The Knicks hire the right coach here, and that’s where you need to start. Forget about the double elimination interview tournament that the team’s team seemed to be running while most of the NBA was busy trying to get back to work, the 11 candidates who entered and exited their competition. All of that is a prelude.
This is the main event: They hire the right coach, at the right time, they add a significant building block to a better place and a better time at Madison Square Garden. They hire Tom Thibodeau, give him a five-year contract, and begin the long and laborious task of becoming a relevant basketball team again.
“Tom Thibodeau is one of the best coaches in the world,” said Jeff Van Gundy a few months ago, and yes, Van Gundy is not exactly the most objective voice on the Thibodeau issue: they are friends and worked closely together the last time the Knicks brought any style, style and high-end aspiration to the Garden.
Those seven years in the Garden – 1996-2003 – Thibodeau not only saw how Van Gundy did the job, how he managed to gain the trust and loyalty of his players and maximize those talents, but he also tried what can be for a player. basketball in a New York city starved for so long.
Van Gundy became an unlikely popular hero here, starting as a dark assistant, even regulars on the court would have had a hard time choosing between a lineup and somehow becoming a guy whose name Knicks fans sang one night in 1999, when his team was on the brink of eliminating the Hawks and advancing to the conference finals.
There is little mystery related to how to win those hearts and minds. Van Gundy won, and fought, and it didn’t hurt that he somehow won and kept fighting as his bosses tried to fall in love with Phil Jackson, so there was also a common man quality to his story. But he delivered. He was an excellent coach. The Knicks defended their watch. The Knicks bled, sweated, and looked after their watch. It is not a complex equation.
The Knicks will do those things for Thibodeau, too, because he comes with his own reputation, because if it weren’t for Derrick Rose hitting his knee in a horrible playoff game against the 76ers in 2012, he could have led the Bulls to a rebirth. Complete post-Jordan, he could well have taken one of the titles the Heat won during the time LeBron James was there, he could have built something permanent at United Center.
As it was, he was 352-246 with the Bulls, a winning percentage of .647 that included some of the most incredible impromptu on-the-fly training jobs he’s ever seen. In 2013, a shattered and defeated Bulls team entered Brooklyn and beat the Nets in Game 7 of a playoff series, and then Nets coach PJ Carlesimo sounded like a high school kid caught by an officer. absent.
“He just ran a clinic in this series,” said Carlesimo. “Everything we tried, they had an immediate response. And that team plays very hard. They are as intense as him. “
Things didn’t go so well for Thibodeau in Minnesota, although the Timberwolves won 47 games their last full year there. In the NBA in 2020, a coach can only control that much, so there is no guarantee that the Knicks have secured a trip down the pass line to the top of the East. But he was still the best coach available. That used to matter when New York teams were looking for coaches. For the Knicks, for now, it still mattered.
It was wise to avoid Jason Kidd and any illusions of Giannis Antetokounmpo that he may have hung up on during his interviews. You hire Kidd, you hire his intriguing past, his Machiavellian machinations, and that’s not what the Knicks needed, not the 20 percent chance Kidd could really free Giannis.
Thibodeau will demand responsibility and will be a teacher for children. Van Gundy has told anyone who hears that winning players thrive under Thibodeau and of course part of the team’s mission will be to get more of those types of players. But on the one hand, it seems that a Thibodeau-RJ Barrett partnership should be very fruitful.
That is a good place to start. The Knicks took their time and seemed to speak to all the coaches on this side of Norman Dale and Ken Reeves looking to make the right decision. It doesn’t matter how they got here, it matters that they got here. Tom Thibodeau is hired. They hire the right coach.
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