Eric Gay / Associated Press
Probably always Tom Thibodeau in New York.
Newly appointed Knicks team president Leon Rose conducted a week-long extensive search that included high-profile candidates like Jason Kidd and less-than-acclaimed assistants like Ime Udoka of Philadelphia, Will Hardy of San Antonio and Chris Fleming of Chicago. But from the start, the stars lined up for Thibodeau, who ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reports is finalizing a five-year deal to replace interim coach Mike Miller.
The Knicks have always loved taking a dip, and Thibodeau is the biggest name on the coaching market.
The Knicks tend to prioritize people with backgrounds in the organization (Isiah Thomas and Phil Jackson, anyone?), And Thibodeau was an assistant in New York for eight seasons under Jeff Van Gundy and Don Chaney, from 1996 to 2004.
Rose took over the Knicks in February after a long career as a high-powered agent at CAA. Thibodeau has been represented by the same powerful agency for almost a decade. The Knicks and CAA often they worked very close in the years since Carmelo Anthony designed an exchange to New York in 2011.
In hindsight, it feels inevitable, but does hiring make sense beyond the convenience of past business relationships?
The Knicks haven’t made the playoffs, or even finished with a .500 record, since 2013. Thibodeau, meanwhile, has a long history of coaches winning more games than they should, even if it hasn’t always been translated. in playoff success.
Thibodeau, who was fired midway through his third season as coach and president of the Minnesota Timberwolves in January 2019, ticks every box the Knicks as an organization have historically valued. How effective he will be as a head coach in the 2020 NBA and beyond is a different question.
Thibodeau’s flaws are well known. His once innovative defensive scheme, built around pick-and-rolls, has become less effective in the past decade as the rest of the league caught up. His offenses are intermediate when he’s not building around an elite scorer like Jimmy Butler or Derrick Rose before the injury. His views on minutes and workload are out of step with conventional wisdom in the age of load management.
And so far he has been reluctant to evolve as the NBA has. After the Bulls unceremoniously fired him in 2015, the 2015-16 season passed. sitting on in other team practices and talking about a great game about how he had his year off I change it As the El Thibodeau coach who took the Timberwolves job in 2016, however, he was more or less the same guy with the same focus.
The story has unfolded in a similar way in the 18 months since Thibodeau’s departure from Minnesota. He swears he is open to shifting your focus Minutes He even appeared on a panel at this year’s MIT Sloan Analytics Conference in March. In the coming weeks, when he is officially introduced as the Knicks’ new coach, he will talk a lot about the lessons he has learned since his last job ended and how he’s out of step with the modern NBA. At this point, you need to show it before you get the benefit of the doubt.
Thibodeau’s biggest downfall in Minnesota was his insistence that he be given the dual role of head coach and president of basketball operations. Those job descriptions are often at odds with each other: A coach’s job is to win as many games as he can with the players he has, and a CEO’s job is to think long-term about things like the draft and the salary cap. . Thibodeau is too big a fan of the movie theater to worry about a multi-year team building plan, and he is too loyal to his own boys (Butler in Minnesota, Luol Deng, and Kirk Hinrich in Chicago) to make objective decisions about list moves.
Nam Y. Huh / Associated Press
In New York, with Leon Rose and influential NBA power broker William “World Wide Wes” Wesley heading the main office, Thibodeau, at least in theory, will be able to focus entirely on training. And he will face a difficult task in getting a Knicks team that went 21-45 before COVID-March 19 shutdown to win more games.
The Knicks don’t have a lot of must-have talent to show during their lottery years, outside of shot-blocking center Mitchell Robinson. Recent lottery picks Kevin Knox and Frank Ntilikina have not worked. But RJ Barrett, the No. 3 overall pick in the 2019 draft, can thrive under a coach who was more than happy to let the bodyguards isolate when he had Rose and Butler. At least it’s a young team that can handle a greater workload.
On the subject of minutes: The concerns of Thibodeau throwing his boys to the ground are real, but they are a bit exaggerated. The boys with whom he has played many minutes: Butler, Deng, Hinrich, Taj Gibson, Joakim Noah, are players who want to play many minutes. If a player tells Thibodeau that he can play, he will play it.
He bristled in Chicago within the minute limits that management tried to put Noah after knee surgery in 2014-15, his last season with the Bulls. He doesn’t like anyone getting in his way, so he wanted control of personnel in Minnesota.
But Thibodeau also publicly supported and defended Derrick Rose’s desire to be cautious by returning from two knee surgeries that ended the season during his time with the Bulls. When Rose was out for the entire 2012-13 season recovering from a torn LCA, he faced tremendous pressure from fans and the media to return in time for the playoffs, especially after the organization. leaked to ESPN who had been medically authorized to play. But that pressure never came from Thibodeau, who always maintained that he wouldn’t force Rose to come back before I was ready. There’s a reason why Rose was one of the few players who fought for Thibodeau when he was fired in 2015, and why he signed to play again in Minnesota.
The Knicks haven’t been relevant in a long time, and Thibodeau is a coach that teams hire when they want to win more games in the immediate term. He made the Bulls a competitor for the title in his first year, winning 62 games in 2010-11 and reaching the Eastern Conference Finals. They had the best record in the East the following season also before Rose broke her knee in the first round of the playoffs.
When Rose missed most of the next two seasons, the Thibodeau Bulls outplayed him, and even won an extremely short playoff series in 2012-13. In Minnesota, he led the Timberwolves to their first playoff appearance in 14 years in 2017-18. Thibodeau exhausts his welcome because he is uncompromising and can be difficult to work with, not because he cannot train.
The Knicks are not going to compete any time soon. At this point, they would settle for being respectable. If Thibodeau can take them from 21 wins this year to somewhere in the mid-1930s next season, it would at least be a sign of progress. The next time New York is truly a basketball powerhouse, the roster will be very different from what it is now. By then Thibodeau may have reached the end of his useful life in his third job as head coach.
For many reasons, Thibodeau was the inevitable hiring of Leon Rose. As the first defining move of your tenure as Knicks president, you better hope this hiring is the right one.
Sean Highkin covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. He currently resides in Portland. His work has been honored by the Pro Basketball Writers’ Association. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram and in the B / R app.
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