Raptors allegedly stealing information from the Knicks has cause them massive problem today...

Raptors allegedly stealing information from the Knicks has cause them massive problem today…

Lawsuits tend not to be funny, but there is something rather comical about the Raptors being accused of stealing information from the New York Knicks.

It reminds me a little of high school in a misguided kind of way.

Imagine sitting in class, next to the kid who never gets better than 60% on his test results and you decide that day you’re looking at his paper and copying off it.

Doing that doesn’t get you anywhere.

If you’re going to copy — and I confess I used to write stuff on my hands before tests — you sit beside the kid who gets 85 or 90 and you peak at his multiple choice answers to see if they match yours.

If you’re going to steal in the NBA, you don’t steal from the Knicks. You don’t steal from a franchise that can’t get most things right. You don’t steal from a ‘centre of the basketball universe’ club that has missed the playoffs 16 of the past 21 years.

You don’t do that unless you’re really desperate. The Raptors might be desperate — have you watched them lately? — but desperate enough to steal information intentionally or inadvertently from the Knicks?

That seems almost laughable by the standards of today’s NBA.

If you’re going to steal, steal from Steve Kerr and the Golden State Warriors, steal from Gregg Popovich, steal from the Denver Nuggets. Hell, you can even steal from the Los Angeles Lakers and LeBron James if you’d like.

But the Knicks? What could they know that nobody else knows? They know how to lose. They know to fire coaches — they’ve had 10 of them in the past 14 seasons. They know how to bully ex-Knicks players who speak out about their incompetence.

None of that is in the Masai Ujiri playbook, although doubt is more than creeping to the veracity of that internal document, if one actually exists.

In their legal response to the unusual lawsuit filed by the Knicks, the Raptors wrote just six sentences. I hope their lawyer isn’t paid by the word.

The Raptors have asked to have the matter to be settled by NBA commissioner Adam Silver. Which by itself adds to the overall levity of the situation.

You see, Silver runs the NBA as commissioner. His right-hand man in running the owners of the NBA — who are ostensibly Silver’s bosses — is the Raptors chairman Larry Tanenbaum, who doubles as chairman of the board of the league.

Silver and Tanenbaum are close in more than a business associate kind of way. They are friends. They are addicts of basketball and the NBA.

And this lawsuit is a matter of embarrassment for both of them and especially with it coming from James Dolan, owner of the Knicks and Madison Square Garden, among other things, who is not exactly a welcome member of the fraternity.

Dolan has resigned from every important committee he was part of previously in order to pursue this matter against the Raptors, his disliked rival Ujiri and, by proxy, Tanenbaum.

Asking for Silver to settle the matter is like having going to court and have your mother as judge. No matter what the charges are, your mother will be on your side. And Silver, if asked to arbitrate here, would almost certainly lean in the Raptors’ direction. He knows best where his bread is buttered.\

Which is probably the right way to lean anyway, considering the history of the franchises and those involved with this dispute.

Clearly in this early confusion that is Darko Rajakovic’s first season with the Raptors and first season in the NBA, whatever inside information they allegedly stole from the Knicks has hardly impacted their season in any way at all.

The more ordinary the Raptors play, the less guilty they look for whatever they might have done here, The hiring of former Knicks assistant video coordinator, Ike Azotam is at issue here. Allegedly, Azotam downloaded all kinds of confidential files from the Knicks — and I wonder, what could these files possibly contain, considering the Knicks’ lack of success over the years.

The Raptors have been accused in the lawsuit of violating U.S. federal law and international law but, in reality, there’s a lot of ‘so what’ in all of this.

Dolan does not want to settle the matter and does not want Silver to be the judge and jury here. He is well aware of the potential conflict of interest. The Raptors would just like this to go away, this mosquito of basketball nonsense still buzzing in their ears.

The Raptors are likely not innocent here, but there’s a long highway between guilty and being found guilty as anyone who has been in a court room understands.

“I don’t know anyone who takes this lawsuit seriously,” a Western Conference executive told ESPN.

Anyone but James Dolan, that is.

And really, in the end, what’s the win here, if there’s a win at all? Which by itself makes this lawsuit even more strange and more laughable.

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