BUCKING THE TREND
Old-school Thibs, Showalter also share an unfortunate lack of rings
AN EMAIL arrived in my inbox Saturday from a loyal reader named Jon Sigall, and it came with the subject line “Thibodeau the modern Showalter,” and Jon was making a salient point with that comparison.
“He is to this Knicks team,” he wrote, “what Buck Showalter was to the 1990s Yankees.”
I’ll buy that, and as a guy who got a chance to see what both men did in taking impossibly bleak situations and turning them around 180 degrees, I’ll wholly endorse it. The record kind of speaks for itself.
I opened that email with a little trepidation, though, because taken a different way, viewed through a different prism, the words, “Thibodeau is the modern Showalter” can mean something entirely different. And not nearly as upbeat.
Buck was in the news this week because he touched on the twoword phrase that has replaced “point shaving” as the most feared and reviled in all of sports. Speaking on “Foul Territory,” Showalter rolled head-on into the subject of “load management” — normally mostly a scourge and sore point of pro basketball, but also an issue, in Buck’s view anyway, in baseball now.
“It’s funny how guys get penalized now for playing too much. First thing I look up in the column is games played. Do you post up? Do you post up? And these guys posted up, man,” Showalter said when discussing Adam Jones and Nick Markakis, two players he managed in his time with the Orioles. “They’re hard to find nowadays.
“I love when those guys come in about their load management,” Showalter said, referring to front-office suits. “We had a guy that had a triple and two doubles, and they came in and said he probably needs a day off because he ran too much around the bases. So, what do you want me to tell him? Don’t get any hits so you can play the next day? I didn’t quite understand that.
“I said, ‘OK. You go out there and tell Brandon Nimmo that he’s not playing today because he did too well last night.’ ”
And … I mean, let’s be honest. You can close your eyes and hear Thibodeau saying those exact words (absent Jones and Markakis, of course), am I right? Here’s the thing, though: Right now, Thibodeau really does have a career that parallels Showalter’s in so many ways. He is a guy fortified by old-school values who has unlocked the trick to make those fundamental beliefs translate to new-age athletes. Neither man has 100 percent approval ratings among his players, of course, but the malcontents tended to be weeded out, and the acolytes tended to be the kind players you would expect to buy in and lead others to the light.
Both men have multiple franchise resuscitations on their résumé and both have multiple Coach/Manager of the Year hardware to prove it — Thibodeau with the Bulls in 2011 and the Knicks in 2021; Showalter with the Yankees (1994), Rangers (2004), Orioles (2014) and Mets (2022). And speaking as a sportswriter who’s been in plenty of rooms talking their respective sports with them: Both have the ability to break down those games in smart, digestible ways that make you understand them far better than when you walked in the room.
There is, of course, one other comparison.
Showalter never has won a World Series, and it’s entirely possible he’ll never get another opportunity to manage another big league club, at age 67, so it’s entirely possible he never will add the final jewel to his résumé.
Thibodeau is 66, so it certainly seems that the Knicks will be his last best chance to add the missing piece to his dossier, too, which would be an NBA championship.
Sports never guarantees a thing to anyone, and never even hints at being fair, which is why Ted Williams and Dan Marino and Patrick Ewing can spend their professional lives having never played for a champion, why the likes of Marty Schottenheimer and Gene Mauch and Jerry Sloan never coached one, while so many lesser lights have multiple rings gathering dust in safe-deposit boxes. Showalter and Thibodeau would both be the first to remind you of that hard reality.
Still, it feels like there’d be something wrong if both of them wind up being forced to live it. Showalter may have no choice. There’s still time for Thibodeau.