Mitchell Robinson, Tom Thibodeau, and the development of a defensive bromance
The Knicks have had their ups and downs so far this season, but one thing has been a theme: these Knicks try more on defense under Tom Thibodeau. The biggest reason? Mitchell Robinson, perhaps the most talented defensive big man that Thibs has ever coached.
Question: What is the single most sustainable element of the New York Knicks’ (relatively) hot start to the season?
Answer: Saint Thomas of Thibodeau pulling a top-10 defense out of his anus.
Question: How is he doing that?
Answer: Mitchell Robinson.
The End. Come back next week for questions and answers involving world hunger and Immanuel Quickley.
Oh, right, yeah, you want the juicy details. Alright fine, here are some numbers courtesy of cleaningtheglass.com, a site that excludes garbage time from all its statistics, something more important than ever in this, The Season of the Halftime Twenty Point Deficit. The Knicks through 11 games have the ninth-best defense in the league. In large part, this ranking belies what has been an unsustainable defensive shot profile — lots of threes allowed (seventh-most), lots of shots at the rim allowed (third-most) — which simply surrenders too many of the highest value shots. They’ve also benefitted from unsustainably bad shooting by opponents (whispers: a little luck).
Thankfully, there is a more sustainable, less fortuitous, infinitely more spiritually satiating secret sauce to New York’s early-season defensive prowess: the combination of Tom Thibodeau and Mitchell Robinson, a player-coach tandem plucked from the heavens.
With Mitch on the floor, the Knicks defense is 4.2 points per 100 possessions stingier than when he sits. Mitch is a walking forcefield around the paint, with teams taking fewer shots at the rim (-5.8%), and midrange (-1%) while taking more threes, both from the corners (+2.4%) and above the break (+4.3%), when he’s manning the middle. Even more impressive, though, is that after funneling opponents away from the paint and out to the perimeter, teams are then shooting worse from three, both from the corners (-2.5%) and above the break (-1%) in Robinson’s minutes.
“His pick and roll defense, it’s special, and he makes our team different when he’s on the floor”
It’s worth noting that this positive on/off impact is buoyed by a chunk of non-Mitch minutes while Nerlens Noel was out injured, coming with Julius Randle at the five. That bump exists, but may be somewhat smoothed out by Mitch having played against some of the best bigs in the league — Domantas Sabonis, Joel Embiid, Rudy Gobert, and Nikola Jokic — in his minutes so far.
Robinson has a block percentage of 3.3% and a steal percentage of 2.2%. He’s one of two players in the league to play more than 200 minutes with a block percentage more than three, and a steal percentage more two. The other is Myles Turner, who’s rocking a BLK% of seven(!), and STL% of two for the Indiana Pacers. Take both qualifiers down half a percentage point — to a 2.5 BLK% and a 1.5 STL%, — and that disruptive duo is joined by Andre Drummond and Richaun Holmes. Take it down another half a percentage point — to a BLK% of two and a STL% of one — and the likes of Anthony Davis, Joel Embiid, and Christian Wood join the stocks party. Even among this elite — and, for the most part, vastly more experienced company — Mitch stands out.
In maybe the most symbolic marker of Robinson’s development, the Knicks give up 8.1 fewer free throw attempts per 100 opponent field goal attempts — a 95th percentile impact — with him on the floor this season. This is after languishing down in the 36th and 30th percentiles his foul-happy first two years. The benefits of him fouling less are twofold: 1) He doesn’t muffle his individual impact by giving up free throws — the best points per possession offensive outcome in basketball — while also allowing opponents to set up their defense after shooting two, hurting the Knick offense and defense and 2) he doesn’t torpedo his playing time and end up watching from the bench.
Mitch staying out of foul trouble, and in turn keeping opponents off the line, has liberated all sorts of possibilities for the 22-year-old big man. It’s truly a developmental tipping point, not only for its blinding impact in the immediate, but because it gives him the necessary and crucial on-court reps to get even better. And here is the beautiful kicker: he already looks like a legitimate defensive NBA anchor, despite just getting his big-man driving license. The kid is still drifting around corners and donutting in car-parks, generally poking at boundaries, and getting some wind-in-his-hair 0-to-60 kicks. Remember, he didn’t play a lick of basketball in college, and had his sophomore campaign in the NBA cut short by the pandemic.
What will he look like when he’s had a couple of seasons behind the wheel of an NBA defense with Tom Thibodeau at the helm? Some combination of mind-boggling and tummy-tickling and paint-prowling, if this neck-straining trajectory holds. It’s obvious, watching him bank real and regular NBA minutes, that his previously abstract ceiling is becoming more concrete by the game.
What’s not so obvious is how Thibs — whose tummy I can guar-an-tee you is tickled by the tantalizing possibilities of a foul-free and frisky Mitch — is going to schematically maximize his 7-foot-1 berserker.
