James Dolan: Buggin' Melo, Chillin' with the Django Folks

James Dolan keeps the lowest of profiles when it comes to Knicks matters, but we get occasional reminders that he 1. Does, indeed, own the team and meddle in its affairs. 2. Is a very rich, very eccentric, fairly scary persona. Dolan managed to make his presence felt in two distinct, bizarre ways over the last few days:

1. I was watching the Golden Globes last night, and at one point the camera panned over a table of the folks behind Django Unchained: Christoph Waltz and Harvey Weinstein and James Dolan and Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington and Quentin Tarantino an--wait, hold on a second. James Dolan? Yes, James Dolan (via @cjzero):

"YES I AM A MAN OF FILM AND TELEVISION DRAMAS IT IS TOTALLY NORMAL FOR ME TO BE HERE".

No idea. I guess Mr. Dolan has cool friends (Update: Twitter tells me Dolan is friends with Weinstein, which makes the most sense.)

2. According to Dave D'Alessandro, Dolan had Carmelo Anthony bugged during Friday's loss to the Bulls:

Two audio technicians were stationed at two corners of the court — one a few feet just behind the Knicks bench, the other diagonally opposite — and they were holding those umbrella-shaped contraptions known as parabola microphones, which fed the audio into a DAT recorder on the truck on the loading dock.

These guys had one directive from Dolan: Record every syllable Carmelo Anthony utters and absorbs while he’s on the court and on the bench, the Madison Square Garden CEO ordered them, and send the tape directly to me.

As our friend @netw3rk totally beat me to saying: Dolan's just making a KnicksTape! I guess Dolan wanted to make sure Melo wasn't giving/receiving too much verbal abuse after the whole incident with Kevin Garnett. Hopefully that's all. One way to investigate such a matter is to, you know, just ask the guy, but deploying a surveillance team works, too, I guess. I hope JD enjoys his tape of "NUHGGH"s and "AHRHGH"s.