IT MUST BE liberating, in a way, for New York Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau to have a roster like this, stripped to its bare essentials, six or seven healthy players, each of them taking the court with the same mentality: dogged persistence, fierce competitiveness, ego-free play.
Trust the pass, he tells them, and so they do. Fight like hell, he tells them, and so they do. Get better every day, he tells them, and so they do.
Three or four of them play the entire game, or close to it, and that’s just the way it has to be. Thibodeau, who has been criticized his entire career for the workload he demands of his stars, finally finds himself with no choice. Maybe his whole career, through head-coaching gigs with three teams over 12 seasons, has been leading to this very moment: His guys either play — and play, and play — or the Knicks lose. The math is pretty simple.
There’s Jalen Brunson, the world’s smallest giant, and the indefatigable and ridiculous (in a good way, mostly) Josh Hart, and Donte DiVincenzo, all loose-limbed confidence. There is, or was, the smooth and versatile OG Anunoby, whose hamstring injury in Game 2 sidelined him for the next two games and potentially the entire series.
The first four games of the Eastern Conference semifinals against the Indiana Pacers, with the Knicks winning the first two and the Pacers the next two, show how quickly Thibodeau’s freedom turned into confinement. He might be able to get away with running the same guys out there minute after minute in game after game, but they have to be the right guys. The Knicks were 31-5 with Anunoby on the court this season; his injury changed everything.
The rotation is really no rotation at all, no more than a quarter-turn before it snaps back in place. Julius Randle was injured during the season, and three more of the top eight — Bojan Bogdanovic, backup center Mitchell Robinson and Anunoby — have gone down in the playoffs. The situation, once dire, is now absurd. It all seems like the perfect convergence of coach and team, as if Thibodeau sent a signal out into the universe and these are the ones who responded.
Hart played 48 minutes in four straight playoff games before Game 3 in Indiana, a stretch that amounted to 192 straight minutes of game time. He is the first player to do that in the postseason since Chicago’s Jimmy Butler — coached by you-know-who — did it in 2013. When Brunson missed most of the first half in Game 2 against the Pacers and ended up playing 32 minutes, it must have felt like a day off. DiVincenzo routinely plays 44 to 48 minutes, and Isaiah Hartenstein logged 39 in the first game without Robinson. Joakim Noah, who played — and played, and played — for Thibodeau with the Bulls, once expressed his admiration for his coach while famously adding, “But he doesn’t understand the rest thing.”
Here, at this point in the postseason, with this roster, Thibodeau doesn’t have to understand it. He doesn’t even have to acknowledge it. “The rest thing,” such as it was, no longer exists. Thibodeau is down to five players, maybe six, and he just might win a title with Hartenstein as his only healthy center.
Thibodeau’s reaction whenever the topic of workload is invoked is to either deflect or ignore. He shrugs and says everyone has a seven- to eight-man rotation in the playoffs, so his team just falls a bit below the average. Before Game 1 against the Pacers, I asked him how his players were embracing the heavy minutes. “They can do better,” he said. He immediately looked around the room, scanning faces, as if to make sure the joke landed. In his world, they — and he — can always do better. He has an overlooked sense of humor that’s not so much dry as brittle, like a lit match tossed onto dried leaves.
The Knicks have reached this point by a unique, and uniquely odd, style. The pace is relatively slow but frantic, five guys storming the court from the opening tip to the final buzzer. They beat opponents to rebounds and loose balls not through athleticism, though there’s plenty of that, but by sheer desire. There’s something almost pathological about the way they keep rebounds alive by batting them all over the court. Every loose ball is attacked as if they’re unclear when a play is supposed to be over. This far into it, 10 games into the Knicks’ postseason, the Pacers now and the Philadelphia 76ers before them seem routinely surprised at the ferocity of the Knicks’ effort.
It has to be said: The idea of a team taking on the personality or mentality of its coach is both patronizing and patriarchal. Nobody would suggest Brunson, Hart and DiVincenzo acquired their tenacity and fitness levels only after hanging out with Thibs; more likely, in him they found someone more than willing to identify, accommodate and — most importantly — understand their common belief: Sticks bound together are strong; by themselves, they break easily.
“To us, it’s more about being so competitive we don’t want to come out of the game,” Hart said, and Brunson put it like this: “There is no quote-unquote burden.”
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