Til The Well Runs Dry
The injury-filled end to the Knicks season feels like a story of what-ifs, but Tom Thibodeau's Knicks promise certainty. They will give all they have, and then there will be nothing left.
(Here’s the first newsletter on my new Substack. It’s a day later than I promised, about a team that has been over-covered by the millions of other Knicks fans in the media sphere, and a series the world has already moved on from. I’m crushing this. At least it’s free!)
“‘A real man makes his own luck.’—Billy Zane, Titanic”—Dwight Schrute, The Office
Basketball can seem like a game of chance. Some nights you hit the shots, some nights your opponent does. But not with these Knicks. They beat luck to death with a metal pipe every night until they ran out of gas and functioning limbs.
The Knicks fulfilled every hoops fantasy New Yorkers have about the grittiness of our city-ness. Their most iconic play of the post-season involved a near-turnover, a miracle bounce off the front rim, a forced turnover, an offensive rebound, five bodies on the floor, and at least three missed foul calls. The Knicks trailed by at least nine points in six of the seven playoff games they won. (Yeah, the stat would’ve sounded better if it was double-digits. You work with what you have.) They used the missed shot as a form of offense, improving on their league-best offensive rebound rate in the postseason. They shot worse than the Sixers in a six-game series they won, 4-2. They fought and they pushed and they scrapped and they clawed and if you have another verb describing physical combat you can use it here.
And then they ran out of juice. The blowouts started, and the season ended. As head coach Tom Thibodeau said, “It was a battle all year. And there was nothing left to give at the end.” A quick rundown of their season-ending statuses:
OG Anunoby tweaked his hamstring in Game 2 and tried to come back for Game 7, but couldn’t run up and down the court and had to leave the game after playing just five minutes and shooting two shots. (Hit ‘em both—the last moment of Knicks magic this season.) The Knicks went 26-4 with Anunoby after trading for him in December, but he missed 32 games, including all of their losses to the Pacers, if we count Game 7 as a game he missed.
Jalen Brunson had an ankle injury in Game 3 but kept playing, then broke his hand in Game 7. Even before his second injury, Brunson was starting to look like someone finally giving into fatigue after a full season as the team’s do-everything scorer and playmaker. The Pacers preyed on his fatigue by running a full-court press, forcing Brunson to work for 94 feet for 48 minutes. (Credit to the Pacers for playing with the league’s fastest pace, a rare example of franchise-level nominative determinism.)
Josh Hart suffered an abdominal injury in Game 6 and lost some of his eagerness for hurling his body at full-speed into things. On some occasions, he actually had to come out of the game, which never happened when he was healthy. Although he technically falls into the category of players who never missed time, he was struggling by the series end.
Mitchell Robinson, who missed most of the regular season with an ankle injury, returned for the playoffs, injured it again against the Sixers, missed Game 4 of that series, played three more games, then re-re-injured it in Game 1 against the Pacers. The man tried.
Bojan Bogdanovic, the Knicks’ other big in-season acquisition, suffered a season-ending ankle injury in the Sixers series. He has since had surgery on the ankle and an additional surgery to fix the wrist injury he was playing through. (Edit: I initially wrote that he just had the wrist injury. Tough to keep track!)
The entire postseason run happened without Julius Randle, the Knicks’ highest-paid player and second-leading scorer. Randle suffered a shoulder injury in January, just before the All-Star Game which he was set to participate in, and never returned. Their post-Randle success spawned a slew of “are the Knicks better without him?” takes that should keep the fanbase occupied until October.
Even the Knicks who weren’t officially injured spent large portions of time grimacing and falling to the floor in pain. They were all exhausted, banged-up, or some combo of the two. Except for Alec Burks. Burks showed up halfway through the Pacers series totally unbothered, well-rested, and moisturized, cheerfully getting buckets as the broken bodies piled up around him. He was like a jester crushing his stand-up set in a medieval court where everybody is dying of the bubonic plague. Ignore the stench of death and keep thriving, Alec!
We often refer to the concept of “injury luck” in sports, because it feels wrong to assign blame when a player’s body fails them. If that’s how the world works, the Knicks are one of the least lucky teams of all time. But it would be obtuse to celebrate the Knicks’ commitment to non-stop reckless effort and act like the way their health and energy bars zeroed out at the end of the season was sheer randomness.
After the Game 2 victory, I tweeted that the Knicks were a miracle: “They make fewer subs than their opponents, make more effort plays than their opponents, and still seem less exhausted than their opponents in crunch time.” The truth, of course, is that it wasn’t a miracle. It was a plan with an expiration date, like a city built in the desert. You can marvel at the beautiful lawns and flowers built on what should be sand and rock. But we know how it was built, and we know how it will crumble when the wells run dry.
