The Knicks broke up with Tom Thibodeau before he broke their heart
Tom Thibodeau couldn’t let go of his vision. Turns out neither could Leon Rose.
A paperclip for a pen, a pen for a hand-crafted doorknob, a doorknob for a stove, and so on, until he had a house. Thus began the “one red paperclip” experiment by early 2000s blogger Kyle McDonald, whereby he began a series of trades with a simple red paperclip until fourteen transactions later he had, remarkably, a house.
That’s not unlike what NBA GM’s strive to do. Sam Presti humbly began in 2007 by trading Kurt Thomas to avoid team tax payments, garnered a trade exception, and roughly 9000 trades later cycled through multiple All-NBA players and two Finals teams 14 years apart. When Leon Rose took over the Knicks, he started with a similarly empty cupboard. To make matters more difficult, there was nary a top-5 pick in that cupboard, much less any hope for a bonafide Hall of Famer to arrive of their own volition.
What did Rose do? Well, he began with a post-hype, mid-career-crisis Julius Randle and a smidge of cap space. He brought Tom Thibodeau out of involuntary retirement – NOBODY was looking to hire him – because Tom was the perfect trade-up. This was a situation perfectly tailored for his gifts as a leader. With, time, cap space and about 50 tiny trades added up over a few years, Leon eventually traded a series of pens and paperclips up until he acquired two All-NBA talents in Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns. On the front office side of things, he turned a standard operation with strong scouts into an analytics juggernaut made up of multiple coaching analytics staffers and data product enginners, as well as a data scientist and separate player and film analytics staffers. Rose hired the Death Star of collective bargaining agreement (CBA) analysis, Brock Aller. Trade by trade, hire by hire, New York built the organizational capacity and modernized the team philosophies, often hand-in-hand with Thibs.
The throughline in all of Leon’s moves, big and small, player and staff, are two precepts:
Win the margins
Follow the numbers
Following these two cardinal rules, the Knicks consistently turned paperclips into houses. And yet, as they marched past competency, past relevance and towards contention, the stronger their devotion to those two rules has become. Randle and Thibodeau were both let go, despite all their considerable gifts, because both also left too much on the table. Thibs returned to coaching in New York newly open to analytics and the modern game, and in some respects proved a quick study. He was aligned enough, for four years, to work in partnership with Rose. It wasn’t until 2025 that small misalignments became large rifts.
Where did Thibs begin to distrust some of the loud numbers staring him in the face? And when did his pursuit of his own vision become a different goal than the front office’s?
Rules?
First rule: winning the margins. What does that even mean?
Winning the margins means extracting an extra second-rounder where possible. Examples:
Adding a team option onto a role-player deal
Securing Deuce McBride on an extension for pennies on the dollar right before he was given a bigger role
Only picking as high as you need to obtain Tyler Kolek
Having Pacôme Dadiet sign for less than 100% of his allowable first round pick salary
Convincing Jalen Brunson to not max out his first big extension
Signing Isaiah Hartenstein to a prove-your-worth, two-year, bargain-bin deal
And so on. It means in deals large and small, the Knicks derive just a bit more value, and conversely it means not overpaying where you can avoid it. Every dollar saved counts in the world of second-apron team-building.
On the court, it means playoff intensity in February to steal a win. It means playing Mitchell Robinson and Hartenstein in aggressive coverages, and letting Immanuel Quickley and Brunson and Josh Hart guard the rim. It means Brunson slightly mitigating defensive shortcomings by taking charges and running through screens. It means Hart getting the 80-20 rebounds. It means valuing every possession through ball control and avoiding turnovers (where the Knicks ranked third, fifth, sixth, seventh and sixth the last five years). These are things Thibs has subscribed to, and emphasized, consistently.
It also means making substitutions right on time, rather than too late. It means adjusting proactively, understanding that a five-minute stretch in the middle of the first quarter is as critical as crunch time. It means not making assumptions about player roles, be they younger or vets. It means diversifying defenses a bit, as most teams do. These are marginal things that add up over time, that Thibs struggled with more and more as time went on.
