20 Second Timeout

Knicks Fire Their Most Successful Coach of the Past 25 Years

"You're timing stinks. We've just made a billion eight for the second year in a row. That's three and a half billion in the past two years. But mark my words, Henry. You may never see a billion eight again. And do you know why? Because you don't know how the f--- we made it in the first place." Lee Iacocca to Henry Ford after being fired by Ford

A family run business can hire and fire on a whim. That is how Ford Motor Company operated under Henry Ford II, which is how Lee Iacocca ended up at Chrysler, where he revitalized a company that had seemed to be on the brink of imminent collapse; meanwhile, Ford Motor Company's market share gradually declined after the Iacocca firing. Iacocca had a lot to do with Ford Motor Company's success in the 1960s and 1970s, but job performance had nothing to do with Henry Ford II's decision to fire Iacocca. 

What does this trip down automotive history memory lane have to do with the NBA? Tom Thibodeau just coached the New York Knicks to their most successful season in the past 25 years--the culmination of three straight years of improved regular season records--but that was not enough to save his job when James Dolan decided to fire him. Much like Henry Ford II ran Ford Motor Company as a family business (never mind the existence of a supposedly independent board of directors), Dolan runs the Knicks as a personal fiefdom where he can declare "Off with their heads!" on a whim. 

The Knicks steadily improved during Thibodeau's tenure, and before this season began no reasonable person would have said that reaching the 2025 Eastern Conference Finals would constitute failure, let alone be a fireable offense. The Knicks went 21-45 in the COVID-19 abbreviated 2019-20 season, and then went 41-31 in Thibodeau's first season at the helm. After slipping to 37-45 in 2021-22, the Knicks went 47-35, 50-32, and 51-31 in the next three seasons, advancing to the second round in back to back years before reaching the Eastern Conference Finals this season.

Prior to hiring Thibodeau in 2020, the Knicks had missed the playoffs for seven straight seasons under six different coaches. The Knicks have had 13 head coaches in the 24 years since the departure of Jeff Van Gundy in 2001.

Do you see the pattern? The one constant is James Dolan, who has owned the team through all of this turbulence; the general managers change, the coaches change, the players change, but Dolan is always there, presiding over the chaos. 

Firing excellent coaches is a trademark move of a dysfunctional franchise. Sensible reasons to fire a coach include underperformance relative to reasonable expectations, declining performance in the absence of extenuating circumstances, or the availability of a superior coach. Those reasons are not applicable to Thibodeau and the Knicks. 

Bashing excellent coaches is a trademark move of media members who do not understand the sport that they cover. The correct way to critique a coach is to focus on a specific coaching decision, provide evidence demonstrating why that coaching decision was suboptimal, and then suggest an alternative coaching decision that would have been better, supporting that alternative with evidence. Media members do not do this for a simple reason: they are not capable of doing this. The barriers to entry for some fields are quite high: to become an attorney, you must first get a high LSAT score, then you must graduate from law school, and then you must pass the bar exam; to become a chess master, you must achieve a rating in timed, competitive play that exceeds the ratings of 99% of competitive chess players. To become a media member, all you have to do is know someone who knows someone who likes you, and that is why media members who could not coach their way out of a paper bag with a machete are paid to intone solemnly (or yell bombastically) about how they would coach a team much better than a career professional coach would.

The prevailing media-driven narrative that Thibodeau did not use his bench enough is as lazy as it is stupid, and the people who propagate that nonsense fail to explain (1) who specifically Thibodeau should have played more minutes, (2) who specifically Thibodeau should have played fewer minutes, and (3) what evidence exists to demonstrate that making those moves would have produced a better outcome than losing in the Eastern Conference Finals.

When I critique a coach, I provide specific evidence-based reasons for that critique. For example, when Kevin Durant entered the NBA and Seattle Coach P.J. Carlesimo declared that he would move Durant from forward to guard, I expressed skepticism: 

Durant has not played one minute of regular season action in the NBA, yet even though he has been advertised as a great inside player his coach already wants him to switch positions. Carlesimo clearly wants to spare Durant from being pounded in the paint but the move to the backcourt will lead to other problems. To the best of my knowledge, Durant has never played guard; now he will have to learn how to do so against the best guards in the world. Also, from what I saw in the summer league, Durant has a very high dribble and is not a great ballhandler, so he will be a turnover waiting to happen if he is relied upon to do a lot of dribbling.

