Leon Rose has some tasks ahead of him across these next few months. There are the looming free agencies of OG Anunoby and Isaiah Hartenstein. There’s Jalen Brunson, now eligible for an extension at max money. And as has been the case since he took over the Knicks, there’s the underlying question of identifying and acquiring the Next Piece, at a moment in time when the Knicks are ideally equipped to do that.
There’s something else, too.
Before he does anything else, he needs to extend Tom Thibodeau, who has one year left on his contract. Rose needs to do this both as a reward for what Thibodeau has already done — three playoff appearances and two series wins in the last four years, after 20 years of five postseason appearances and one series win — and to solidify that part of the corporate flow chart for the immediate future.
We know where the coach stands on this.
“That’s something that my agent will take care of,” Thibodeau said Sunday afternoon, asked about his looming talks with Rose. “The Knicks have been great to me. This is where I want to be.”
And there’s no indication Thibodeau’s bosses feel any less committed to him, as well. Thibodeau is 66, but he’s an energetic 66. Adding three or four years to the one he has left will take him into his 70s. By then, he may well be ready to go back to the beach and recreate the picture that caused such an internet sensation the past week.
And by then, perhaps the Knicks will get where everyone wants them to be. If they get there, with this core, it’ll be because of the foundation Thibodeau has created.
“To me, what’s crazy is the idea that there’s even something resembling a debate about this subject,” one longtime NBA insider told me Monday. “I don’t sense there’s much of that internally. But you hear things about Tom, all the usual things, and you just want to scream: How’d things go under the previous dozen or so coaches? Look at the Lakers, man. Look at the Suns. Look at all these franchises desperate for real leadership.
“And with the Knicks you have players literally willing to run through a wall for their coach. In the NBA? In 2024? I mean when do you see that? Ever? And there are people criticizing him? Really?”
The truth is there is a large and quiet majority of Knicks fans who remember what it was like in the wilderness years connecting Dec. 9, 2001 — the day Jeff Van Gundy resigned from the Knicks — and July 30, 2020 — 6,808 days in which the Knicks were among the most deplorable franchises in North American sports.
The relevant numbers: 585 (wins), 863 (losses) and 13 (coaches who tried to coach the Knicks and failed miserably, with one outlier in Mike Woodson).
The detractors? Invariably the conversation returns to one subject: Thibodeau’s alleged insistence on playing his players to the brink of exhaustion. This is something that persisted this year despite the inconvenient fact that in the regular season the Knicks didn’t have any of the top 13 players in average minute workloads and only two — Jalen Brunson and Julius Randle — in the top 50.
Did those minutes swell once injuries began, and then once the playoffs began?
Of course they did.
But here are two things to ponder for the members of the militant force Thibodeau half-jokingly refers to as the “minutes police”:
1. The Knicks barely survived the 76ers in the first round — remember, the point differential after six games was exactly one point — and that’s with guys like Brunson, Josh Hart and Donte DiVincenzo logging huge minutes. So the ideal solution, then, is play fewer minutes, win fewer games? And maybe not win a winnable series? Is that really where we’ve gotten to now?
2. In these same circles the Knicks were lampooned for playing hard enough to gain the No. 2 seed, even winning in OT in Game 82. Guess what? If the Knicks had finished with the No. 3 seed, they would’ve faced the Pacers a round earlier. And if you choose to argue that they’d have been better off, then their Round 2 opponent would either have been Philly — with a more fully healed Joel Embiid — or Milwaukee, with Giannis Antetokounmpo back to health.
The facts are the facts: The Knicks won 50 and a playoff series and made it to Game 7 because of a team-wide code — installed by Thibodeau — that forbade them from feeling sorry for themselves. The job he did was, in the view of a lot of folks who know coaching, the best he’s ever done, and he already has two Coach of the Year plaques.
Rose has been nothing if not a sober analyst and appraiser of the Knicks’ strengths and weaknesses since he came on the job, and so it’s unlikely he’s going to get caught up in the silliness. He knows what he has in Thibodeau. It stands to reason he’s going to lock him up. Now he just has to do it.
