Mere minutes after the end of the New York Knicks’ 2024-25 season, Tom Thibodeau laid out the path forward. “Like you would do after every season, you take a step back, I think, decompress,” Thibodeau said following the Pacers’ 125-108 win in Game 6 of the 2025 Eastern Conference finals on Saturday — a victory that sent Indiana to the NBA Finals for the first time in a quarter-century and sent New York into a summer of uncertainty. “You do a deep dive on the team, and then, you analyze what you think you need to improve upon.”
Evidently, Knicks president Leon Rose didn’t need to take a step back. Didn’t need time to decompress. He’d already “conducted meetings with select players, Thibodeau, and some of his staff this week to assess the season,” according to SNY’s Ian Begley, had already performed the autopsy on the 2024-25 Knicks … and his analysis of what the franchise needed to improve upon pointed first to the sideline.
That the Knicks fired Thibodeau on Tuesday, just three days after the end of his team’s season, is shocking. But it’s also not surprising.
It’s shocking because of what Thibodeau had achieved since taking the reins in New York in the summer of 2020. Four winning seasons in five years — the first time the Knicks have managed that in more than two decades. Four playoff series wins — three more than the franchise had seen in the previous 20 years. Back-to-back 50-win seasons for the first time since 1994 and 1995, capped by a conference finals berth — New York’s first since 2000, when Thibodeau was an assistant under Jeff Van Gundy.
“I mentioned the job that Thibs has done there — you know, he’s just turned the culture completely,” Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle said after the Game 6 win. “Flipped from what it was.”
The Knicks knocked off the defending champion Celtics in the second round — a series roughly zero people outside of Madison Square Garden predicted they’d win, present company very much included — thanks in part to Thibodeau shifting his base defense, moving from drop coverage in the pick-and-roll to a more switch-heavy scheme that bogged down heavily favored Boston’s offense. They were an Aaron Nesmith out-of-body experience away from a 1-0 lead in a series in which they had home-court advantage. When they went down 2-0, they didn’t roll over; they got off the mat, stealing Game 3 in Indiana and winning Game 5 back home to extend the series, thanks partly to some mid-series rotation and defensive adjustments by Thibodeau.
All that coming after two massive offseason trades, one of which came on the literal eve of training camp, and with center Mitchell Robinson — a huge piece of the defense-and-rebounding identity that Thibodeau had installed over the years — missing nearly 80% of the season constituted a pretty reasonable argument for staying the course. Giving Thibodeau a full offseason and training camp to revisit and revise his plan of attack for a roster that would enter next season with the benefit of continuity — much like the Pacers team that just eliminated them, one year after falling short in the conference finals following a huge trade for an All-Star power forward — seemed a sensible course of action, not least of which to New York’s superstar point guard and captain.
So, yes: shocking … but not surprising, if you’ve been paying attention over the past few months.
The Knicks finished the regular season fifth in offensive efficiency, but that mark was buoyed heavily by a roaring start to the season. From Jan. 1 on, New York went 28-21 with the NBA’s 14th-ranked offense and 16th-ranked defense. An attack that had opened the season roasting teams behind the two-man game of Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns found itself defanged whenever opponents cross-matched a wing defender onto Towns and a center onto inconsistent shooter Josh Hart. The tactical shift effectively vaporized what had been one of the most efficient offensive actions in the NBA, and New York never really developed a counterpunch — a long-gestating problem that burst into full view in Game 2 of the first round, when Towns went without a field-goal attempt in the final 17 minutes of a dispiriting loss to the Pistons.
In many ways, the first-round matchup with Detroit represented a snapshot of the Knicks’ season on the whole: more wins than losses, but often arrived at in underwhelming fashion, with occasional bursts of brilliance and incredible shot-making bailing out a