A classic Daily News cover
When in the course of basketball watching it becomes necessary for one group of fans to dissolve the relationship that connects them to the team and to assume a new identity to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of others requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident that all teams are created equal. That they are endowed by David Stern with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are draft picks, free agency and $50-million worth of cap room. That to secure these rights, executives are instituted among clubs, deriving their just powers from the consent of the fans. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the fans to abolish it.
Such has been the suffering of these patient fans. The history of the present owner of the Knicks is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these Knicks. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
- He has not had a winning team in the past decade.
- He has not had a playoff win in nine years.
- He has squandered countless draft picks and made countless dumb trades.
- He has charged outrageous sums while fans have been forced to watch an abysmal product.
- He has inflicted Eddy Curry, Jerome James and countless other overpaid players who don’t care on us.
- He has laughed at us as he brought back Isiah Thomas for a second time to run the Knicks. Returning the same man to power that caused us our deepest moments of despair.
- He has eliminated all hope and joy associated with the team.
We therefore, the representatives of the Knicks, in general congress, assembled, appealing to the supreme judge of the world for rectitude of our intentions, do in the name, and by the authority of the good Knicks’ fans, solemnly publish and declare, that these fans should be free and independent; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the Knicks and that all connections between them and the team is and ought to be totally dissolved.
