We’ll give Raymond Felton this: At least he didn’t have to read off a sheet of paper to get his basic thoughts across.
But in the minute-long statement he gave on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after he left Manhattan Criminal Court on $25,000 bail, you would have thought he would include these two words in his meager comments to the press: “I’m sorry.”
He never said it once, not a single time, and that capped off a miserable performance by Felton and the Knicks on what definitely has been the worst two-day stretch of this awful season.
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Felton has a lot to apologize for, even if he’s cleared of the felony gun charges and never spends a minute in jail, and even if his legal defense precludes him from making what could be viewed as admissions.
First off, he needed to ask forgiveness from Jim Dolan, who pays Felton a lot of money and hardly gets a bang for his buck, for what’s become a huge distraction. Then he needed to say he was sorry to Mike Woodson, who didn’t need to see one of his main players arrested, even as the team continues to implode on the basketball court.
After that, Felton needed to apologize to his teammates for making himself a major distraction as they play out the final 25 games of the season.
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Then there are the fans. Felton would have scored a few points with any of them still rooting for him, if he had told them that getting himself into hot water was the very last thing he ever wanted to do. We would have even taken a “my bad,” not that it would have been sufficient. But it would have been better than what we heard.
The apologies shouldn’t have ended with Felton. Dolan should have gotten himself up to his practice facility in Greenburgh to meet the media and tell his season-ticket holders, and Knick fans who can’t afford his prices, that he was very sorry for the entire incident and making what has been a messy season even worse.
Of course Dolan was a no-show, gutless as ever to show his face and let fans know that he does care about who represents his team and how they behave off the court.
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At the least, Dolan had to send his top basketball executive, Steve Mills, to take questions from the media. Mills was on the premises. We know that because when we were allowed into the gym to view about six minutes of practice, he could be seen walking near the court.
Of course, Mills never got close to the microphones set up in the press room — the Garden chairman would never allow that.
Dolan and Mills dropped this entire embarrassing episode at the feet of Woodson, who is cutting quite the sympathetic figure in what surely are his final weeks as coach of the team. His roster has fallen apart, which is always a good excuse for why you can’t win. And now, he’s got a starter on his team, a veteran player, who ends up getting chased out of an arraignment by a horde of reporters. Beautiful.
Woodson handled himself as well as he could. No, he said, the Knicks didn’t consider suspending Felton a game or two for his actions, even if they would have been covered by the clause, “conduct detrimental to the team.”
At one point, Woodson allowed, “I’m not an attorney, not in the least.”
When your head coach is invoking that phrase, it’s never a good day.
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Tyson Chandler, to his credit, took one for the team. On this day, the Knicks didn’t allow reporters anywhere near the court to grab players and get their thoughts on what Felton is accused of doing or whether they own/carry guns or anything related to the topic that landed their teammate on the front pages of the newspapers.
The Knicks controlled the situation, bringing Chandler, Woodson and then finally Felton, at 1:06 in the afternoon, into the media room, which was standing room only.
“This is not a distraction to the team,” Felton said.
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Oh, yes it is, it’s just that nobody will know how much until the Knicks are back on the court Thursday night in Miami.
And speaking of which, what happened on Wednesday in Knickland must have been a first. They’ve been playing, and losing, to LeBron James for a long time now, dating back to 2003-04 when he entered the league. But for the first time that anyone could remember, there was not a single question asked of the Knicks’ players or their head coach, the day before playing LeBron, about the game’s greatest player.
This was a day all for Raymond Felton, who couldn’t even bring himself to say, “I’m sorry.”
Sorry he is.
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