Hey, Should We Fire Him?

Sure! It's only our best performance in 25 years

Thanks for reading The Dope.

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You have to hand it to the New York Knicks: They’re not ones to take success lightly. Not that they’d know much about it, since they’ve had almost none since “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” was topping the charts and “All In the Family” ruled the airwaves.

Actually, in 1973, the last time the Knicks won an NBA title, the No. 1 entry on the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 was “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” but it’s such a terrible, terrible song that I was hoping to avoid any mention of Tony Orlando and Dawn. The thing is, I then risk my own credibility with you, and I can’t do that, so we’re all stuck with this mortifying paragraph. (Don’t turn the sound up when you search that song on Spotify.)

Anyway, the idiot Knicks fired their coach this week. His name is Tom Thibodeau, and he’s a hardass, and not all the Knickerbockers just absolutely loved playing for him, and his career history is one of thoroughly worn-out welcomes after several seasons at previous stops in Chicago and Minnesota.

And if we were willing to suspend all context, it’d end there. “Unpopular coach fired, players gleefully rip man in off-the-record remarks.”

However.

There’s also this: The Knicks, under the impatient and often surly countenance of Bad Bad Tommy Thibodeau, just reached the Eastern Conference Finals, their deepest playoff plunge in a quarter century. They just won 50 games in back-to-back seasons for the first time in 30 years. They took down Boston in the playoffs despite having lost all four games to the 61-win Celts during the regular season.

And they did it with a bench that was so short — the result of front-office payroll mangling that had left the team without money to spend on depth — that Thibodeau had to lean heavily on about seven players to carry the entire load. He did that, and the players responded, and the Knicks became something that they have not been in decades: relevant.

Fantastic job! You’re fired.

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There’s a lot to all this, but alas, most of it is painfully stupid. New York has a crazy owner, James Dolan, and an apparently trigger-happy team president in Leon Rose. This brain trust just watched Thibodeau coach its flawed roster to an astounding finish — that upset of the Celtics in the second round was a glittering moment for the New York franchise — and concluded that the coach is the problem.

"Our organization is singularly focused on winning a championship for our fans," Rose said in a statement released by the team. "This pursuit led us to the decision to inform Tom Thibodeau that we've decided to move in another direction.”

Thibodeau’s Knicks teams won 226 regular-season games in his five seasons. Between 2012 and 2020, pre-Thibs, this same franchise won about that many games over eight seasons while churning through six head coaches: Mike Woodson, Derek Fisher, Kurt Rambis, Jeff Hornacek, David Fizdale and Mike Miller.

Singularly focused on winning a championship. Wait: You sure?

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Best guess, Thibodeau wore everybody out. I’m sure he constantly heckled the front office to get him a more talented or versatile bench. He is notorious for grinding his players and exhorting them toward a physical, punishing style. And even in the best of times, he’s been known to favor a very short rotation — seven guys, eight at the most. These players receive heavy minutes, which in theory means higher chances of injuries or even somewhat shortened careers from the extra pounding.

This season’s Knicks were notably healthy, and the starters logged a lot of playing time. One of them, Mikal Bridges, spoke publicly about the minutes load, and even suggested that he and Thibodeau had had a conversation about it, indicating that it was a problem. Asked about that, Thibs said they’d never had any such a talk. All righty, then.

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Jalen Brunson, Mikal Bridges, OG Anunoby, Josh Hart, Karl-Anthony Towns. Did I just introduce an NBA Murderer’s Row? I did not. But this starting five for the Knicks, despite holding a negative net rating for most of the reason, won 51 games, had the third-highest point differential in the East, and fell just short of the Pacers for the right to go to the NBA Finals. All snark aside, it was a masterful coaching job by Thibodeau and a great performance by the players themselves.

After the Knicks were eliminated in six games by Indiana, Brunson, the team’s leading player, was asked if Thibodeau was the right coach to take New York to the promised land.

“Is that a real question right now?” an incredulous Brunson replied. “Did you just ask me if I believe he’s the right guy? Yes.”

Or, you know, no! Maybe Brunson should spend more time with the front office. I’m sure it’ll become clear.

Leon Rose & Co., by the way, sure need to be right about this. Not only do they owe Thibodeau at least $30 million from the contract extension they gave him last summer, but they sent out five first-round picks to Brooklyn in order to secure Bridges, and they dealt Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo to Minnesota for Towns. They’ve got starting talent but no depth.

They also just hit a 25-year high for a season’s performance, while electrifying their celebrity-studded fan base. In other parts of Manhattan, that’d get you a curtain call. Over at Madison Square Garden, it’s apparently a signal to start blowing stuff up and calling it ingenuity.