Giving away anything — much less a game — is not in Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau's DNA
Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau reacts in the first half of an NBA game against the Raptors at Madison Square Garden on Saturday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
The word filtered out Tuesday afternoon that the Milwaukee Bucks had fired Adrian Griffin 43 games into his tenure as head coach, prompting a glance at the standings — and seeing that the Bucks sat in second place in the Eastern Conference with a 30-13 record, a reminder of just how tenuous these jobs are in the NBA.
It was also proof that you can’t waste a day, give away a single game.
And that brings us to Tuesday night’s nationally-televised Rivalry Week showcase between the Knicks and Nets, or more specific on this day, between Tom Thibodeau and Jacque Vaughn.
With the Knicks trailing through most of the game, in the final minutes it certainly came down to talent. But it also came down to toughness, to fight - and if there was ever a team that was an on-court representation of its coach, it came in the final 70 seconds of a tie game when Josh Hart and OG Anunoby blocked layup attempts, Julius Randle finished off a break with a dunk on the other end and when Hart cut to the rim for another layup through contact, flexing and nearly getting knocked over by celebratory shoves from Jalen Brunson and Donte DiVincenzo. It was a formality from there as the Knicks took a 108-103 decision at Barclays Center.
"I didn’t think we played particularly well, but I love how we responded in the fourth quarter," Thibodeau said. "That said a lot about who we are. The bench, they were hustling, flying all over the place. That closed the gap and gave us the hope that, okay, we can get this done. Then when the starters came back they fed off that energy. Finding a way to win when you’re not at your best is huge and that’s the bottom line. Just find ways to win. I think our team is doing that."
The loss dropped Vaughn and the Nets to 17-26 and reeling. Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint just where things went wrong, but for the Nets it’s simple — they were 15-15 when Vaughn, or just as likely, voices above him in the organization, opted to put a skeleton crew on the floor on December 27 against the Bucks. They sat out three starters, had three other key players sit after the first quarter and understandably lost.
But they followed it with just two wins in the last 13 games, including an assortment of ugly losses — to bottom of the standings teams, late-game collapses and an odd need to still teach lessons that should have been learned long ago — including how to stop a 22-0 game-ending collapse against the Clippers Sunday. A film session Tuesday morning didn’t stop it from happening again on this night.
Thibodeau will never say a cross word about a member of the coaching fraternity and it would be hard to find anyone who doesn’t like Vaughn — although perhaps after that Milwaukee loss you might have found a few in the Nets locker room, including Mikal Bridges, who spoke out a day later against it.
But Thibodeau doesn’t need to speak about what the Nets did for you to know that it goes against everything that he preaches to his team, to the media and likely to any member of the Knicks front office who would would broach a load management strategy to him. The Knicks were shorthanded Tuesday with Isaiah Hartenstein sidelined with left Achillies Tendinopathy — and Mitchell Robinson already out for months. That meant little-used Jericho Sims was inserted as the starting center.
Asked about it before the game, Thibodeau went through his oft-repeated mantra, one that begins in training camp and doesn’t need to be said by this time.
“It’s their investment to each other and the team,” Thibodeau said. “… So next man get in there and get it done.”
“Thibs instills confidence in the whole team, top to bottom,” said Knicks backup guard Ryan Arcidiacono, who has played for Thibodeau in numerous stops. “He says from the beginning of the year there’s more than enough in this room to be successful, to win games. When someone goes down and someone doesn’t play we all know that Thibs has confidence in everyone in the room. He just says, ‘Hey, make the most of your opportunity. But there’s more than enough in this room to go out there and win a game and play hard, play the right way.’ That’s what he wants, just playing hard.”
What you won’t hear in that message is that 'maybe this game gets a pass'. You don’t tank one game to ready yourself for some uncertain future. And it’s not just the approach to the game, but even the construction of the team.
Thibodeau is a second-hand descendant of the Pat Riley regime in New York, tales passed down through Jeff Van Gundy. And one story that is told is of Riley addressing a Knicks team before a game and seeing Charles Smith in a suit, asking him sincerely, “If you had to, absolutely had to, could you give us one play tonight?” When Smith acknowledged he could, Riley, as the story goes, shouted, “Then why the [expletive] are you wearing a suit?” That is in line with Thibodeau, long a supporter of Quentin Grimes, reportedly getting upset when Grimes sat out in the playoffs last season with a shoulder injury.
You play to win the game. Believe tomorrow someone will be able to take the court and win the next one.
Thibodeau is a two-time coach of the year and has established a culture in his image in New York — and still has had detractors and critics along the way, to this day. Vaughn may not have the resume that Thibodeau possesses and whoever made the decision to give a game away, the loss goes on Vaughn’s record, not someone in a front office or ownership suite.
“You see the franchises in this league who have over and over been able to be great franchises, and a big part of that is continuity,” Vaughn said. “So whether that is the Spurs, whether that is the Heat, whether that's been Utah historically, there's something to continuity. And so I don't know what's going on in someone else's household. Always worried about my house and how tight and in order it needs to be, so I'll just leave it at that, but there's something to continuity in this league.”
Thibodeau, who had Griffin as a player when he was an assistant coach in Houston and then on his coaching staff in Chicago, may agree, but he also knows the reality for coaches — and maybe that’s why he plays every game as if it is his last.
“I think it’s big. But again, every organization has their philosophy,” he said. “There’s different things that you go through throughout the course of a season. And so, you never really can judge another organization unless you’re there. No one really knows. … So it’s unfortunate but that’s our business.”
Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
