Madison Square Garden and Time Warner Cable had a dispute that resulted in subscribers missing the first half of the Knicks season. No one cared during the early part of the season because the Knicks sucked. Then Jeremy Lin and Linsanity hit and everyone was all like, “Hey, I want to watch the Knicks because they’re winning!”

It was a classic New York story. An immigrant comes to The Big Apple to make a new life for himself and he ends up making the big time. And New Yorkers ate it up because New York is the center of the Universe and Go Knicks! That’s when people needed their MSG (and to a much lesser extent, Billy on the Street).

With pressure from all sides, Time Warner and MSG made up and put the Knicks back in the homes of New York area residents who had caught basketball fever. Of course, as soon as that happened, Carmelo Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire returned to the Knicks lineup and the whole thing fell apart because Carmelo is a shitty team player and Amar’e's knees don’t “work so good no more.”

Now the Knicks are losing, the coach resigned, the hero is dead marginalized and nobody cares about the Knicks anymore. Still though, those 3 weeks when nobody could see what was happening sure were awesome. Someone is to blame for everyone being forced to watch the highlights on YouTube and SportsCenter. Let’s sue some of these evil bastards. From The Hollywood Reporter:

In an amended class action, a group of plaintiffs demand that the cable distributor reimburse them for more than $5 million in service fees and charges for withholding programming.

The named plaintiff in this lawsuit is Harold Hoffman, who says he was induced on the phone by a TWC representative to sign up in 2008 for service with the promise he would receive programming on the MSG and MSG+ networks.

Snake cable salesmen I say! Apparently, TWC was Hoffman’s only cable option at the time.

So he signed up for TWC, and when the games were taken off the air for 49 days beginning at the beginning of this year, he couldn’t deduct from his billing statement the component of charges allowable to MSG and MSG+.

He’s filed a lawsuit on behalf of all similarly situated individuals for redress.The games are now back on, but his lawsuit continues.

Of course it does. New York, a city where an English-speaking, American-born Harvard graduate can become a star and cause fans to sue a cable provider for keeping them from watching a lottery team. You would think they would be inspired to sue the people running the Knicks instead of the ones who kept them from seeing the Knicks.

[Hollywood Reporter]