Considered the favorite for virtually the entirety of the team’s head coaching search, Tom Thibodeau is indeed the next head coach of the Knicks, as confirmed by SNY Insider Ian Begley.

Thibodeau will now be tasked with turning around a Knicks team that has won just one playoff series in the last two decades, something that his recent predecessors have not been able to accomplish.

Here are four things you need to know about the Knicks’ new head coach …

Background

The 62-year-old Thibodeau is a native of New Britain, Conn. He played college basketball at Salem State College in Massachusetts, and after graduating he served as an assistant for the team before becoming head coach at just 25 years old. He then spent four years as an assistant at Harvard from 1985-89 before making the jump to the NBA.

NBA coaching experience

Thibodeau got his first taste of NBA action as an assistant with the Minnesota Timberwolves in 1989. He then bounced around as an assistant with the San Antonio Spurs, Philadelphia 76ers, Knicks, Houston Rockets and Boston Celtics. Thibodeau spent seven seasons as a Knicks assistant under Jeff Van Gundy and Don Chaney.

Thibodeau’s fist head coaching job came with the Chicago Bulls in 2010. In five seasons in Chicago, Thibodeau’s Bulls never finished worse than second place in the Central Division. He amassed a 255-139 record with the Bulls, including a 62-win first season in 2010-11. The Bulls had mild playoff success under Thibodeau as well, reaching the Conference Finals once and the Conference Semifinals two other times.

But Thibodeau and the Bulls’ front office never seemed to see eye-to-eye on some things, and he was let go following the 2014-15 season. He got another chance at coaching with Minnesota in 2016, where he was hired as head coach and president of basketball operations. In two full seasons, the Timberwolves made the playoffs once, but Thibodeau was dismissed 40 games into the 2018-19 season.

Relationship with Leon Rose

One of the primary reasons why Thibodeau was long-considered the frontrunner to land the Knicks job was his close relationship with team president Leon Rose. Before taking the job as Knicks president, Rose was one of the more well-known NBA agents, allowing him to build plenty of connections around the league. Thibodeau was one of Rose’s clients at CAA.

Coaching mentality

Thibodeau’s trademark as a head coach is defense, and he’s also known for pushing his players to get the most out of them in practice situations as well.

But he’s seemingly suggested recently that should he be given another coaching chance, as is now the case, he may be willing to adapt to what works best for his players.

“My experience this past year in going around and visiting a number of different teams and seeing it -- and it's been evolving this way for probably the last three or four years -- there's different ways to manage practice," Thibodeau said in an interview with ESPN’s First Take recently. "There's load management, there's sports scientists, there's situations in which your young guys are practicing a little bit more and your older vets are doing less and you're separating the two, and you're bringing them in toward the end of practice to do whatever needs to be done to prepare for that next game. So I think utilizing all the resources that you now have, understanding how to use them, how to manage that, has become critical.”

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