A deep dive into the principles of Tom Thibodeau and the Knicks’ help defense
Tom Thibodeau’s defense has been lauded ever since his days with the Chicago Bulls. But just what about his concepts has made him a coaching success, and brought the Knicks back from the brink as a competitive team?
They aren't sexy, and they aren't exciting, but the composite collection of wax-on wax-off micro-skills — stunt, recover, closeout, contest: repeat — that make up help defense are often the foundation for wins and the root cause of losses in the NBA. In the context of the athletic storm of absurd human freakery that is professional basketball, it's relentlessly mundane, and it's relatively simple, this stuff — but it really, really, matters.
Well-drilled help principles are to elite defense as functional household plumbing is to stress free domestic life, but there are plenty of leaky defensive taps in the NBA, which begs the question: why is there so much variance in the league-wide execution of such a seemingly simple skill?
At first glance, it's neither particularly complicated nor especially challenging, physically, for guys who can all but, you know, fly, to do: sit in a stance, take two hard steps to your left, stick a deterring hand in the direction of the ball and, without stopping, immediately change direction, four hard steps back in the direction you came from, hand high and ready to contest a shot, butt low in a stance, still, to prevent a blow-by.
Not so difficult, right? Maybe not once, or twice, or even five times. But a game’s worth of reps, hundreds of them, in between just as many offensive exertions, and the defensive grunt work that seems simple becomes a mammoth physical and mental challenge. Worse than the unglamorous lung-mashing labour of it, maybe, is its lack of reward, of applause, of claimable recognition for individual players whose professional currency is goals aimed for and goals clearly achieved.
It’s this challenge — buy-in for this challenge, collective investment in this challenge — that New York Knick head coach Tom Thibodeau specializes in. It’s a large part of why he won Coach of the Year last season, a large part of what makes him such a valuable coaching commodity, and a large part of why Zach Lowe in his season preview for ESPN said of the Knicks, “they will nail rotations as long as Tom Thibodeau is there.”
Here’s an archetypal possession for the Knicks under Thibs:
Julius Randle stunts twice to the elbow to deter Chris Duarte’s drive, demonstrating a number of Thibs’ help principles: help early, help with the first man against penetration, anticipate and plug gaps before gaps appear, and recover back out to your man early. It’s no accident that this double effort that has no individual statistical reward, but results in a turnover, happens with the Knicks up 15, in the rust-riddled early days of the preseason, from the team’s best player. It doesn’t matter who’s helping, whether the game is in the balance, or what the stakes are — the help must be early, with effort, every time.
Here’s RJ Barrett — the Knicks’ golden child of fundamentally flawless help — with the closeout:
As Torrey Craig attacks a closing out Evan Fournier and drives middle, RJ stunts early help to the elbow, conceding the pass to a wide open Duarte at the top of the key. The importance of being early is clear here, because it prevents RJ’s momentum from being used against him. If he’s a step slow, he’s still moving to the elbow as the pass is made, and moving in the opposite direction of the ball. The margins of momentum are tiny here, but crucial. RJ sprints the first half of the closeout, before sliding into a no middle stance for the remaining distance, he doesn’t bite on the pump fake, staying low, with one hand already high for a quick contest when Duarte pulls the trigger.
Here’s another play from the same game, in the final minute, with two young guys in Quentin Grimes and Kevin Knox — who aren’t in the rotation — executing like they know their chances of getting into the rotation depend on it:
Knox is in the strong side corner, with Grimes on the wing, and with 40 seconds remaining in a game long decided, they execute a flawless help rotation. Grimes stunts to the foul line to stymie middle penetration, forcing the pass out to his man on the wing. While Grimes is recovering to his man, Knox helps the helper from the corner with a stunt of his own to buy Grimes an extra step on his closeout.
The beauty of a Thibs-coached team is that players understand and fear the repercussions of a missed rotation: a fear that nurtures exceptional discipline. Not all players on teams that want their players to defend with this level of discipline can leverage this type of buy-in.
Here’s an early example from a random preseason game:
Terrence Ross, helping one pass away as Dejounte Murray rounds a screen and heads for the paint, helps halfheartedly at best, and helps late, and so doesn’t really help at all. He’s as active as a lamp post as Murray gets deep into the paint for a high percentage shot. He’s guarding sharpshooter Doug McDermott, so maybe we can generously give him the benefit of the doubt, right?
