Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Jalen Brunson:
“Thibs is the type of coach, you hear his voice all the time because he’s always talking about what to do, the right way to play, the right pace, the right defense,” Brunson said last season. “After a while, that voice becomes your voice.”
Listen to Josh Hart:
“Fifty wins, a second seed with a roster hurt for half a season and not a Coach of the Year candidate…” Hart wrote on social media last spring.
Hear this from a longtime NBA insider: “I congratulated Tom when I heard the Knicks extended him (Wednesday), but what I had to do was congratulate the Knicks for not (dealing with) this with one of their two or three best coaches in. NBA today.”
Tom Thibodeau’s contract extension agreed to keep him around for four more years, past his 70th birthday, is one piece of good news for the Knicks in what has been an overwhelming summer so far. This continues the leader of the band leading the band for the foreseeable future, and who will celebrate inside the walls of the Knicks locker room of course.
“I’m not sure what player doesn’t like playing for him,” Donte DiVincenzo said last spring. “It makes you wonder if he doesn’t like playing for anybody.”
Well, it’s no coincidence that these three gave Thibodeau a high approval rating, as all three played college ball for Jay Wright. Now Wright might be more telegenic, and he might laugh a little less, but as a coach, he’s Thibodeau’s job. Maybe it just looks better in an Armani business suit than an Adidas track suit. Or maybe Thibodeau will just get caught up in the easy narrative.
“The same fans who are whores about how Tom allegedly dresses his players,” said an NBA insider, “are the same fans – the same ones – who go on social media and complain about load management and how many guys sleep and the team. who cruise and that team is a tank and how it destroys the NBA. You know what? You can’t have it both ways.
There’s no question about the way Thibodeau likes to play, and he’s been blessed to work for someone in Leon Rose who has built a roster filled with the players he envisions. Players like that have a lot in common. They care mainly about winning. They do not gripe about the minutes (either too much or too few) or touching. And he’s not included in the annual percentage of anonymous players who claim they won’t play for him.
That never bothered Thibodeau. Who knows if he’ll find time in the past 35 years to watch “Hoosiers,” but if he does, he’ll probably like Coach Norman Dale: “My team is on the floor.”
Tim Thibodeau is in the Garden. Tim Thibodeau has reminded New York City that the city is a basketball city at heart, a Knicks city at its core. The past two fountains have served as reminders of how beautiful and abundant Midtown Manhattan can be when the weather warms up and basketball matters.
If you celebrate the players – and you should celebrate the players, after waiting decades for them to emerge – then you should also celebrate the coaches.
Not everyone does. And it’s not just the volume of work he commands. When the Knicks lose two or three in a row, the critics come up like grass through a crack in the pavement, they pass over the slumping or banged players and direct them directly to the coach. They will do it again this year, for sure. Extensions provide financial security, but no armor for the slings and arrows that critics will launch.
“It makes you wonder,” said an NBA insider, “that these guys remember what it was like to watch a game coached by David Fizdale and Derek Fisher and Kurt Rambis.”
yes already. It is not. You also wonder if these guys really appreciate where the Knicks are now compared to the days of the summer of COVID 2020 when Thibodeau first came on board. Here’s how it feels: They’re 595-931 for the previous 1,526 games, having won exactly one playoff series in that stretch. In Thibodeau it is 175-143, and two playoff wins in two years.
Congratulate Thibodeau, sure, or at least wait until the first tough loss in the Park to castigate him. But congratulate the Knicks, too, for not (fouling) this up.
