“A football team is like a piano. You need eight men to carry it and three who can play the damn thing.” – Bill Shankly
There was no more demanding coach in the NBA over the last few seasons than Tom Thibodeau. As a result, there was no fanbase treated to seeing their best players play night in, night out more than the New York Knicks.
Known for his tight rotation and even shorter bench, Thibodeau reached his peak form this past year when all five New York starters were among the top 20 players in the league in minutes per game, with three in the top five.
OG Anunoby (36.6 minutes), Mikal Bridges (37 minutes), and Josh Hart (37.6 minutes, to lead the league) would lug the Steinway with their defense, length, and lung-busting bursts of energy. Guards Deuce McBride (24.9 minutes, 129th in the league) and Cameron Payne (15.1 minutes, 212th) assisted them in spurts, leading the smattering of reserves, whose ranks were later buttressed by center Mitchell Robinson, limited to 17 regular-season games due to injury.
Guard Jalen Brunson and center Karl-Anthony Towns averaged around 35 minutes, clocking in at 14th and 20th in the NBA as Thibs’ pianists, averaging 26 points and 7.3 assists and 24.4 points and 12.8 rebounds, respectively.
Despite that – or because of it, depending upon who you ask – the Knicks made it three-straight playoff appearances, back-to-back fifty-win regular seasons (for the first time since Brunson and Towns were born), and made the franchise's first Eastern Conference Finals appearance in a quarter-century.
But three days after falling in six games to a familiar foe of old from Indiana, the Knicks fired their head coach of five years. “Our organization is singularly focused on winning a championship for our fans,” team president Leon Rose said in a statement, adding that “this pursuit” has led them to “move in another direction,” as they hand Thibodeau a $30 million golden parachute.
The move was both shocking and not surprising, a state that has come to define the melodrama of the modern NBA. As star players have gained a more equal footing with team decision-makers, the league’s coaches, executives, and other players are now being reshuffled and discarded at a frequency more commonly seen at the poker table.
Rose’s decision (in consultation with owner James Dolan) was not surprising as the team floundered down the stretch (11-11 after a 40-20 start) of a regular season that saw them look short of being truly elite after going 0-4 against Cleveland and 0-4 against Boston, the two teams in the East that finished above them.
So, again, Thibodeau entered the playoffs with the sword of Damocles occupying its familiar spot in the MSG rafters next to a dusty 1972-73 World Champions banner. In the playoffs, his charges needed six games to elbow their way past a Detroit side that had given them fits all year before finally capitalizing after six games on the Celtics’ historically awful three-point shooting to overturn a pair of 20-point deficits in the first two games and Jayson Tatum’s season-ending injury late in Game 4.
Against the Pacers, the problems that had been glaring but not fatal were again on full display: poor communication on defense, lack of consistent scoring outside Towns and Brunson, turnovers, falling behind by wide margins, poor defense from Towns and Brunson, foul trouble for Towns and Brunson, and no bench help arriving or being summoned.
Game 1 featured all of the good and all of the bad as New York built and blew a 20-point fourth-quarter lead en route to an overtime defeat, punctuated by Tyrese Haliburton offering a Reggie Miller choke sign after his wild bucket at the end of regulation.
Like his defenders’ slow reaction to the barrage of Pacers threes in the defeat, the head coach, who patrols the sideline looking like a figure who pops antacids by the fistful,1 waited two games before Payne, who had cause nothing but agita during his 18 minutes on the floor, was exiled to the bench and a so-so McBride saw his role reduced. Landry Shamet and Delon Wright entered and offered some effective play. Hart, a minus-14, lost his starting job to Robinson, a plus-6, after two games, too.
Despite Thibs’ alterations, the lifelong bachelor remained a committed practitioner of dancing with the ones who brung him. Through the first three rounds of the playoffs, the five players who have played the most minutes are all New York’s usual suspects.2
Thibodeau called for the song he knew best, but the piano had become too heavy for the trio to carry and impossible for the duo to play, especially since the two players became nearly incapable of succeeding while the other was on the court.
Hindsight confirmed what everyone said at the time: The Knicks’ season died with the Game 1 collapse, and the rest of the series was for sitting shiva. The Pacers waited three days beyond tradition to bury the Knicks with a 17-point clincher in Game 6.
After the way it ended, it is no surprise that his time in New York has ended.
Yes, the Knicks improved each year under Thibodeau, but they appeared to reach the business end of the season and, for a third-straight year, clank out of the playoffs while looking far from getting over the final hurdles and winning a title.
Yes, this imperfect Knicks team overachieved again, but a team made fully in the head coach’s image came apart in the exact way everyone expects a team made in his image would.
Yes, Thibs showed he could make changes, but the familiar starting five had a negative net-rating for most of the regular season and throughout the playoffs, the time for tinkering and keeping bench options involved was constantly passed over, despite player protestations about minutes.
But still, a shock.
Brunson, the star player who signed an extension a year early to take less money and give the franchise more flexibility to build around him, backed the head coach after the season ended, scoffing at a question about whether Thibs was the right person for the job.
A year ago, after falling to the Pacers in a seven-game second-round series, the star gave a similar endorsement, and the front office did, as well. The Knicks backed the head coach with a lucrative extension, acquired Bridges, the ultimate Thibodeau player (a tough defender who has never missed a game during his seven-year NBA career) for an exorbitant ransom that included five first-round draft picks, and on the eve of training camp, dealt Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo for an All-Star caliber No. 2 in Towns.
It is hard to argue that reaching the Conference Finals was a triumph for Thibodeau’s Knicks, but the performance when they got there left a lot to be desired. Now, any shot at stability and building upon the year’s success is gone, as the roster will surely be dismantled in the coming months. There will be no fine-tuning this offseason.
For a Knicks fanbase that has not had much to crow about, the past few years, which culminated in these playoffs, were something to cherish. But, unless they are topped, these memories will fade as time goes by.
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore who lives and works in New York.
Thibs also looks like: The guy at the deli who ordered three people ahead of you and can’t believe his sandwich isn’t ready yet. Also, the guy at the deli ordering Mortadella. Also, the guy on line at the deli telling you the Knicks gotta fire Tom Thibodeau.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Haliburton, who have each played two fewer games, will need to play 122 and 144 minutes in the NBA Finals before they surpass Bridges' mark of 706 minutes played in the playoffs.