This was a few plays later:
Mo Bamba closes out hard to McDermott in transition, Ross is at the elbow. The weak side low man, Gary Harris, helps to contest McDermott’s drive, who kicks to Harris’ man, Derrick White — who should now be Ross’ man — in the corner. Harris gets out to contest the corner three as Ross perfects his lamp post impression. The two should have switched assignments, with Ross closing out to the corner, and Harris rotating up to the wing, in what is known as an X-out rotation (because the paths of each players rotation cross). Ross even signals his awareness of what should have happened to his teammate after the play.
It took five preseason minutes to find two Terrence Ross lapses that RJ Barrett very rarely makes — or, more accurately, isn’t allowed to make — even if it is only preseason. This chasm of execution between Ross and RJ specifically, but also random NBA player X and Knick player X generally, is the difference between points saved and points surrendered, between a good defense and a bad defense, between drip-free taps and a flooded bathroom.
The Knicks’ help defense is built on old school principles of early elbow help to prevent middle penetration, coupled with ferocious effort on closeouts to impact shooters. Not all teams play this style, with teams like the Rudy Gobert-anchored Utah Jazz mostly staying at home on shooters, happy to let players roam the 2-point no mans’ land inside the line and outside the paint. Here are two Jazz possessions from the playoffs:
First, Bojan Bogdanovic and then Joe Ingles stay at home one pass away, sticking to their assignments on the perimeter, rather than stunt towards penetration. They know Rudy can handle and impact the ball handler on his own, which allows for a much more conservative base Jazz perimeter defense.
The contrast in style is demonstrated in the proportion of 3-pointers the Jazz and Knicks gave up as a proportion of opponents shot attempts, respectively, last season. Per Cleaning the Glass, Utah gave up the second-fewest threes in the league, compared to the Knicks’ 23rd-fewest.
Last season, the Knicks had the fourth-best defense in the NBA, and did so while giving up a large proportion of shots from high value areas — from three and at the rim. There is a supposed friction between results and process here that is all too commonly explained with “luck.” In reality, the Knicks defend with more effort and intensity in rotation than almost any team in the league, leaning on the combination of perimeter effort and constant backline rim protection as a counterweight to a risky shot profile.
Mitchell Robinson and then Nerlens Noel were crucial to this schematic tightrope of perimeter pressure and rim protection, with Knick defenders on the outside empowered to run shooters off the 3-point line and effectively funnel them to a waiting Noel, who happens to be — despite his two-way warts — one of the best weak side rim protectors in the world, with a potent combination innate vertical timing and an admirable lack of fear at being the victim of the occasional immortal highlight. When the Knicks did give up lanes to the rim last season, a lot of it was after blockading the middle, coaxing a kick-out pass, and closing out hard — confident a Knick big was waiting to contest at the basket. Despite ranking 21st in frequency of opponent rim attempts, per Cleaning the Glass, the Knicks allowed the lowest field goal percentage at the rim in the league, at 60.5%.
Zach Lowe’s defensive confidence in a Tom Thibodeau-coached team making rotations — like the sky being blue and the sun being hot — is not surprising. But the juicier takeaway from last season’s defensive success is that the Knicks needed to be so militantly disciplined in rotation, because they simply didn’t and still don’t have the personnel to stay out of rotation. Thibs knows his guys have to excel in help because they will be in rotation. Point of attack defensive talent was a problem last season, and will be again in 2021-22.
Kemba Walker will battle, he’ll draw charges, he’ll slither through razorblades of light around screens — but he is 6-feet tall at best, and he will be a bullseye all year long. Reggie Bullock was an excellent team defender last year, and he needed to be, and was seen to be, in Thibs’ help-heavy system. But he was a so-so individual defender on the wing and had no chance — sorry to bring it up — guarding offensive uber-conductors like Trae Young. RJ Barrett has far superior “wing stopper” potential than Reggie, so that’s an upgrade, but he can’t guard Ferrari-quick point guards like Trae, either.
Interestingly, rookies Deuce McBride and Quentin Grimes may be Thibodeau’s best options on the current roster to impact the league’s Trae types at the point of attack enough to change the ceiling of a defensive philosophy that was simultaneously the Knicks’ greatest regular season weapon and most vulnerable playoff flaw last season.
The list of “Trae types,” really, is Trae himself and lesser versions of. He might have been the worst individual playoff matchup for the Knicks defensive philosophy in the entire league in the spring. Think about four of his best offensive skills, in the context of the Knicks’ early-elbow help scheme, with a big sat in a drop (as a base, although Thibs bought his bigs higher, and mixed up coverages, as the series went on) close to the rim.
