Tom Thibodeau and the minutes-heavy Knicks are at it again

Copy Link

Email

Print

BACK IN 2017, coming off a frustrating season in which his young Minnesota Timberwolves set a modern NBA record by blowing 22 double-digit leads, then-Wolves coach and team president Tom Thibodeau was crystal clear in diagnosing the issue.

"I went through [film of] those games, and it kept coming back to toughness," Thibodeau said during that year's media day. "A lot of what we were doing wasn't tough enough. And this summer we wanted to change that."

One of the quickest ways to increase the team's toughness, Thibodeau suggested, was to infuse more of it into the roster. So despite a slew of teams leaning into the league's load-management strategy to help keep their stars…