Previewing the Knicks' inevitable Tom Thibodeau hiring

Photo credit: Tom_Thibodeau.jpg: Keith Allison from Owings Mills, USAderivative work: Chrishmt0423 / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)

Against all odds and maybe conventional medical wisdom, we’ve got basketball again!

Congratulations to the 22 eligible teams, who head to Orlando for what’s likely to be an insanely odd Thunderdome-style end to this postponed season. Further congrats to the 8 eliminated squads, who avoid meaningless games but can always point back to getting excluded from this as the reason why 2020-21 went so poorly for them.

One of those eliminated squads? The moribund, perpetually inept New York Knicks.

Why do I say inept?

The Knicks somehow managed to bungle a “anti-racism” corporate statement. This franchise, so petty that they’ve issued press releases on feuds with Spike Lee and jokes by Richard Jefferson, can’t work up the courage to denounce racism, police brutality, and inequality in a statement.

Don’t do that! Take this time to listen thoughtfully and support actively. If, like me, you’re looking for how to best help: I thought this piece from Vox offered a great roadmap from black activists and leaders on how to be a useful and thoughtful ally right now, and this powerful video from Emmanuel Acho is the first in a series on this very topic.

There’s a ton of organizations that are doing great work like Color of Change that are well-worth your donations.

These same Knicks now look to hire their newest coach after firing David Fizdale mid-season. They reportedly have Tom Thibodeau at the top of their coaching candidate list.

No stat nerd will ever need to translate Knicks production into per-36 numbers if Thibodeau gets the job.

Thibodeau, last seen coaching the 2018-19 Minnesota Timberwolves, carries a reputation for hard-nosed defense, success with the early 2010s Bulls, and…running his star players into the ground with insane workloads.

Per Basketball Reference, a Thibodeau player finished in the NBA top three in minutes per game in all but one of his seasons as a head coach. For four consecutive seasons from 2011 to 2015, his players led or tied for the league-lead in that year.

His players hold five of the top fifteen minutes per game seasons in this time-frame, highlighted below in orange.

You may notice Luol Deng and Jimmy Butler popping up multiple times. Both players saw their careers, production, and accolades dramatically improve under Thibodeau’s guidance, but they also had to play ungodly amounts of minutes every night. Deng went back-to-back seasons with over 39 minutes a game, while Butler put up nearly the same totals in 2013-14 and 2014-15.

Look at the sheer number of 40+ nights Deng faced in 2011-12 alone.

You might be saying “you only made this graph to write The Denger Zone."

You would be right.

In an era of load management and thoughtful analysis around workload and mitigating risk, Thibodeau must resist his archaic insistence on only playing his starters.

RJ Barrett and Mitchell Robinson, get your ice ready

I had this assumption that Thibodeau exclusively played Taj Gibson at the expense of every young prospect—around here we call that the Mike Miller special—so I pulled the minute allocation from Basketball Reference for every Thibodeau team based on three age buckets.

The buckets break out players under 25, 25-30, and the old vets above 31. With the majority of the core Knicks players under 25, I was curious to see if Thibodeau had any experience playing and cultivating young talent.

While he barely played younger guys during his tenure as the head coach of the Bulls—Derrick Rose took up most of the early season share as an under-25 player—Thibodeau showed a change in perspective once he took over the rebuilding Minnesota Timberwolves.

In fact, he over-indexed in minutes allocated to young guys compared to rough estimations of league averages.

This shift in philosophy bodes well for the young Knicks, and while some of his hand might have been forced with the Wolves roster, he still resisted the impulse to bench all the prospects.

Did these young players develop?

Minutes are one thing, but I’m curious if these players improved under Thibodeau’s tutelage. Per Basketball Reference, I found four players who played at least three seasons in a row for Thibodeau, with their first year coming under age 24, and looked at how their PER changed year-to-year. PER isn’t perfect, but for our purposes, it will help isolate any major changes in performance.

None of the three showed sustained improvement, with Andrew Wiggins actually demonstrating a consistent decline over three years under Thibodeau. Karl-Anthony Towns entered the league as a productive star and remained at that level, but didn’t take the leap.

To be fair to Thibodeau, in Jimmy Butler’s fourth season, his PER skyrocketed from 13.5 to 21.3. Butler’s the clearest example of a young player cultivating and growing under Thibodeau’s leadership, but there seem to be few other examples to support the idea he’s ideal for a developing squad like the Knicks.

Has anything changed in 2020?

Thibodeau claims now—while unemployed and job hunting—that he’s a changed man. Mike Vorkunov’s great overview in The Athletic analyzes a variety of ways that a Thibodeau hire would play out for the Knicks, and includes a brief recap of a talk Thibodeau gave at the Sloan analytics conference.

The whole article is worth a read, but this part stuck out to me:

This sounds less like a man changed and more like an interviewing candidate bullshitting his way through a problematic gap in his resume. Look at his comments in 2018, after yet another NBA scribe called him out on his brutal workloads for his starters.

Steve Aschburner’s piece highlights the minute allocation for the Minnesota Timberwolves starters at that time, and frames Thibodeau’s inability to adjust to modern rotations as a willful disregarding of conventional wisdom.

Aschburner writes:

Dismissing scientific and medical evidence of your wrongdoing behind a flimsy “just win” mindset, with minimal examples of cultivating young talent?

He really would be the perfect Knicks coach.