Expectations are fluid in the NBA. Tom Thibodeau took over a New York Knicks team in 2020 that had just spent two decades wandering through the desert. At the time, achieving a baseline degree of competence was all the Knicks could ever ask out of a coach. Since he was hired for his first top job in 2011, he is the only person to win Coach of the Year without earning a top-three seed.Five years ago, that's how low the bar was in New York. Getting the Knicks home-court advantage in a first-round series seemed borderline miraculous.
And on paper, Thibodeau worked miracles as recently as a few weeks ago. No team had ever overcome multiple 20-point second-half deficits in a single series. New York did so on the road in back-to-back games in Boston. Weren't these Knicks supposedly built specifically to beat the Celtics? They were well on their way to doing so even before Jayson Tatum went down, and Thibodeau was an essential component of that upset. On paper, beating Boston and reaching the conference finals probably exceeded New York's expectations.
But expectations change. Eliminating Boston created a golden opportunity. The 64-win Cleveland Cavaliers were knocked out of the second round as well, giving the Knicks home-court advantage in the conference finals. The Oklahoma City Thunder remained a heavy championship favorite, but needed seven games to escape the Denver Nuggets and are younger and less experienced than they will ever be. It's fair to suggest that this Knicks team will never have an easier path to the Finals and perhaps a championship than it just had ... and botched.
Six games after the euphoria of the Boston series, the Knicks have been eliminated with Saturday's 125-108 loss to Indiana. The Pacers are going to the Finals, and the Knicks are going into one of the most complicated summers in franchise history. They fired their roster bullets last offseason. The war chest of picks and assets was spent on Mikal Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns. They have a team with two All-NBA stars and several of the most coveted role players in basketball. And Thibodeau never quite figured out how to use it.
An identity crisis
No team relied more heavily on its starters in the regular season than the Knicks. The five-man unit of Bridges, Towns, Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart and OG Anunoby played 940 minutes in the regular season. Only two other lineups in all of basketball played half as many. Cracks started showing in that unit during the regular season, then the wheels fell off in the playoffs. It took losing back-to-back home games in the conference finals to make a change.
It was necessary, but it was also desperate. Most successful coaches treat the regular season somewhat experimentally. They try different lineups so they can see what combinations work and are ready to adapt in the playoffs. Thibodeau didn't do that to the extent that he needed to. He rarely does. His commitment to his starters is notorious among head coaches. The rest of the series reeked of panic. That's what leads to minutes for Delon Wright and Landry Shamet when they'd been out of the rotation for the entire postseason. They had nothing else to try. That those minutes weren't disastrous was almost a happy accident. And it was ultimately too little, too late.
Never did Thibodeau address the core playing style concerns here. The Knicks lost their defensive identity with Isaiah Hartenstein. The theoretical purpose of the Towns trade -- aside from just filling in for the injured Mitchell Robinson -- was to reinvent the team as a five-out, offense-first juggernaut. It never really happened. Opponents disarmed New York's pick-and-roll offense by putting their centers on Josh Hart. That allowed them to provide extra rim help while knowing Hart wouldn't punish them as a shooter. The obvious counter to that would have been to start Miles McBride in Hart's place, injecting extra shooting into the starting lineup and providing a bit more ball-pressure defensively. Instead, the starters with McBride in Hart's place played only 82 regular-season possessions and 16 playoff possessions.
That might've been a solvable problem with a more creative approach to offense, but so much of what the Knicks do offensively boils down to Brunson dribbling. They ranked 18th in passes per game, 26th in average speed moved by their offensive players and 26th in pace. Unsurprisingly, that led to a suboptimal shot diet, as the Knicks ranked 28th in 3-point attempt rate and 23rd in free-throw rate. They got to the rim relatively frequently, but were inefficient once they got there.
The Knicks got away with uninspired offensive process in the past because they were the best offensive rebounding team in the NBA. With Hartenstein gone and Robinson hurt for most of the season, they weren't nearly as good this year. They still managed to rank No. 5 in offense during the regular season. Their talent is, obviously, considerable. But playoff-level opposition and coaching weakened them significantly. Brunson's individual brilliance saved them late in big games, but he can't singlehandedly carry an offense for 48 minutes. The Knicks scored an impressive 120.6 points per 100 possessions in fourth quarters this postseason. They were at 111.3 or below in each of the other three. At times it felt as if they had no system, no way of leveraging their considerable talent to consistently create advantages and keep all five players engaged. It was, far too often, Brunson dribbling. When it wasn't, it was usually just someone else dribbling.
The Knicks needed elite offense to win with this group because they just never got stops with Brunson and Towns on the floor at the same time. Some of that's on them. Some of it has to fall on Thibodeau, ostensibly a defensive-minded coach, to find a scheme that suits them. Towns has always struggled in Thibodeau's preferred drop-coverage. The Knicks tried to introduce more switching in the playoffs to counter the shooting of Boston and Indiana, but they lacked the muscle memory to do so all that effectively. The Pacers, for most of the series, could basically get to any matchup they wanted. They almost completely controlled the terms of engagement in the series, successfully goading the Knicks into track meets they weren't equipped to win.
