Knicks benchmark: Tom Thibodeau stepping out of his coaching comfort zone

BOSTON — The morning before his Boston Celtics fell apart in the first game of the Eastern Conference semifinals on Monday night, a story ran in The Boston Globe about how coach Joe Mazzulla spent a week in the jungle of Costa Rica with a chess prodigy/personal growth guru.

Mazzulla apparently honed his inner coaching genius the summer before last year’s championship season by going on barefoot 3-mile hikes up a mountain populated by scorpions and snakes. The story details how his guru has since moved to Boston, where he works as Mazzulla’s “mentor, ally and jiu-jitsu sparring partner.”

I don’t know for sure, but I feel pretty safe in saying that Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau has never spent an offseason this way. Thibodeau does have a house on the shore in Connecticut, but jokes that he vacations at “Club Tarrytown,” otherwise known as the Knicks’ practice facility. Any honing of his inner basketball genius takes place in a tape room or less than exotic conference room meeting with his staff.

So, surprise, surprise, here we are one game into what is shaping up to be a tough series and the coaching score is Club Tarrytown Tape Room 1, Costa Rica Self Discovery Retreat 0.

Only two games removed from the Game 5 against Detroit where he was roundly criticized for a failure to call a timeout to get Jalen Brunson back in the game, Thibodeau orchestrated a stunning 108-105 overtime upset of a Celtics team that was a nine-point favorite.

Clearly unhappy with the way his team defended the Celtics in their four losses to them in the regular season, Thibodeau deployed a defensive scheme his team rarely uses, to force the Celtics into more isolation. Though this did cause some mismatches, the Knicks’ players stepped up and defended at a high level.

Josh Hart heralded Thibodeau for stepping outside of his comfort zone and asking the players to try something different to contain the Celtics.

“I think you give him credit cause it shows a willingness to adapt and to change,” Hart said on a Zoom conference call on Tuesday. “The one thing about him is he works extremely hard and he’s going to make sure that we are prepared and have a good game plan and go out there and execute it.

“During the course of the game, there’s always tweaks needed and X’s and O’s that you do, but his ability to make sure we are prepared to adjust on the fly in certain situations was huge for us. So, you have to give him a huge amount of credit for that and his willingness to change and adapt to a different style or a different game plan to what he’s used to.”

The defense was confusing enough to the Celtics that they pretty much quit driving the ball. The Celtics threw up 60 shots from three-point range — ultimately sinking just 15 of those shots — en route to a three-point overtime loss. Those 45 total misses from beyond the arc set a single-game NBA playoff record, as did Boston’s 60 total attempts.

The three-pointer is the Celtics’ bread-and-butter. It’s been a sound strategy for the team all regular season when they won 61 games. In their four regular-season wins over the Knicks, they made 84 three-pointers, including 29 in their embarrassing season opener rout.

Mazzulla said after Monday’s game that he could live with most of the shots his team took. Still, one would think you would make some kind of adjustment when so few were falling. Instead, the Celtics didn’t seem to have a Plan B. In fact, 24 of their 41 shot attempts in the second half were threes, including all but one of their 20 shots in the third quarter.

Mazzulla, who was 34 when he was named the Celtics’ interim coach at the start of the 2022-23 season after Ime Udoka was suspended by the team, is often heralded as a boy genius for having led an incredibly talented Celtics team to a championship last year. The team he took over had won 51 games the season before.

Thibodeau, who spent 21 years as an NBA assistant before landing his first head coaching job in Chicago at the age of 52, is often criticized by his own team’s fans for being old school and running his players into the ground. The Knicks team he took over won 21 games the season before.

It will be interesting to see what adjustments both coaches make in Game 2. Maybe Mazzulla can get some advice from his guru/jiu-jitsu sparring partner. Maybe Thibodeau will step outside of his comfort zone again.

Either way, it’s quite an interesting matchup.

By Barbara Barker

barbara.barker@newsday.commeanbarb

Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.