met James a decade earlier when they had discussed making a film together, but it never came to fruition. The new project is a gamble for both Lee and James: It will inevitably be compared to the now-beloved original in the same way that James is continually measured against Jordan. If it flops, a movie literally billed as “A New Legacy” may be damaging to James’s own.The movie is, if nothing else, self-aware. At one point, James, playing himself, notes how poorly athletes fare when they try to act. (Similarly to the original, other pro basketball players — including Damian Lillard, Anthony Davis and Diana Taurasi — have cameos.) The film also features Don Cheadle as the villainous manifestation of an algorithm named, well, Al G. Rhythm, who kidnaps James, his youngest son (Cedric Joe) and the rest of the Warner Bros. universe.James and Bugs share the screen.Warner Bros. In addition to preparing for the film, James, 36, also had to stay in shape for the N.B.A. season. Lee said that on shoot days, James would wake up at 2 a.m. and work out till 6 a.m., then show up for a full day on set.In an interview, Lee, who is the cousin of fellow filmmaker Spike Lee, discussed his own love for basketball and how he directed a star without a traditional acting background. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Did you grow up playing basketball?The third grade really is when I started playing organized basketball. I wasn’t as into it as my brother and my dad were encouraging me to. I started playing in this league in Brooklyn called the Youth Basketball Association. My dad coached a year. In fact, it’s funny, too, because Spike, who was living with us at the time, was the assistant coach. [Lee is 13 years older than his cousin.]No kidding.Swear to God. And Spike will tell you himself. There was one week when my dad went down to Alabama — that’s where he’s from — and Spike had to coach us. We had an undefeated season until that date, so Spike was sweating coaching us. And we actually got the victory. He didn’t want to spoil my father’s streak.What was your first conversation with LeBron like when you took the “Space Jam” gig?I think LeBron had the same agenda as everyone else in that he wanted to make the movie great. He wanted to make sure that I knew what I was doing, that my vision was clear and that he’d be taken care of. Not coddled, but that there was a leader aboard who was going to say, “This is what we’re going to do and this is how are we going to do it.” I assured him that there could be delays — I just don’t know — but I’m a professional, I’ve been in this for a long time and I will make sure that you’re taken care of.Lee signed onto the film late in the process. “It was organized chaos,” he said.Justin Lubin/Warner Bros.Did you have any reservations about working with a basketball star who doesn’t have the traditional acting training that someone like Don Cheadle has?Not really. LeBron’s been in front of the camera since he was 18 years old. Now, I mean, “Oh, those are just interviews,” but people get asked the same questions over and over again. So he’s got some rehearsed responses. He also was very funny. He wants to be good. He was good in “Trainwreck.” There’s some actors that get something and say, “OK, that’ll cut together.” And some that are just natural. I think LeBron has a lot of natural ability.Without spoiling it, there is a scene where LeBron has to convey a vulnerable emotion toward his son. Is there anything in particular either you or he did to prepare for that scene? Because that had to be out of his comfort zone.For sure. Look, the first thing that I try to get with any actor is trust, right? I have to trust them. They have to trust me because I’m going to ask them to go to some places that they aren’t necessarily comfortable going. So yes, we did talk about something before he delivered some of those lines. Then we did a couple of takes — just let him get warmed up. If I’m not getting what I’m looking for, then I’ll say, “Why don’t you think about this? And don’t worry about the line so much. Just have this in your brain and then say it.”From left, Nneka Ogwumike, Cedric Joe, Damian Lillard, Anthony Davis, Klay Thompson and Diana Taurasi on the set. Scott Garfield/Warner Bros.Film is a director-driven medium, and basketball is very much player-driven in that players can get coaches fired or disregard them entirely. Did that dynamic ever come into play in the course of filming?No. I don’t think there was ever any “I want to do it this way and I don’t care what you have to say.” I think LeBron likes to be coached. He’s a master of his craft. But at the same time, people are in your corner whose job it is to say: “Make sure you do this. Think about this. I’m seeing this on the court. You’re not seeing blah, blah, blah.” And I think he takes that information. Same thing with acting.During the filming of the original “Space Jam,” Michael Jordan hosted scrimmages with other N.B.A. players. Was there anything like that here?There was a court built for [James] on the Warner Bros. lot. I did go to one pickup game and that was thrilling for me, because I’m a huge basketball fan. Chris Paul was there, Ben Simmons, Anthony Davis, JaVale McGee, Draymond Green.You didn’t ask to play?Hell no.What an opportunity, man!Are you kidding? The opportunity to get embarrassed. A lot of those guys come into the gym, they don’t know I’m the director of the movie. They’re like, “Who’s this dude?” I can’t be like, “Hey, how you doing? I played intramurals at Georgetown.” That’s not going to impress anybody. More

