Knicks brass may have felt Tom Thibodeau left money on the table in the playoffs, but firing him is a major gamble

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Mere minutes after the end of the New York Knicks’ 2024-25 season, Tom Thibodeau laid out the path forward.

“Like you would do after every season, you take a step back, I think, decompress,” Thibodeau said following the Pacers’ 125-108 win in Game 6 of the 2025 Eastern Conference finals on Saturday — a victory that sent Indiana to the NBA Finals for the first time in a quarter-century and sent New York into a summer of uncertainty. “You do a deep dive on the team, and then, you analyze what you think you need to improve upon.”

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Evidently, Knicks president Leon Rose didn’t need to take a step back. Didn’t need time to decompress. He’d already “conducted meetings with select players, Thibodeau, and some of his staff this week to assess the season,” according to SNY’s Ian Begley, had already performed the autopsy on the 2024-25 Knicks … and his analysis of what the franchise needed to improve upon pointed first to the sideline.

That the Knicks fired Thibodeau on Tuesday, just three days after the end of his team’s season, is shocking. But it’s also not surprising.

It’s shocking because of what Thibodeau had achieved since taking the reins in New York in the summer of 2020. Four winning seasons in five years — the first time the Knicks have managed that in more than two decades. Four playoff series wins — three more than the franchise had seen in the previous 20 years. Back-to-back 50-win seasons for the first time since 1994 and 1995, capped by a conference finals berth — New York’s first since 2000, when Thibodeau was an assistant under Jeff Van Gundy.

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“I mentioned the job that Thibs has done there — you know, he’s just turned the culture completely,” Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle said after the Game 6 win. “Flipped from what it was.”

The Knicks knocked off the defending champion Celtics in the second round — a series roughly zero people outside of Madison Square Garden predicted they’d win, present company very much included — thanks in part to Thibodeau shifting his base defense, moving from drop coverage in the pick-and-roll to a more switch-heavy scheme that bogged down heavily favored Boston’s offense. They were an Aaron Nesmith out-of-body experience away from a 1-0 lead in a series in which they had home-court advantage. When they went down 2-0, they didn’t roll over; they got off the mat, stealing Game 3 in Indiana and winning Game 5 back home to extend the series, thanks partly to some mid-series rotation and defensive adjustments by Thibodeau.

All that coming after two massive offseason trades, one of which came on the literal eve of training camp, and with center Mitchell Robinson — a huge piece of the defense-and-rebounding identity that Thibodeau had installed over the years — missing nearly 80% of the season constituted a pretty reasonable argument for staying the course. Giving Thibodeau a full offseason and training camp to revisit and revise his plan of attack for a roster that would enter next season with the benefit of continuity — much like the Pacers team that just eliminated them, one year after falling short in the conference finals following a huge trade for an All-Star power forward — seemed a sensible course of action, not least of which to New York’s superstar point guard and captain:

So, yes: shocking … but not surprising, if you’ve been paying attention over the past few months.

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The Knicks finished the regular season fifth in offensive efficiency, but that mark was buoyed heavily by a roaring start to the season. From Jan. 1 on, New York went 28-21 with the NBA’s 14th-ranked offense and 16th-ranked defense. An attack that had opened the season roasting teams behind the two-man game of Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns found itself defanged whenever opponents cross-matched a wing defender onto Towns and a center onto inconsistent shooter Josh Hart.

The tactical shift effectively vaporized what had been one of the most efficient offensive actions in the NBA, and New York never really developed a counterpunch — a long-gestating problem that burst into full view in Game 2 of the first round, when Towns went without a field-goal attempt in the final 17 minutes of a dispiriting loss to the Pistons. In many ways, the first-round matchup with Detroit represented a snapshot of the Knicks’ season on the whole: more wins than losses, but often arrived at in underwhelming fashion, with occasional bursts of brilliance and incredible shot-making bailing out arrhythmic offense, shaky defense, at-times head-scratching decision-making … and a starting lineup that just didn’t work the way it was supposed to.

New York’s high-priced and highly touted starting five — Brunson, Towns, Hart, Mikal Bridges and OG Anunoby — struggled mightily for months, getting outscored by 59 points in 687 combined regular- and postseason minutes from New Year’s Day through Game 2 of the conference finals. Thibodeau continued to stick with it, though, playing it more than any other coach played any other unit in the NBA during the regular- and postseason … until, in a 2-0 hole, Hart went to the head coach and suggested he come off the bench to shake things up.

That move, and the timing of it, gets to the heart of the divide in how both Thibodeau’s season and his ouster are viewed — a question of process vs. results.

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Yes, Thibodeau did lean heavily into the star players Rose gave him … but he also oversaw an offensive infrastructure in which this collective of shooters somehow produced a bottom-five 3-point attempt rate. Yes, Thibodeau did scrap drop coverage and institute switching for the Boston series … but only after virtually never doing it in games during the regular season and not giving his players a chance to get reps and familiarity with the approach before deploying it in the highest-leverage moment of the season. Yes, Thibodeau did change the underperforming starting lineup and extend his rotation against Indiana … but only once the Knicks were down 2-0 and in danger of seeing their season effectively ended.

