Official Knicks Coaching Search Thread

[Zenzibar]

What's Next for New York?
Coaching Candidates
Thibs' Firing Raises Questions
I research organizations and culture. Here’s a lesson the Knicks should heed
By Spencer Harrison

June 7, 2025
Editor’s note: This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering leadership, personal development and success through the lens of sports. Follow Peak here.

Spencer Harrison is a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and an expert on culture. He is also an NBA fan who grew up in Salt Lake City during the John Stockton-Karl Malone era of the Utah Jazz.

In March, a story about the New York Knicks caught my attention. Mikal Bridges, one of the team’s starters, said he had gone to his coach, Tom Thibodeau, and asked him to ease the heavy minutes Bridges was playing.

“Sometimes it’s not fun on the body,” Bridges said.

What interested me is what happened next. Bridges said that he and Thibodeau had spoken about his workload. But Thibodeau told reporters the two “never had a conversation about it.”

As someone who studies the cultures of businesses and organizations, I found Thibodeau’s response telling. To me, it suggested a stubbornness and unwillingness to consider other options, as if the conversation wasn’t even worth having. And it reminded me of leadership and organizational issues we see in the business world.

we can't post full articles, especially ones behind paywalls. zenzibar knows this. -JVG

[spree8]

And maybe the plan was they just didnt think they could win a chip with thibs and had to see what other avenues were available. Which if thats the case would suck.

I think that is the case lol. It’s validation for those of us who’ve facetiously said all year that any one of us could coach this team better than Thibs.

He just really wasn’t it, and they knew that any of the available options were better going forward.

[god shammgod]

probably the mavs are really thinking over this kidd thing and everything is waiting on that. because if they really were sure they wanted to keep him they'd shut it down right away like the udoka thing was.

Also could be posturing from Mavs. They just trying to hold out any leverage they have by trying to get some kind of compensation for him.

Kidd has been a HC for a minute it's either you want him to be your coach or you don't. The Mavs allowing him to talk to us is basically saying they have agreed on compensation when we do officially hire him.

It's why you probably havent even heard of guys getting interviewed yet while we "wait".

Also league probably wants this **** done after the finals since it's already getting **** ratings and don't want ESPN and all the media talking about the hire rather there Finals.

i heard someone say their ownership might be trying to figure out if they want to rebuild or not. they got gifted this cooper flagg thing after screwing up luka. they could trade ad. let kyrie expire. and have cap room and whatever they get for ad. they have their own pick next summer too.

[mpharris36]

probably the mavs are really thinking over this kidd thing and everything is waiting on that. because if they really were sure they wanted to keep him they'd shut it down right away like the udoka thing was.

Also could be posturing from Mavs. They just trying to hold out any leverage they have by trying to get some kind of compensation for him.

Kidd has been a HC for a minute it's either you want him to be your coach or you don't. The Mavs allowing him to talk to us is basically saying they have agreed on compensation when we do officially hire him.

It's why you probably havent even heard of guys getting interviewed yet while we "wait".

Also league probably wants this **** done after the finals since it's already getting **** ratings and don't want ESPN and all the media talking about the hire rather there Finals.

i heard someone say their ownership might be trying to figure out if they want to rebuild or not. they got gifted this cooper flagg thing after screwing up luka. they could trade ad. let kyrie expire. and have cap room and whatever they get for ad. they have their own pick next summer too.

That would be pretty wild but be gifted Flagg certainly can change a franchises outlook. No Kyrie next year also.

AD and Flagg aren't on the same timeline.

[Knicksfan1992]

What's Next for New York?
Coaching Candidates
Thibs' Firing Raises Questions
I research organizations and culture. Here’s a lesson the Knicks should heed
By Spencer Harrison

June 7, 2025
Editor’s note: This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering leadership, personal development and success through the lens of sports. Follow Peak here.

Spencer Harrison is a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and an expert on culture. He is also an NBA fan who grew up in Salt Lake City during the John Stockton-Karl Malone era of the Utah Jazz.

In March, a story about the New York Knicks caught my attention. Mikal Bridges, one of the team’s starters, said he had gone to his coach, Tom Thibodeau, and asked him to ease the heavy minutes Bridges was playing.

“Sometimes it’s not fun on the body,” Bridges said.

What interested me is what happened next. Bridges said that he and Thibodeau had spoken about his workload. But Thibodeau told reporters the two “never had a conversation about it.”

As someone who studies the cultures of businesses and organizations, I found Thibodeau’s response telling. To me, it suggested a stubbornness and unwillingness to consider other options, as if the conversation wasn’t even worth having. And it reminded me of leadership and organizational issues we see in the business world.

full text removed. -JVG

This was a really interesting perspective and good read.

