What do you get when you put a top point guard, a top big man, and two of the NBA’s top defensive wings together on one team?
Apparently, for the New York Knicks, an 0-7 record against the league’s top three teams is the result.
After over two decades of being the premier cellar dwellers of professional basketball, the 2020s Knicks have been trying their best to change the tune surrounding one of the sport’s most storied franchises. The best way to do it, of course, is to win basketball games.
Yet, even after years of botched lottery picks, constantly revolving personnel both on and off the court, and mathematical postseason eliminations in early to mid-March, New York fans are not content with the team’s current tie for the fourth-best record in the entire NBA.
Rightly so, by the way, since the Knicks haven’t given them a reason to be.
While being talented enough on paper to match up with the NBA’s best in Boston, Cleveland, and Oklahoma City, the Knicks have walked away from each of their matchups against these teams with battered egos and bruised tailbones. And despite what the final box score may tell you (even then, it won’t be much), none of these games ever felt particularly close.
The Issue (?)
As is the case for many teams amid a rough patch, the head coach is usually the first to take the brunt of the blame. Tom Thibodeau has been absolutely no stranger to this sentiment throughout his career, but the critiques surrounding his coaching practices seem to be seeded in more concrete evidence than most.
Thibodeau has gained somewhat of a notorious reputation—depending on who you ask—around the NBA for his notoriously stringent rotations and reckless handling of his players’ minutes.
Most (in)famously, Thibodeau took plenty of heat when coaching the early 2010s Chicago Bulls, led by the youngest-ever NBA MVP, Derrick Rose.
That is until Rose blew out his knee with just over a minute to go and a 12-point lead in Game 1 of the 2012 NBA Playoffs, with most wondering why he was even still on the court. If the idea of Thibs overplaying his guys wasn’t already a common conception around the NBA, it was most certainly born that day.
He’s also drawn the ire of each fanbase he’s coached for due to his nonurgency when it comes to in-game adjustments. Instead of shaking up the game plan when the initial one is falling flat like many other modern coaches would, Thibs often opts to see the schemes he entered the game with through and make adjustments in the film room later on if needed.
These very same reasons that people hurry to cite as the source of Thibodeau’s shortcomings, however, can just as quickly be used to come to his defense as a head coach.
Yes, he plays his starters a lot of minutes. But the Knicks have the eighth-most regular-season wins in the NBA since he took over as head coach in 2020-21. Thibodeau already has the fifth-most wins by a head coach in Knicks history.
Yes, he doesn’t make as many on-the-fly adjustments as other coaches around the NBA when things are going south for his team. But he also spends arguably more time in the film room than anybody on the planet and, as a result, has the utmost confidence in both his knowledge of the opponent and his team’s ability to execute his game plan.
That initial Derrick Rose injury was 13 years and two teams ago now, yet we’re still here having the same conversation about who Thibodeau is as a coach when, at this point, I think we know who he is.
He obviously didn’t plan for his 22-year-old MVP to have a career-altering injury on that fateful day in 2012, but he also didn’t necessarily view that injury as a byproduct of his coaching habits. To Thibodeau, you play basketball to play basketball, and injuries are simply a part of the game.
His stance on this subject matter has been as unwavering over the years as it is public, with the topic coming back into discussion in the final minutes of the Knicks’ matinee loss to the Boston Celtics in TD Garden on Sunday.
With about eight and a half minutes to go in the fourth quarter and New York down by double digits, Karl-Anthony Towns drove into the lane and unsuccessfully attempted to throw down a dunk over Boston’s Kristaps Porzingis, not only being left without the bucket but also with a lower leg injury.
Towns winced and grabbed at his knee as he stumbled over to the New York bench before eventually heading back to the locker room to be examined. Just over four minutes of (already decided) game time later and the Celtics’ lead now at 18, he was back on the floor with his injury still apparent.
“He said he was fine,” said Thibodeau after the game.
The Knicks are now listing Towns as questionable for their next game—with patellar tendinopathy in his left knee.
While KAT’s decision to check back into the game was his own, it’s ultimately the job of the coach (and medical staff) to decide whether or not the player is healthy enough to re-enter a game and whether or not it’s even worth it. In this case, it was visibly not to all but Towns and Thibodeau.
That type of desire to win is something every fan loves to see—just not at the detriment of a player’s body down the stretch of a regular-season game that was all but over, and certainly not from a coach who, frankly, should know better than to allow the player to put himself at further risk of injury.
But this is who Tom Thibodeau is, and this is who he’s been showing us he is since the first time he took the sideline. If a player says they’re “fine” and Thibs believes that they’ll give his team the best shot at winning, you better believe that player is going to be out there.
At 67 years old, he’s the oldest active head coach in the NBA; it’s illogical to expect him to suddenly change his mind now. As the saying goes, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
This formula of top-heavy player minutes has more than proven successful in the regular season, as is evident by New York’s turnaround since Thibodeau’s arrival. However, in the postseason, the wheels start to fall off due to fatigue, and many start to take issue with Thibodeau’s rudimentary philosophies.
What good is regular season success if you’ve seen that it’s more than likely going to be at the cost of the true goal?
It’s not just as if it’s only a playoff issue, either. The fatigue monster also rears its ugly head during the regular season, which has shown in the Knicks’ on-court production at times and potentially aided in the lingering injury issues of players such as OG Anunoby and Josh Hart, who just returned from a two-game absence following the NBA All-Star break due to patellofemoral syndrome.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results,” is a quote from Rita Mae Brown yet famously misattributed to Albert Einstein, which I think perfectly encapsulates what we’ve seen from Tom Thibodeau’s career as a head coach.
He’s brought the same ideology to every team he’s called the shots for and raised their floors across the board, but potentially at the expense of their ceilings.
The Trend
Although the Knicks have shown no signs of moving on from Thibodeau to this point, it’s not out of the ordinary in today’s NBA to see organizations fire an established head coach in pursuit of taking their team to the next level, and it’s showed to work on more than one occasion.
Mark Jackson is credited with turning the Golden State Warriors into a playoff team, but his replacement, Steve Kerr, took them to dynasty status.
Dwane Casey won Coach of the Year and got canned by the Toronto Raptors in that very same offseason for not being able to get over the hump of the Eastern Conference Finals. The next year, Nick Nurse took them to the NBA Finals and won it.
Brad Stevens was the head coach of the Boston Celtics for eight seasons and took them to the playoffs in seven of them. It wasn’t until Steven stepped into a front-office role and Joe Mazzulla eventually took over as coach that they became indisputable champions.
Because of his character as a coach, Tom Thibodeau has taken the New York Knicks from being the NBA poster boys of poverty to a perennial playoff team. But will that be enough to take them to the promised land? That decision is Leon Rose’s to make.
Thibodeau signed a three-year contract extension in July 2024, which will keep him as the Knicks’ head coach through the 2027-28 NBA season.
