Julius Randle, OG Anunoby & Tom Thibodeau: The end of the road?
The Knicks face three crucial decisions this offseason. The answer is obvious: bring everybody back — or maybe don’t.
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Fifty-three weeks before the 2024 Knicks’ season ended in Manhattan, the 2023 season ended in Miami. Four Knicks – Jalen Brunson; Josh Hart; Isaiah Hartenstein; Miles McBride – played in both games. That’s where the similarities end. No matter what’s next, it will be new. Does that seem obvious? Like, duh? It’s not.
Take last offseason, when the Knicks did something radically new for them by following up a successful season with . . . nothing. The only rotation player to exit was Obadiah Toppin, the only newcomer Donte DiVincenzo. Positively Parminedean of them! Contrast this with the Heraclitean hecticness that’s followed the last couple good years: 2021, when the starting backcourt of Elfrid Payton and Reggie Bullock begat Kemba Walker and Evan Fournier, or 2014, when Andrea Bargnani and a rookie Tim Hardaway Jr. succeeded Steve Novak and Jason Kidd. Maybe “succeeded” isn’t the perfect word there, but you get the drift.
Then again, maybe the 2024 Knicks were mercurial as ever. If the offseason was quiet, the regular season became a transactional mosh pit, bodies flying in and out and all about. Of the nine Knicks to see action opening night, the majority weren’t here by season’s end, either traded to another team or out due to injury (Julius Randle; Mitchell Robinson; Immanuel Quickley; RJ Barrett; Quentin Grimes). Imagine going back in time eight months and telling your past self that Precious Achiuwa and Alec Burks would become rotation mainstays in the deepest Knicks playoff run in a quarter-century.
So if history is any guide, the Knicks will change very little this summer – or definitely absolutely do something significant. How do we navigate this fork in the road? Robert Frost wrote, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood/and sorry I could not travel both/and be one traveler, long I stood/and looked,” but he’s been dead 60 years and was probably a Celtics fan anyway, so he’s no help. Perhaps we should go even further back, to wise King Solomon, and split the baby in two. If there are multiple voices in your head, turn that cacophony into polyphony; into symphony, ideally. I’m of two minds regarding whether to welcome back or wave goodbye to OG Anunoby, Julius Randle and Tim Thibodeau. Here they are.
Trade Julius Randle
In that Game 6 loss to Miami a year ago, Brunson scored 41 points on 14-of-22 shooting (64%). The other Knick starters? 31 on 5-of-32 (16%). Randle was no innocent bystander, posting a ghastly 3-of-14 all his own. Too often in that postseason, Brunson had no reliable second banana to split the workload with.
These past playoffs saw the faces change but the issue remain: beyond Brunson there was no primary Plan B, to coin an oxymoron. The difference is playing out in real time right now in the Western Conference Finals: Dallas is up 3-0 on Minnesota in part because when Luka Dončić is tired, he turns to Kyrie Irving, and when Anthony Edwards is tired, he turns to Karl-Anthony Towns — and guess who’s shooting 53% in the series and who’s shooting 28%? You see Randle more as a Kyrie or a KAT?
OG Anunoby at the 4 gives the lineup more of what it needs most alongside Brunson: defense and spacing via cutting and corner threes, both more reliable (health permitting) than betting Randle’s third time through the playoffs proves to be the charm. Moving off Randle doesn’t address the need for another star-level scorer, but coupled with re-signing Anunoby, the Knicks would have an opening for an off-guard or a big wing who might. There are cap ramifications I may ignorant to as far as the timing of deals and how that impacts cap space, but assuming OG is in the $35-40 million neighborhood and Randle $45-50 million, trading JR for a better quality and quantity of depth while saving $10 million that can go elsewhere makes more sense than hoping someone who hasn’t been the answer the last five years suddenly will be next year. And remember: after this offseason, the latest fan-unfriendly CBA makes it more difficult for teams to make big moves. Unless the Knicks are certain Randle is their guy going forward, now is the time to cut the cord.
Keep Julius Randle
Barring a blood moon over Broadway, this whole postseason could not have been a clearer sign from the basketball gods that the Knicks should not only keep Randle but extend him. If he’d been active in the Philadelphia series, the Knicks win in four games, five at most; and if he were healthy for Indiana, nobody would be complaining about the untested Celtics cruising to the Finals.
What were the Knicks lacking in the playoffs? Shot creation outside of Brunson and frontcourt depth. Imagine Randle were never a Knick, and they finished this season with those same holes – shot creation and quality size – and a three-time All-Star, two-time All-NBA power forward who puts up 25, 10 and five was available. Keep it simple, stupid.