“You guys haven’t seen it yet... But it’s coming”
NBA defense is a certified jungle of competing, but subtly interrelated variables. Trying to carefully pry out some fundamental universal NBA truths about what exactly constitutes a stylistically optimal defense is like some combination of trying to text on a rollercoaster, attempt a Rubik’s cube blindfolded, or stand near Trae Young without being whistled for having and requiring the use of lungs.
Defense is the messy meeting of priorities and personnel. Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau, in his previous NBA stops, has given us clues to his priorities, but he’s never had the keys to a suped-up and shiny Mitchell Robinson before. He’s had a practical and reliable Joakim Noah, and he’s had the rickety defensive rickshaw that is Karl-Anthony Towns, but he’s never had a backline predator of Robinson’s horsepower.
The “how” of Thibs’ deployment of his weapon of mass deterrence is murkier than the “what” he’ll prioritize protecting. Every NBA head coach wants to take away the best shots and force teams to take the worst shots. In a vacuum (not taking into account individual players being especially elite at specific shots, and so warping their value), from good to bad, those shots are: free throws, shots at the rim, corner threes, non-corner threes, and, lastly, the dreaded longer twos.
These are the universal NBA “what’s” on both ends of the floor. The shots every team wants to take on offense and take away on defense. The devil, as always, is in the details; in the tradeoff between strategic routes to taking away as much as your roster’s defensive skillsets allow.
Do you play aggressively? Hunting turnovers for gold-dust fast break freebies, at the expense of an increase in defensive breakdowns, fouls leading to free throws, driving lanes, and open threes? This is a one-punch knockout of a defense, mastered by last year’s Toronto Raptors, who forced the second-most turnovers, had the second-highest transition frequency, and gave up by far the most corner threes in the league — but rode a roster of Dark Trooper perimeter defenders to the second-best defense in the Association, and almost as importantly, helped prop up a limited half court offense with a steady stream of transition buckets.
Or do you play conservatively? Protecting every slither of advantage, funnel everything to an elite rim protector, hug the 3-point line, be disciplined about not fouling, not gambling, and generally starve teams of offensive oxygen. This is a chokehold of a defense, mastered by the Gobert-era Utah Jazz, who last year forced the third-fewest turnovers and had the third-lowest transition frequency, but gave up the second-fewest corner threes, sported the seventh-best free throw rate, and cruised on Rudy’s sizable coattails to the best defensive shot profile in the NBA.
In his five seasons coaching the Bulls, Thibs trended conservative, with a Jimmy Butler, Luol Deng, and Joakim Noah defensive spine. Averaging out his tenure, the Thibodeau-led Bulls were 19th in turnover percentage, seventh in free throw rate, 20th in transition frequency, and first (fewest) in corner threes allowed.
In his two full seasons with Minnesota, he had personnel that better protected perimeter than paint, with two steal merchants — first Ricky Rubio, and then Jimmy Butler — on the perimeter, and a lackluster rim protector in Towns on the backline. In those two topsy-turvy seasons, Thibodeau’s Wolves were eighth in turnover percentage, 13th in free throw rate, 25th in transition frequency, and 20th in corner threes allowed.
Through 11 noisy games this season, the Knicks are 27th in turnover percentage, 11th in free throw rate, 30th — by a large margin, as much as the difference between the 29th-ranked Houston Rockets and 24th-ranked Golden State Warriors — in transition frequency, and 19th in corner threes allowed. Thibs’ founding defensive philosophy has always been to protect the paint above all else. So far this year, in a scheme that in principle is an attempt at a Raps-Jazz hybrid of sorts, the Knicks are conservative about defending the perimeter — with Mitch stationed in a drop or ice coverage and rarely getting up to the level of the screen — but less conservative about suffocating any lane touches with perimeter defenders digging into the paint. The Knicks aggressively over-help in this mission, constantly collapsing on the ball before scrambling out to the corners to flush the rock out to those more difficult above the break threes.
It’s fundamentally conservative around the arc, but undeniably aggressive when the perimeter walls are breached; and it’s all built around Mitch, who regularly contests shots at the rim and then sprints out to contest a three. Sometimes he’ll contest a shot in one corner, contest a shot at the rim, and then contest a wing three on the opposite side of the floor, all in the same possession, and all without fouling. Like this absurd possession against the Jazz, early this season, where Mitch displays a preposterous combination of raw size, improbable mobility, and elite effort.
Despite the feel-good synergy of the franchise through 11 games — from the heady heights of .500-ish basketball to the MSG floor polishing cajones of one Austin “Onions” Rivers — this season is still a developmental one. Mitchell Robinson, emphatically, is a big, fat, shot-swatting developmental dub for these fledgling Knicks.
It’s a win that can’t be separated from the arrival of big man whisperer Kenny Payne. A win that can’t be separated from Saint Thomas of Thibodeau’s gospel come voodoo, a bellowing syringe of uncut and uncompromising my-way-or-the-highway culture drilled directly into the beating heart of the franchise. And a win that makes answering questions about the ‘Bockers’ defensive direction pretty simple.
The answer is Mitchell Robinson, and this is only the beginning.
