Léon Rose has a few tasks ahead of him over the coming months. There’s the impending free agency of OG Anunoby and Isaiah Hartenstein. There’s Jalen Brunson, now eligible for an extension at max price. And as has been the case since he took over the Knicks, there is the underlying question of identifying and acquiring the Next Piece, at a time when the Knicks are ideally equipped to do so.
There is something else too.
Before he does anything else, he needs to extend Tom Thibodeau, who has one year left on his contract. Rose must do this both to reward what Thibodeau has already done – three playoff appearances and two series wins in the last four years, after 20 years of five playoff appearances and one series win – and to solidify that part of the company’s organizational chart. for the immediate future.
We know what the coach’s position is on this subject.
“That’s something my agent will take care of,” Thibodeau said Sunday afternoon when asked about his impending discussions with Rose. “The Knicks have been great to me. This is where I want to be.
And there’s no indication that Thibodeau’s bosses feel any less committed to him, too. Thibodeau is 66, but he’s an energetic 66. By adding three or four years to what he has left, he will reach 70 years old. By then, he might be ready to return to the beach and recreate the image that caused so much buzz on the Internet last week.
And by then, maybe the Knicks will get to where everyone wants them to be. If they get there, with this core, it will be thanks to the foundation created by Thibodeau.
“To me, what’s crazy is the idea that there’s even anything resembling a debate on this topic,” a longtime NBA insider told me Monday. “I don’t feel like there’s a lot of that going on internally. But you hear things about Tom, all the usual things, and you just want to scream: How did things go under the previous dozen coaches? Look at the Lakers, man. Look at the Suns. Look at all these franchises desperate for real leadership.
“And with the Knicks, you have players literally willing to run through a wall for their coach. In the NBA? In 2024? I mean, when do you see this? Never? And there are people who criticize him? Really?”
The truth is that there is a large, silent majority of Knicks fans who remember what it was like in the wilderness years connecting December 9, 2001 – the day Jeff Van Gundy resigned from the Knicks – and the July 30, 2020 – 6,808 days during which the Knicks were among the most deplorable franchises in North American sports.
The relevant numbers: 585 (wins), 863 (losses) and 13 (coaches who tried to coach the Knicks and with one outlier – Mike Woodson – failed miserably).
The detractors? Invariably, the conversation returns to one topic: Thibodeau’s alleged insistence on playing his players to the brink of exhaustion. It’s something that has persisted this year despite the awkward fact that in the regular season, the Knicks had none of the top 13 players in terms of average workload and only two – Jalen Brunson and Julius Randle – in the top 50 .
Did those minutes increase once the injuries started and then once the playoffs started?
Of course they did.
But here are two things to ponder for members of the activist force that Thibodeau half-jokingly calls the “minute police”:
1. The Knicks barely outlasted the 76ers in the first round – remember, the point differential after six games was exactly one point – and that’s with guys like Brunson, Josh Hart and Donte DiVincenzo recording more huge minutes. So the ideal solution is to play fewer minutes and win fewer games? And maybe not win a winnable series? Is this really where we have arrived now?
2. In these same circles, the Knicks were criticized for playing hard enough to earn the No. 2 seed, even winning in overtime in Game 82. Guess what? If the Knicks had finished with the No. 3 seed, they would have played the Pacers a round earlier. And if you choose to argue that they would have been better off, then their second-round opponent would have been either Philly — with a more fully healed Joel Embiid — or Milwaukee, with Giannis Antetokounmpo returned to health.
The facts are the facts: The Knicks won 50 and a playoff series and reached Game 7 thanks to a team-wide code — installed by Thibodeau — that forbade them from feeling sorry for themselves. The work he did was, in the opinion of many people who know coaching, the best he has ever done, and he already has two Coach of the Year plaques.
Rose has been nothing but a sober analyst and evaluator of the Knicks’ strengths and weaknesses since he took over, and so he’s unlikely to get caught up in his stupidity. He knows what he has in Thibodeau. It stands to reason that he’s going to lock him up. All he has to do is do it.
New York Post
