An Ode to Tom Thibodeau, the Knicks’ Mustard-Stained Genius

Tom Thibodeau is one of those guys who always seems to have a mustard stain on his tie. We’ve come to associate star NBA head coaches with a slick, Pat Riley style, but Thibodeau carries the rumpled, crotchety mien of a lifelong third-in-command. Indeed, he served as an assistant for six different teams over 21 years, including the Knicks from 1996 to 2003 and the Celtics from 2007 to 2010, when he cemented his reputation as the “defensive coordinator” for those dynamite Kevin Garnett–Paul Pierce–Ray Allen teams. Some have said he looks like the Penguin’s cranky younger brother, but that’s not quite right: He more resembles a Die Hard villain’s bag man, the guy who runs all the numbers, who knows where all the bodies are buried, and who has the main guy’s back to the end … not that this prevents him from being the first guy John McClane rubs out. Thibodeau, more than anything else, looks dispensable.

This may explain why he has spent most of his head-coaching career being brilliant yet still getting fired. After the Celtics won the 2008 championship, Thibodeau got his first head-coaching job with Chicago Bulls, led by the then-ascendant MVP Derrick Rose. Thibodeau instantly turned that team into a juggernaut, getting them to 62 wins in his first season and earning Coach of the Year honors before losing to the LeBron–Wade–Bosh Heatles in the Eastern Conference Finals. The Bulls were even better the next season, earning the top overall seed heading into the playoffs, but when Rose went down with an ACL tear in the playoff opener, his career changed forever, and so did Thibodeau’s. The coach clawed and scraped to keep the Bulls above water the next three years — Thibodeau’s signature strategy is treating every game like it’s the only game that has ever mattered — but eventually he wore his players and Chicago fans out and the Bulls fired him.

Thibodeau took a year off and went to Minnesota, where he got the Timberwolves back to the playoffs for the first time in 14 years but clashed constantly with stars Jimmy Butler and Karl-Anthony Towns. When he got canned again after just three seasons, it was widely assumed his head-coaching career was over: The league was deemphasizing obsessive tacticians like Thibodeau and instead hiring recently retired players who could “relate” to the roster under their management. Thibodeau is the sort of guy who doesn’t look like he can relate to anybody. In the two years after the Timberwolves fired him, Thibodeau worked for ESPN as a television analyst, and he was, let us say, not a natural in the medium.

???? pic.twitter.com/9lkGFU3KiL

— CJ Fogler account may or may not be notable (@cjzero) February 7, 2019

So when the Knicks hired Thibodeau to replace the disastrous David Fizdale in July 2020 — something you might have been a little bit too distracted to notice at that particular moment — the reaction was near universal: He wouldn’t last. The sense of inevitable failure was so strong in part because the Knicks had gone through six coaches in the previous seven seasons. But it was mostly because Thibodeau’s reputation preceded him. The Ringer’s Rodger Sherman captured the way most Knicks fans I knew felt at the time:

Even if he succeeds, he will eventually alienate every meaningful player on the roster through Scorsese-length practices and an insistence on playing his five favorite guys 43 minutes per night. It’s a strategy that simultaneously upsets the players whose bones are being ground to dust and the ones who are being covered in cobwebs … Maybe most alarming for Knicks fans is that Thibodeau’s preferred philosophies have become obsolete in the modern NBA. As 3-point prowess has clearly emerged as a critical factor, Thibodeau remains stubbornly resistant to change … sometime in a few years I’ll be writing about the Knicks’ next attempt at climbing out from the depths.

It’s easy to mock Sherman now that the Knicks are as exciting as they have been in decades, in large part thanks to Thibodeau’s vision. (It turns out that Thibodeau isn’t so stubbornly resistant to change after all; his offenses shoot a ton of threes.) But it’s important to remember that his current team has almost fired him several times in the last three-plus years. In late 2022, when the Knicks were struggling, reports emerged that Knicks executive vice-president William Wesley had been urging owner Jim Dolan to push Thibodeau out for more than a year. (Thibodeau told a friend then that “they’re going to fire me.”) Just this last summer, ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith took a break from his ever-riveting political analysis to proclaim that this would (and should) be Thibodeau’s last season in New York despite the fact that he had led the team to only its second postseason-series victory this century.