The Knicks won by pushing their players’ bodies to the limits, asking the stars to give 45 minutes of high-effort hoops per night. Hart and Brunson were 10th and 11th in minutes played in the regular season, then first and second in minutes played in the first two rounds of the playoffs. These were not empty minutes! They were filled with effort and violence. At least 10 percent of Knick possessions involve Brunson crashing to the floor attempting a layup, then Hart crashing to the floor trying to secure an offensive board.
Even the freak injuries—ones not directly caused by slamming into another player or the hardwood floor—are likelier to happen when you play like this. We know that there’s a correlation between NBA players playing unusually high minutes and suffering a higher-than-expected share of injuries. They’ve done studies about this sort of thing! Lots of them! You think “load management” is just Gen Z players lacking the drive to play all 82? The teams ask them to sit! It’s the best chance at keeping your stars healthy! (The NBA came out with their own study saying load management doesn’t matter. In other news, your bosses think you should work more.)
This is the great Thibodeau debate. Hart says it’s “idiotic” to blame Thibodeau for his players’ injuries, presumably while grimacing because of the painful abdominal injury he suffered while playing for Thibodeau. The apparent coincidences date back to the beginning of Thibodeau’s NBA head coaching career with the Derrick Rose-era Bulls. In 2012, Rose suffered a postseason knee injury which derailed his entire career; in 2013, Thibodeau’s Bulls won a playoff series without Rose, Kirk Hinrich, and Luol Deng, who led the NBA in minutes played and went to the ER mid-series to get a spinal tap which caused him to lose 15 pounds. (He tried to play through it.) Thibodeau’s Timberwolves teams also had injury issues, and now so do the Knicks.
It’s something I wrote about in 2020, when the Knicks hired Thibodeau. I noted that Thibodeau’s teams had a predictable cycle of early success, injury issues, and player mutiny. I was wrong. Forgive my wrongness: Knicks fandom made me unreasonably pessimistic. When they hired Thibs, the Knicks hadn’t made the playoffs since 2013, and have now done so in three of four seasons. They’ve won more playoff series under Thibodeau (two) than in the previous 20 years (one.)
The question for me is not whether Thibodeau teams have a higher likelihood of postseason injury-related breakdowns than those coached by normal people. That’s backed by years of evidence, as well as science and logic. The question is whether it’s a smart choice to play that way anyway. And I think it is. I believe the Knicks under Thibodeau are significantly better than they would be under any other coach. I believe that Thibodeau’s insistence on tenacity and play-until-your-limbs-fall-off roster management are net positives for these Knicks, evidenced by the way they squeezed every drop out of of their potential.
This is a perfect roster for Thibodeau—not least of all because their star player was literally raised by one of Thibodeau’s ride-or-die assistant coaches. There needs to be buy-in to play like this, and the Knicks have it. Everybody seems happy on the hospital ward, and there’s no player mutiny in sight. In fact, these Knicks get upset when all the other players in the league say that playing for Thibodeau sounds awful.
Thibs is a ceiling-raiser, and quite frankly, this roster needed its ceiling to be raised. None of their rotation players are lottery picks (not counting Randle.) They are dramatically undersized, banking on a 6-foot-2 guard for virtually all offense and a 6-foot-4 shooting guard for rebounding. They are middle-of-the-pack at shooting, ranking 14th of 30 teams. Just about every player the Knicks have had under Thibodeau played above the expectation when they were acquired—from Randle to Brunson, whose big-money signings were panned, to Miles McBride and Isaiah Hartenstein, who will earn big salary increases when they get the chance to hit free agency. And they were able to stay afloat after losing three rotation players, only capsizing when the fourth and fifth injuries happened.
But the truth is, you can’t actually subtract luck and chance from basketball. You can only balance the equation. The Knicks eliminate any potential risks from bad shooting nights, missed calls, and loose balls through a physical style of play which adds the risk back through injury “luck.” The Knicks signed a contract: It delivers victories and thrills and emotions, and must eventually be paid in muscle tears and mangled ankles.
A Thibodeau season feels like a series of what-ifs. It’s brutal as a Knicks fan to watch the conference finals between the looking-funny-in-the-light Celtics and a Pacers team the Knicks nearly beat. What if we’d been healthy for a few games longer? Could this have been the year?
But I think Thibs-ball is a series of absolutes. A Thibs team will play better than the sum of the parts on their roster. They will win games they shouldn’t. They will win 75 percent of 50-50 balls. They will erase shooting gaps. They will outplay their size, contracts, and reputations. They will go farther than they realistically should, and they will leave you wondering whether it wasn’t far enough. And you will have to accept that.
It is easy to get lost in what could have been, but the Knicks offer the ultimate certainty. They will give everything they have to give, and in the end, there will be nothing left.