Thanks for sharing

[god shammgod]

Also could be posturing from Mavs. They just trying to hold out any leverage they have by trying to get some kind of compensation for him.

Kidd has been a HC for a minute it's either you want him to be your coach or you don't. The Mavs allowing him to talk to us is basically saying they have agreed on compensation when we do officially hire him.

It's why you probably havent even heard of guys getting interviewed yet while we "wait".

Also league probably wants this **** done after the finals since it's already getting **** ratings and don't want ESPN and all the media talking about the hire rather there Finals.

i heard someone say their ownership might be trying to figure out if they want to rebuild or not. they got gifted this cooper flagg thing after screwing up luka. they could trade ad. let kyrie expire. and have cap room and whatever they get for ad. they have their own pick next summer too.

That would be pretty wild but be gifted Flagg certainly can change a franchises outlook. No Kyrie next year also.

AD and Flagg aren't on the same timeline.

yep. next season is a wrap for them with the kyrie injury so might as well tank one more time since they have their pick. kyrie is expiring and paying him big money after that injury is questionable. they have lively, christie, flagg and this pick to start over with. ad, gafford, klay, pj to trade. probably the smart choice.

[KnixinSix]

probably the mavs are really thinking over this kidd thing and everything is waiting on that. because if they really were sure they wanted to keep him they'd shut it down right away like the udoka thing was.

Also could be posturing from Mavs. They just trying to hold out any leverage they have by trying to get some kind of compensation for him.

Kidd has been a HC for a minute it's either you want him to be your coach or you don't. The Mavs allowing him to talk to us is basically saying they have agreed on compensation when we do officially hire him.

It's why you probably havent even heard of guys getting interviewed yet while we "wait".

Also league probably wants this **** done after the finals since it's already getting **** ratings and don't want ESPN and all the media talking about the hire rather there Finals.

i heard someone say their ownership might be trying to figure out if they want to rebuild or not. they got gifted this cooper flagg thing after screwing up luka. they could trade ad. let kyrie expire. and have cap room and whatever they get for ad. they have their own pick next summer too.

Kyrie and AD are breaking down and get older. Players that are pretty injury prone in their youth usually get even more injury prone as they age.

Perhaps they try and trade AD and Kyrie this summer and go full rebuild with Flagg that might be a smart approach. Give AD in a package to Spurs for #2 pick perhaps? Flagg and Harper would be an insane young foundation for a team.

[KnixinSix]

i heard someone say their ownership might be trying to figure out if they want to rebuild or not. they got gifted this cooper flagg thing after screwing up luka. they could trade ad. let kyrie expire. and have cap room and whatever they get for ad. they have their own pick next summer too.

That would be pretty wild but be gifted Flagg certainly can change a franchises outlook. No Kyrie next year also.

AD and Flagg aren't on the same timeline.

yep. next season is a wrap for them with the kyrie injury so might as well tank one more time since they have their pick. kyrie is expiring and paying him big money after that injury is questionable. they have lively, christie, flagg and this pick to start over with. ad, gafford, klay, pj to trade. probably the smart choice.

Interesting thought....would you do Mitch, Hart, Mikal plus our 2026 #1 for Anthony Davis in some 3 team deal with the Mavs? Anthony Davis is in theory could be a near ideal pair mate with KAT in the front court.

[TheGreenArrow]

Read on Twitter

?s=46&t=W09F6FrMDfp5_y1gKYgF1g

No Giannis so hopefully no Kidd!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[mpharris36]

Read on Twitter

?s=46&t=W09F6FrMDfp5_y1gKYgF1g

No Giannis so hopefully no Kidd!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

well there is basically zero chance of that happening Giannis.

[3toheadmelo]

Read on Twitter

?s=46&t=W09F6FrMDfp5_y1gKYgF1g

No Giannis so hopefully no Kidd!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So basically we running it back with a worse coach. Oh well.

[Spot31]

shaping up to be the dumbest offseason of the decade. good lord what has jason kidd done as a coach to warrant this much attention. why would we want him that badly?

just get bryant

He's coached his team to an NBA Finals. What has Bryant done to warrant this much attention?

[8516knicks]

That would be pretty wild but be gifted Flagg certainly can change a franchises outlook. No Kyrie next year also.

AD and Flagg aren't on the same timeline.

yep. next season is a wrap for them with the kyrie injury so might as well tank one more time since they have their pick. kyrie is expiring and paying him big money after that injury is questionable. they have lively, christie, flagg and this pick to start over with. ad, gafford, klay, pj to trade. probably the smart choice.

