After Thibodeau refused to change his ways, it’s possible New York could look for someone more like the coach who beat him, Rick Carlisle, in their coaching search.
Tom Thibodeau was easily the most successful head coach the New York Knicks employed in decades.
His tough-minded, no-nonsense style meshed well with a gritty club led by an unexpected ascendant superstar in Jalen Brunson, who would seemingly go to any length to win. In 2023, he led New York to its first playoff win in 10 years. This year, the Knicks went on their first conference finals run in a quarter century. Before Thibs guided the team to four winning seasons in his five years in charge, the Knicks had four winning seasons in the previous 20 years combined.
Knicks GM and President Leon Rose seemingly built a team in Thibodeau’s image after he won the NBA’s Coach of the Year award in his first season. After signing Brunson, trades for Josh Hart, OG Anunoby, and Mikal Bridges gave Thibs a dream quartet of gamers who would scrap and fight for every basket, every loose ball, every possession. Dealing for Karl-Anthony Towns, Rose’s former CAA client, was seen as the final piece of the puzzle who would ease Brunson’s scoring load and lead New York to its first championship in more than 50 years.
Yet, fractures and cracks in Rose’s vision began to show throughout the 2024-25 season, culminating in Thibodeau’s ouster on Tuesday, less than a year after signing a contract extension, which the Knicks still owe Thibs more than $30 million of. During that six-game conference finals loss to the Indiana Pacers, which also knocked New York out in last year’s conference semifinals, Indiana head coach Rick Carlisle has for years built his teams’ coaching styles and philosophies around the personnel he’d work with during a given year.
“In Detroit and Indiana, Carlisle’s teams were defined by their defense and were all about controlling the possession on offense,” Kevin Arnovitz wrote for ESPN in January 2013. “In Dallas, Carlisle went away from play-calling in favor of something that relied on more general principles — and the instincts of Jason Kidd and Dirk Nowitzki to put those principles into action. To the extent that there’s a commonality over the course of Carlisle’s career, it’s ‘find the right shot at the right time for the right guy.'”
When that column was published, Carlisle teams had reached the postseason 10 of his 11 years as head coach, including winning the 2010-11 championship with the Mavericks. From Chauncey Billups, Reggie Miller, and Nowitzki to Luka Dončić and Tyrese Haliburton, Carlisle was always flexible and malleable enough not to be wedded to one particular style but to cater his tactics to utilize best the talent he had at his disposal.
The current Indiana team dispatched the Knicks and reached the Finals for the first time since 2000, thanks to a free-flowing offense that has embraced randomness, multiple ball-handlers, and a rapid pace. The Pacers outwork and are more physical than their opponents while deploying a deep bench that broke their opponents’ will and spirit by attacking in relentless waves. Carlisle’s Pacers turned the conference finals into a track meet, wearing the Knicks down and bending their opponents to their will by dictating the style and speed that played into their hands.
It also perfectly accentuated Thibodeau’s flaws as a head coach and seemingly asked Rose a more immediate question of whether Thibs was the right man to bring the Knicks a title.
Thibodeau famously played his starters more minutes than any other coach in the league at every stop he had as a head coach in his career, from Jimmy Butler, Derrick Rose, and Joakim Noah in Chicago, to Butler and Towns in Minnesota, to Brunson and Towns in New York. All season, Thibs was notoriously reluctant to change the starting lineup or trust more than a few of his bench players, even during blowouts. While he was largely credited for a strong effort in a series win over the defending champion Boston Celtics, only when the Knicks dropped the first two games against Indiana did Thibodeau change the starting lineup and incorporate more bench players to keep up with the Pacers’ barrage of substitutions.
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As long as the Knicks were winning and surpassing expectations, Thibodeau’s flaws, notably his aversion to changing his coaching style, were always going to be overlooked. Perhaps Rose’s roster construction, which featured three strong defenders in Hart, Anunoby, and Bridges, and two porous ones in Brunson and Towns, doomed this team from the start. Carlisle and the Pacers mercilessly exploited Towns’ defensive deficiencies, hunting him whenever possible on switches and pick-and-rolls. But Towns has three more years and $118 million left on his contract, Bridges’ deal is up in a year, and it’s far easier to can a coach in the modern NBA than get rid of one or two of your franchise centerpieces.
James Dolan, Rose, and the Knicks clearly felt that Thibs — and not Towns — was the team’s biggest problem as they look for a new voice and new leadership to guide the team forward. And it’s no guarantee that this team remains the same; trading Julius Randle and Donte Divincenzo to Minnesota for Towns right before training camp last fall was evidence of that. Perhaps Thibodeau was always destined to be an antiquated relic, a stubborn coach in a players-first league that didn’t often listen to his players, is not exactly a stable recipe for longevity.
The Knicks’ next coaching hire will be their most important in a long time, one that can advance this team further with a more open mind suited to basketball’s modern era. New York would be better suited to hire someone like Carlisle, who tinkers and adjusts to the talent on hand, rather than someone who, while extremely successful at what he did, was ultimately too rigid to adjust to modern times.
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