Tom Thibodeau and the heavy-minute Knicks are at it again
BACK IN 2017, coming off a frustrating season in which his young Minnesota Timberwolves set a modern NBA record by blowing 22 double-digit leads, then-Wolves coach and team president Tom Thibodeau was crystal clear in diagnosing the issue.
“I went through [film of] those games, and it kept coming back to toughness,” Thibodeau said during that year’s media day. “A lot of what we were doing wasn’t tough enough. And this summer we wanted to change that.”
One of the quickest ways to increase the team’s toughness, Thibodeau suggested, was to infuse more of it into the roster. So despite a slew of teams leaning into the league’s load-management strategy to help keep their stars fresh for the postseason, the Wolves did the opposite. They cornered the market on a particular type of player.
“Last year, we had three of the 17 guys in the league who played in all 82 games. And we just added two more, Jamal [Crawford] and Jeff Teague, who played in all 82. So now we have five of the 17,” Thibodeau said, clearly proud of what the signings represented. “That’s important.”
Those pickups didn’t even include the additions of Jimmy Butler and Taj Gibson, rugged players who had appeared in all 82 games under Thibodeau once previously during their time with the Chicago Bulls.
Eight years later, with the Knicks, Thibodeau’s strategy remains. So has the debate that has followed the 67-year-old throughout his career.
Looking at this season, no team has played its bench less frequently or gotten less scoring production from its bench than the Knicks. And it’s been almost 40 years, dating back to the 1986-87 Boston Celtics, since a team that led the NBA in starters’ minutes reached the NBA Finals, according to ESPN Research.
The two-time Coach of the Year’s worldview concerning how heavily he relies on his best players is a polarizing subject for Knicks fans, even as Thibodeau, who on Tuesday tied Hall of Fame coach Pat Riley for fourth on the team’s all-time wins list, has helped shepherd the franchise’s most sustained run of success in a quarter century.
Thibodeau, whose 58% win percentage is the highest in NBA history among coaches to never reach the Finals, said he believes championship-caliber clubs need to establish a resolve and “mental discipline” throughout the season. But his demanding, win-at-all-costs mentality raises a key question that could determine his team’s ceiling and his future with the organization:
Will the heavy-minutes mindset burn out the Knicks for when they need an extra gear the most?
“I think everybody,” Thibodeau said last week, “has to run their own race.”
ANY OTHER TEAM, and the comments wouldn’t have prompted a second thought.
But in New York — where, for years, the starters have played far more minutes than any other teams, and where the club’s best players have been dinged up come playoff time — the reflections from Mikal Bridges, who leads the NBA in minutes and hasn’t missed a game in his seven-year career, were bound to cause a firestorm.
“Sometimes [it’s] not fun on the body,” Bridges told reporters in Portland last month. “We’ve got a good enough team where our bench guys can come in and we don’t need to play 48, 47 [minutes]. We’ve got a lot of good guys on this team that can take away the minutes, which helps the defense, helps the offense, helps tired bodies being out there.”
Ironically enough, the storyline simmered down by the end of that night when Bridges — in his 41st minute — hit a dramatic, buzzer-beating triple to knock off the Blazers in overtime. Still, it was noteworthy that a Knicks newcomer like Bridges would publicly voice the notion of potential overuse.
Even if other Knicks have avoided being as vocal as Bridges, there’s plenty to illustrate the team is an outlier when it comes to how much time its top players spend on the court each game.
When Jalen Brunson badly sprained his ankle in overtime against the Lakers nearly a month ago, the Knicks rostered three of the four highest minute-getters in the NBA: Bridges at No. 1, Josh Hart at No. 2 and Brunson at No. 4. Even after Brunson’s extended absence, the team’s starting five have logged 885 minutes together, 255 more than the next closest team.
Should Bridges and Hart finish first and second in the league in total minutes played, it would be the third time in Thibodeau’s coaching career — 2016-17 and 2020-21 being the others — that two of his players led the NBA in minutes. There have been just two other seasons in the league’s 79-year history where one team had two players leading the NBA in minutes.
For his part, Thibodeau explained that he views it as necessary to play his wing players for longer minutes because many of the league’s best players — the Celtics’ All-Star duo of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown is a potential second-round matchup — handle the ball so often, and consistently pose the biggest scoring threat.
“We try to keep them matched up. If you look at the league, all those guys are playing 36, 37 minutes,” he said. “[Bridges and Hart] are primary wing defenders. That’s the way it works.”
Some might point to the fact that the Knicks play at one of the NBA’s slowest paces as evidence that the workload isn’t as strenuous as the minute totals might suggest. But New York’s starters might be exerting themselves much more than it appears.
