When should you fire your coach?
The Knicks just had their best season in 25 years. Then they fired Tom Thibodeau. Does that make any sense?
While I’ve become a huge New York Knicks fan, I never got over my skepticism about the team’s chance of reaching the NBA Finals — let alone actually winning their first title since 1973. I thought the Pistons would be a tough out, and they were. I did like Knicks’ odds against the Celtics — and even placed some small wagers along those lines — but that’s the whole point of odds. (If you’re getting 6.6-to-1, you only have to be right 14 percent of the time to turn a profit.) I wasn’t quite sure what to make of their matchup against the Pacers. But between losing the tactical battle — the Pacers controlled the pace — and a devastating collapse in Game 1, the series immediately became uphill. And if the Knicks had survived Indiana, they were probably a sitting duck for the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Overall, the Knicks’ performance has been in line with reasonable expectations, with an emphasis on the word “reasonable”. Talent-wise, they’re probably something like the 4th or 5th best team in the NBA. (I’ll attempt to quantify this in a moment.) You’d expect such a team to be one of the four conference finalists roughly once every other season. That’s exactly what the Knicks did, losing to Indiana in the conference semifinals in Game 7 last year amidst a series of injuries, but then advancing to the Eastern Conference Finals (but again losing to Indy) this year.
I suspect when Knicks fans look back on this era in 10 years, they’ll remember it warmly. But unless they cash in over the next couple of seasons, a decade from now is about when the Knicks might be competitive again. They’ve plundered their draft capital to build a good team. Perhaps a very good team, even. But certainly not a great one.
The Knicks made an unusual move. But that doesn’t make it wrong.
On Tuesday, the Knicks fired their head coach, Tom Thibodeau, the only one among the 13 Knicks coaches since Jeff Van Gundy abruptly resigned in 2002 to post a winning record in the playoffs. Only 3 of the other 12 even coached a single playoff game. While you can cherry-pick some optimistic exceptions — Bill Simmons cited the Warriors replacing Mark Jackson with Steve Kerr in 2014 — it’s pretty unusual to dismiss a coach amid a rising tide. Particularly after he beats the fucking Celtics.
And yet, the move probably makes sense. If James Dolan had texted me and asked for my opinion, I’d have demurred. I think it’s a close enough call that my lack of inside knowledge about Thibs’ relationships with the players and the Knicks’ offseason plans would render my opinion more noise than signal. But if there had been some sort of incentive for giving my most honest answer — courtside seats next to Spike? — I’d have been a reluctant member of Team Fire Thibs.
Outside of HR violations, there are basically three reasons to fire a coach. One is for tactical misexecution, the nominal purpose of the coach’s job. The second is for the failure to adequately develop players or realize their full talent. And the third is just to mix things up: to introduce variance.
Often, this last reason is just a lame excuse: you can’t fire the owner, the current CBA makes it hard to fire the players, and so a general manager sometimes uses his first-mover advantage to fire a coach so that he doesn’t get fired himself. (I know most of you aren’t hockey fans, but see, for instance, this year’s New York Rangers.) But at other times, it can be a reasonable tiebreaker, particularly in the NBA, where it’s really hard to win a title unless you have OKC-level talent. And I’d argue this is one of those times for the Knicks. However, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Reason #1 to fire a coach: tactics
I’m not really an X’s-and-O’s type of NBA fan, but I know the Knicks well enough to know that outside of some minor stuff — minor stuff like coaches’ challenge strategy and fouling when up 3 points that happened to be highly pertinent in Game 1 against Indiana — the bill of tactical complaints about Thibs is basically two items long.
The first complaint is that Thibs overtaxes his starters. In the past regular season, Josh Hart ranked first in the league at 37.6 minutes per game, Mikal Bridges was 3rd (37.0), OG Anunoby was 5th (36.6), Jalen Brunson was 14th (35.4), and Karl-Anthony Towns was 20th (35.0). Bridges and Hart are famously durable players, but clearly, Thibs is bucking a leaguewide trend toward playing your starters less often.
