Head coaching seats in the NBA are hotter than ever. The cushion upon which Tom Thibodeau of the New York Knicks (sometimes) sits is no different.
This comes across as patently funky, perhaps even deliberately inflammatory, in a vacuum. It’s not. Changing out the head coach after a disappointing regular season or a short-circuited run during the NBA playoffs is far easier than remaking the roster. Especially when said roster is already remade.
Reminders of this continue to crop up in droves. The Denver Nuggets just fired head coach Michael Malone, along with general manager Calvin Booth. This comes barely one week after the Memphis Grizzlies booted head coach Taylor Jenkins.
While Malone and Jenkins were chaperoning teams embroiled in one of their season’s crummier stretches, both squads remain in contention for home-court-advantage playoff slots. Notably still, they were each canned with fewer than 10 games left on the schedule.
This kind of 11th-hour axing verges on unprecedented. It doesn’t matter if writing was on the wall. Firing head coaches mere weeks before the playoffs start is bonkers. The lesson in all of this: The NBA is more than ever a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately league. So much so that, to paraphrase The Wire, even semi-recent success ain’t got nothing to do with it.
Tom Thibodeau’s success in New York cannot save him
Even Thibodeau’s most ardent critics cannot deny his body of work with the Knicks. He already has the fourth-most total wins of any head coach in franchise history. He is sixth in overall winning percentage, with a real chance to crack the top five by the end of 2024-25.
Only four of New York’s head coaches have racked up more total playoff victories. And potentially most impressive of all, the Knicks are about to win 60 percent or more of their games for a second consecutive season, something that has not happened since current Miami Heat team president Pat Riley was patrolling New York’s sidelines.
Skeptics will argue Thibodeau’s standout resume says more about the Knicks franchise than Thibs himself. That is beyond reductive. The culture has changed under him, both visually and viscerally. Pepper in a (likely) top-three playoff seed this season, and the three-year extension he signed this past summer, and he should be relatively safe.
He’s not.
Recent success is, clearly, no longer enough to buy time and space. Consider the past six head honchos of championship teams. Just two of them are still currently employed by those organizations. This is even more harrowing when looking at how long it took before they were shown the door:
- 2019: Nick Nurse, Toronto Raptors (fired after 2022-23 season)
- 2020: Frank Vogel, Los Angeles Lakers (fired after 2020-21 season)
- 2021: Mike Budenholzer, Milwaukee Bucks (fired after 2022-23)
- 2022: Steve Kerr, Golden State Warriors (still employed)
- 2023: Michael Malone, Denver Nuggets (fired before the end of 2024-25 season)
- 2024: Joe Mazzulla, Boston Celtics (still employed)
Three of the four dismissed coaches from this list failed to last more than two full seasons following their title. And if a recent ring isn’t enough to protect them, two playoff series victories (to date) surely aren’t enough to guarantee Thibs won’t be on the chopping block if this postseason ends in anything other than a championship.
The Knicks are running out of other ways to improve
Signing an extension last summer and having a good working relationship with the front office bodes well for Thibs. That isn’t quite tantamount to job security.
New York has expended enough of its assets that changing head coaches may be the only big alteration it can feasibly make. The team has no outright first-rounders to trade this summer—that Washington pick may never convey—and is slated to begin the offseason over the first apron, severely hamstringing what the front office can accomplish in free agency.
Futzing and fiddling with the roster is hardly impossible. Maybe the Knicks can enter the Kevin Durant sweepstakes, though this likely entails moving Karl-Anthony Towns. Perhaps Mitchell Robinson stays healthy and has more sheen as an expiring contract over the summer. Ask yourself, though: What’s more likely, the Knicks acquire a potential member of their go-to closing lineup this summer or change the head coach?
NBA title windows are closing faster than ever
If there is anything we can take away from the past year or two’s worth of NBA transactions, it’s that franchises are feeling the urgency to optimize shorter windows. The implementations of the salary-cap aprons have made the most glittery forms of continuity almost prohibitive.
We know the Boston Celtics are eventually going to break up. The Los Angeles Clippers dissolved their own Big Three last summer (and are apparently better off for it). The Phoenix Suns attempted to disprove the inflexibility of #ApronLife, only to implode. Memphis and Denver both jettisoned accomplished coaches at bizarre and inopportune times in the face of increasingly expensive cores.
Urgency is the prevailing theme in today’s NBA. The Knicks are not immune. They have deeper pockets than others, but nobody is above the roster-building restrictions inherent of expensive teams with limited to no draft assets.
This is not a prediction, just a PSA
None of this is meant to predict the Knicks will show Thibodeau the door. We need to see how far they go in the playoffs first, and what they look like while doing it. Even then, in the event they disappoint, the extent to which players go to bat for Thibs will matter.
So, too, will the fact that New York has taken three massive swings on the trade market since late-December 2023. Overhauls seldom culminate in a title during that initial full season. Knicks president Leon Rose will surely take this into account.
But to declare Thibs unequivocally safe ignores reality.
Lofty expectations foment pressure. That pressure, at this level, has a way of reducing success down to a binary proposition: Did you win a title this year or not?
In Thibs’ case, the bar may be lower. By how much, though? Well, unless the Knicks make the NBA Finals, we’re about to find out.
Fortunately for them, and unlike L.A., they don’t need a Doncic-level blockbuster to vault them into title-contention ranks. They may already be there.
Dan Favale is a Senior NBA Contributor for FanSided and National NBA Writer for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Bluesky (@danfavale), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, co-hosted by Bleacher Report's Grant Hughes.