You had to understand that the most important players on other teams usually played only thirty-six or thirty-seven minutes per game at most.
Thibodeau, however, could get all five of his starters to average around forty minutes.
For a long stretch, three of his starters even averaged more than forty minutes per game.
Think about it: if you played three more minutes than everyone else in a game, and appeared in seventy games over a season, that would be an extra 210 minutes.
That was equivalent to playing five or six more games in a season.
What's more, Thibodeau worked those five donkeys especially hard.
He didn't just have them play seventy games in a season.
They all generally played more than seventy-five.
The downside of working his starters that hard was obvious: they were more likely to get injured, especially in the Playoffs, where the intensity was higher.
Under Thibodeau, the Knicks had seen their starters go down one after another in the Playoffs several times, ultimately leading to repeated postseason defeats.
But no matter how much criticism he faced, Thibodeau stuck to his own approach. Every season, the Knicks Five Donkeys still played close to forty minutes per game.
That was how the Knicks Five Donkeys got their name.
Now Chauncey Billups was using these five Trail Blazers players as five donkeys, too.
It was genuinely surprising.
In fact, Billups hadn't used his players this way in the past. His rotations had been scientific and sensible, and he'd always given a lot of thought to managing his players' energy.
The only reason he was using these five starters like five donkeys today was that this game mattered.
If they lost, they'd be nailed to the Raptors' historical pillar of shame.
Chauncey Billups absolutely didn't want to be the