James Dolan Lays Groundwork For Sale Of Knicks And Rangers; MSG Stock Surges

It’s been a trying week, so let me treat you to something nice. Watch the stock price for The Madison Square Garden Company do a little jig over the last two days:

What could explain this spike? Probably the announcement, late Wednesday, that James Dolan, chairman and CEO of MSG, is considering spinning the Knicks and the Rangers off into a separate company, which would smooth the path for an eventual sale of both teams, per a Crain’s report. This suggests that there may be a day, perhaps even in the not-so-distant future, when those teams are no longer owned by James Dolan.

The aspiring bluesman, profiled by our own Dave McKenna in 2016, is said to be bringing his business life in alignment with his true passions. Here’s an extremely peculiar sequence of sentences from that Crain’s report:

Dolan is understood to be more interested in music and building cutting-edge entertainment venues than sports.

“He wants to be more Elon Musk than George Steinbrenner,” an analyst told Crain’s in an article last month.

Dolan inherited the teams as part of the family business, and it does not come as a total surprise that he might want to ease out of the sports game. After all, as Dolan told, uhh, us, personally, in song last November:

You know I own a basketball team

For most people that would be a dream

For a trust fund kid it’s a living hell

Always some ass hole telling me to sell.

Update, 4:59 p.m. ET:

The Madison Square Garden Company has released a statement: “There are no plans to sell the Knicks or the Rangers.”