Viewed from one angle, Tom Thibodeau losing his job as head coach of the New York Knicks, a development reported this afternoon by Shams Charania, appears deeply unfair. Here's a guy who led his team to a 51-win regular season, a trip to the Eastern Conference finals—kicking the beans out of the hated Boston Celtics along the way—and got two wins away from the NBA Finals, and is now jobless. If you were fired under similar conditions, you would probably feel pretty hard done by.
But the true states of a basketball team and its head coach's suitability for employment are never quite as simple as the macro conditions might make them seem. Before the playoffs began, the Knicks were marked as a particularly underwhelming three-seed. Their net rating was plus-4.3, they had very few impressive wins against good teams, and Thibodeau was once again burying his starters under a mountain of needless minutes. Whatever shine the playoff results themselves had restored could be easily tarnished by some of the underlying facts: The Knicks went 10-8 in the playoffs with a point differential of exactly 0, and the starting five that Thibs leaned on so heavily in the regular season was so bad—minus-31 in 335 minutes—that Mitchell Robinson was inserted into the starting lineup partway through the conference finals.
The basketball being played didn't look much better than the statistics it produced. Jalen Brunson left the postseason with another handful of big shots with which to burnish his growing status as a Knicks legend, but nobody would mistake the system that produced those shots as "forward-thinking." The mundanity of the Knicks' offense was further highlighted throughout their series against the Pacers, whose whirring, frenetic style appeared as poetry next to the Knicks' binary inputs. It is ultimately the players who decide what happens on the court, but the Knicks were clearly not helped by having a coach who is more known for shouting various catchphrases from the sidelines than he is for drawing up plays.
And yet! The Knicks were one of the last four teams standing, and were stuck in a long, long period of unseriousness before Thibs showed up. Helping to turn a doofy franchise like the New York Knicks into a competent organization carrying around real expectations is an achievement, and one that someone in Thibodeau's position might expect to be celebrated rather than met with a shitcanning. If he were to spend the rest of his days cursing the Knickerbockers and praying for their downfall, nobody could blame him.
As for the Knicks, they are now in a position that demands perfect decision-making. Other teams have found themselves here before, having ditched an objectively competent but possibly limited head coach right when success starts to feel sustainable. The Knicks are betting that Thibodeau has taken the team as far as his abilities will let him, and that a new coach—perhaps one who has some more modern ideas about rotation management and offensive sets—can help them kick on to the next level of prosperity. It is easy to remember how the Golden State Warriors transformed from a good team under Mark Jackson into a dynasty under Steve Kerr and think, Hey, that's what we should do.
Whether this bet pays off is entirely dependent on who the Knicks decide to replace Thibodeau with. Taylor Jenkins is out there. So is Michael Malone, and a whole host of assistant coaches you've probably never heard of. Pity Thibodeau, sure, but pity the next guy more. No matter what happens next, Thibodeau can look back on his work in New York with pride. His replacement, on the other hand, will either end up being the hero who finally takes this team over the last, tallest hurdle, or the ding-dong who fucked it all up.