Interesting thought....would you do Mitch, Hart, Mikal plus our 2026 #1 for Anthony Davis in some 3 team deal with the Mavs? Anthony Davis is in theory could be a near ideal pair mate with KAT in the front court.

Is Bellevue still open?

[thebuzzardman]

Schrödinger's Kidd

[thebuzzardman]

Spoiler:

What's Next for New York?
Coaching Candidates
Thibs' Firing Raises Questions
I research organizations and culture. Here’s a lesson the Knicks should heed
By Spencer Harrison

June 7, 2025
Editor’s note: This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering leadership, personal development and success through the lens of sports. Follow Peak here.

Spencer Harrison is a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and an expert on culture. He is also an NBA fan who grew up in Salt Lake City during the John Stockton-Karl Malone era of the Utah Jazz.

In March, a story about the New York Knicks caught my attention. Mikal Bridges, one of the team’s starters, said he had gone to his coach, Tom Thibodeau, and asked him to ease the heavy minutes Bridges was playing.

“Sometimes it’s not fun on the body,” Bridges said.

What interested me is what happened next. Bridges said that he and Thibodeau had spoken about his workload. But Thibodeau told reporters the two “never had a conversation about it.”

As someone who studies the cultures of businesses and organizations, I found Thibodeau’s response telling. To me, it suggested a stubbornness and unwillingness to consider other options, as if the conversation wasn’t even worth having. And it reminded me of leadership and organizational issues we see in the business world.

Thibodeau is well known for playing his starters heavy minutes during the season while limiting his bench players (four of the top 10 players in total minutes played this season were Knicks). One of the criticisms leveled against him is that while his players usually play hard and he often wins during the regular season, his teams can burn out in the playoffs, and he doesn’t develop a reliable bench for the postseason.

We know that Thibodeau is really passionate about basketball and a really good defensive coach who has won doing things his way. But the question with him has always been: Can he be more flexible within his system? Can he use people with different skillsets in different ways?

I thought about Thibodeau’s response again this week after the Knicks fired Thibodeau, the franchise’s most successful coach in years, following the team’s exit from the Eastern Conference Finals. It reminded me of interesting research on how leaders can get the most out of groups and could point the way forward for the Knicks.

One of my colleagues, Pier Vittorio Mannucci, a professor at Bocconi University in Milan, did a study of the creative teams on films in the animation industry — creative teams at Pixar and Dreamworks, for example. For each film, directors had teams of animators with varying levels of expertise and experience. Some animators might know how to work with many different technologies; others might specialize in one.

The question Mannucci wanted to answer was: What makes the most creative team? Is it the unit where you just have experts? Or is it the team with more generalists?

What Mannucci found, in his words, was that you want a team that has a bigger expertise toolkit, or people who have been exposed to different ways of doing their job. It allows them to adapt as they’re working on projects, and they’re better able to come up with creative solutions to problems.

The study showed that the most creative teams are able to look at the full toolkit and then utilize it, so that when you get to a point where you need an innovative new strategy, you have the capacity to develop it.

It’s an easy metaphor for an NBA team. We know that sometimes you have basketball players who are specialists. There are players who are great on defense. There are sixth-man microwave scorers. And then you have other players who are hybrids; they do a lot of little things.

But do you have a leader, a coach, who can use the whole toolkit?

Using the whole toolkit is a very common problem in business. People sometimes engage in what we call “mythological learning.” The idea is simple: I’ve become successful, and as I begin to get promoted, I assume that my success is based on all the choices that I have made, rather than realizing that some of the choices I made might have led me to success in part by luck.

As a result, some of the lessons that you’ve intuited from your success might be the wrong lessons.

The problem is that what got you there is not necessarily going to get you over the hump in the next role. And if you’re not willing to second-guess or expand your learning, to actually have the conversations to explore what other ideas are available, then it’s hard to see your own blind spots. This might have been a key issue for the Knicks with Thibodeau.

Even so, in moving on from Thibodeau, the Knicks are taking a huge risk. Thibodeau was their most successful coach in decades, and their track record prior to this recent era indicates that they have struggled to find a coach capable of maximizing the toolkit of talent that’s available to them. Thibodeau was able to do that, to a certain level.

To use another business example, there was a study that showed how changing leaders can go wrong. 3M was always well-known as an extremely innovative, creative organization. Prior to the 2000s, 3M always promoted CEOs from within, because the feeling was that a leader needed to understand the culture to make the organization perform well. But then 3M had a couple of years of down performance, so company leaders thought: Maybe what we need is an outsider to shake things up and get us to the next level.