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      The Leon Rose Approach: Way Too Quiet, But Effective for Knicks (So Far)

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The NBA SeasonVirus Hotspots in the N.B.A.LeBron and Anthony DavisThe N.B.A. Wanted HerMissing Klay ThompsonKobe the #GirlDadAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyon PRO BasketballThe Leon Rose Approach: Way Too Quiet, But Effective for Knicks (So Far)As the team president for the past year, Rose has let the Knicks’ on-court flickers of progress do most of his talking.Leon Rose, center, a former player agent, attended his first game as the Knicks’ team president, above, on March 2, 2020.Credit…Kathy Willens/Associated PressFeb. 28, 2021Updated 8:26 p.m. ETThe Knicks had just sullied their better than expected start with a loss at home to the Miami Heat, but the more pressing topic on Feb. 7 was a looming trade. A deal with the Detroit Pistons was about to position the Knicks’ Tom Thibodeau to coach Derrick Rose for the third time.The trade, though, was not yet official, so Thibodeau was not yet ready to discuss the player’s arrival with reporters — not even after their happy stints together in Chicago and Minnesota.“In terms of the roster, that’s a Leon question,” Thibodeau said, referring interest in the topic to Leon Rose, the Knicks’ team president.It was quite the deflection from the defense-loving coach.Leon Rose, you see, makes himself available to field media queries about as scarcely as any N.B.A. executive running a front office ever has. Tuesday will be one full year on the job for Rose, who didn’t even hold an introductory news conference. Apart from a brief interview with the team’s play-by-play man, Mike Breen, on the MSG Network in June 2020, Rose has only once spoken to reporters, during the team’s Zoom session in July 2020 to formally announce Thibodeau’s hiring.A public sense of Rose’s vision for how to build a team, how he plans to lead the Knicks back to sustained prominence for the first time since the 1990s, thus remains murky.Our request for Rose to break from that policy for this article was predictably declined by a team spokesman — even as the Rose regime, presiding over one of the league’s first-half surprise teams, has some good things to trumpet. Few predicted that these Knicks would contend for a postseason berth, but the present is going well enough that Rose has faced scant pressure to expound on the moves he has made or on his future plans.“I see orange-and-blue skies again,” the filmmaker Spike Lee, who is known as one of the Knicks’ biggest fans, said in a telephone interview. “I’m very, very encouraged.”Perhaps this is one time he should be. On March 2, 2020, Rose attended his first game in his new role, but the Knicks’ victory over Houston — in their 61st of 66 games in a coronavirus-interrupted season — was overshadowed by a messy dispute between the team’s owner, James L. Dolan, and Lee over the entrance that he used at Madison Square Garden. This March: Julius Randle’s breakout season earned him a spot in next Sunday’s All-Star Game; Thibodeau’s schemes and throaty exhortations have steered the Knicks to the league’s third-ranked defense; and tangible positivity is bubbling about the possibility of the team securing just its fifth playoff berth during Dolan’s 20 seasons in charge.It also helps that after seven consecutive nonplayoff seasons, Rose has presided over more hits than misses so far. That starts with the hiring of Thibodeau, whose demanding style has clicked more seamlessly than anticipated with an inexperienced roster. The Knicks entered Sunday’s game at Detroit at 17-17, which was good enough not only for a share of fourth place in the Eastern Conference, but also to shift focus away from Dolan, last season’s dreadful headlines about his clashing with Lee and the much-panned hiring of Steve Stoute as a branding consultant.