Perhaps it would have made a difference if there had been a stellar press conference at Madison Square Garden or at the Knicks headquarters in Westchester. Perhaps in those usual boundaries, dressed in a nice suit, free to use his platform as a domineering pulpit, Tom Thibodeau would have brought the day with prayer and charm.
Although, honestly, this doesn’t seem to be Thibodeau’s genre.
In many ways, then, this was a perfect way for Thibodeau to greet in the summer of 2020, on a Zoom call, in a Knicks golf shirt, a Brady Bunch square on a computer screen with castmates Leon Rose and Scott Perry. It is impossible to win the press conference when that conference is on Zoom, however, so there was no need to try.
Also: Knicks fans are tired of the victorious press conferences. David Fizdale and Jeff Hornacek were excellent artists on Day 1, less thereafter. Nobody had a more triumphant press conference than Phil Jackson did in 2014, when he wasn’t just hired to manage the Knicks, he was canonized. Winning the press conference is fantastic.
Afterwards, winning basketball games is much more useful and much more meaningful.
“Whenever you’re in a situation where you think about how to improve your club,” said Thibodeau on Thursday, the day he officially took over the reins of the Knicks. “You start with the players you have, your internal development is fundamental. So let’s start from there and add talent to the draft, we are also looking for a free agency to add talent and we are trying to exchange to add talent. There are four ways to improve the team. And we will see them all. “
Thibodeau is a no-frills coach with a no-frills personality, and if he can joke about how surprising it was for some when they heard he actually took a vacation to Miami this year, sitting and fried on a beach, he doesn’t even pretending not to be focused on the laser and focused on the work to be done.
Others in recent years have accepted this job and have spoken grandiloquently about what their vision was for the franchise and for the future, and have been overwhelmed by the generalities of optimism – which, in the end, translates mainly into thought desire. Thibodeau speaks mainly in detail and with the authority of a man who has won 59% of his games as an NBA manager. It subscribes to five fundamental values: rebound, defense, low turnovers, sharing the ball and using paint – passing or penetrating – as a fundamental weapon.
Simple, perhaps, but it is exactly the type of basic starting point for a team like the most requested Knicks. Speaking of the players he inherits now, Thibodeau said: “But I thought there were some players who really stepped up and did a good job. But there is a lot of work to be done. One of the most important things when studying a team is just looking at efficiency, and when you see that you are a -6.54, you realize that there is a lot of work. And we hope to get players to play for each other and start building those habits. “
It is also useful to go back 24 years to the day when Thibodeau’s friend and guide, Jeff Van Gundy, was elevated to the role of head coaching after Don Nelson’s surprise which eliminated 23 games from the end of the season. . Van Gundy is another who would never have won a press conference in those days, when he was a little known gym rat, with empty eyes and a scratchy voice.
But from the beginning, the reason why he was able to succeed in the job is that he was not intimidated by the job. He didn’t have a track record like Thibodeau now, but listen to these very first words he said on his first day at work and then ask yourself: why does it seem so familiar to you?
“Some coaches believe in giving players a day off,” Van Gundy said in the old Philadelphia Spectrum on March 8, 1996. “Other coaches believe in saving players’ legs. I’m one who believes in practice. I think the games are won in practice. He’s not just working hard, he’s working productively. My job is to create a winning work environment.
“There is no simple answer.”
It wasn’t there then. There is not now. If the Knicks are to be redesigned, one brick will come, one nail at a time, one piece at a time. Van Gundy was a serious basketball man, and Thibodeau is a serious basketball man, so serious that he sometimes makes Van Gundy look like Jackie the Joke Man in comparison.
But the Knicks need seriousness now. They require serious. They crave seriously. Tom Thibodeau takes him to dance, that winning percentage and a specific belief about how it should all be done. Good. It’s almost time.
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