Well, looks like it’s official. The Knicks have scheduled a 1 p.m. press conference today to introduce Donnie Walsh as their next president of basketball operations. Naturally this means Isiah Thomas will be stripped of his team presidency, however whether or not Zeke will be retained as coach or in some other role within the organization is still unclear.

The man doesn’t have a day on the job and yet Knicks fans already have several reasons to be thankful to Walsh. That is because Walsh has already forced Garden chairman James Dolan into making several concessions during the course of negotiations, according to the New York Times.

The franchise’s hierarchy will no longer resemble a circus tent, as Walsh will now report directly to Dolan, cutting Garden president Steve Mills out of the loop. Dolan has also reluctantly allowed Walsh the rewrite the Garden’s Gestapo-like media policies, which have fostered an adversarial relationship with the news media and forbid Garden employees from speaking to reporters without a PR representative present. Walsh is viewed as “an accessible, media-friendly executive” and “insisted on retaining that freedom before accepting the job,” said the Times.

Way to go, Donnie!

What this means, more than anything, is that regardless of whether competency has returned to the Knicks organization (for the record, I think it has), sanity has at least returned, and that is very good thing for fans of the New York Knicks.