Durant clearly needs to put on some weight but that will be true regardless of which position he plays. I think that he and Seattle would be better served if he takes his lumps at his natural small forward position where he will at least be in the comfort zone of playing in areas of the court that are familiar to him.

The Seattle franchise subsequently moved to Oklahoma City and replaced Carlesimo with Scott Brooks, who immediately shifted Durant back to forward, a decision that I praised: "Moving Durant to small forward is a big step in the right direction that I predict will pay noticeable dividends, possibly as soon as the end of this season." The rest is history, as Durant assembled a Hall of Fame career as a forward; he averaged 20.3 ppg on .430 field goal shooting in his one year as a shooting guard, and in the next 16 seasons he never averaged less than 25.1 ppg and he never shot worse than .462 from the field.

A few years later, Carlesimo was coaching the Brooklyn Nets and Thibodeau was coaching the Chicago Bulls. The teams met in the first round of the 2013 playoffs, and I predicted that Chicago would win: "This series features a huge coaching mismatch. TNT's Kenny Smith says that if a team loses by more than five points then blame the players but if it loses by less than five points blame the coach; the games in this series figure to be low scoring and close and I trust Chicago's Tom Thibodeau much more than I trust Brooklyn's P. J. Carlesimo; this is not just about in-game adjustments but also about elements of preparation that give one team an edge over another." Sure enough, Chicago--which had won 45 games during the regular season while Brooklyn had won 49 games--won that series, 4-3. After the series, I distinguished coach evaluating from coach bashing:

Coach bashing is a favorite media pastime but most media members do not have a clue how to determine if a team is well coached or poorly coached. I respect all NBA coaches tremendously and I fully realize that even a bad NBA head coach knows more about basketball than the vast majority of coaches at any other level of the sport; [George] Karl is a very good NBA coach but he seems to be better suited for rebuilding teams/coaching underdogs than he is at extracting the maximum out of 50-plus win teams. Carlesimo was an excellent collegiate coach and he served as an assistant on Gregg Popovich's San Antonio staff so Carlesimo obviously has a very good basketball mind--but as an NBA head coach he has not measured up well in comparison with the best of the best, a category in which Thibodeau clearly belongs.

When I critique coaches like Carlesimo and Karl I am not trying to suggest that I know more about basketball than they do or that I would be a better NBA head coach; in other words, I am not acting like Bill Simmons. I am just doing my job as an NBA analyst by pointing out that, as much as Karl and Carlesimo know about basketball, there are other coaches who are demonstrably performing at a higher level.

Media members do not like to admit being wrong and it is interesting to see the lengths some of them will go to in order to avoid such admissions. Simmons used to regularly bash Doc Rivers' coaching acumen but now Rivers is widely recognized as a great coach so Simmons had to stop degrading Rivers--but did Simmons admit that he was wrong? Of course not! Simmons' story is that Rivers has evolved into being a great coach. Rivers won the 2000 Coach of the Year award in his first season as an NBA head coach after leading the "heart and hustle" Orlando Magic to a 41-41 record with Darrell Armstrong, John Amaechi and Chucky Atkins as the top three players in the rotation. Has Rivers become a better coach in the intervening 13 years? I am sure that he has; I hope that anyone who does something for more than a decade becomes better at it--but the idea that Rivers was a terrible coach who then became a great coach is absurd. Simmons was dead wrong about Rivers and he should just admit it. 

After retiring from the NBA, Brian Scalabrine has played several one on one games versus regular people who assume that because he was a bench player in the league and is now a retired player they have a chance to beat him--but Scalabrine routinely dominates these players, and he has correctly stated that he is closer to LeBron James' level than any of those players are to his level. Similarly, the worst coach in the NBA is closer to Phil Jackson's level of basketball understanding and acumen than any media member is to the worst coach's basketball understanding and acumen. In other words, media members should approach their craft with humility and with the goal of trying to learn more about basketball strategy--but that does not generate hype or TV ratings, so basketball fans will continue to be subjected to empty minds with large mouths loudly proclaiming "hot takes" devoid of cold logic.

Labels: James Dolan, Jeff Van Gundy, Kevin Durant, New York Knicks, Oklahoma City Thunder, P.J. Carlesimo, Scott Brooks, Seattle Supersonics, Tom Thibodeau

posted by David Friedman @ 10:32 PM

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