Lupica on Zeke

The last few months have not been sports columnist Mike Lupica's best. He has been exposed as a thin-skinned bully by more than one "Sports Reporters" ex-colleague. And he has embarrassed himself trying to hang the contempt-of-court citations around President Bush's neck.

Still.

Still, he sometimes hits one out of the park. One of the guilty pleasures of Saturday night's Knicks-Nuggets brawl was knowing that Lupica would lay in.

And so he does, for the third day in a row, in what is the best of the three. A sample, in Lupica's pitch-perfect wise-guy prose:

I am standing in front of the Garden on Sunday morning, in front of the famous marquee on Seventh Ave., and remembering what it was like back in the '90s, when it would only say "Michael Jordan Tonight" on that marquee and this was the only place in town you wanted to be. You know when that will happen with Isiah Thomas in charge of basketball at the Garden? Never.

Now, in the aftermath of a fight that everybody but the commissioner of the NBA seems to know Thomas instigated, you wonder what type of further embarrassment it will take for Dolan to tell the guy to go back to Chicago or Indiana, go anywhere and get himself good and lost.

Read the whole thing.