Tom Thibodeau’s Knicks and the importance of identity, culture’s little cousin
The Knicks have out-performed even the most optimistic fan’s expectations so far this season under Tom Thibodeau, establishing a defensive identity that’s landed them among the best defensive teams in the league. Could the Knicks be on their way to establishing the white whale of NBA rebuild platitudes… culture?
I guess we shouldn’t be all that surprised. Tom Thibodeau was born in a defensive rock fight, molded by slow-motion slugfests, and is old friends with the shadows and darkness of back-alley basketball. The New York Knicks, now 7-8, 15 games into this sprint of a season, have won two in a row, after a five-game skid threatened to extinguish upstart notions of any enduring and plucky competence in these new-look ‘Bockers. As they emerged — battered and bruised, but ultimately victorious — from Mondays 91-84 tussle with the Orlando Magic, less than 24 hours after holding the mighty Boston Celtics to a feeble 75 points, one thing is blindingly clear: these Knicks are created in Thibodeau’s image.
We love to talk about culture, but identity is just as important. For NBA teams: identity is a lesser-heralded cousin of culture. A crucial “who are we” on which to build the habits of “how we do things.” It’s all too easy to publicly espouse confidence in the latter, as all rebuilding teams do, as if the microphone in the press conference is the holy grail of organizational change. A sorting hat of sorts. Just humbly sit behind the all powerful mic, profess your regime’s intentions with appropriate reverence to, and repetition of, approved buzzwords — “Accountability…”, “Habits…”, “Process…” — and, voila! Congratulations! Your regime has graduated to relevance! Or, shockingly, maybe not.
The NBA’s burial ground of failed rebuilds is littered with aspirational platitudes absent the necessary footholds to actually start climbing out of the league’s toilet. A sheer and daunting ceramic cliff face of post-press conference reality. Bad teams that get lucky in the draft can fly out of the toilet on the wings of all-conquering talent. Bad teams that don’t get lucky in the draft need something else to coalesce around and cling to, on the way up. Enter: Tom Thibodeau. Enter: competitive basketball. Enter: identity.
It’s no coincidence the Knicks and Magic produced the lowest scoring game so far anywhere in the NBA this season, combining for 175 total points. It featured two head coaches, in Thibs and Steve Clifford, whose coaching identities can be traced back to a common defensive denominator: Jeff Van Gundy. Both men are disciples of defensive low hanging fruit: limiting turnovers, defensive rebounding, playing without fouling… the grunt work of winning. Monday night’s game, as both teams wrestled each other into shooting less than 34% from the field, was a contest dripping with a nostalgic Van Gundian aesthetic, with a box score worthy of an archetypal ‘90s NBA arm wrestle. For many Knicks fans, and for Thibs: ‘90s basketball feels like home.
Fifteen games and over 20% of the way through the 72-game slate — the Knicks are a homely fifth in defensive rating. Last season, Seth Partnow of The Athletic discussed how many games it takes to have differing levels of statistical confidence in a team’s early season efficiency. In his 14-season, 420-team sample, half of the teams were within three spots of their final offensive and defensive efficiency rank after 43 and 49 games, respectively. After 15-20 games, half his sample were within five ranking spots of their eventual rank. Which is to say — with all the appropriate caveats about this season being a uniquely disrupted campaign — we are getting closer, with every game, to the Knicks simply being a good defensive team.
This is no mean feat, especially with a roster devoid of any established defensive difference-makers, outside of a 22-year-old Mitchell Robinson. Forget top-10, or even top-15: since the 2003-04 season, per Cleaning The Glass, the Knicks have finished with a bottom-10 ranked defense in 13 of 17 seasons. Having an end of the floor to hang their hat on, night in night out, is a welcome change for this franchise. It’s fitting that Thibs, after all these years, is the man spearheading this defensive identity.
Having a coach with such a domineering stylistic fingerprint has infused the whole roster with a similar defensive ethic. No player has bought into and benefitted more from the Thibs way than the Knicks’ so-far star, Julius Randle. This season, the Knicks’ defense is six points per 100 possessions better with Randle on the court — a career-best mark for the 26-year-old by a whopping 5.1 points per 100 possessions. For all his offensive heroics — pick a statistic, any statistic, the smart money says it’s a career high — this defensive impact by Randle may be the most surprising improvement of all.
Julius’ spectacular two-way play, after last season’s growing pains, is testament to the fickle and wriggly nature of individual players’ identities. The breadcrumbs of Randle’s emergence started before Thibs turned up, but this apex version of Randle the player can not and should not be separated from Thibodeau the coach. Randle isn’t the only beneficiary of Thibs’ uncompromising cradle of player development. Contributions are coming from up and down the roster: from Robinson manning the middle, or the folk-hero emergence of rookie sensation Immanuel Quickley, to the consistently positive Kevin Knox.
RJ Barrett, ever under the microscope, in his up-and-down sophomore season, seems to have the unwavering confidence of his coach. This, too, shouldn’t be a surprise, considering how often Thibs beats the twin-drums of process over results and hard work over everything. RJ, with a stoicism beyond his years, more than any other player on the roster, embodies these two tenets of day in and day out disposition. He has to, given the neurotic lust Knick fans have to chart and plot his NBA destiny; to neatly place him in a basketball box, with a clear and fixed label, immediately, or else the sky will fall and crush us all for our “patience” and “perspective.” There is a razor-sharp contrast between his own zen-like reaction, and the frenzied reactions of fans to the oscillations of the 20-year-old’s performances 71 games into his NBA career.
Sophomore RJ Barrett hasn’t even played a full rookie season’s worth of professional basketball games yet, and regardless of what you think his shooting percentages will be in five years’ time, the way he has dealt with the scrutiny and spotlight that comes with playing in New York inspires a confidence in his ability to figure it out. Not all players can handle the glare of the MSG lights, or the back pages the next day. Not all coaches can, either.
These are easy and optimistic narratives for a team too used to difficult and pessimistic realities. A melting pot of identities — of coach, of players, of a fanbase — seamlessly meshing together, to the tune of a top-five defense, and a surprisingly stable season underfoot, after the squelchy and exhausting slog of recent seasons. Easy or not, this is a story of a team — at least for now — that looks and sounds like a single, refreshingly coherent whole.
Randle — despite evidence to the contrary — isn’t perfect. Neither is Barrett, or Quickley, or Thibodeau; but they are playing a brand of basketball that is tangibly more effective, and more enjoyable, than rosters of Knick rebuilds past. Ironically, these defensive slugfests are turning out to be the most watchable Knick games in years. With Thibs patrolling the sidelines like an angry masked walrus, arms outstretched in bodily disbelief, on his toes and with his chin tucked, ready for coaching combat: the Knicks — finally — have an identity.
With that elusive identity, the ‘Bockers have a heartbeat again. They play a style that makes fans care, with significantly less self-loathing about blue and orange basketball. They have a roster of players who are at least trying — with every screaming sinew of their bodies, in every sweat-drenched second, of each defensive grapple of a possession — to win for their coach. And they have a coach whose identity has flooded the franchise like a force of nature. In these parts, that qualifies as culture: a rare and fragile and surprising thing.
