What's Next?

The search for the next Knicks head coach begins.

Good morning! Today I’ll take one last look back at New York’s process of firing Tom Thibodeau before looking forward to where they go from here.

What's Next?

A day and a half after the big news that was maybe stunning and maybe totally unsurprising depending on your viewpoint, we’re still sorting through the aftermath of Tom Thibodeau’s dismissal as Knicks head coach.

I’m not sure how much more reporting, if any, will emerge regarding what went on behind the scenes to arrive at the decision, but my impression is that there was at least some palace intrigue involved. There’s little question in my mind that:

• Certain players were not fans of Thibs, and more specifically, not fans of how they were utilized under Thibs (i.e., “didn’t know their role”).

• Those feelings came out in the Dolan-attended exit meetings, which Ian Begley reported yesterday only took place with “a select few” players and coaches. My guess is that those “select few” were the higher end players on the roster.

• Ian also reported that “this was less an exit meeting and more of an assessment of what went wrong and what needed to be fixed.” In other words, the situation was ripe for anyone who may have had a gripe with the coach to lay blame at his feet in front of the most important person in the organization.

• From everything I know about how this organization has been run for the better part of a quarter century, when expectations are not met and there’s a conflict at the center of those unmet expectations, there’s a decent chance that someone is going to lose their job. In this situation, a player can’t lose his job (or definitely get traded for value), so the axe then moves on to the next neck: either the person who wanted to trade for the player in the first place, or the coach.

• We’ve long known that Dolan has many voices that whisper in his ear. I can’t imagine those voices stayed silent as the Knicks were losing their first two conference finals games at Madison Square Garden in 25 years.

• It’s not unreasonable to assume that some of the front office people who have had issues with Thibs for years are the same front office people who favored the significant moves of last summer.

I 100 percent believe Ian when he says that this was Leon’s decision with the support of Dolan and not the other way around. I also believe that if Rose fully believed that Thibs should still have a job, he would have stood his ground and refused to fire Thibodeau, consequences be damned.

But if this was a “someone is going to pay for how this thing went down” situation, I wonder if this was Rose essentially choosing the lesser of several evils - Leon’s Choice, as it were.

And if the thought of an impetuous decision going down at MSG seems far fetched (because when has that ever happened under this owner before), consider the timing of the decision, the fact that all reporting indicates the Knicks don’t have a clear top candidate or candidates lined up, and Ian’s reporting that the timing of the move wasn’t tied to the fact that Johnnie Bryant was at the time a finalist for the Phoenix job.

Of course, it’s possible that Rose and his team have been thoroughly analyzing the coaching situation for some time now, that they compiled all the evidence they felt they needed to conclude that Thibodeau wasn’t the right coach for the team, that it had very little to do with specific player gripes and/or Dolan hearing those gripes in the exit meetings and/or things Dolan may have heard from other voices in the organization, and that the front office has always been comfortable with the idea of an open coaching search, regardless of the immense pressure that is on the them at this moment.

If that were the scenario though, it would seem odd to me that Thibodeau heard whispers - as Steve Popper reported - about how he needed to win the Boston series to save his job. That sort of black and white dichotomy would seem to run counter to the notion that there were broad philosophical differences between how the front office felt Thibs should do his job and how he actually went about handling his business. Then again, maybe the front office was always willing to give Thibs the benefit of the doubt up to the start of the playoffs, after which they’d make their final judgments. If they really didn’t like what they saw, well…there you go.

Does any of that matter? Maybe yes, maybe no. The fact is that under Tom Thibodeau, this team - and the starting lineup in particular - very clearly didn’t look right for large swaths of the season. There were unquestionably pivots that weren’t tried, or were tried too late, and we have no idea how much fruit a different approach would have yielded. Whether any player who had an issue with Thibs was completely justified in their opinion or was acting akin to a petulant kindergartner doesn’t really matter. Why certain players underperformed, or didn’t gel with teammates, doesn’t matter. The offense on a supposedly offense-first team was, far too often, a slog. It is incumbent upon the organization to get the most out of everyone on the roster, and there’s ample evidence to believe that wasn’t going to happen under this head coach. Even if this move was made through bad process or for the wrong reasons, it doesn’t make it the wrong decision.

The key, of course, is making the right decision on the next hire. There’s certainly a lot of ways it could go, so let’s go through all of them right now.