‘He got outcoached’: Why the New York Knicks fired Tom Thibodeau, their most successful coach in decades

TOM THIBODEAU UNDERSTOOD the job he had signed up for. He grew up listening to Knicks games on the radio and driving from his family’s home in Connecticut to go to home games with his father. In the 1990s, he was a young assistant coach on Jeff Van Gundy’s staff, arriving early each morning and afraid to be anything but the last one to leave the building at night.

“I loved being here in the ’90s,” Thibodeau told ESPN in 2021, during his first season as the franchise’s head coach. “There was nothing better than the environment at the Garden. We had great players. We had a great coaching staff. There were so many big games, whether it was Chicago, Miami or Indiana. But you know how life is. It goes by. You blink and all of a sudden, it seems like the ’90s was yesterday.

“But I always knew how lucky I was to be with the Knicks.”

In his first season at the head of the bench, the Knicks failed to deliver on a promising regular season, one in which Thibodeau was named NBA Coach of the Year and Julius Randle was elevated into the MVP discussion, losing a first-round playoff series to the Atlanta Hawks.

“I love the challenge of it all,” Thibodeau said. “When I went to Chicago, it was a .500 team and everyone said, ‘Don’t go there.’ But I loved it there. When I came here, everyone said the same thing. ‘The Knicks, it’s a tough job.’ But that’s never scared me.”

He had spent decades building a reputation as a relentless grinder, which fueled his rise to lead benches in Chicago and Minnesota but also served as his downfall in both.

No one knew Thibodeau’s strengths and weaknesses better than Knicks president Leon Rose and executive vice president William Wesley, both of whom had built a relationship with him through shared connections at CAA. Knicks owner Jim Dolan convinced them to leave their roles at the agency in 2020, making Thibodeau one of their first hires.

“We meet after just about every game,” Thibodeau said of Rose and Wesley back in 2021. “They’re going to always be truthful with me, I’m going to be truthful with them. And I feel like I have a voice. That’s all I need is to have a voice.

Like Thibodeau, Rose had grown up a Knicks fan. It was the only franchise for which he’d consider leaving the blue-chip client roster he had built at CAA. And he was also uniquely qualified for the job, having built a strong relationship with Dolan over the years.

The key to success in this role was first and foremost talent acquisition, which Rose had proved to be expert at as an agent. That’s obviously different from how teams acquire talent, but Dolan bet that those relationship-building skills would translate to the front office. Equally important, though, was being able to manage the famously irascible Dolan and the famously brusque and hard-charging Thibodeau.

Rose was uniquely well positioned to do so, having worked closely with Dolan when his client Carmelo Anthony starred for the Knicks and having built a two-decades-long relationship with Thibodeau.

For five years, that’s exactly what Rose did. Those who know them well marveled at how Rose kept Thibodeau from spiraling over minor issues and focused on the bigger picture. Thibodeau’s tendency to wear himself out was fine, as one source put it. But Rose largely kept him from wearing out other people.

Managing Dolan was a different feat altogether. Rose did that by earning Dolan’s trust with his methodical approach to team-building and by being right about when to go all-in and when to wait for the next hand.

Dolan said as much in an appearance on Josh Hart and Jalen Brunson’s podcast in March.

“There were times when [we’ve] sort of reached for that shiny, sparkly object. ‘Maybe this is what we need.’ Especially when things weren’t going well,” he said. “‘Let’s bring in this guy and maybe he’ll turn it all around for us.’ Sometimes it’s players, sometimes it’s a coach.

“What I learned over time is that doesn’t work. It really doesn’t. You really have to do the fundamentals, the basics. You’ve got to build a team, you’ve got to build an organization. There is no waving a wand over a team and all of a sudden make it a great team. It doesn’t happen.”

Only Rose and Dolan know what changed from that statement in March and the decision to fire Thibodeau on Tuesday. Yes, Thibodeau had gotten the team within two wins of its first NBA Finals in a quarter century. Yes, he was the most successful Knicks coach in a generation, winning 50 games in back-to-back seasons for the first time since 1994-95.

But they also had lost a series to the Indiana Pacers that many in the organization believed they should have won.

And eventually Rose, the man Thibodeau met with after every game, delivered the kind of honest assessment that Thibodeau once said he appreciated so much.

“Our organization is singularly focused on winning a championship for our fans,” Rose said in a statement announcing the firing.

The implication was clear: He and the organization did not believe Thibodeau could deliver them one.

“This pursuit led us to the difficult decision to inform Tom Thibodeau that we’ve decided to move in another direction. We can’t thank Tom enough for pouring his heart and soul into each and every day of being the New York Knicks head coach. He led us not only with class and professionalism for the past five seasons, but also to tremendous success on the court with four playoff berths and four playoff series victories. Ultimately, we made the decision we feel is best for our organization moving forward.”

IN THE DAYS before Thibodeau’s firing, Rose met with several key players and members of the coaching staff, sources told ESPN.

Ostensibly similar to the kind of exit meetings teams hold with players after each season, in this case, only a handful of players — essentially the top rotation players — were summoned to meet with Rose and Dolan to give their opinions on the state of the franchise and how the team should move forward.

But the decision to replace Thibodeau, one source told ESPN, had been trending in that direction for months. The team simply wasn’t maximizing its talent, despite having two All-NBA players in Brunson and Towns. And after meeting with the select group of players and coaches this week, sources said, it was clear to Rose that the organization needed a new voice.

The players hadn’t tuned out Thibodeau, one source told ESPN, but there was doubt that he could lead them to the Finals after the way the Knicks lost to the Pacers.