The second commandment the front office established – one which remained underdiscussed throughout the last five years – is a commitment to analyticsball. Nobody seems to associate the Knicks with analytics, possibly because Thibs had such a powerful brand that it overwhelmed any other traits which could be associated with the team. We were gritty, physical, competitive, overachieving, high-minutes dawgs – not an org steeped in progressive basketball strategy. Despite that reputation, the evidence of numbers reigning supreme was always there, if you knew where to look. Some examples:
The bargain acquisitions of Brunson, Hartenstein, Hart, Derrick Rose (the second time), Alec Burks (the first time) and Donte DiVincenzo during the competence-building phase of the Knicks’ ‘’life cycle’’ showed a preference for players who were undervalued in the market despite very strong supporting analytics.
Upon arrival, Brunson immediately upped his 3-point rate, beginning to maximize his deadly shooting potential and increase his overall impact. This was something many a metric-watcher had been calling for, given his tremendous shooting talent.
Mitchell and Randle formed a rebounding-analytics juggernaut duo, where Mitch – the leading statistical box-out man in the NBA – took out the opponent's top rebounder and allowed Julius to monster-truck his way to glass dominance. Each were a great defensive rebounder; together they made the Knicks a force on the glass.
Later they added to what fans affectionately called the offensive-rebounding grift, playing mathketball to maximize their advantage in shot attempts when their roster was a less-efficient-shooting bunch. More offensive rebounds, more shots, more points. They produced a top-5 offensive rating despite actually not being efficient putting the ball in the basket.
Randle’s shot diet shifted year to year, depending on what was analytically preferable. When he had a season as Julius Nowitzki, like 2021, his 3-point rate shot up. In 2025, when his 3-ball abandoned him, they shifted his diet to more rim and short midrange attempts, where he could be efficient while drawing fouls and creating offensive rebound opportunities.
DiVincenzo built on the blueprint executed by Evan Fournier in really expanding the diversity of catch-and-shoot threes a perimeter sniper could take by taking “4-point range’’ threes, fading and running catch-and-shoot treys and more. This helped achieve the goal of increasing the Knicks 3-point volume – a critical analytics goal for modern teams – while still playing a few non-shooters.
Most of their draft picks are analytics model darlings, with high box-plus-minus scores and top marks on important Synergy play-type metrics.
From bending the rules to breaking them
All the above examples are from past seasons. This season featured a very different roster, filled with accomplished multimillionaire veterans, All-Stars and All-Defense team alumni. In terms of on-court stylings, the players tended to be high-percentage shotmakers of different stripes. Many shared Brunson’s previously untapped potential for shooting more threes and dominating the paint with increased spacing.
On defense, an assortment of high profile-wings, a center who played power forward for three years and an injured Mitchell portended more switching. So did an eye towards inevitable showdowns versus the Boston Celtics, and their armada of long, skilled, wingy hoopers. And yet, a very different strategy emerged from the mind of the Knicks coach.
The Knicks began the year blitzing teams by taking advantage of KAT and Brunson mismatches and an unstoppable KAT/JB pick and roll – until January, where teams decided to ignore Josh Hart for 30-plus minutes a game to have centers their clog the lane. The strategy was put New York’s fifth starter, Hart, on the ball far more, effectively making him the secondary initiator. He was proficient for stretches, but the new acquisitions suffered. Bridges’ most efficient play-type, as a pick-and-roll ball handler, became a teeny tiny part of his offense, while Towns 3-point volume plummeted. Despite prolific efficiency numbers and a well-deserved All-NBA selection, many analytics had KAT’s offensive impact as more muted compared to his prior seasons playing center in Minnesota.
The Knicks’ team-wide 3-point rate followed suit, which would have been a silly prediction if you asked anyone at the beginning of the year. It was bottom-three the last month – unthinkable, given the presence of the most talented shooting stretch-5 in the NBA and a top-10 offensive engine like Jalen Brunson.
Suddenly, it seems, the Knicks were ignoring analytics and losing the margins as much as winning them, despite winning a more-than-healthy 51 games. After the Game 5 loss to Boston, Towns was quoted [emphasis is mine]: “I haven’t really been out there, have the chance to shoot. We’ve just been trying to do our gameplan. I’ve been trying to execute that at the highest level. I’ve been trying to do most of my damage inside and do whatever my team asks of me.”