Now, though? Now, Thibodeau is having his moment. And he has done it by being, as ever, resolutely himself. Even during this terrific season, Knicks fans have occasionally groused about Thibodeau’s insistence on playing his star players more than 40-plus minutes during seemingly meaningless regular-season games, often using Sherman’s “bones ground to dust” construction. But that strategy, along with Thibodeau’s relentless old-school focus on work ethic, hustle plays, and floor burns, has paid off magnificently in New York’s first-round playoff series against the 76ers, where Knicks players, used to these excess minutes, are still looking fresh late in games while Philadelphia’s wither. (Though less so on Tuesday night, when Philadelphia triumphed in overtime to extend the series to a sixth game.) Thibodeau has put his players’ feet to the fire all season, and while some of his teams in the past have struggled with that (Thibodeau regularly wins players’ polls of “coach you’d least like to play for”), he has a team now that fits his mold perfectly.

Play regular season games https://t.co/Bhb5MJo4GT

— Andrew Claudio (@AndrewJClaudio_) April 28, 2024

This is a team, more than any other in his career, that is made of “Thibs’ Guys,” grinders and scrappers who might not be the smoothest or most physically gifted players but will, like their coach, outwork and outlast you. Jalen Brunson, an undersize, underappreciated point guard cast off by his last team, is the perfect manifestation of this m.o., but Thibs Guys are everywhere, from Donte DeVincenzo to Mitchell Robinson to Isaiah Hartenstein to OG Anunoby to, especially, Josh Hart, who, when the Knicks traded for him last year, Thibodeau praised to the heavens, saying he had been trying to acquire him for years and had a “competitive spirit” that was unmatched. In many ways, Hart is the player Thibodeau would be if he could compete in the NBA himself: fierce, unrelenting, competitive to the point of nothing else mattering in the world. It is not just that Thibodeau is coaching this team. It is as if they are the pure physical representation of how he sees the world.

Thibodeau is an infamous gym rat who cares about nothing but basketball. He has never been married — he was engaged once, back as a graduate student, but the relationship ended because, as Thibodeau told his boss at the time, “There’s no room in my life for a woman if I’m going to be a basketball coach” — and is notorious for wearing his coaching workout gear all hours of the day, no matter where he is. Including pumping gas this past Monday morning, the day after the biggest win of his career.

Friend sent me this pic of Thibs pumping his own gas at 6am this morning. You think he sleeps in that uniform? pic.twitter.com/s33J6d1Wcz

— GERIATKNICK (@Delblogo) April 29, 2024

The Knicks are doing things they have not done in decades, and they’re as likable a team as any in basketball. After Tuesday’s setback, they are still just one win away from a second-straight Eastern Conference Semifinals in which they will almost certainly be favored, which means they’d be four wins away from their first Conference Finals appearance since 2000. (Back then, Thibodeau was a Knicks assistant under Jeff Van Gundy, another gym rat.) They have Jalen Brunson, the player Knicks fans have been waiting their whole lives for. They have turned Madison Square Garden into the biggest party on the Eastern Seaboard. They are making us Knicks fans lose our minds with excitement.

Let’s not forget the forgotten coach who has gotten them here, the man who finally has the team he has always been trying to construct, the lifelong bachelor who is married to the sweat and grime of the gym, the man who is always about to be fired, the guy who pumps his own gas and looks like your kids’ disheveled PE teacher while doing so. This is the Knicks’ peak. But it’s also Thibodeau’s. It’s a long time coming. It’s all he, and Knicks fans, have ever wanted: It turns the ugly into the gorgeous. So here’s to the beautiful slobs. Here’s to the guys who don’t look good in the team picture but will work your ass into the ground when the cameras are gone. Here’s to the mustard stains. Here’s to Tom Thibodeau.