Knicks

lawmanfan said:
Spo is the one coach who is an inarguable upgrade from Thibs.

Hiring a college coach would be an enormous mistake.

I like Malone but there is no good argument that he is an upgrade from Thibs.

And I love the "hit his ceiling" argument. Hit his ceiling with what, the roster the front office put together by changing 40% of the starting lineup at the beginning of this season, supplementing with a one-deep bench, and giving up essentially all of their future draft capital that might have produced useful bench players?

If folks don't see this more as a front office failure than a coaching failure then we are watching different games. This team consistently produced out of timeouts, consistently won close games, and consistently came back from deficits that a lot of teams would have quit on. The lineup and rotations got changed against Indy when they needed to after a starting unit that was consistently poor all season finally got exposed in THE CONFERENCE CHAMPIONSHIP round where they haven't been in 25 years, and if it were not for a Game 1 loss because Aaron Nesmith went NBA-Jam "he's on fire!" and Halliburton got a lucky bounce then on Thursday it would be them instead of Indy with the chance to lose to OKC in 5 games.

IMHO Thibs was an enormous factor in how this team got as far as it did, and in the end his undoing was the roster construction which is not on him.

EDIT: And what will happen next year is that Towns will be gone and if the team wins folks will say "yeah, it's because Thibs hit his ceiling and X took them farther" as opposed to saying "gee it's a shame that they saddled Thibs with the worst defensive big in the league and he didn't have this roster instead."
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What LMF said!

Brandon Tierney is so so wrong with his take that Thibs is to blame.
 
While Thibs certainly has his flaws with riding guys too long with a somewhat indifferent attitude on using his bench, what happened in the Pacers series was not a failure on the coach. The Knicks lost to a deeper team that had more ways to beat you than this Knick roster did. Period. The Knick roster, while talented, is top heavy, lacks depth and the pieces don't all fit together. As Thibs didn't have final say on personnel acquisitions, that responsibility falls on Leon Rose.

Whomever takes over as coach will inherit the same issues - two negative defensive players on the court at the same time, and those two players didn't mesh offensively as well as hoped. They also have to live with the inconsistency on the offensive end of both Bridges and Anunoby, and a lack of juice coming from the bench for energy if not rest for the starters. I don't know that a better coach is available on the market, but unless there are some roster changes to make this team deeper and more cohesive on both ends of the floor, I don't know how they expect to beat Indiana or Cleveland next year.

I hope to be proven wrong. Thank you Thibs for restoring credibility on the basketball court to this franchise, and making the last four years of Knick basketball enjoyable again.
 
NCJohnnie said:
Disagree with this. This is a Rose decision imho.
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Gently and politely disagree.

Dolan was pissed that the team lost to a team many, if not most, thought they could beat in Indy.

Rose (I think) was Thibs agent at one time and hired Thibs. He's a Thibs guy.

Apparently Dolan wanted Thibs gone last year (maybe even the year before) and Rose resisted, and got Thibs an extension deserved IMO.

This year he couldn't save him.

Dolan for years before Rose was a tempestuous, meddling, nepo-Baby (baby with a Capital "B")-owner. to wit:. Isiah, Jeff Hornacek, Phil Jackson, Derek Fisher, David Fizdale, Mike Miller, Kurt Rambis, Mike Woodson, Larry Brown, Herb Williams.

I'm afraid JD is returning to his former ways. When his celebrity friends couldn't get their front row seats to the Finals, he got embarrassed and pissed. Sorry Ben Stiller and Mariska Hargitay and Edie Falco.

I agree with LMF, this was a poorly conceived roster, with multiple defensive liabilities, and Thibs did the best he could with the players he was given. Watch, the next to go will be Rose ('26 or '27) because that is Dolan's M.O. It's in his D.N.A.

********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Thibs led the Knicks to back-to-back 50-win seasons and their first Eastern Conference Finals appearance since 2000.

The Knicks had their most successful stretch in more than 20 years under Thibodeau, missing the postseason just one time and going 226-174 in the regular season. He was named the NBA's Coach of the Year in 2020-21 after taking the team to the playoffs for the first time in seven years.
 
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Don't really know how I feel about Thibs firing. I guess a lot of it will come down to who they get to replace him.