In sum: there was a precipitous drop in KAT-JB two-man actions, a traffic jam in the paint, a career-low in threes for an elite shooting big and for a team with a gang of shooters, and more frequent counter-productive wing cuts into the lane compromising both New York’s offensive spacing and transition defense. I don’t think you have to be privy to front office conversations to hypothesize that neither the process nor results were what the Knicks’ staff intended.
On defense, Thibs inexplicably deployed consistent drop coverage – something he’d long abandoned in favor of deploying Hartenstein and Mitch more aggressively. It was the primary defensive tactic in spite of it being Towns’ weakest statistical coverage. In addition to ignoring those numbers, Thibodeau also tossed away potential marginal advantages by rarely varying defenses, as is quite standard in 2025. Switching was rare, zone defenses rarer still.
As the calendar turned, teams began to twist the knife and take advantage of both KAT’s weak drop defense and the predictability that deploying a single scheme grants opponents. McBride and OG Anunoby’s animated point-of-attack defense remained a side dish rather than a main entree, contributing to a career-high number of screens hitting Bridges as he spent more and more time on-ball.
Famously, the Knicks starting lineup of Brunson, Hart, Bridges, Anunoby and Towns had been wholly mediocre on offense (and overall) for three months leading up to the playoffs. The data was indisputable, yet the coach doubled down on all of the lineup compositions and tactical strategies which led to New York’s hot-and-cold, emotionally uninspiring play.
We saw hardly any lineups with Towns at the power forward, hardly any with five shooters and minimal minutes with Miles McBride playing alongside four starters.
Thibodeau’s devotion to the starting unit far eclipsed any other contending team’s dedication to their own, despite performing orders of magnitude worse.
This was not the first time Thibs rejected conclusions put forth by analytics – Elfrid Payton and Immanuel Quickley, say hello – but there was no other season where it seemed like the norm, rather than an exception. Where teams like the Thunder, Pacers and Celtics were quick to vary starting and closing lineups, the Knicks remained mostly etched in stone.
With this being a group of players that will make up at least some – if not most – of the core of our theoretical championship contending roster, differing strategic visions matter. When you're trying to set in place a culture, a front office is not going to quibble with a coach over the role and usage of Payton, Burks, Fournier or even Randle. When you expect to contend, not having that alignment on players like Towns, Brunson, OG, Bridges and their supporting role players is alarming.
The 2025 playoffs: the beginning of the end
As the playoffs approached an aversion to experimentation morphed into obstinance, and into Thibs rejecting the two unbreakable rules of the front office: win the margins, follow the numbers. Jalen Brunson's heroics late in the season saved the Knicks from a few embarrassing losses, and again in the first round versus Detroit. Entering that series, the Knicks had no data on how different lineup configurations would work. They had minimal data on what they looked like playing faster. Unlike in prior playoffs under Thibs, they didn’t even know what their team would look like if someone other than Brunson initiated offense. That information was viewed by Thibs not as a marginal advantage to be gained, but a waste of time.
They did win versus Detroit, thanks to Anunoby finally being moved on-ball, moreso thanks to the Brunson heroics (and thanks to J.B. Bickerstaff matching Thibs’ freak and also not playing his best players). Even with that, the Knicks outscored the Pistons in the six-game series by eight points, while losing the starters minutes. Those numbers matter to the front office, in their first postseason since spending a pretty significant number of dollars, picks and player capital to assemble their current roster. Those numbers were a bad omen.
Lost in the mania of Brunson’s majesty was a truth: they escaped the Pistons as much as they defeated them. The Pistons were not a murderer’s row to be survived, yet that was the nature of New York’s win. While many a fan may decry that a W is a W, the nature of a win matters to a good front office. It also matters to the players.
Players know which combos work and which do not. They look to their leader, the coach, to have macro-level solutions. Every time the starting lineup bled points, I promise you they took note.
