Before Stan Van Gundy came along, though, very few NBA coaches did.
Van Gundy’s disclosure on Thursday that he was aware star center Dwight Howard wants him fired as Orlando Magic head coach was troubling on a number of levels. The most obvious was that Howard, due to his stature as one of the top players in the league, could hold sway over the man he technically works for.
Just as troubling was the possibility that the Magic might do as Howard allegedly says and lose one of the best coaches in the game as a result.
Van Gundy’s coaching prowess should be obvious, but this is a game where many fans still believe the greatest factor in Phil Jackson‘s success was his “Zen Master” reputation rather than the triangle offense he implemented with longtime assistant Tex Winter. That Van Gundy took a team with Jameer Nelson as its second-best player to the NBA Finals should be proof enough of his abilities, except many casual fans still see him as the bumbling, wisecracking older brother of Jeff Van Gundy.
Those who know the game know better. Van Gundy belongs in the discussion of the five best coaches in the NBA along with the Spurs’ Gregg Popovich, the Celtics’ Doc Rivers, the Bulls’ Tom Thibodeau and the Mavericks’ Rick Carlisle, with old reliables such as George Karl, Rick Adelman and Doug Collins just a hair behind. Very few NBA coaches have been as innovative as Van Gundy, and the primary thing that set him apart from many of his peers was his philosophy regarding the 3-pointer.
Van Gundy’s philosophy, in shorthand: Take the 3 on offense and take it away on defense.
That may seem obvious, but few coaches looked at the extra point afforded by the long-range shot and went to such extremes with it. Many of them came up in a culture that looked at the 3-pointer as a novelty, and they still look at the shot with some disdain. Reasoning that the marginally lower percentage of making the 3-point shot was well worth sacrificing the long two-pointer in his offense,Van Gundy got the most out of players like Rashard Lewis, Hedo Turkoglu and Nelson. Conversely, he is fanatical about his defenders running shooters off the 3-point line, forcing shooters to take the relatively difficult deep two-pointer, with the understanding that even if the shooter hits it, he only gets two points instead of three.
Even if there are some fans who do not respect Van Gundy’s skills with the whiteboard, they have to love his approach. His statement about Howard wanting him fired came at Thursday’s shootaround, with Howard standing nearby. He uttered it matter-of-factly, in a manner that said, “Look, this is what’s going on. Let’s get it out there in the open, address the elephant in the room and move on.”
Van Gundy’s candor was a marked contrast to Howard, who followed Van Gundy’s comments by deriding reporters’ “sources,” ignoring the fact that their “source” was his own head coach who had made those comments less than five minutes earlier, on the record, in front of an assemblage of local and national media members.
Howard’s hand in Van Gundy’s success in Orlando cannot go unmentioned. It was Howard’s presence in the paint on defense that dissuaded opponents from driving into the lane and made them settle for those long twos. He will also forever be the man who was fired as Heat coach 22 games into the 2005-06 season before Miami went on to win it all, and his reliance on the 3-pointer did not look so wise when the Magic were run out of the 2010 Eastern Conference Finals by the Celtics, shooting as low as .267 from downtown in Game 3 of that series.
But he has also led his team to 52 wins or more in five of his first seven seasons as a head coach, and he had the Magic white-hot entering that Celtics series after guiding them to four-game sweeps in the two earlier rounds.
Under Van Gundy, Dwyane Wade blossomed from an undersized shooting guard out of Marquette into one of the top five players in the NBA, Turkoglu and Ryan Anderson grew from role players to borderline All-Stars and Nelson earned an All-Star invitation.
Howard’s issues with Van Gundy do not seem to stem from the coach’s system or his grasp of X’s and O’s, of course. Reports suggest that Howard bristles as Van Gundy’s insistence that his players try to continually improve, which tells us just as much about Howard as it does about Van Gundy.
A new coach may be favorable to Howard, who is really the only Magic player believed to dislike Van Gundy. A new coach may placate the star center and keep him in Orlando, but he probably will never get as much out of Howard or that team as Van Gundy has. If that is the case, this time next year the Magic could be a worse team with an even unhappier star primed for free agency.
The folly of following such a path should be obvious — as obvious as the value of the 3-pointer.
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