It’s not entirely straightforward to determine whether this is a mistake. In principle, it’s an empirical question. It certainly presents some player development challenges: if young Knicks like Tyler Kolek or Pacôme Dadiet are any good, we’d have no way to know because they played so rarely. And one probably ought to have a wisdom-of-crowds prior that deviating from the consensus strategy is wrong more often than not. And in this particular case, it doesn’t help Thibs that this exact 5-man lineup that was played so heavily — Brunson-Bridges-Anunoby-Hart-Towns — was not especially effective, to the point where he abandoned it against Indy.1
And yet, the Knicks are thin, and there’s a certain caveman logic to “play good players more often.” I’d bet against this, but if the stathead conventional wisdom shifts over the next decade to thinking players are too coddled — elite starting pitchers are removed too early, NFL teams should ride All-Pro running backs instead of sticking them in platoons, and superstar NBA players should average high-30s MPGs instead of low-to-mid 30s — it won’t entirely surprise me. So this is a strike against Thibs, but not a decisive one.
The other main line of complaint is that the Knicks’ offense is stale and lacks a higher gear. And here I’m less sympathetic to Thibodeau. The Knicks ranked 5th in the league in offensive efficiency this year, which is perfectly fine if you also have an elite defense — but the Knicks don’t, ranking tied for 13th.
As I discussed in my previous Knicks piece, the team can be astonishingly effective with their backs to the wall late in the shot clock, with Brunson often pulling a rabbit out of his hat. But these possessions are only effective on a relative basis: the best late-possession offenses (last year, the Knicks and the Suns) are still generating fairly putrid offensive efficiency as compared to getting a shot off early, or at least giving yourself the optionality to use all 24 seconds, as Indiana does. The Knicks aren’t a particularly young team, but they aren’t an old one either. They’d likely be more effective with more ball movement, seeking out mismatches, and then using the rabbit-out-of-your-hat-Brunson-7-second-offense as their ace in the hole if nothing better develops.
What sort of shots should they be looking for? Well, Towns, one of the best-shooting big men of all time, attempted just 6.7 3-pointers per 100 possessions this year, his lowest total since 2019, despite shooting 42 percent from long range. The Knicks almost certainly aren’t tapping into this enough. And Bridges often felt like an afterthought, a luxury item that the Knicks paid dearly for. Brunson averaged a 26-and-7 line (points and assists) last year. That’s good, but the Knicks would probably be better if he weren’t pounding the ball so much and posting a 23-and-9 line instead.
So overall, I judge Thibodeau to be guilty of poor tactical execution.
Reason #2 to fire a coach: player development
As an on-and-off NBA bettor — my attempt to take NBA betting seriously is described in On the Edge2 — I’ve learned to trust the “eye test” to some degree. Are you a believer in a team’s high-end talent, or are they the next iteration of the 2015 Atlanta Hawks? Or failing that, executing some sort of extraordinary system that reliably maximizes merely good talent? The eye test is annoyingly subjective, but as I’ve become a more seasoned bettor, I’ve come to think it’s usually a mistake to round down a subjective assumption down to zero.
So say you escape from Plato’s Cave, but somehow possessed of prescient and up-to-date knowledge of the National Basketball Association, and are told that the current Knicks’ roster consists of Brunson, Towns, Bridges, Anunoby, Hart, Mitchell Robinson and Deuce McBride, and then what’s at best some unproven flotsam-and-jetsam beyond that. What would you expect such a team’s regular season and playoff record to be?
Well, Vegas put the Knicks’ over-under at 53.5 wins to start the season. And then they won 51 games. So somewhere in that range feels about right.
But here’s a more rigorous approach that I used in my Future of the Franchise rankings. Mostly, the NBA is a star-driven league; to win a title, you usually need a top 5 player, or failing that two to three players in the top 10 to 20. And then you want to surround them with minor stars and elite role players that fit well with the core. There are perhaps 100 players in the league at any given time that really add to a franchise’s championship equity. Conveniently, The Ringer routinely updates a Top 100 player list, which I have my disagreements with3 but reflects a nice balance between a more stats-driven approach and a well-informed version of the conventional wisdom.
So my system, which I’ll call Talent Points, applies a steeply sliding scale. For example4:
The #1 player in the league (currently Nikola Jokic) is worth 100 points
The #10 player (Brunson before the playoffs began) is worth 56
And the 100th-best player (Bradley Beal) is worth 8.
Here’s how every team’s Talent Points as of the end of the regular season5 compared against their regular season win total: