Tom Thibodeau Felt Betrayal Over Knicks Firing

After a summer full of dramatic coaching-related news for the New York Knicks, the first man on the bench finally got his first signature moment with the team.

Mike Brown held serve at home against the always-challenging Cleveland Cavaliers in a 119-111 win, getting the team started by snapping a four-game losing streak against the fellow contenders. The rotation was thick, the minutes were relatively-evenly distributed and Brown's fingerprints could be spotted all over the victory.

Shrapnel from the Knicks' recent coaching-related chaos could have infringed upon his coronation; news broke that Tom Thibodeau, the man Brown replaced when the Knicks' leader of five seasons was fired shortly after last season concluded, was not at all happy with the way things ended with the team, with a source close to him citing a "sense of betrayal" in how everything was handled.

Tom Thibodeau Blamed for Knicks' Faliures

The Athletic's Ian O'Connor did some digging after details around James Dolan, the Knicks' long-standing majority owner, and his active role in the culture reset. He sat in on exit interviews to get a feel of how Thibodeau was received by the players, and after years of gradual disapproval between the "philosophically misaligned" parties, he fully signed off on Brown's hiring.

He was reportedly getting blamed with the lion's share of the team's shortcoming, with O'Connor's source going as far as to say that "In their world, the players were 51-0 and Tom was 0-31," in regard to the team's most recent 51-win season.

That was good enough to get the Knicks all the way to the Eastern Conference Finals, a playoff run inspiring enough to the point that some of the whispers surrounding Thibodeau's job security briefly quieted. But their six-game loss to the Indiana Pacers wasn't pretty; the coach waited a little too long to switch up his starting lineup and make the necessary adjustments to his rotation, and New York's predictable scheme came back to bite them against the run-and-gun Pacers.