“Knick fans, we’re optimistic,” Lee said. “We see hope. We haven’t seen that in a while.”Within the N.B.A., most observers say it would be unfair to grade Rose on one year of work even if the Knicks (with 13 of their 17 wins against sub-.500 teams) weren’t capitalizing on the East’s famously forgiving nature. Rose’s detractors, or skeptics of his ability to succeed in the transition from player agent at Creative Artists Agency to team builder with no front-office experience, surely see he deserves more time to shape the roster.An urge to say that the Knicks erred in November by drafting Obi Toppin at No. 8 over all rather than taking the electric guard Tyrese Haliburton, who went at No. 12 to Sacramento, is tempered by the possibility that Rose may also have unearthed a true sleeper by acquiring the rights to the No. 25 overall pick, Immanuel Quickley, who (sorry, can’t resist) quickly established himself as a fan favorite. The Knicks made a hard push in free agency to sign Gordon Hayward — at Thibodeau’s urging — but won plaudits when they did not overreact after Hayward chose Charlotte. Rose maintained the financial flexibility to be a player in free agency this summer instead.Although that free-agent class will not be as inviting as once thought, after several stars signed contract extensions before this season, hopeful vibes are unexpectedly circulating ahead of schedule. Thibodeau’s New York team is bunched record-wise with established teams like Toronto, Miami and Boston, despite up-and-down play from RJ Barrett, the Knicks’ top draft choice in 2019, and a broken hand sustained by the athletic center Mitchell Robinson.The newly acquired guard Derrick Rose, driving against the Kings’ De’Aaron Fox, top left, has bolstered a roster that lacks playmaking and perimeter shooting.Credit…John Minchillo/USA Today Sports, via ReutersThe trade for Derrick Rose initially inspired fears that Quickley’s development could suffer, on top of Toppin’s slow start and the apparent gaffes of previous regimes, which burned top-10 picks on Kevin Knox (two spots ahead of Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander) and Frank Ntilikina (five spots ahead of Utah’s Donovan Mitchell and six ahead of Miami’s Bam Adebayo). Yet Derrick Rose, in his second stint as a Knick, has settled well to strengthen a roster that lacks playmaking and perimeter shooting. Some of the snickering that would typically greet Thibodeau’s reunion with Rose, his former first option in Chicago, has been drowned out by what Thibodeau is coaxing out of a group that finished 23rd in defensive efficiency last season.“Like all the great Knick teams, they’re playing defense,” Lee said.Yet one suspects that the sunny outlook, even among the Knicks’ long-term loyalists, is fleeting — especially with the Nets seemingly collecting superstars for sport across New York’s East River.Rose, who The New York Times reported in November earns an estimated $8 million annually, and his top aide, William Wesley, who is known as Worldwide Wes, will ultimately be judged on how swiftly they can deliver at least one player in the talent ZIP code of the Nets’ Kevin Durant, James Harden and Kyrie Irving. If the Nets play to their potential and emerge as true title contenders, sticking to Rose’s current methodical approach, sensible as it sounds, will take discipline the Knicks aren’t exactly known for.The media strategy, in the interim, appears to be letting the on-court flickers of progress (and Thibodeau) do the talking. Rose and Wesley are accustomed to operating this way after maintaining very low profiles during their C.A.A. days, but it actually takes the franchise back in some ways to pre-Dolan times. Pat Riley and then Jeff Van Gundy were the frontmen as coaches, largely because of the star center Patrick Ewing’s aversion to the spotlight.When Toppin became the first draft pick of this new era, Rose limited the sharing of his thought process behind the selection to a written statement that said little more than “Obi was someone we really coveted.” When the Knicks were criticized for their apparent infatuation with players represented by C.A.A. or Kentucky alumni who had played for John Calipari, who is close to both Rose and Wesley, it was left to Thibodeau to insist that it’s “more coincidental” than the news media suggests.In a letter to season-ticket holders a year ago, Rose wrote: “Nothing about this is easy, or quick, so I ask for your continued patience. What I promise you in return is that I will be honest and forthright.” The reality, of course, is that forthrightness has never been a hallmark of Dolan’s ownership, but who is going to complain apart from sportswriters when the Knicks are playing like plucky overachievers?If this is really the start of something — if Rose has staying power after all the false dawns that have felled supposed saviors on the court (Amare Stoudemire, Carmelo Anthony and Kristaps Porzingis) and off (Donnie Walsh, Mike D’Antoni and Phil Jackson) — only the scribes are bound to remember Rose’s letter from when he got to Gotham.Lee insisted, furthermore, that the fans understand why they are so rarely briefed.“You know where that’s coming from,” Lee said. “That’s an edict from up top. I’m not happy about it, but there’s someone else calling those shots. We’re used to it by now. And he’s not selling the team, so what are we going to do?”“Orange-and-blue skies,” Lee added with a laugh.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More