It's not fair to lay all of this at the feet of a coach. Brunson is who he is. It's hard to run an offense with much movement when he is your centerpiece. Remember, when Rick Carlisle had him and Luka Dončić in Dallas, he ran a dribble-dribble-dribble offense too. Towns has been vulnerable defensively forever. The Knicks knew that when they got him. Thibodeau rarely used his bench, but he didn't have a great one to begin with. This was an impressively talented roster, but it probably wasn't one that especially suited its coach. Last year's team with Hartenstein fit the stereotypical Thibodeau mold to a tee. The CBA broke that group apart, so the Knicks made lemonade.
Who would the Knicks hire if they make coaching change?
This wasn't a one-and-done run. The Knicks are expensive, but they're equipped to stay together for a few years if they want to. They can duck the second apron without cutting any core players next season. Robinson expires after that, but if the Knicks are going into the second apron in 2027 anyway, they might as well YOLO their finances and pay to keep him. The oldest core player here, Hart, is only 30, and had Aaron Nesmith not had the greatest three-minute shooting stretch in NBA history, the conference finals likely return to New York for a Game 7. This may have been a blown opportunity, but it doesn't need to be the only opportunity. Boston is presumably sitting next year out. Cleveland has serious apron issues. The Knicks could run this thing back, take another swing at the Pacers and hope they connect.
That's certainly the old-world answer here. But the NBA really doesn't think that way anymore. Four of the past six championship-winning head coaches have been fired by the teams they won it all with. Memphis fired Taylor Jenkins in the middle of a playoff race in March, and that got overshadowed by Denver doing the same in April. Teams are less patient than ever. Maybe, in the era of the aprons, they have to be. Changing coaches isn't always the right lever to pull, but it's certainly the easiest. You can unilaterally choose to fire someone. You can't force another team to trade you good players.
It's easy to just say "the Knicks should fire Tom Thibodeau." Who exactly are they hiring to replace him? The name that comes up most frequently is Michael Malone. But he's almost as old-school as Thibodeau, and it's not as though he could import Nikola Jokić. What kind of offense would he run without the greatest offensive player of his generation?
Typically, when a team makes a coaching change, it wants someone that significantly differs stylistically from his predecessor. With Thibodeau, that describes Mike Budenzholer. He under-utilizes his starters. His teams pluck all of the low-hanging fruit, shooting a million 3s and protecting the basket relentlessly. But his playoff track record is shaky, and he's coming off of a bad season in Phoenix. There's not a Carlisle out there. There's no guarantee the Knicks could find someone better than Thibodeau.
There is a lot of untapped coaching talent in the NBA at any given time. The Knicks would do well not to limit themselves to bigger names if they do indeed conduct a search. Joe Mazzulla has quickly emerged as one of the NBA's best young coaches. If Will Hardy hadn't left for Utah, Mazzulla would probably still be an assistant in Boston right now. Where coaching is concerned, resumés are pretty circumstantial. Would Malone be a top candidate for future jobs without Jokić? Is there a genius assistant out there just waiting for the sort of chance Mazzulla got? Or maybe it's a second-chance candidate who's gone overlooked because of his circumstances?
James Borrego won 43 games in his final season with the Hornets. They've been stuck at 27 and below ever since. He very nearly got the Cleveland job last summer, and if he had, he might be the reigning Coach of the Year as Kenny Atkinson turned out to be. If he could go above .500 with the Hornets, he could do quite a bit more with the players New York has accumulated.
What about a coaching outsider? Is there another JJ Redick out there, someone with a proven basketball acumen who could take over a team without the baggage of a lifetime in the coaching profession? Maybe that's an older player ready to transition. Chris Paul probably still wants to play, but he was a longtime Leon Rose client who would seemingly jump to the top of everyone's candidates list if he decided he was interested in coaching. Maybe that's an avenue worth exploring?
These aren't slam dunks. Rarely are proven, elite head coaches available, and getting them usually requires some luck. Think of how the Pacers got Carlisle back. His decade-long tenure in Dallas happened to surprisingly end right as their job became available, and if Kevin Durant's foot had been a size smaller, the Bucks probably would have fired Budenholzer and dangled the opportunity to coach Giannis Antetokounmpo in front of him. Getting the perfect coach at the perfect time is often as much about luck as it is execution.
Frankly, so is winning. The Knicks lost the Eastern Conference finals in six games, but the losses were mostly close. A bit of shooting luck here, some better bounces there and it could be the Knicks heading to the Finals right now. Merely having the chance to compete at this level was almost unthinkable when Thibodeau arrived. A coach who isn't good enough to win the conference finals is still good enough to get there. How many Knicks coaches this century can say the same?
That's the burden these newfound expectations have put on the Knicks. Thibodeau dragged this team out of the gutter, but the traits that take a team from bad to good are not necessarily the ones that take it from good to great. Sometimes a coach can be an essential step in a process that ends without them. Now it's up to the Knicks to figure out whether the coach who made all of this possible is the one who can take them all the way.
6/2/2025 7:01 PM