NBA Insider with Ken Berger

Big story out on Friday that the Knicks received a luxury tax bill from the NBA in the amount of $45.1 million.

What a shock!

It means, of course, that the Knicks were exactly $45,142,002 over the salary cap in 2006-07 for a team that won 33 games. But let’s not treat this as news. It’s not like it’s a big secret that the Knicks are tens of millions over the cap. I predict they will remain tens of millions over the cap until my soon-to-be 3-year-old son replaces Neil Best as Newsday.com’s mobile-web-only sports media watchdog columnist and 24-hour-a-day blogger.

Seriously, Neil has lost his mind. We used to work together on the football beat, and he swore he would never do a stitch of online work if he didn’t get paid extra for it. He also once famously said that the Internet is only a fad. Well, several years later he is getting up in the middle of the night to write blog entries and getting paid diddly squat for it. He is a multimedia, multiplatform machine. And he seems happy.

Neil was a meticulous, obsessive beat writer covering the Giants at a time when the news cycle offered him only one deadline per day. Now, it appears that his life is one, long deadline. His blog is informative, up-to-date, funny, personal, interactive – all the things a blog should be. Check it out here.

But I digress. Nobody remembers – nor will they ever remember – that I was the first Newsday sports beat writer to start a blog back when I was covering the Jets. People talk about Newsday’s glory days of Steve Jacobson, Peter King, Stan Isaacs, Tim Layden, Pat Calabria, et al. Phooey on all those dinosaurs. When the final assessment of the newspaper industry is complete, let it be known that I dragged the newspaper I grew up with into the interactive age of sports coverage.

Boy, do I digress. My point about the Knicks is this: While some find it interesting that only five teams are paying luxury tax, and that the one closest to what the Knicks owe is Dallas at $7.2 million, it’s not really that interesting to me. This is how the Knicks do business: They overpay and overpay and spend Cablevision’s money on a team that has been mediocre at best for years.

Now they have made a sound basketball trade for Zach Randolph, and if they add once more piece, they could be one of the top five or six teams in the East next season. Will anyone be poking fun at their luxury tax bill then? I suppose Cablevision customers and/or shareholders would quibble, but nobody else would.

Come to think of it, this would make an interesting blog topic for Neil.