1) His willingness to take and ability to make deep pull-up threes, meaning ball screens are set higher than normal above the 3-point line, meaning more ground for stunting wing defenders to cover on the way in and the way out.
2) Once he gets around these picks, he has a devastating arsenal of ambidextrous one-handed skip passes in his bag, which uniquely stress the fine margins of the momentum crucial to early help. He can whip them in an instant, without surrendering his dribble, to a buffet of ready perimeter shot-pockets.
3) Once he gets into the paint, with a defender on his hip, he’s looking for whistles and is one of the most successful in the association at wooing them.
4) If he doesn’t get a whistle, he’s in his sweet spot for either a floater or a lob pass, both of which he’s mastered, and both of which look identical. Rim protectors are up a decision making fecal-creek: their shot blocking is negated if Trae doesn’t challenge them at the rim, but they open up a lob if they step up to contest the floater.
Trae flanked by shooting destroyed the Knicks. He also destroyed Ben Simmons and the Sixers, though, and Jrue Holiday and the Bucks; who each played a similar drop scheme — but with toned down wing help replaced by superior point of attack defense — and got similarly shredded. As we all know, the way to defend Trae is to make him pay on the other end of the floor, where he is defensive cotton-wool to his offensive terminator. The Knicks’ front office prioritized operation Cotton-Wool-In-A-Hurricane this offseason with offensive upgrades at both starting guard spots — but the limits of a defensive scheme built on motivated team defenders, early help, and dropped back rim protection were pretty emphatically exposed by a point guard uniquely suited to exposing its squishy bits.
Could the Knicks get lucky and dodge the matchups featuring supercar-jitterbug primaries? Could the return and evolution of Mitchell Robinson change the equation enough to give Thibs strategic wiggle room? Could one of the rookies build enough regular season equity to become a viable option in the spring? Could the offense take such a jump that the defense can afford either slippage or strategic inflexibility?
We will see, down the road, if and when we get the luxury of such a problem.
For now, Trae-shaped playoff spanners aside, Thibs has decided this is the Knicks’ best route to an elite defense for this particular collection of plus-team but variably-effective individual defenders. They aren’t perfect, but mistakes are rare, mistakes come with consequences, and mistakes are much more likely to be made over-helping than under-helping. This is baked into a strategical cake that relies on such early help that rotations become pre-rotations. Cleverly, it almost guarantees maximum effort by incorporating maximum effort into the scheme itself: helping early is by definition proactive, and once players have helped, they have no choice but to close out like they’ve been shot out of a cannon, else someone will be wide open.
When opposing players who shouldn’t be wide open are wide open, with a full-throttle closeout nowhere in sight, it’s a very red flag for all defensive parties involved: the all seeing eye of The Laid-Back Sideline Sauron will witness the error in effort, or execution, or in extremely dangerous cases — gulp — both. Will seethe and pace. Will gesticulate like a man trapped in an elevator with a swarm of bees. Will potentially charge the prime culprit at mid-court. Will succumb to Olympic level tooth-grinding in lieu of the potentially controversial mid-court charge.
It’s beautiful and hilarious when Thibs goes full Thibs, but it isn’t rage for rage’s sake: the effort and execution is the scheme.
The Knicks’ head man often peddles a common coaching trope in press conferences about emphasizing his players’ strengths and limiting their weaknesses: his defense is a picture-perfect representation of this sentiment. Of course, far further down the road, as far more talented teams have long discovered, diversification from the comfort of a base philosophy is essential to playoff success. But the Knicks are numerous competitive timezones away from that hallowed road. Now, in year two of post-LOL life, the Knicks are learning to walk like a normal NBA team, and will happily take the high floor of Thibs’ system.
This season, there are a few things we can bank on, as long as Tom Thibodeau is here: the Knicks will lead the league in rotations nailed, defensive stunts given, and angry timeouts taken; everyone on the roster will know the game plan, their opponent’s game plan, and what the opponent’s equipment guy had for breakfast; that they will stay in games they shouldn’t be in, and win games they had no right to win, because of a collective dedication to the unsexy stuff that is easier to talk about on media day than actually sit in a stance and do.
There are plenty of leaky defensive taps in the NBA, but — freak offensive hurricanes notwithstanding — not in the house that Thibs built. This, as much as any other individual factor in the franchise’s recent success, is why the Knicks have found their way back to relevance.
