The New York Knicks fired head coach Tom Thibodeau today after the team’s best run in 25 years. The man known as Thibs brought accountability and expectations back to New York City, and ultimately, he was punished for it by Knicks owner James Dolan. The 2020-21 NBA Coach of the Year was all the rage in New York when he first arrived, and now it is left to someone else to finish the job he began. Aided by the ascension of Jalen Brunson to true superstardom, Thibs turned around a historically moribund franchise who Tom Scocca described better than anyone as “the franchise that answers the question ‘What if the Detroit Lions thought they were the Green Bay Packers?”
After winning one playoff series this century before Thibodeau showed up, the Knicks finally got to feel like the Packers, winning at least one playoff round each of the last three years and falling two games short of the NBA Finals this season. That was enough to convince Dolan that the Knicks were close enough to win a championship, but were missing something, and he pressed sports owners’ favorite “do something” button, firing the head coach today.
Whether a man who is known for wearing out his welcome across the NBA landscape deserved to get fired is up for the New York media to discuss nonstop for 48 hours a day for the next few months, what I am here to blog about is how recent history proves that the last thing anyone wants is to win the NBA’s top award for coaches. It is akin to being infected with the NBA’s Black Plague that has an incubation period of a year or two.
The 2015-16 NBA Coach of the year, Steve Kerr, is still holding his job in Golden State of telling Steph Curry how he should keep shooting threes, but after him, the unemployment line starts to build for people the NBA has officially anointed as great coaches. The 2016-17 NBA Coach of the Year Mike D’Antoni was fired a few years later, spent a year with the Nets as an assistant, and now he is a relatively anonymous coaching advisor for the downtrodden New Orleans Pelicans.
Dwane Casey won the 2017-18 NBA Coach of the Year, and shortly after it was announced, the Toronto Raptors thanked him for all his hard work of setting franchise records by firing him. Mike Budenholzer won it the following year for Milwaukee, led them to a championship two years later, and just two years after reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he was fired after losing to the eight-seed Miami Heat.
Nick Nurse was handed the reins after Casey was fired in Toronto, and all he did was win an NBA Championship in his first season and NBA Coach of the Year in his next. He signed a contract extension with the Raptors in 2020 and was fired three years later, and he currently is tasked with the impossible: trying to drag the Philadelphia 76ers to the mountaintop. Thibodeau won it in New York the season after Nurse, and he was followed by Monty Williams winning it with a .780 win percentage for the 2021-22 Phoenix Suns. They signed him to a contract extension that offseason and fired him less than a year later for having the audacity to lose to the eventual NBA Champion Denver Nuggets who also fired their head coach Michael Malone after just one failed championship defense (some early speculation is the Knicks canned Thibs so they could go after a Queens kid in Malone).
Mike Brown won the 2022-23 NBA Coach of the Year for doing what few have ever done in Sacramento and turning the Kings into a real playoff team, but after a 13-18 start in 2024, the Kings fired him too. The only coach who won Coach of the Year from 2016 to 2023 who is still employed as a head coach is Steve Kerr. Obviously going past that is moving beyond the half-life of an average NBA coach, but between the retired Gregg Popovich and George Karl, the Chicago Bulls’ iteration of Thibs, Mike Brown winning in Cleveland for telling LeBron James to do LeBron James things, and some NBA Coaches of the Year who also are not in the NBA anymore, the last head coach before Kerr and the last two COY winners to hold a current NBA head coaching job is 2001-02 NBA Coach of the Year Rick Carlisle, who helped facilitate Thibodeau’s dismissal by leading the Indiana Pacers to beat the Knicks in six and advance to the NBA Finals.
If I were Mark Daigneault (the 2023-24 Coach of the Year) or Kenny Atkinson (this year’s winner), I would not be getting too comfortable right now. Oklahoma City is the NBA’s best team, and if Daigneault cannot win the NBA Championship with them over a Pacers team who frankly, has no business beating OKC on their best day, then either this offseason or next will be his moment to join the rest of these former COYs in the unemployment line. Given how few believers there were in Cleveland’s ascent this year to a Monty Williams-esque .780 win percentage, Atkinson’s agent should currently be putting feelers out for his next job in a couple years.
The old maxim that there are two kinds of coaches, those who have been fired and those who will be fired, is truer in the NBA than anywhere else, and it seems to be accelerating. Between the Grizzlies and Nuggets firing each franchise’s most accomplished coach ever just before the playoffs and now Thibs, NBA owners’ trigger fingers are clearly getting itchier. Winning Coach of the Year seems to be a curse more than anything, as it is a declaration from the rest of the league that you should be getting the ultimate job done and you deserve to be declared a bozo for the whole world to see if you don’t.
However, in Budenholzer’s case, we know that even reaching one of the most difficult mountaintops in sports is not enough justification for keeping coaches around a couple years after they struggled to repeat. There are usually a lot of different reasons coaches get fired, some more justifiable than others (like with Budenholzer always being a questionably good coach)—but at this rate, if I were a head coach who was named the NBA’s best coach, I would start searching Zillow for listings in other cities ASAP.
GET SPLINTER RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
The Truth Hurts
