Maybe it would have made a difference if there had been a star-studded press conference at Madison Square Garden or at the Knicks headquarters in Westchester. Perhaps in those usual confines, dressed in a pretty suit, set free to use his dais as a stalking pulpit, Tom Thibodeau would have led the day with prayer and charm.
Although, frankly, that doesn’t seem to be the Thibodeau genre.
In many ways, this was a perfect way for Thibodeau to say hello in the summer of 2020, on a Zoom call, in a Knicks golf shirt, a Brady Bunch square on a computer screen with his co-stars Leon Rose and Scott Perry. Anyway, it’s impossible to win the press conference when that press conference is on Zoom, so there was no need to try.
Plus: Knicks fans are tired of the victorious press conferences. David Fizdale and Jeff Hornacek were excellent artists on Day 1, let alone later. No one had a more triumphant press conference than Phil Jackson in 2014, when he was not only hired to lead the Knicks, he was canonized. Winning the press conference is fine.
Winning basketball games thereafter is much more useful and much more meaningful.
“Every time you get into a situation, you think of ways you can improve your club,” Thibodeau said Thursday, the day he officially took over the Knicks. “You start with the players you have, your internal development is paramount. So we started there and added talent on the draft, we’re also looking at free agency to add talent, and we’re looking to swap to add talent. There are four ways to improve the team. And we will see them all.
Thibodeau is a no-nonsense coach with a no-nonsense personality, and if you can joke about how amazing it was to some when they heard that he actually went on vacation to Miami this year, sat and chilled on the beach, he also says nothing. Pretend it is none other than laser-focused and focused on the job at hand.
Others in recent years have accepted this work and have spoken in bombastic tones about what their vision was for the franchise and for the future, and have been overwhelmed with the generalities of optimism, which, at the end of the day, mainly translates into illusions. thinking. Thibodeau talks mostly about details and with the authority of a man who has won 59 percent of his games as an NBA coach. It subscribes to five fundamental values: rebounds, defense, low turnovers, sharing the ball and using paint, passes or penetration, as a fundamental weapon.
Simple, maybe, but that’s exactly the kind of starting point back to basics that a team like the Knicks needs the most. Speaking of the players he inherits now, Thibodeau said: “But I thought there were some players who really stepped up and did a good job. But there is a lot of work to do. One of the most important things when studying a team is just looking at efficiency, and when you see that you have a -6.54, you realize there is a lot of work. And hopefully we can get players to play with each other and start developing those habits. “
It’s also helpful to go back 24 years to the day that Thibodeau’s friend and training guide Jeff Van Gundy was elevated to the position of head coach after Don Nelson’s surprise cut 23 games since the end of the season. Van Gundy is another who was never going to win a press conference in those days, when he was a little-known gymnastic rat, with hollow eyes and a hoarse voice.
But from the beginning, the reason he was able to succeed on the job is that he wasn’t intimidated by the job. He didn’t have a track record like Thibodeau now, but listen to these first words he uttered his first day at work, and then ask yourself: Why does it sound so familiar?
“Some coaches believe in giving players a day off,” Van Gundy said in the old Philadelphia Spectrum on March 8, 1996. “Other coaches believe in saving players’ legs. I am one of those who believes in practice. I think games are won in practice. You are not only working hard, you are working productively. My job is to create a winning work environment.
“There is no easy answer.”
There was not then. Not Now If the Knicks are going to be rehabilitated, one brick will come at a time, one nail at a time, one piece at a time. Van Gundy was a serious basketball man, and Thibodeau is a serious basketball man, so serious that he sometimes makes Van Gundy look like Jackie the Joke Man in comparison.
But the Knicks need serious now. They require serious. They crave seriously. Tom Thibodeau brings that to the dance, and that winning percentage, and a specific belief in how this should all be done. Okay. It’s time.
.
