Former New York Knicks forward Charles Oakley says no thanks, he won’t step foot in Madison Square Garden.
Not during these NBA playoffs, and certainly not as long as he has an ongoing lawsuit against Madison Square Garden and team owner James Dolan over a tussle with security at a 2017 game that got Oakley ejected from the arena.
“I guess their lawyer called my lawyer saying it’s a good time for you to come back to the Garden,” Oakley told The Associated Press on Friday.
Oakley, the former NBA enforcer and rebounding machine with the 1990s Knicks, said he has no interest — though he continued to root for the team — in coming back as long as he remains in a dispute with Dolan.
The animosity dates to 2017, when Oakley was arrested after an altercation with MSG security officials after they told him to leave his seat at the arena near Dolan. Oakley was cleared of misdemeanor assault charges in 2018.
So what would it take for Oakley to sit courtside at the Garden?
“They’ve got to apologize,” he said. “We’ll go from there. Can [Dolan] be man enough to say, ‘Mistakes happen.’ And he made one.”
Oakley brought assault and battery claims against Dolan, and an amended lawsuit was filed just last month. An order Thursday assigned it to Magistrate Judge Stewart D. Aaron to handle going forward.
“Just be honest,” Oakley said. “Just be transparent over what you put someone through and how you changed their life. This definitely changed my life. My daughter Googled me, they show them pulling me out of the Garden, that’s bad. That’s hell for a kid to see that.”
MSG has denied all claims.
“There’s no kind of agreement. There’s no kind of, ‘Let’s make this go away,'” Oakley said. “They’re not being transparent about what happened.”
Behind Jalen Brunson, the Knicks are enjoying an NBA renaissance and took a 2-0 series lead in the Eastern Conference semifinals into Game 3 Friday night against the Indiana Pacers.
Oakley, 60, played for the Knicks from 1988 to 1998, helping them reach the NBA Finals, but has a splintered relationship with the team because of his past criticism of Dolan.
“It’s been a struggle the last seven years,” Oakley said. “There have been things said that weren’t true. The league didn’t step in. The commissioner is pretty soft. He didn’t do nothing. The city got behind me and I’m always behind the fans. I love that.”
Oakley had alleged assault, battery and false imprisonment, along with defamation after Dolan and the Knicks implied he had a problem with alcohol. Oakley was sitting near Dolan at a game on Feb. 8, 2017. He was approached by security soon after arriving and began to scuffle with them before he was removed from his seat and arrested.
“I don’t want to get in their way, they’re playing great,” Oakley said. “I’m going to cheer at the guys to do well. I’m not mad at nobody on the floor.”
Oakley stirred some ill will recently toward his former teammates when he was a guest on a SiriusXM show and said Brunson was the best Knick since Walt Frazier. It was a slight that got back to Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing, Oakley’s former Knicks teammate whom he has feuded off and on with since they retired.
Ewing took the high road on another NBA podcast and declined to enter the debate.
“They said leadership was a big thing and Patrick wasn’t a great leader,” Oakley told the AP. “Brunson, I think, was way more a leader.”
Oakley said at one point Dolan promised to retire his jersey but was only trying to make amends now “for a photo opp. It’s all about him.”
“He doesn’t want to apologize,” Oakley said. “What he did was wrong. But the team is playing well. The Rangers are, too. It’s like 1994 all over again.”
The Knicks lost to the Houston Rockets in seven games in that year’s NBA Finals, but the Rangers won the Stanley Cup for the first time since 1940 a few days earlier.
Here’s the bottom line: Oakley “would love to go” to MSG to see a Knicks game — as long as Dolan makes things right.
“I think it’s a bad time to ask me to come to a game,” Oakley said. “The case is still going. You ain’t trying to settle a case. The case is still pending. Take care of your business with the case and let the game worry about the game, you know what I’m saying? You’re not doing anything special. If you were trying to do something special, you wouldn’t have done this.”