“He got outcoached,” a league source familiar with the situation told ESPN. “The Game 1 collapse was insane. If they don’t have that collapse, who knows what happens.”

Throughout the series, Thibodeau was challenged on his decisions by the relentless New York media.

There was the interminable absence of Karl-Anthony Towns in the fourth quarter of Game 2 while the Knicks were struggling to score. Then there was the slow-to-make lineup change in Game 3, moving Mitchell Robinson into the starting lineup and Hart to the bench, after the Knicks’ starters had been outscored by 29 points in 43 minutes during the first two games of the series.

After New York rallied to win Game 3 in Indiana with that revamped starting lineup, Hart confirmed that he had suggested the lineup change to the coaching staff late during the Boston series.

“We have to figure out ways that he can play more,” Hart said of Robinson. “We’re great with him on the floor. We’ve all got to be willing to sacrifice for the betterment of the team.”

While Thibodeau did pull some key levers to help the Knicks rally to extend the series to six games, they were far too late to change the course of the series — or the rather public questioning of Thibodeau and his decisions.

It was not the first public critique one of his players made this season.

Earlier in this year, forward Mikal Bridges, one of the league’s most durable players, went public with a complaint about how many minutes the starters were playing and said he believed the bench players should play more.

“We’ve got a lot of good guys on this team that can take away the minutes, which helps the defense, helps the offense, helps tired bodies being out there and giving up all these points,” Bridges told reporters before a mid-March game in Portland. “It helps us keeping fresh bodies out there.”

Bridges said that he had talked with Thibodeau and that the longtime coach understood.

“Yeah, no, he’s not really, he’s not arguing about it,” Bridges said. “Sometimes I think he just gets in his ways and he gets locked in and he just wants to keep the guy out there. Sometimes you have to tell him like, Landry [Shamet], for example, or somebody, keep them out there, they’re playing well.”

It is a criticism that has plagued Thibodeau for decades — and one he has never reconciled.

That two of the team’s marquee players went so public with critiques of their coach was alarming, sources said.

Then there were more general concerns about how much Thibodeau relied on Brunson. The Brunson-Towns pairing was initially wildly successful. Entering February, the Brunson and Towns pick-and-roll was the second-most-efficient pick-and-roll combination in the NBA, averaging 1.22 points per direct play. But after February, that dropped to 0.88 points per direct pick as opponents started putting a wing on Brunson and switching a center onto the inconsistent-shooting Hart.

Thibodeau never came up with an effective counter — often forcing Brunson to bail the team out at the end of possessions.

He won the NBA’s Clutch Player of the Year award because he happened to be very good in those situations. But Brunson’s usage, which under Thibodeau has been the highest of his career, raised concerns.

One league source suggested history could serve as a warning precedent — that Brunson, who missed games this season because of ankle and calf injuries, would struggle to hold up long term without a more layered or balanced offensive system, just as Derrick Rose had faltered when he played for Thibodeau in Chicago.

play

Why Stephen A. wouldn’t complain if Michael Malone gets Knicks job

Stephen A. Smith tells Scott Van Pelt some of the names that he feels are capable replacements for Tom Thibodeau as the next coach of the New York Knicks.

ALL OF THAT might’ve been forgiven if the Knicks had beaten the Pacers, a team with less top-level talent but more depth and shooting, a fact plainly evident in that epic fourth-quarter collapse in Game 1, when Aaron Nesmith and Tyrese Haliburton conjured Reggie Miller’s best Knicks-killing performances from the 1990s as New York blew a 14-point lead in the final 2 minutes and 50 seconds of that game.

None other than Miller was on the broadcast to rub salt in those wounds.

The Knicks went from seeing street signs around the city renamed in their honor and Mayor Eric Adams releasing economic impact reports on how much money the team’s playoff run was generating for the city to abject dejection in one night.

All the hope and goodwill Thibodeau and the Knicks had built up after upsetting the defending champion Boston Celtics in the second round had disintegrated. Instead, a cold reality was left: The Knicks had gone all-in on this season and busted out before the final table.

New York traded five first-round draft picks to acquire Bridges, a stingy defender with enough offensive game to carry a team on any given night; in a separate deal, the Knicks sent Randle, Donte DiVincenzo and a first-round pick to get Towns, one of the most offensively gifted big men in the game.

Thibodeau’s job was to maximize the unique talents of the new additions while minimizing their flaws. Ultimately, he did not elevate either of them, or get this talented roster to the Finals. Which stung even more as the Eastern Conference proved to be wide open this season — and should remain so next season after the devastating Achilles injuries to Boston’s Jayson Tatum and Milwaukee’s Damian Lillard.

The Knicks’ next task is finding someone they deem an upgrade at coach and retooling a roster with holes that were dramatically exposed.

Whether the coach who replaces Thibodeau will help the Knicks break through remains to be seen. The New York job is a great one, but it’s also the toughest in the NBA. Nobody knew that like Thibodeau, who had lived it as a young assistant on all those 1990s teams that got so achingly close, too.

The Knicks have been the great Siren’s call in the NBA for decades. Since the team last won a title in 1973, countless superstars and coaches have tried and failed to be the one to complete that journey. Thibodeau is just the latest to crash up against the rocks.

He knew the stakes going into it. The pressure, the environment, the fervor in the city when it seems the Knicks are getting close again.

“Those games in the Garden, there’s nothing better,” Thibodeau said that first season. “It’s the best. What the Knicks mean to New York City is so special. … Then, as life unfolds, sometimes I’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, how lucky have you been?'”