As for the “He’s never been good in the playoffs!” hardcores:
In 2021 vs. Atlanta, RJ and Bullock shot 39% from the field, IQ and Randle shot 30%, and before he was benched Payton literally shot 0%. At a recent family reunion in Minnesota, six people contracted brain worms after eating undercooked black bear meat. Two of them never ate the meat but got sick from vegetables cooked with the meat. The Hawks’ defense was the parasitic disease and the Knicks’ one-man offense an undercooked carcass. Everybody struggled. When there’s cross-contamination, the kabob and the broccoli sprout are equals.
The 2023 playoffs opened with Randle returning early from a bad ankle sprain, re-injuring the same ankle a week later, then returning from that sprain just over a week later. When he did play, clearly physically limited, he was mostly guarded by Evan Mobley and Bam Adebayo, a fate so cruel you’d think Randle called Aphrodite “an Athens 8 but a Midtown 4” and was being punished.
Randle, like Hephaestus (Mr. Aphrodite) and Todd Hundley before him, was injured trying to do right by others. As Leonardo da Cherry Hill – a.k.a. Leon Rose – expands upon this Knick renaissance, it’s worth considering the holistic benefits that’d come with rewarding a long-term Knick, one who was there in the bad old days and who joins Rose, Thibodeau and Brunson on the Mount Rushmore of Knick 2020s saviors. Re-signing Randle not only makes sense for the team’s needs now, it’d add chapters to the most successful free-agent story in franchise history, a man who despite being out nearly four months received love from the MSG crowds at both Knick and Ranger playoff games. You can’t put a price on that good will.
Keep OG
Rom-coms are jealous of how perfectly Anunoby and the Knicks came together. Rudy Giuliani’s path from racist mayor to national punchline marvels at OG’s seamless transition to MSG. Juan Soto never imagined a New York city newcomer packing such punch.
The Knicks were like 100-2 with OG in the lineup. You know the numbers. Numbers lie, but when they’re all saying the same thing they’re usually onto something. These regular-season on-off numbers are onto something.
But what about the playoffs?
As striking as the numbers are, Anunoby’s is a brilliance you can see with the naked eye, whether his work against Joel Embiid in the first round or key late-game steals against Tyrese Haliburton in the second. The Knicks traded a lot for him. His boss is his agent’s Pops. His game, his age, his blendability — re-signing Anunoby is a no-brainer.
Let OG go
Sometimes no brain is better. A University of Toronto researcher found highly intelligent people are more likely to develop blind spots to their own biases. He called this “dysrationalia,” meaning “people doing irrational things despite more than adequate intelligence.” One way to cut through such entanglement: Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation for something, the one with the fewest elements, is often the most trustworthy. So let’s keep this simple: this is the percentage of games OG Anunoby’s missed over the course of his career:
2018: 10%
2019: 18%
2020: 4%
2021: 40%
2022: 41%
2023: 18%
2024: 39%
OG missing the last five games of the Pacers series (I’m not counting his five minutes in Game 7) means he missed 38% of the Knicks’ postseason. That seem like a lot? Because that’s pretty much who he’s been for four years now. Anunoby’s teams have made the playoffs five times. He played every game of those runs three times, missed Toronto’s entire 2019 title run and the Knicks’ final five games this season. His 2019 absence was due to an emergency appendectomy, but similar to questions about Randle: if there’s reasonable doubt that OG can be counted on to be available for the biggest moments, it’s reasonable to doubt the wisdom of giving him what’d be (for a year or two) the biggest contract in franchise history. And as for “But they’ve already given up so much for him; letting him walk would be a disaster!” — a bigger disaster is doing something you know could cause long-term suffering just so you can feel better about what you did today.
Move on from Thibs
After losing a 3-2 lead and being knocked out in the second round, the man the players say is the foundation of their success is in line for a new contract. It’s widely assumed to be a matter of when and not if, and the whens won when Patrick Ewing signed a four-year deal in the summer of 1997. What, you thought this was about Tom Thibodeau?
Well, it is. The parallel is meant to draw your attention to the danger of the obvious. It was obvious in July of 1997 that the Knicks would re-sign Ewing, then 34, to a deal that’d pay him at 38 for what he did at 28. Less obvious yet ultimately more meaningful was the future: a third of the way into the ‘98 season Ewing broke his wrist; he was never the same. A year later a torn Achilles sidelined him for most of the conference finals and all of the Finals. A year later he talked about joining Pat Riley and the hated Heat before signing off on the Knicks trading him to Seattle. The deal was a mistake.