Brunson, the team’s floor general, has possessed the ball a league-high 8.7 minutes per game this season, and leads the NBA in clutch baskets with 47. Hart, New York’s most physical player, dives on the floor constantly, and has recovered an NBA-high 80 loose balls this season.
In sliding over to defend ballhandlers, Bridges has been forced to run through 25 screens per game — a Herculean task, and more than any player in the league’s 12-year-old tracking era. Looking at the teams the Knicks could face in the first round of the playoffs, Bridges this season has run 37 miles more than Indiana Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton, 41 miles more than Detroit Pistons guard Cade Cunningham and 66 miles more than Milwaukee Bucks guard Damian Lillard, according to NBA tracking data.
That’s why games like December’s 24-point victory against the Charlotte Hornets stand out.
The Knicks were dominating Charlotte, which was without 25-point-per-game guard LaMelo Ball and 20-point-per-game forward Miles Bridges. Capitalizing on those absences, New York jumped out to a big advantage and never led by fewer than 20 points over the final 25 minutes.
Hart played 38 minutes, Karl-Anthony Towns 39 and OG Anunoby 40. Bridges, meanwhile, played the game’s first 46 minutes and 30 seconds before finally exiting.
Thibodeau has addressed why he’s so adamant about leaving starters on the floor late, even with double-digit leads. He cites the fact that he was an assistant with the Houston Rockets in 2004, when Tracy McGrady ignited for 13 points in 35 seconds against the San Antonio Spurs to cap an improbable comeback.
“In this league, no lead is safe. I’ve seen it all,” Thibodeau said last season. “People will tell you, ‘Oh, he needs to get the starters out of there.’ Yeah? Well, I know what experience tells me.”
WITH HIS ENTRANCE from the Madison Square Garden tunnel, and then his two quick makes against Indiana to open Game 7 of the 2024 Eastern Conference semifinals, Anunoby’s return from a hamstring strain a week and a half earlier had the potential to be a Willis Reed moment of sorts.
Instead, it proved to be more of a last hurrah. Anunoby clearly had little to no fluidity on the defensive end.
“You could see it there on the last two plays: OG Anunoby just does not have the movement,” ESPN analyst Doris Burke said during the telecast. “On that post-up by Pascal Siakam a couple possessions ago, [Anunoby] barely moved.”
One possession later, Anunoby gingerly sought to close out on Andrew Nembhard at the 3-point line, but was too late and surrendered a triple. Thibodeau called for time, and Anunoby took a seat five minutes into the game. It would be his final play of the season.
Things got worse. The Knicks — already without Julius Randle, Mitchell Robinson and Bojan Bogdanovic, who had all been ruled out for the rest of the season — also lost Brunson to a fractured left hand in the second half.
After the Pacers shot a Game 7-record 67% from the field, to beat New York, Thibodeau praised his team. “Guys gave everything they had … there was nothing left to give,” he said.
Critics of Thibodeau would likely point out that last year’s injury-filled playoff run was far from an isolated case. The Bulls were consistently plagued by ailments — most famously Derrick Rose’s knee injuries, but also ones to Joakim Noah, Gibson and others — during the Thibodeau era. The Knicks also potentially had their postseason cut short due to injury in 2023, when Randle and Brunson were hampered in the second round against the Miami Heat.
In Thibodeau’s defense, New York’s reserve unit isn’t nearly as deep as it was a year ago. The Knicks lost Isaiah Hartenstein to the Thunder, and in trading Randle for Towns, New York also gave up Donte DiVincenzo, who began last season on the bench before hitting a Knicks-record 283 3-pointers as one of Thibodeau’s most-trusted players. But if there’s a bright side in New York, it’s that the nature of how they’ve played is shifting.
Missing the past month has potentially allowed Brunson a rare chance to recharge before the postseason. There were indications that the Knicks had perhaps become overly dependent on their captain; at the time of his injury, Brunson had scored a league-high 49% of his team’s points in the clutch.
In the time he has been out, Anunoby and Bridges in particular have stepped up their scoring efforts, averaging more than 22 points each — up from 16.5 and 17.2 points, respectively, prior to Brunson going down with the ankle ailment. The Knicks as a team have been a top-10 defense since Brunson’s injury, after having ranked just 17th prior.
Are those shifts, plus having a healthy, rested Brunson back in the mix, enough to think that the Knicks can close what has been an undeniably large gap between them and the East’s top two contenders? Maybe, maybe not.
But similar to Thibodeau’s physically intensive, grind-it-out mentality throughout the long season, it’s simply a matter of perspective.
“There’s no right or wrong,” Thibodeau said. “There’s what you feel is best for your team.”
ESPN Research’s Matt Williams contributed to this report.
Source: espn.com