No lineup in basketball has played more than the starting five for the New York Knicks. The group of Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, Mikal Bridges, OG Anunoby and Karl-Anthony Towns played 940 minutes during the regular season, and only two other lineups played even half as many minutes. It’s a Tom Thibodeau cliché at this point. No coach in the NBA clings as desperately to his best players as Thibodeau does.
He’s been a head coach for 12 full seasons and one of his players has led the NBA in minutes per game in four of them. Even when they don’t, several are often near the top of their list. His 2018 Timberwolves starters also led all NBA lineups in total minutes. This is perhaps his defining trait as a coach.
It’s also probably going to cost him his first trip to the NBA Finals.
Almost every lineup the Knicks are putting on the floor this postseason is working. Of the 18 most-used lineups New York has thrown out there in the playoffs, 12 have a positive point-differential and a 13th is neutral. Of the five negatives, three have only been outscored by single digits. A fourth has only played 11 minutes.
But the fifth is by far the most-used, and — based on the first two paragraphs — you probably know which group I’m talking about. New York’s starters have played 308 minutes in the postseason and been outscored by 50 points.
This is basically statistically impossible. The last lineup to go minus-50 or worse was Oklahoma City’s starting lineup in the Orlando bubble back in 2020. Lineup data has been tracked since 2008, and since then only seven lineups besides New York’s starters have reached the minus-50 threshold in a single postseason. Of those groups, only one other — the starters for the 2018-19 Portland Trail Blazers — played more than 200 minutes within that postseason. There’s an easy logic to that fact. Generally speaking, if a lineup is playing that badly in the postseason, the team is smart enough to stop using it. If they aren’t, they’re just eliminated before they can rack up lofty minutes or negative plus-minus…
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