PHILADELPHIA — Tom Thibodeau did not deserve to be fired.
James Dolan did the right thing by firing him and replacing him with Mike Brown.
Both things can be true in the bizarro world of professional sports, and both things are true today, with the Knicks back in the Eastern Conference finals and playing a level of basketball they haven’t reached in more than three decades, and maybe in more than five.
Brown delivered a masterclass in the final three games of the Atlanta series in Round 1, and he just delivered another one in the only four games of the Philadelphia series in Round 2. His Knicks won those seven games by an average of 26.4 points. They won their two closeout games over the Hawks and 76ers by a combined 81 points.
Now comes the hard part, of course, as the Knicks step up in weight class in their second straight appearance in the conference finals, where they will face Detroit or Cleveland. But unless the Knicks suddenly fall apart in the next round — and there appears to be a better chance of the Mets making the playoffs than that happening — Dolan can take a bow.
Not that he took a noticeable one on Mother’s Day, while his team thrashed the Sixers, 144-114, to complete the sweep, as his customers turned Xfinity Mobile Arena into a stage for the loudest Knicks pep rally you’ve ever heard.
During a first-quarter timeout, with the rout already in progress, Dolan was the only fan standing in his row of baseline seats not far from the Knicks’ bench. He put his head on a swivel and surveyed the scene. From eight rows behind him, it seemed as if the Knicks owner was almost in awe of what his team and his fans were doing to this building.
When the game ended, Dolan made his way for the tunnel ahead of the Knicks’ pack, looking like he was walking into a boardroom at MSG. All business. His Knicks still have some work to do to meet his stated goal of reaching the NBA Finals, at a minimum.
If nothing else, Brown is giving him a better chance to do that than Thibodeau would have if he were retained for a sixth season. Why?
Brown made a stunning, transformational move with a star player, Karl-Anthony Towns, that Thibs would not have made. It’s worth mentioning a second time — Brown essentially took Gronk and turned him into Tom Brady in the middle of a win-or-else series. He converted one of the Knicks’ two franchise cornerstones into a pocket-passing point-center, and the Knicks haven’t lost since.
Towns had 24 assists in 18 playoff games for Thibs last year. He has 66 assists in 10 playoff games for Brown this year, including 10 in 20 minutes Sunday.
Understand this: If his Towns move went sideways and cost the Knicks their season, Brown would have been hammered in the court of public opinion. He might have even gotten fired.
Brown did it anyway because he didn’t fear the consequences of failure, and because he was hired by Dolan and team president Leon Rose to be less traditional and more flexible than his predecessor.
“We made a lot of moves throughout the course of the year and throughout the course of the playoffs, and you just keep trying to do what’s best for the team,” Brown said. “I don’t care what team I’m with. When you’re talking about being in the NBA, even if you do stuff right, you’re going to get criticized.
“So you just embrace whatever’s out there and you keep trying to do what’s best for the team. And at the end of the day, if it doesn’t work out, the one thing I know I can do is I can go look in the mirror and say, ‘Hey, I tried to do the best I could for this group, regardless of anything else.’ I try to do the best I could, and that’s what keeps me going.”
Brown’s best has been plenty good enough in Year 1 in New York. Jalen Brunson is still Jalen Brunson, but Towns is a new man despite the foul trouble. Mikal Bridges is now playing both sides of the ball like a wing actually worth five first-round picks. Even with OG Anunoby out of the lineup, the Knicks scored a franchise postseason record 144 points and tied a league record with 25 3-pointers (in only 44 attempts).
“It’s unbelievable,” Brown said. “It’s great basketball.”
What he called his “equal opportunity offense” allowed for Deuce McBride, of all people, to morph into Steph Curry while scoring 20 of his 25 points in the first half. “The Deuce McBride Show,” KAT called the early stages of the blowout.
But back to Towns for a moment. He is a six-time All-Star and a career 23-points-per-game scorer who might be the best big-man perimeter shooter ever. After averaging 15.8 shots for Thibodeau in last year’s postseason, he is averaging 9.2 shots for Brown in this year’s run … and not at all complaining about it.
In fact, Towns said the other night, “I feel like I always had this (passing ability) my whole career. It’s just now I have the opportunity to utilize that skill set.”
Karl-Anthony Towns passes the ball past Joel Embiid, and Mikal Bridges scores in the third quarter for one of Towns’ 10 assists in Game 4. (Kyle Ross / Imagn Images)
Brown’s primary responsibility as head coach is to find ways to make his players better, and he did that with Towns. The same Towns who started the season saying he didn’t know his role in the new coach’s offense, and who spent parts of the year looking less comfortable than he did in the Thibs system.
But Brown wasn’t afraid of taking the kind of gamble with Towns that Dolan took on him, and ended up absorbing no criticism, KAT said, “because we didn’t give him a chance to get it. A shout-out to our team.
“We found a way to, in a way, save our season and do what was needed to adjust for Atlanta, and found ourselves in better position. It’s a shout-out to the coaching staff for realizing adjustments that needed to be made. And also, a shout-out for me personally that they trusted me.”
As a result, the entire Knicks traveling party spent the holiday taking turns talking about the team’s resolve, focus, and attention to detail. Nobody seemed terribly interested in doing cartwheels over this return trip to the conference finals, including the owner who, along with Rose, fired the coach who led them there last spring.
Thibodeau did great work cleaning up an organizational mess, made the Knicks a regular tournament participant and made life around the city a lot easier for his boss. I would have played it safe and kept him for another season, but tweeted this the day Thibs was canned:
“Firing Tom Thibodeau isn’t fair, but if Dolan/Rose believe someone else gives the Knicks a 5% better chance to win a ring, then firing Thibs is the right thing to do. Knicks think another coach will get more out of Karl-Anthony Towns. We’ll see.”
Brown is definitely giving the Knicks a 5 percent better chance to win a ring, and he has found something inside of KAT that was always there, waiting to be discovered. Though the regular season wasn’t always a picnic between Brown and his players, the coach wasn’t hired for 82-game harmony.
He was hired to make the Knicks a great postseason team, and right now, New York is playing at a level approaching their two championship clubs of the 1970s.
At great risk, James Dolan gambled that Tom Thibodeau’s winning program was leaving points on the board. He is winning that bet.