Knicks branding advisor Steve Stoute is confident that he, team president Leon Rose and executive vice president William ‘World Wide Wes’ Wesley can attract free agents to New York.

“The three of us? I think we’re the best sort of team as it relates to being able to speak to a free agent, our relationships with talent to bring them to New York,” Stoute said in an interview last week on Power 105.1’s The Breakfast Club (thanks to Knicks Fan TV for the heads-up). “I think they’ve never had this level – at least (not) in the last 10 years – this level of talent that can go out and pitch a free agent or convince a player why New York is great.”

Stoute was responding to a question about an article from the Sporting News that said Knicks owner James Dolan’s actions hurt the team in free agency.

New York has struggled to attract top free agents for much of the past two decades. The club attempted to land Kevin Durant last summer – after trading Kristaps Porzingis – but Durant and Kyrie Irving opted to sign instead with the Brooklyn Nets.

The Knicks obviously hope that Rose and his group can acquire the kind of elite talent that past regimes failed to attract.

Earlier in The Breakfast Club interview, Stoute was asked about the challenge of rebuilding the Knicks brand in the wake of incidents between Dolan and Spike Lee and Dolan and Charles Oakley.

“Straight up, I think the owner is misunderstood. I think James Dolan is definitely misunderstood,” Stoute said. “He’s certainly brash. And I always, as the sports fan, love the owner that’s willing to invest and pay for the talent. You look at some of the greatest owners in sports history, those are the guys that were willing to go buy the top players. And it’s a very risky business, right? Because when you go get Phil Jackson, nobody says, ‘Man, they got Phil Jackson.’ There’s a guy (in Dolan) who spent a ton of money to get Phil Jackson and Phil Jackson failed. Or when they got Amar’e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony – they’re trying and they’re spending the money and it doesn’t always work out the way you would hope it would be.”

On the Dolan-Charles Oakley incident and subsequent legal battle, Stoute added, “The Charles Oakley thing was clearly a disaster. Charles is a very dear friend of mine and that was terrible. That incident as a whole, just for New York, it was terrible for an icon to be seen that way.”

Stoute also offered his thoughts on Dolan’s run-in with Spike Lee: “The Spike Lee thing seems to be a matter of a celebrity expecting certain privileges and when you don’t get that privilege anymore for whatever reason, you start throwing a fit. That doesn’t seem real. ... The Charles Oakley thing is definitely real and terribly unfortunate.”

Dolan drew public criticism from some former players when the Knicks were the only NBA team to not issue a written or video statement condemning racial inequality in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer.

According to ESPN, Garden employees and some players were upset over the organization’s decision not to release a statement. Dolan explained his thinking in two internal emails and Madison Square Garden released a statement on the day of Floyd’s funeral.

Stoute was asked for his thoughts on the decision.

“That’s a really good question. I think the sensitivity around the beginning of the sort of re-emergence of the Black Lives movement after Floyd, companies, and I get these calls all the time – they don’t know what to do, they don’t know what to say, they don’t know how to address their employees,” Stoute said.

“It’s still happening now, for sure. But in the beginning, I kept on seeing all kinds kind of random things from all kinds of different companies. Bank of America puts a billion dollars towards urban communities. You hear that and then it disappears or you don’t hear the next step. Just countless amount of news and headlines and donating to the NAACP. ... And I think that, with the Knicks, they fell victim to the same kind of sensitivity where people were making these statements, the employees wanted to hear something, they wanted to definitely hear something. (The Knicks) weren’t ready to make, fall victim to what the employees wanted to hear immediately and it became an issue.

“But listen, I had that issue with my company. Everybody ran up on me talking about Juenteenth and the truth of the matter is, I never heard of Juneteenth before this year. I never heard of it. I heard mention of it years ago when I was a kid. Somebody I knew from Texas said something about it, but I didn’t know about it as a national holiday or something that I should observe. And I know people who worked for me for 10 years who didn’t observe it at all that all of a sudden got pissed off that we didn’t observe it this year. And I’m like, ‘But we never observed it before. What are you talking about?’

“I’m sensitive to the information but let’s not all of a sudden, a week before, turn our world upside down because we now have to respond publicly to the fact that we’re celebrating Juneteenth when you didn’t even know about it last year. There was a lot going on during that time and I think it was a learning experience for everybody.”

Stoute’s job for New York is to help re-brand the organization, which has just one playoff series win since 2000. He was asked during The Breakfast Club interview if Dolan makes his job more difficult.

“I think Dolan is brash, he has a very strong point of view on things. But he doesn’t make it any harder – not to me man,” Stoute said. “There’s different strokes for different folks. I like his very clear style. He makes a point and he’s very loyal to his perspective. It doesn’t make it any harder. If you have a strong argument, he listens. If you don’t have a strong argument, you’re going to get run over. I’m a CEO, I understand that.”

In an interview during the 2019-20 season on ESPN’s First Take, Stoute basically confirmed that the Knicks were not going to retain interim head coach Mike Miller in the offseason. The Knicks distanced themselves from Stoute’s comments in a statement after the interview. Last week, the club hired Tom Thibodeau as its next head coach. New York is expected to offer Miller a position with the organization next season.

Aside from the NBA, Stoute, a branding executive with a long history in the music industry, offered an interesting perspective on the lack of minority representation in advertising during The Breakfast Club interview. For those interested on that topic, it’s worth checking out the full interview.

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