And yet, I would be remiss if I glossed over Thibs’ crowning jewel: the upset victory versus over Boston. Miraculously, experimentation informed by data finally took hold – albeit for the first time, in a pressure cooker, versus the defending champions. Famously, Thibs decided the Knicks needed to switch everything to keep apace with the champs.
I want to say that again: Thibs decided that the first time he would ever ask this team to switch everything was in the second round of the playoffs. Against the defending champs.
All reasonable expectations dictated that was a strategy doomed for failure. That they not only were capable, but successful, is not a testament to some ingenious 4-D chess by the coach (who pulled that lever unconscionably late) but to the players. The players did something they had zero practice doing. They might as well have been asked to play FIFA in the middle of a NBA 2K tournament – yet play it they did. And won!
Unfortunately, they were not practiced enough to handle the advanced version of that versus the Pacers, who unlike the Celtics not only make you switch on-ball, but off-ball as well. On top of that, it took being down 2-0 for the coach to make a lineup change, only after Hart suggested it . . . only to still play the same analytically flawed unit 25 minutes per game anyway. He was officially going down with his ship, turning down opportunities to trade paperclips for pens and cars for houses. Marginal advantages were being flushed, numbers tossed aside.
The axe falls and we should have seen it coming
Even though the firing surprised many people, myself included, the misalignment was clear as day during the 2025 season. The vision for the team revolving around Brunson was made more clear when KAT joined the Knicks, as a stretch 5 who could give Brunson more space to operate than the my-turn/your-turn dao of his partnership with Randle. However, it wasn’t a vision the coach subscribed to, as evidenced by his lineups. Yet even though it feels like the coach and the front office have been aligned through the years -- Thibs’ players for Thibs’ gritty teams, revolving around a star guard, etc. – a truly perfect mind meld is pretty rare, and there were moments of divergence early on, even before 2025:
Payton started the entire 2020-21 regular season despite mountain ranges of evidence showing that lineup being terrible, and despite Thibs likely knowing he would have to totally remake his rotations in the playoffs (which he begrudgingly attempted before the year ended)
Not experimenting with expanded roles for young players in 2021-22 (and not really until 23 games into 2022-23), despite the data consistently pointing to them outperforming veterans ahead of them, when expectations were decidedly championship-less
Not fully utilizing the bench of IQ, Hart, Deuce, iHart and Obi Toppin. Today that group includes a $175 million combo guard, two key rotation players a year later in the Knicks’ playoff run without the injured Julius and two impact players impacting the 2025 Finals
Only utilizing Jalen Brunson’s considerable off-ball mover and shooter gifts in 2024 once Randle was hurt, rather than with Julius and his significant gravity
Thibs joined the Knicks after a coaching sabbatical where he did update his philosophies. Anyone telling you he coached like a dinosaur is lying. And yet alignment is a spectrum, and over his tenure the front office’s tolerance for misalignment shrunk and shrunk while Thibs’ devotion to his own vision remained steadfast. Philosophical bridges once possible to cross proved no longer passable.
Now what?
Zooming out, you have a coach who for four years was often – but not always – tactically and philosophically aligned with his front office. That’s nothing to be ashamed of in today’s NBA, and rarer than people think. But as a crack becomes a fissure becomes a canyon, a front office has to act.
In that way, Thibs was a victim of both Leon Rose’s success and his own. A third tenet Thibs and Leon always agreed on was that each year, the team needed to move forward. No wasted years. The Knicks were brought to the brink of the Finals in spite of divergence from analytically-flawed decisions and discarded margins. Rose and his staff were faced with a choice: wait and see if the sting of a simultaneously disappointing and impressive ECF loss was enough to cause Thibs to course correct, or move on from their coach. Left unspoken was the truth that as the Knicks inched closer to their ultimate goal, as they invested more picks and more prospects into a more settled core, the margins for error – for misalignment – shrank. The new CBA means competitive windows are shorter, parity is greater, opportunity more fleeting.
As a result, the coach has finally become the paperclip, and we now await to see who the front office decides is an upgrade. As we wait, though, Knicks fans would do well to acknowledge the causes of this decision, and take solace: whomever they hire will join the Knicks in part because they value analytics, and value the margins. Leon Rose would not have it any other way.
