More than anything else, James Dolan and Leon Rose hired Tom Thibodeau to try to make the Knicks feel like the Knicks again. After a couple of mostly aimless decades flitting from one would-be savior and monorail sales pitch to the next, New York’s braintrust hired the least slick man on the planet because it didn’t want a dream anymore; it wanted a defense.
Between 2010 and 2020, the Knicks employed seven different head coaches and five different heads of basketball operations, but produced just one above-average defense. Enter Thibodeau, the hard-charging and ever-hoarse former defensive coordinator turned successful head coach of the Bulls (and somewhat less successful head coach of the Timberwolves), tapped by Knicks brass to restore the defensive commitment that defined the franchise throughout the title-contending Riley and Van Gundy eras, and that has only rarely been seen at Madison Square Garden this millennium.