They hired James McNerney, who had been groomed to possibly succeed Jack Welch at General Electric. GE is all about efficiency, cutting waste, rewarding high performance — a totally different culture than 3M. McNerney came into 3M and tried to make an innovative company more efficient, implementing all the toolkits he had learned from GE. It didn’t work. After five years and minimal gains, McNerney left and 3M largely reverted to the culture it had before.

This is the trick for all organizations going through this kind of change, including the Knicks: How do we leverage the value of the gritty, hard-working culture that Thibodeau built with a new coach who’s going to want to implement new things?

In business and in life, we often overvalue and trust specialists vs. generalists. But there’s a key way to succeed with this kind of change.

You want to make dead sure that the next person you hire is not a system leader but a learning leader. It’s a coach who should say: “I want to learn from the players on what made this team successful, and then I’m going to focus on expanding and maximizing the toolkit.”

This was a really interesting perspective and good read.

Thanks for sharing

Sounds like the Knicks should hire Johnny Bryant, based on this, because it's the closest to "hiring from within"

[rajajackal]

the narrative is now circling to the mavs being in a better situation than the knicks? after being clowned for historical mismanagement up until their head coach was in contention for a knicks job?

[stuporman]

There are some of you mfers that never believed or even gave them a chance, always doubted nearly every move and yea, there was sometime this season for about 30 seconds you did think anything was possible but now you're right back to hating and baiting.

Some skepticism will always be warranted with this regime. They ran back elf. That in of itself is enough to always be a lil cautious. But they've made other mistakes that dont need listed. But I think its safe to assume they have a plan(s) in place. And maybe the plan was they just didnt think they could win a chip with thibs and had to see what other avenues were available. Which if thats the case would suck. All that said they also deserve some grace which were very generous at handing out.

'Some skepticism' isn't what is going on, it's the same old trope, if the Knicks don't win the title they think they are the smartest basketball knowers and act like whatever they say is gospel truth on everything. Having some skepticism about our own opinion is a powerful insight few people care to entertain, I guess it's more comfortable to delude oneself about it.

[god shammgod]

That would be pretty wild but be gifted Flagg certainly can change a franchises outlook. No Kyrie next year also.

AD and Flagg aren't on the same timeline.

yep. next season is a wrap for them with the kyrie injury so might as well tank one more time since they have their pick. kyrie is expiring and paying him big money after that injury is questionable. they have lively, christie, flagg and this pick to start over with. ad, gafford, klay, pj to trade. probably the smart choice.

Interesting thought....would you do Mitch, Hart, Mikal plus our 2026 #1 for Anthony Davis in some 3 team deal with the Mavs? Anthony Davis is in theory could be a near ideal pair mate with KAT in the front court.

no

we can't afford to trade 3 rotation players for one. especially one that is often injured.

[BKlutch]

STATUS REPORT:

Written by MDB.

Published on June 10th, 2025.

It has been 6 days since Tom Thibodeau has been dismissed.

The Knicks Fandom is awash with many emotions as the departure of a beloved, yet polarizing figure has sent shockwaves through many. Some are relieved. Others are processing their grief. The fact remains, the ship is entering uncharted territory.

No replacement has been named, as the Knicks organization remains tight lipped. Some believe it's because they already have picked their coach. Some believe they haven't and are flailing in the wind.

This analyst's objective study has led to one simple conclusion:

No one knows anything.

Wild and baseless speculation runs rampant.

Panic ensues with every new tweet that says a lot of nothing.

Posters have threatened to post entire substack articles as mods rush in to prevent DMCA strikes that run the risk of toppling the RealGM empire.

Adam Silver awakens with heartburn as no one is watching the NBA Finals and all the click baiters are locked in to fueling the paranoia and anxiety of Knicks fans.

As we begin the 7th day of the Post Thibslamic Era, the only advisable course of action is to remain patient and let the future chain of events unfold, as the fanbase has no control over the situation.

This analysis also includes evidence of Giannis Antetokounmpo falling and busting his ass while visiting children in Brazil

End report.

According to this report, this offseason will be as uneventful as last year's. It was nearly time for training camp and the whole board was saying how we hadn't done nearly enough. There were no credible rumors of anything hapening.

Then BOOM!

We were all caught off guard by the KAT trade. So I have to ask,

"Why is this board so impatient?"

Spoiler:

Maybe most of us are still withdrawing from playoff fever?

[god shammgod]

who would trade for anthony davis ? it would have to be someone who would think they would contend after and need a big man ? detroit ?