During his decade-long run as a star for the New York Knicks, Charles Oakley was known as a bruising player who embodied a hardnose style of basketball that endeared him to the fans at Madison Square Garden.
That familiar grit seemed to surface at times on Thursday in a federal courtroom in Manhattan as Mr. Oakley addressed questions about whether he had intentionally trashed text messages describing his ouster in 2017 from the Garden by security guards.
Mr. Oakley, who retired from the N.B.A. in 2004, filed a suit against companies that own the Knicks and the Garden after the incident, saying he was assaulted during his removal and asking for unspecified damages.
When the ouster occurred, Mr. Oakley professed to be perplexed, saying that he had merely been enjoying the game like thousands of fellow fans.
The Knicks said Mr. Oakley had behaved abusively. James Dolan, the mercurial and sometimes combative head of the entities that own the Knicks and the Garden, said on an ESPN radio show that Mr. Oakley was “physically and verbally abusive” and added that “he may have a problem with alcohol.”
Mr. Oakley’s lawsuit called those statements “outrageous and patently false.”
Defense attorneys have written to Judge Richard J. Sullivan of Federal District Court in Manhattan accusing Mr. Oakley of having “destroyed all of his text messages” before February 2022.
Those messages would have contained the best evidence of what happened during the incident and Mr. Oakley’s state of mind during it, defense lawyers said. They added that the destruction of the messages combined with the failure by Mr. Oakley’s lawyers to investigate it in good faith “warrants the severest of sanctions, up to and including dismissal of this case.”
Mr. Oakley’s lawyers countered with a far less sinister take. Their client had twice replaced his Android phone after it broke, they wrote to the judge, and in the process lost access to old text messages.
Dressed in a dark suit while testifying from the witness stand at the pretrial hearing, Mr. Oakley was grilled by a defense lawyer, Randy Mastro, about whether he had made any efforts to preserve text messages while switching phones.
Mr. Oakley replied that he had asked for data to be transferred from his old phones to his new devices but had been warned by his carrier, AT&T, that some information could be lost.
“You thought it was, quote, more important to have a number, end quote, than to get all your data?” Mr. Mastro asked at one point.
“It was more important to have a phone,” Mr. Oakley replied.
While testifying on Thursday Mr. Oakley seemed annoyed by some of Mr. Mastro’s questions, frequently beginning to answer before the lawyer was done speaking and once telling the lawyer:
“You keep yo-yoing it.”
Mr. Mastro, too, appeared to experience moments of exasperation, as Mr. Oakley said that he was unaware that he was under an obligation to make sure his texts did not vanish, despite having signed retainer agreements that stipulated he do so.
Mr. Oakley’s case has circulated through the court system for seven years, reaching the point where at least some of its assertions seem dated. In his first filing in 2017, between seasons in which the Knicks went 31-51 and 29-53, Mr. Oakley’s lawsuit described the team as “a laughingstock in the N.B.A., decried for their incompetence both on and off the court.” Last season they were 50-32.
The lengthy dispute at various times appeared to reflect Mr. Oakley’s sense of embattlement and injured pride or the outsize ego of Mr. Dolan, who has been seen as viewing the Garden as a private fief.
Lawyers at firms with clients who sued Madison Square Garden Entertainment said they were informed that they could not attend events at the venue. Facial recognition technology was used to enforce such bans. And on television Mr. Dolan trolled the chief of the New York State Liquor Authority, which was investigating whether the ban on certain lawyers broke state beverage laws.
Mr. Oakley’s court papers have said that Mr. Dolan ordered his removal from the Garden in 2017. He is expected to be deposed next month by Mr. Oakley’s lawyers, suggesting that he could be called as a witness if the case goes to trial. The latest iteration of Mr. Oakley’s case does not name Mr. Dolan as a defendant.
Others who are expected to be deposed by the plaintiffs include a former high ranking security officer at the Garden, an N.B.A. security officer and John McEnroe, the former tennis star who was present during Mr. Oakley’s removal.
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