New York Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau has a long history of pushing his players during games, but one former Chicago Bulls player recently told a pretty funny tale about how difficult practices were under the coach during his early days in Chi-Town.
Tom Thibodeau has a very old-school coaching style. He is not in favor of maintenance days for his stars and actually has his best players playing some of the most minutes in the league. Like his predecessors, he is a leader who believes hard practices produce positive results in games.
While some feel it may wear players down, especially come playoff time, it is hard to knock the results as he has led teams to nine winning seasons during his 12 years in the NBA as a head coach.
Tom Thibodeau record (Career): 527-389
During a recent appearance on the “Pardon My Take” podcast, Bulls great Joakim Noah told a hilarious story about how difficult Tom Thibodeau’s practices used to be in Chicago and the wild effect it would have on Bulls veteran Kyle Korver.
Kyle Korver used to fear Tom Thibodeau’s practices with the Chicago Bulls
“I mean, almost every day,” Noah said about asking Thibodeau to relax his intense practices. “I would see Kyle Korver before practice. He would stay in his car until the last minute. And I would walk by, I would see Kyle, and like his eyes were wide open. You knew what he was thinking. He’s like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this right now.’
“We just had a game and we’re doing defensive slides and it’s like, what the f*** is going on? There’s no other team that’s doing it. And then he’s just looking at his books like, ‘No. 1 defensive team. Best rotation in the league. That’s because you guys are doing it the day after practice. That’s why we are doing it.’ Thibs was nuts man,” he added.
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“Like, you’d be winning by 20 points, [and] if they made two threes at the end of the game he would come into the locker room be going nuts on us like we lost.”
The word around the New York Knicks organization is that Thibodeau has relaxed a lot since those Bulls days, but he still pushes much harder than most current coaches and the team won 47 in 2022-23 and 50 games for the first time in over a decade this past season.
Noah was a player who starred under Thibodeau and was never quite the same after he was fired by Chicago in 2015.