Had the Knicks taken the road less traveled and never re-signed Ewing, there’d have been an opening for a younger and likely healthier star going forward. Scandalous? Sacrilege? They don’t raise banners for getting revenge against the Heat. In fact, one Knicks coach was ready to punt Patrick two years earlier.
Don Nelson replaced Riley and wanted to trade Ewing ASAP, believing from his connections around the league that Shaquille O’Neal was interested in coming to New York. Can you even imagine? Shaq left Orlando at 23. If he’d chosen the Knicks over the Lakers – which may sound unfathomable to you now, but which made all the sense in the world of 1996 – the Knicks would have broken their title drought a long, long time ago, and several times over. Which brings us to Thibodeau.
The man has done everything anyone could have hoped for with this team since he arrived; more importantly, he’s done everything he’s capable of with them. Just as there are tiers of players, there are coaches who get a team pointed in the right direction – Doug Collins; Mark Jackson; Mike Woodson – and coaches who get them to the mountaintop – Riley; Phil Jackson; Tyron Lue. Thibs is so obviously not the latter it’s just as clear if you throw them into a completely different context. If that quartet went into outer space and an explosion exposed them to cosmic rays, a la the Fantastic Four, Riley, Jackson and Lue each make sense as Mister Fantastic, The Invisible Woman and the Human Torch. The Thing could only be Thibs, just as Thibs could only be The Thing.
Moving on would be a scandal, natch. The players will hate it. You’d have to follow him with an undeniable upgrade. I don’t know who that’d be. But how much longer is it fair to expect a Thibs team, specifically, to succeed? It’s possible the final bill for this incredible 2024 season is paid by the 2025 team. Champions talk about how hard it is to repeat because playing longer and harder than 29 of 30 teams carries over into their title defense. The Knicks didn’t win the championship, but may have expended more energy in two rounds than the Celtics will over four.
Re-sign Thibs
Thomas Wayne Thibodeau is on track to go down as the most important coach in Knicks history behind Red Holtzman. His middle name isn’t really Wayne; I just wanted your attention. Now that I have it: re-sign Thibs. Whatever it costs. You’ll be glad you did.
Thibodeau’s work in New York has already surpassed Riley’s, even while the results haven’t. The Riley mythology paints him as descending from Olympus, i.e. the 1980s Lakers, to work what miracles he could with a Knick roster that after Ewing was plenty tough but talent-poor. The truth is Riley inherited a better core than they’re often credited for. The Knicks won 51 games Riley’s first year; five of the nine Knicks in Riley’s rotation were in Rick Pitino’s when he led them to 52 wins three years prior. Adding John Starks and Anthony Mason, whether genius or luck, were organizational genius/luck; it’s not like Riley knew them from pickup games at the Y and brought them in for a tryout. Also, after four years Riley went full Ouroboros, a rat and a snake all in one.
Thibodeau took over a very different team. The 2020 Knicks witnessed the last days of the David Fizdale “Weekend Dad” era – no offense, no defense, no standards, no worries . . . nothing but vibes and Ls, and plenty of both. This was Fiz with the Knicks down nearly 40.
This is Thibs with the Knicks up 21.
His teams have outperformed expectations three of his four years here. We saw a team that when it was mostly together – fleetingly, teasingly – was a title contender. With one arm tied behind their back they were knocking people out. You think there’s a bunch of coaches out there you just plug in and keep that going?
Thibodeau took over a perennial loser with zero culture. They’re now one of three teams to win a playoff series the past two years and universally recognized for their intensity and relentlessness, qualities the players credit him for. Portrayed as an inflexible, dogmatic ogre when he first arrived, we’ve seen more flexibility and experimenting than was supposedly possible. He may never be a Nellie-level iconoclast, but Thibs is looser than we’d been led to believe – not to suggest the fire that burns inside him is any fainter, and that’s partly the point.
The man has the respect of his players, particularly his best players, and is basically a basketball encyclopedia with a restless heart and an Adderall connection. The front office knows what kinds of players to bring in because they know what a Thibodeau player is. And similar to retaining Randle, this franchise gains cultural capital by finally having stability at head coach – not only does that mean a great coach continues to work here, it makes the position more attractive whenever it finally does open up, likely improving the candidate pool. Re-signing Thibodeau is a win-now and win-later move.
Unless it isn’t.