And while Thibodeau did eventually assent to changing the starting lineup, he did so by inserting the 7-foot Robinson into the starting lineup next to Towns — and, notably, not by replacing the shaky-shooting Hart with reserve guard Miles “Deuce” McBride, a more willing and able 3-point shooter who could allow New York to field a full-fledged five-out lineup.

Those sorts of alignments — the space they could create in the half-court, the firepower they could allow the Knicks to put on the floor — were presumably what Rose and Co. had in mind when they pulled the trigger on the Towns blockbuster. But Thibodeau evidently never felt comfortable leaning in that direction, perhaps due to concerns about the defensive limitations of a unit featuring two 6-foot-2 guards. All told, he played the Brunson-KAT-OG-Bridges quartet with McBride for just 49 total minutes across 100 total games.

That kind of rotation management — running the Brunson-KAT combo out there with at least one non-shooter for roughly 95% of their total floor time, scarcely ever experimenting to gauge the benefits of a five-out attack, leaning on Hart, Bridges and Anunoby for top-of-the-league minute totals rather than exploring what reserves like McBride, Landry Shamet and Delon Wright (all of whom made valuable contributions when given the opportunity in the playoffs) — seemed to run counter to the theory of the team that Rose provided Thibodeau. And it worked! New York won 51 games and two playoff series.

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What Tuesday’s decision makes clear, though, is that Knicks brass — and it’s notable that, according to multiple reports, it was Rose, not James Dolan, who chose to swing the axe, though the Knicks’ owner signed off on the move — had come to believe New York won those games and series despite the team not being played as it was designed.

“With the Knicks,” Begley wrote Sunday, “the evaluation will be made with clear criteria: Does this help us win an NBA championship?”

If Rose had come to the conclusion Thibodeau had gotten the Knicks as close to the promised land as he was going to, then Tuesday’s decision was the only logical one for him to make. We’ve seen multiple championship-winning head coaches go on the chopping block in the last few seasons; if the guy who takes you all the way there can get got, then so can the one who gets you to the doorstep but no further.

And so, Rose — who has built a track record of quickly pivoting off the mistakes he’s made during his front office tenure (see: flipping Kemba Walker into the cap space to sign Brunson, turning Cam Reddish into Hart) — wasted no time, opting for a clean break and an immediate reset for an organization that he said in a team statement “is singularly focused on winning a championship for our fans.”

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The speed with which Rose hit the reset button and opted to move on from the fourth-winningest coach in franchise history would seem to suggest he has a plan of action and perhaps a preferred candidate in mind — one better suited to maximize a Towns-centric version of the roster, get more out of the rest of the rotation and make changes a beat early rather than two beats late.

It’ll be fascinating to see who Rose and Co. think can give the Knicks their version of the Mark Jackson-to-Steve Kerr, David Blatt-to-Tyronn Lue, Dwane Casey-to-Nick Nurse boost. No matter who steps into Thibodeau’s spot on the sideline, though, there’s something to be said for sticking with the devil you know over the devil you don’t; the Knicks are pretty obviously taking a gigantic risk here. Just ask the Bulls and Timberwolves how easy it is to replicate Thibs-level success once he’s left the facility; “the team just needs a new voice and a fresh set of offensive ideas” might get you Kerr, but it might also get you Fred Hoiberg.

As head-spinning as it is to see Thibodeau go from two wins from the Finals to (admittedly very gainfully) unemployed in less than 72 hours, this is the way of the ever-accelerating NBA world. It’s an environment in which making major roster-restructuring deals becomes increasingly complicated as high-spending teams run afoul of the first- and second-apron restrictions instituted in the most recent collective bargaining agreement, in which championship-contending windows seem to start closing as soon as they’re pried open — and in which team decision-makers find themselves not having a moment to waste when it comes to exhausting every option available to them to make it reach through that window and grab the Larry O’Brien Trophy before it slams shut.

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Those new realities can lead team decision-makers to a grimly familiar course of action, the determination the Knicks arrived at Tuesday, like so many other teams over the years: It’s easier to change the coach than it is the players.

It’s easier, but not always better. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side of a change like the one the Knicks made Tuesday. They clearly feel Thibodeau left money on the table with the way he coached the team as currently constructed and believe his successor will be able to pick it all up and push them all the way to an NBA championship. That’s the thing about wagers, though, even calculated ones: When you scrap what you’ve got in pursuit of greater gains, you might soon find yourself realizing you’ve lost an awful lot in the bargain.

“Oftentimes, these things come down to one or two possessions, and that’s why everything does matter,” Thibodeau said after losing Game 6 to Indiana. “How you practice matters. How you work on your free throws matter. How you concentrate on a scouting report matters. How you concentrate in a film session matters. … A big part of mental toughness is always to have the belief that you can do something better. Even if you’re doing something well.”

For the last half-decade, the Knicks have been doing something well; to get where they want to go, they need to do it better, and they’ve decided that means getting someone else to do it. The Knicks returned to NBA relevance on the strength of Thibodeau’s unshakable, bone-deep belief that the magic is in the work. The hope is they can find other, untapped sources of magic. The fear is that once Thibs walks out the door, the magic goes with him.

This news was originally published on this post .

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