Tom Thibodeau has never been better than this

Tom Thibodeau has already got a matching set of Coach of the Year trophies. He won for the first time in 2011, when he inherited a 41-41 team in Chicago and immediately took it to 62 wins and a spot in the conference finals. He won the second time in 2021, when he took over a 21-45 Knicks team and coaxed it to a 41-31 record and a stunning 4-seed in the East.

In both instances, he fulfilled the easiest requirement necessary for winning that award, which is to say: drag a team with a recent history of hopelessness directly toward prominence. In that sense, three presumptive favorites to win this year’s award — Oklahoma City’s Mark Daigneault, Minnesota’s Chris Finch, Orlando’s Jamahl Mosley — are perfect candidates.

So is Boston’s Joe Mazzulla, who has the the league’s most talented team and is mostly being mentioned because he is significantly more adept at the job in Year 2 than he was as a rookie last season. If there was a “Most Improved Coach,” Mazzulla would win that one in a walk.

So Thibodeau isn’t likely to add a third piece of hardware to his collection because the Knicks were expected to be very good this year and they’ve mostly been very good. That award isn’t usually presented to coaches who merely match expectations — even though, in a grand irony, the award is named for Red Auerbach, and Auerbach’s greatest skill was essentially doing that: making sure the nine Celtics teams he coached to championships maintained excellence. Red did a lot of things; he never had to go worst-to-first.

Thibodeau is around a 1,000-to-1 shot to win this year.

He won’t. He likely won’t even finish top five.