The firing line

 You've heard that thing everyone says when a coach in a high stakes job gets the gate, and it's one of the few times everyone is right: It's a big ol' what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world out there.

But what do you say when you have done something for somebody lately, and you still get pink-slipped?

That happened to New York Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau yesterday, and it's a head-scratcher to be sure. Or maybe it's just the Knicks Knicks-ing it up again, as they've pretty much done since Pat Riley and Patrick Ewing were turning the NBA into Greco-Roman wrestling back in the 1990s.

Because what had Thibodeau done for the Knickerbockers lately?

Let's go to the scorecard, courtesy of  ESPN's Chris Herring and Shams Charania:

*  He just finished helming them to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time in a quarter century.

* Did it with a reworked lineup that booted the defending NBA champion Boston Celtics in the conference semis.

* Coached the Knicks to back-to-back 50-win seasons for the first time in 30 years.

* Passed the aforementioned Riley to become the fourth-winningest coach in franchise history. 

Oh, and did we mention he just signed a three-year extension last summer?

Yet the Knicks suits canned him anyway, abruptly reversing their own course. Trotted out the usual firing line, in which they thanked Thibodeau for all his hard work blah-blah-blah but they'd decided to go in a different direction.

To which a Knicks fan today is completely entitled to say this: "What direction would that be? Backward?"

In retrospect, maybe Thibodeau's mistake was being too successful without being, you know, successful. By which I mean, he got the Knicks to a place they hadn't been in 25 years, but he couldn't get them beyond that. At least, not yet.

"Yet," however, is not a word the front office could live with. The brain trust's eyes had grown bigger than its stomach, and so, three days after losing in six games to a demonstrably better team (the Indiana Pacers), they put their most successful coach since Riley on the street.

It looked, smelled and felt like a classic knee-jerk reaction, and it most assuredly was not what a franchise on the cusp of the NBA Finals generally does. It's what a franchise does that doesn't understand you've gotta get to the cusp first. The rest, if you're doing it right, comes later, gator.

Look. I get it. It's the era of the superteam, when a franchise supposedly can go from zero to the big prize simply by filling its roster with vagabond LeBrons and Kevin Durants and Anthony Davises. Thing is, it hardly ever works; with the exception of the Heat with LeBron and Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade, and the Warriors with Steph and Draymond and KD, the big prize mostly avoids that approach. And the Warriors were already a championship club when KD came aboard.

No, it's usually building a team one astute draft pick or trade at a time that gets it done. Witness the Celtics last year. Witness the Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder, who'll square off in Game 1 of the Finals tomorrow night as franchises that didn't opt for the superteam quick fix.

For that matter, witness Thibodeau's Knicks. Same deal.

Also, no deal, as of yesterday. A Knicks-ing they will go.