But my take on NBA coaches is that they don't matter nearly as much as college coaches. If you go through NBA history, the teams who get over the hump... the overwhelming majority of the time have a top 5 player in the league, or multiple top 15 guys in the league. The Knicks don't have that unfortunately. We have Brunson who is probably hovering right around top 15 in the league (but is also a bit of a defensive liability) and then a handful of guys who are very good but not truly great. It is not to say that the coach doesn't matter, they do, but there's just a cap on how much it matters.

I echo the sentiment of others who feel more strongly about the team having issues with its construction. As I mentioned last week during the Indy series, the Mikal trade is a fork in the road moment for the franchise that I think may have been a crucial error. Star players get unhappy all the time in this league, nowadays the players have more power than ever, if you are the Knicks, I just think if you're parting ways with that many first round picks, you need to be doing it to get a top 15 player, preferably a top 10 guy. Mikal was not that. Even at his best he isn't quite that.

So now, the picks are gone, you basically have to pay Mikal his extension or else you're the team who gave away 5 first rounders for a rental. It just hamstrings the whole roster in a really unfortunate way.

Which is why I think the front office came to the conclusion that they are going to run it back with this team, try to expand the bench with some smaller moves this offseason, and bring in a coach who they believe can develop the bench throughout the regular season. They decided Thibs wasn't going to be that guy. I can wrap my head around that. I guess. But to be honest I feel like this Bridges deal might have hurt our short term ability to put ourselves in the drivers seat in the East, regardless of coach.
 
The Knicks organization is its usual bogus self. Thibs was a fine coach who got them to a level they had not made in decades and with the right trades would have brought them to the next step. The Knicks biggest issue was that their bench was weak which is why their starters logged so many minutes.

Hard to root for a team whose braintrust makes so many bad decisions.
 
Silly Donovan said:
The Knicks organization is its usual bogus self. Thibs was a fine coach who got them to a level they had not made in decades and with the right trades would have brought them to the next step. The Knicks biggest issue was that their bench was weak which is why their starters logged so many minutes.

Hard to root for a team whose braintrust makes so many bad decisions.
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Silly not at all hard for me to root for the Knicks right now. Was it hard for me to root for them in the Carmelo Anthony and Phil Jackson years - absolutely, just like it was hard for me to root for the Johnniesnin the Norm Roberts years or the Yankees in the 1980s.
But these Knicks are easy to root for. I have very mixed (mostly negative) feelings about the Thibs firing but I can understand it and most importantly the Knicks are relevant again. So as a long time Knick fan, I am ok.
 
NCJohnnie said:
Silly not at all hard for me to root for the Knicks right now. Was it hard for me to root for them in the Carmelo Anthony and Phil Jackson years - absolutely, just like it was hard for me to root for the Johnniesnin the Norm Roberts years or the Yankees in the 1980s.
But these Knicks are easy to root for. I have very mixed (mostly negative) feelings about the Thibs firing but I can understand it and most importantly the Knicks are relevant again. So as a long time Knick fan, I am ok.
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And who made the Knicks relevant again? Thibs had them progressing each year and with the right moves may have had them in the finals with a chance to win next year.

Were you also a Knicks fan when they foolishly passed on Ron Artest for Frederick Weis?
 
Silly Donovan said:
And who made the Knicks relevant again? Thibs had them progressing each year and with the right moves may have had them in the finals with a chance to win next year.

Were you also a Knicks fan when they foolishly passed on Ron Artest for Frederick Weis?
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Yes and many years before that back to 1966.
 
I'm thinking big huge picture here: I want a great coach to take over when Pitino retires. That's why I'd be good with Hurley getting Knick job and getting fired in four years.
 
lawmanfan said:
So these people seriously fired Thibs without a plan. Has Dolan written all over it.

www.cbssports.com

Knicks coaching rumors: Two current coaches draw interest as New York moves on from Tom Thibodeau, per report

Whether those teams will be willing to let their coaches interview with the Knicks is another story
www.cbssports.com www.cbssports.com
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Since I am banging the drum loudly as pro-Rose, I would not read into any of this because Rose never speaks to the media, and they are just throwing fake news against the wall.

This goes with my continued belief that the decision was all Rose. He did not have to fire Thibs to keep his job. He can return to repping and earn more money than he is making as a basketball executive.
 
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