The Knicks were outmatched, outclassed, outplayed, and outworked by the Miami Heat on the road Wednesday night. Does Tom Thibodeau have what it takes to salvage this season?

Dear Reader,

Please forgive me for what you are about to read. 

Once again, the Knicks lost a total laugher of a game to a team that may as well have been playing a different sport. The Miami Heat jumped out to a 9-0 and never looked back. I am not sure why I keep getting stuck with these games. Maybe it’s just bad luck. Or, perhaps it’s karma for some past wrong I committed. Most probably, however, is that I keep writing recaps for crappy Knick games because the Knicks keep playing crappy games. Like Katniss Everdeen, the odds are forever in my favor.

Nevertheless, as Julius Randle once said (in what seems like a different lifetime), “we here.“ The game needs covering, which I will do as briefly as possible. But, so do its repercussions, and I will cover those more in depth. Trust me, there are many. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

Deja vu

There really is not much to say about the game. The Heat absolutely eviscerated the Knicks from start to finish. They worked harder, they played smarter, and they schemed better. Bam Adebayo picked the Knicks apart with hand-offs and slip passes on backdoor cuts. Duncan Robinson seemingly ran around the entire game, using the threat of his shot to provide gravity for his teammates and a head start on the defender chasing him when he felt like throwing in a random cut. 

The Knicks came out slow, as they tend to do. And while the bench tried to fight back in the second quarter, this game highlighted how easy it is for a well-coached team to exploit the Knicks’ weaknesses. The Heat had an answer for every trick the Knicks tried to deploy. No play highlighted the gap between the two teams more than this one:

This is a set play, and it is clearly a play for one person. Quickley stands and dribbles in place a few feet behind the arc as three players watch Quentin Grimes run around. This is the easiest action in the world to defend. There is no counter. Nothing. Just one single action without a backup plan. After the Heat thwarted the Knicks’ attempt at freeing Grimes open for a shot, the Knicks reset and eventually got some ill-fated shot attempt off. It always seemed demonstrably more difficult for the Knicks to create a quality look than it did for the Heat. And by the time the bench unit made their way into the game in the third quarter, the deficit, which had ballooned up to 27 points, was well out of reach.

Not this again

Which brings us to a potential truth that is getting more and more difficult to deny with each performance like the one we saw last night; we may have a Tom Thibodeau problem on our hands. I’ve said it before — what Thibodeau pulled off last season was miraculous. The Knicks’ projected win total was the lowest of any team in the league, and they managed to almost double it, and won a Coach of the Year award to boot. He deserves the world’s longest leash, and I expect him to get it.

And while there are many problems with this flailing team, most of them surrounding its lost superstar, Thibodeau’s rotation management is quickly rising to the top of that list of problems. Watching last night’s game, you may have noticed that both halves were simultaneously similar and eerily familiar. The Knicks started each half slow, leading to Thibodeau begrudgingly calling timeout, only to send the five men who started each half back onto the floor to, by Thibodeau’s account, “try harder.” This looked familiar because it is all too familiar.

Above is a list of the most-used lineup from each team in the league entering last night, as well as the two most commonly-used Knicks lineups — their opening night starting lineup (Kemba Walker, Evan Fournier, RJ Barrett, Julius Randle, Mitchell Robinson), and the starting lineup they featured when Kemba Walker has been injured or was benched (Alec Burks, Fournier, Barrett, Randle, Robinson). This list is sorted by volume. As you can see, despite Walker appearing in just 27 of the 48 games played thus far, the Knicks’ current starting lineup is the third-most used lineup in the entire league. Now, watch what happens when we sort by net rating:

The third-most used lineup in the league becomes the fourth-least efficient high-volume lineup ahead of two tanking teams and a starting lineup the Dallas Mavericks swiftly abandoned. Worse, the version of the starting lineup with Burks in for Walker is also in the bottom 10. These lineups (along with the starting lineup with Nerlens Noel in place of Mitch Robinson), have combined to play almost 30% of the Knicks’ minutes this season. There is no way to sugarcoat it; this is preposterous.

It was one thing last season when Thibodeau kept going back to a flawed well as the team heavily exceeded expectations. Would the Knicks have been better if they took Elfrid Payton out of the rotation? Probably, almost every piece of tangible evidence we have points in that direction. But Thibodeau earned the benefit of the doubt. So, while it was frustrating, it was a frustration that grew smaller and smaller the more success the team had.

This is another thing entirely. Because Thibodeau is, once again, defying overwhelming evidence that a change needs to be made, and this time he does not have a leg to stand on. Sitting tied for 11th in the East, on the outside looking in, and with one of the league’s toughest remaining schedules, there likely is not light at the end of the 2021-2022 Knicks season’s tunnel. Yet Thibodeau continues to treat this team like a finished product. Like the pieces, rotations, schemes, everything they have in place, is perfect. They just have to execute better, work harder, in his estimation.

This, of course, is likely not true. But the irony is that we may never know this team’s true ceiling, because Thibodeau refuses to take one hand off the wheel. No matter the venture, discovering a heightened ceiling always involves some amount of volatility. Thibodeau’s strict rotation system as well as his hockey shift substitution pattern means that there are many combinations of players we will simply never see play together. The most damning example? Immanuel Quickley, Quentin Grimes, RJ Barrett, Julius Randle, and Mitchell Robinson have logged just 19 minutes together this season as a unit. Take Robinson out of that equation and that number rises to barely over a game’s worth of minutes. Other tandems have seen even less time together. A few, like Randle playing with his backup Obi Toppin, have seen basically zero meaningful minutes.

There are simple fixes. The easiest one would be to input Immanuel Quickley into the starting lineup. As I noted above, both iterations of the starting lineup we have seen too much of this season have struggled, but when Quickley plays with the other four starters in the place of Walker or Burks the unit’s net rating leaps to +9.3 in a relatively small sample size of 14 minutes. 

Another fix is more philosophical and grandiose than a simple tweak. Thibodeau has to coach the players he has, rather than the roles he wants them to fill. The truth is that Thibodeau likely understands that Immanuel Quickley has been better than Nerlens Noel this season. But Thibodeau doesn’t view his players that way. He knows Mitchell Robinson, a player with a long injury history and less stamina, is the first sub out of the game. So, while some coaches may have Quickley enter the game first and go small with Randle at center, Thibodeau puts Noel in first. Because Noel is Robinson’s backup. There is only one way to play in Thibodeau’s mind. A baseline strategy. Every player has his role to play, and there is little deviation from that strategy. In a way, Thibodeau treats the team like a finished product because in his mind they are a finished product. Any mistakes or shortcomings stem from a lack of execution, not a flaw in the system itself.

There is a reason arrogance is often met with disdain while humility is greeted with praise. Oftentimes hubris is completely unearned. This is certainly one of those cases. Thibodeau may have earned the leash he will get, but look how fast the man he has tied his success to, Julius Randle, has worn out his welcome with Knicks fans. The clock is ticking. Time to start figuring this thing out.