Rockets, Nets, Knicks should stay away from Tom Thibodeau

The Houston Rockets, Brooklyn Nets and New York Knicks are reportedly interested in former head coach Tom Thibodeau. They probably shouldn’t be.

According to Marc Berman of The New York Post, the New York Knicks will get the first crack at hiring former NBA head coach Tom Thibodeau, while the Brooklyn Nets and Houston Rockets will also consider acquiring his services.

If that report is true, all three teams are considering playing with fire.

On the surface, a well-established, defensive-minded coach like Thibodea makes sense for all three franchises. His .647 career win percentage ranks 11th all-time among NBA head coaches with at least 500 games under their belts, he’s taken teams to the playoffs, and even in his last, ill-fated gig with the Minnesota Timberwolves, he helped them snap a 13-year playoff drought before the Jimmy Butler soap opera tanked everything.

For the Knicks, that kind of proven track record and apparent stability would be good for a franchise that’s been lacking in both categories for the better part of two decades now. If the Knicks were in the Three Little Pigs story, they would’ve been the fourth, unmentioned pig who got eaten first by the Big Bad Wolf after trying to build their house with doomed trades for over-the-hill point guards, poor drafting and empty free-agency dreams.

Former Knicks coach David Fizdale and his interim replacement, Mike Miller, drew a ton of criticism this season for neglecting to provide the younger, potential core players with ample minutes. The rotations were nonsensical, and developmental projects like Mitchell Robinson, Frank Ntilikina, Kevin Knox, Dennis Smith Jr. and Allonzo Trier weren’t getting enough opportunities. Maybe they won’t wind up becoming foundational pieces, but the Knicks weren’t even bothering to actually find out.

With Thibs in the Big Apple, Knicks fans wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore, but they would have to worry about Robinson and RJ Barrett collapsing into dust before the age of 25, since the former Chicago Bulls coach is notorious for riding his key players — especially the younger ones — into the ground. That approach doesn’t fly in this era of load management.

For the Nets, hiring an old-school coach with a traditional offense would be a major step backward from the modern, 3-point heavy offense they ran under Kenny Atkinson. The way that whole Atkinson situation panned out was sketchy, but even if Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving like and respect Thibodeau, that could change pretty quickly when he starts playing them 40 minutes a night as they’re both coming off significant injuries.

Hiring a coach who’s been deep in the playoffs makes sense for a squad with championship aspirations for next season, but Durant turns 32 in September, and Irving, who just turned 28 in March, has been injury-prone throughout his career. Not only would the Nets be taking a step backward in terms of tactical approach, they’d be threatening to stunt their star-studded roster’s championship window by subjecting their two best players to conditions just begging for injury setbacks.

And then we have the Rockets, whose inclusion on this potential list of suitors is so stylistically opposed to Thibs’ principles it borderlines on comical. If the Nets‘ 3-point attack would be taking a massive step backward with a coach like Thibodeau, just imagine the migraine Daryl Morey would get from watching his team run a traditional offense after leading the league’s 3-point revolution.

The Rockets averaged 44.3 3-point attempts per game this season, the most in NBA history, and have led the league in long-range attempts in six of the last seven seasons, including the last four straight. Hiring a coach whose teams have never ranked better than 16th in 3-point attempts per game would be a hysterical overcorrection from Mike D’Antoni, even for a small-ball team that could use more of an emphasis on defense.

And don’t even get me started on what would happen to poor James Harden, who has ranked in the NBA’s top three for minutes per game in three of the last six seasons and has only dipped below 36 minutes a night in one season since 2012-13.

You can say Butler kamikaze-d the Wolves’ entire operation, but the most common Thibs complaints — not enough 3-point shooting, an old-school offense, heavy minutes for the core guys — persisted there too, and even worse, the defense wasn’t great either. Even with his involvement with Team USA, he’s an old-fashioned, tough-nosed coach who is unlikely to change his ways, and none of these rosters has the same defensive personnel he had in Chicago.

Maybe that’d fly for a Knicks franchise that needs anything stable to build upon, especially if he could just install a competent defensive structure, but Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins didn’t exactly flourish under his watch. In fact, KAT referred to his handling of Minnesota’s younger players as “a disrespect and a slap in the face to their development.”

Tom Thiboadeau was a great NBA coach with those Bulls teams, but the game and the league have changed since then and it’d take a massive reinvention on his part to start fitting in again. Do your due diligence if you must, Knicks, Rockets and Nets, but at the end of the day, it’d probably be best to look elsewhere for your next head coach.