There’s no question, none and nowhere, that Tom Thibodeau got a bad deal. He got a terrible deal. But Thibs isn’t the first to get slapped like this, and won’t be the last, and not just in New York. Rick Carlisle, showing up once again as a master of the game, got fired in Dallas not so long ago, and look where he is with the Pacers.
There is, though, a good question to be asked here, and it goes like this:
When did this edition of the Knicks, the one who turned into the block-party toast of the town, become a championship-or-bust team — like about eight days ago?
Seriously: Were these Knicks a championship-or-bust team when they couldn’t get a regular-season game off the Celtics or the Cavaliers or the Thunder? Or did it happen for their bosses right after they stole Games 1 and 2 off the Celtics and then watched Jayson Tatum, one of the best players on the planet, go down and out with an Achilles injury? Maybe that’s when Leon Rose’s heart and Jimmy Dolan’s heart started beating faster than Timothee Chalemet’s, and they apparently decided their team could go all the way.
All we know for sure right now is that Rose, with Dolan’s backing, absolutely decided that Thibodeau had taken the Knicks as far as he was going to take them, and wanted another (younger) face on the bench, and another voice in the locker room. So now here we are, as they decide where to go from here. And where they ought to go is Michael Malone, just because I think Pat Riley would fax his own resignation to himself before he’d let Erik Spoelstra do a Reverse Riles and come to New York.
Just because they panicked in Denver and fired Malone about 20 minutes after he won a title there doesn’t mean that he somehow forgot how to coach Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray, and that means whether the Nuggets ended up going the distance with the Thunder or not. No one would ever suggest that Karl-Anthony Towns is close to being Jokic, one of the most complete and gifted centers of all time. But Malone did prove in Denver that he could win with two stars — Jokic and a gifted ball-pounder like Murray — who didn’t play enough defense the way Towns and Jalen Brunson don’t.
Malone is out there and very much available at the age of 53. He even has honorable family history with the Knicks the way Brunson does, since his father once sat on the bench for the Knicks as an assistant with three different coaches. Put it another way: Bill Parcells used to talk about having pelts on the wall. Michael Malone has one more than either Dolan or the president of the Knicks.
Again and again: There is nothing right or fair about what happened to Thibodeau. And it absolutely has happened that way around here plenty of times before, with Buck Showalter in 1995, after he’d put the Yankees back in the postseason for the first time in 14 years. It happened to Joe Girardi after he’d taken the Yankees to within one win of their first World Series in eight years. Guess what? The Yankees even went out of their way to insult Joe Torre with a make-good contract offer when Joe — as great a manager as the Yankees have ever had — was on his way out the door.
We heard afterward that, wait, the Yankees wanted him back. Yeah, on a one-year deal for less money than he’d made the year before. Amazing that he didn’t feel the love after a truly classless offer like that. Bottom line: If the Yankees could get tired of him, Jimmy and Leon could get tired of Tom Thibodeau. And just did.
Listen, by doing it this way, with a press release instead of a press conference, Rose looks both gutless and gutty at the same time. Gutty? Yeah, because he’s about to take another big swing this offseason with a new coach the way he did in the last one by trading away Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo for Towns, and trading away all those No. 1 draft picks for Mikal Bridges, who became as much a lightning rod for Knicks fans as Thibodeau was. It’s official that the guy isn’t afraid to make moves, give him that. He sure does take his swings. But then looks like one of the smallest guys we’ve ever had around here in a job like his when he won’t come out from under his desk to face the media. And the music.
He and Jimmy clearly didn’t like what they heard from the players on their way out the door. Leon Rose clearly didn’t like the fact that Thibodeau didn’t use guys like Landry Shamet, not really, and Delon Wright until the Knicks were in a ditch against the Pacers. In the end, it turns out that the real sheriff of the Minutes Police with Thibs was his boss, who must have decided that the Knicks were deeper than Thibodeau ever thought they were.
And now, just like that, blink of an eye, really, the Knicks are championship-or-bust the way the Yankees always are, even though the two managers who followed Joe Torre have won a combined total of one World Series in 15 years.
Leon Rose was around the NBA for a long time as agent before he took over the Knicks front office. Maybe Rose has already knows the guy he wants to replace Thibodeau. Maybe he thinks his roster is so loaded all of a sudden that he can bring in a young guy like Johnnie Bryant, who sat next to Kenny Atkinson this year in Cleveland.
Does any of this happen if Tyrese Haliburton’s shot doesn’t bounce up into the retired jerseys at the end of Game 1 before dropping dead of exhaustion through the hoop? We’ll never know. All we know is that the Knicks need a new coach. Maybe there’s a better candidate out there than the son of an old Knicks assistant with a title on his resume. I’d like to know who that is.
Unless they finally want to bring Jeff Van Gundy home.
